My Year Inside Radical Islam

by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

  I was interested, at the time, in the irony of statements like Chomsky’s. On the one hand, he urged Americans to “enter the minds of the likely perpetrators.” This is sound advice: it’s advisable in any conflict to know what your enemy stands for. But on the other hand, Chomsky made no real effort to enter the minds of the perpetrators. Instead, he simply projected his own grievances against the United States onto them.

  I was hesitant, but decided to address the class. Knowing what was being said in various NYU circles and knowing full well that the student comments had amounted to calls for Western self-flagellation and admissions of guilt, I wanted to offer a different perspective. I walked up in front of the class and turned toward the other students so I could see them when I spoke. I heard someone laugh. Getting out of my seat and walking in front of the class probably seemed presumptuous (none of the other speakers had done so), but wasn’t meant to be.

  Trying to explain why I had chosen to address the class, I began by saying that I had once been Muslim. It wasn’t a good way to begin. I provided no context, no background. I didn’t mention Al Haramain, nor did I mention that I had once believed in the global jihad. All my classmates and professor saw was this Jewish-looking kid getting up, claiming to have been Muslim once, and lecturing to them about the current world crisis.

  I said basically the same thing that I had said at NYU’s town hall meeting. I said that I was disturbed by some of the anti-American views I saw expressed around campus, on e-mail discussion lists, and otherwise. I said that there was much that is good about the United States, and part of taking a critical view of the current conflict is to understand what the enemy stands for, not just to project our own problems with the United States onto them. While my speech to the class was similar to the remarks that I made at the town hall forum, it was more disjointed at a time when the audience was more hostile.

  When I finished speaking, some of the other students glared at me. I knew that I had upset some of them. A few days later, I ran into a woman of South Asian descent on the street outside Vanderbilt Hall. We had been acquaintances since my first year of law school, when we were in the same class section. When I greeted her, she told me she didn’t want to talk to me. “I was upset by some of the things you said in class about un-Americanism,” she said.

  She meant anti-Americanism, but I wasn’t surprised that she remembered my remarks as more McCarthyite than they had been. Her refusal to speak to me burned more than she realized, and burned more than it should have. It burned because I had once been so intimately involved in left-of-center politics. Some of the tendencies I now saw from NYU students had been my own tendencies when I was a campus activist. Since the far-left bases so many of its positions on principle rather than practical outcome, it generally views most issues as black-and-white moral choices, and perceives those on the other side as possessed by some moral defect. Here, those who favored a military response to the 9/11 attacks were seen as flag-waving jingoists—the kind of people who would appeal to concepts like “patriotism” while undertaking a bloodthirsty push for war and revenge. I was placed in this category for the rest of my time at NYU.

  Another part of what burned was realizing that the school’s aspiration of providing a “safe place” for dialogue about the attacks was false. This “safe place” amounted to embracing a stock narrative of 9/11: on the one hand, you have the vast majority of Americans calling for blood. On the other, you have some thoughtful liberals who want to look deeper at the root causes of the attacks, and who may be reviled for doing so. NYU’s goal was to make students feel comfortable expressing the liberal position. My background did not fit this stock preconception: the conversion to Islam, the radicalization and the long slow climb out, the potential problem of apostasy. I knew that NYU was not, for me, a safe place to talk about this.

  I never came to terms with my time at the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation while at NYU. As I moved further into the legal profession, I preferred simply to pretend that it had never happened. But in my first job out of law school, I found it impossible to do so.

  In August 2002, I began working as a law clerk for Harry T. Edwards, a judge on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a federal appellate court in Washington, D.C. My second day there, the secretary handed me a form, and told me that we’d have to apply for a security clearance. She mentioned that some terrorism cases might come through the D.C. Circuit, so all the clerks had to apply for clearance.

  I nodded and took the form. All I could think about when she handed it to me was Al Haramain. Just a few weeks earlier I found out that Al Haramain was named a defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by the families of 9/11 victims. The plaintiffs claimed that Al Haramain was connected to the 9/11 attacks and should be held civilly liable. When I heard that news, I assured myself that the plaintiffs were casting an overly wide net. I wanted to believe that the fact I had worked for Al Haramain wouldn’t have much of an impact on my life.

  The security clearance form made me revisit those hopes. What would they do with the fact that I had been at Al Haramain? Would I be deemed a threat? Would they deny my security clearance?

  I thought about not filling out the form, explaining that I didn’t want to go through the hassle of applying for a clearance and didn’t want to be involved in the D.C. Circuit’s terrorism cases. But I handed it in, nonetheless, wondering what would happen.

  A few days later, one of the court’s administrative personnel told me that my clearance form had been red-flagged. I tried to appear surprised. “Any idea why?”

  “Do you have anything to do with the Middle East on your application? Like Israel, for example?”

  “Yeah, there’s something related to the Middle East on there.” I didn’t elaborate.

  “Well, that may have been it. They’re really focused on the Middle East and tend to be concerned when someone has connections there.”

  What I didn’t know at the time was that a federal investigation of the U.S. branch of Al Haramain was already underway. When I had filled out my routine background check form before beginning the clerkship, I had listed Al Haramain as an employer. The background form was then referred to the FBI team that was heading up the investigation. That team orchestrated the security clearance check. There was no need for all the clerks to apply for clearances; it was an elaborate ruse to allow them to talk to me. The FBI wanted to get my consent to investigate me, so they could determine whether my real purpose in clerking on the D.C. Circuit was to kill a judge or otherwise help the terrorists.

  There was an initial, routine FBI interview related to my clearance application. A heavyset retired agent conducted the interview. He obviously hadn’t read the form before coming to the courthouse for the interview. He flipped through it, seemingly asking me questions at random.

  He didn’t ask about Al Haramain, but at the end of the interview, he did ask if there was anything we hadn’t discussed that might interfere with my ability to hold a security clearance.

  I wasn’t sure what to say. I worked for a radical Islamic charity for almost a year but it isn’t a problem now?

  I shrugged mildly. “No,” I said. “My life is pretty aboveboard.”

  In January of 2003, I got a phone call from the FBI. A woman clerk said that they wanted to conduct a follow-up interview related to my security clearance application. The interview, she said, would take place at the Washington Field Office, which was just up the street from the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse where I was clerking. She said that the interview would focus exclusively on my time at Al Haramain, which was no surprise.

  A few days later, when I was leaving the courthouse to head to the field office on Fourth Street, I ran into some of the other clerks.

  “Where are you off to, Daveed?” one asked.

  When I said that I had an FBI interview, he assumed it was a job interview. Nodding at my tan trench coat, he said, “Well, you look the part!”

  I didn’t correct him. I didn’t tell him that I
had actually been singled out for additional screening because of my time working for a radical Muslim charity.

  When I got to the Washington Field Office, I had to wait in the lobby. I looked at the photographic displays of agents who had been killed in the line of duty. I was struck by a feeling of how honorable it must be to work for the FBI, particularly at a time like this. Then my thoughts turned to my time at Al Haramain. It had already jeopardized my security clearance. Even though I had tried to keep my past life separate from my current life as a young lawyer, after 9/11 I began to wish that I could contribute something to the war on terror. But I was resigned to the fact that my time at Al Haramain would probably be an insurmountable barrier.

  Two agents interviewed me. One of them, Christopher Rogers, had obviously been with the Bureau for much longer than the other. He took the lead. I saw that Christopher was reading from a list of questions that someone else had typed for him. I would later learn that the questions had been written by Special Agent David Carroll, who worked out of Medford, Oregon. I would meet Dave Carroll in person a little over a year later.

  Most people feel nervous when they have to sit in a room with FBI agents for questioning. This feeling is probably magnified when their past associations include the likes of Al Haramain. I was somewhat nervous when I was walking toward the Washington Field Office, but had formulated a simple plan: whatever they asked, I’d be completely honest. I hadn’t done anything illegal, and didn’t have anything to be afraid of.

  I found the interview unexpectedly liberating. I had never really explained my story—my time working for Al Haramain, my conversion to Christianity, all of it—to anyone, not even my close friends. Those who had known me when I was Muslim were aware that I had worked for an Islamic charity between college and law school. They weren’t aware of what went on there. Most of them didn’t know that I had been radicalized. Nor was I eager to tell anybody that the charity I had worked for was now being sued for alleged ties to 9/11.

  The FBI interview was the first time I sat down and tried to tell my whole story. The forum made it easy. I spoke with two people who were being paid to hear what I had to say. I hadn’t known them before and in all likelihood wouldn’t see them again.

  The agents asked a lot of questions about Pete Seda. They wanted to know Pete’s views on non-Muslims, and I outlined those views in some detail, pulling no punches. The agents often glanced at each other during the interview. My frankness surprised them, and they seemed pleased that I wasn’t trying to disguise what was happening on the inside at Al Haramain.

  But while I didn’t want to mince words, I didn’t want to exaggerate who Pete was or what he stood for. Near the end of the interview, Christopher Rogers asked, “After 9/11, do you think Pete might have been happy that those attacks occurred? Did he say anything like, ‘Good, the U.S. had this coming’?”

  “I think Pete was horrified by the attacks,” I replied. “I called him just afterward to see how he was doing, in the way that everyone was calling their Muslim friends just after 9/11 to make sure they weren’t being beaten in the streets by rampaging mobs. Pete sounded upset. He said he was having trouble eating, and told me that he was horrified. He sounded genuine. I think there’s a disconnect in his thinking between attitudes he might have toward non-Muslims or jihadist groups and his views on terrorism. And I think when terrorism is right in front of him, it genuinely shocks and offends him.”

  The interview lasted about an hour. When it ended, I told the agents that, with all I had been through, I wanted to help them if I could. I told them that they should get in touch with me if they had any other questions about Al Haramain, or about anything else where I might be of service.

  A little over a year later, I would discover that things at Al Haramain were more serious than I had realized.

  thirteen

  INFORMANT

  What did you do between college and law school?”

  I was now a promising young associate at Boies, Schiller & Flexner, the law firm of superstar attorney David Boies, the man who sued Microsoft and represented Al Gore in the 2000 election litigation. I joined the firm in September 2003. I was at lunch with another of the firm’s associates, Steve Miller, a gregarious man with a somewhat colorful past.

  Despite how liberating it felt to tell my whole story during the FBI interview that I’d had while clerking on the D.C. Circuit, that was not the approach I had chosen since then. “I worked for a charity,” I said.

  “What charity did you work for?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “NORML?” Steve asked.

  I thought he was asking if the charity was normal. Instead, he was asking if I had worked for NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. It was a marijuana legalization group. “Kind of,” I said.

  Steve laughed, thinking I had admitted to being part of a marijuana legalization group.

  The encounter was insignificant, but was typical of my cluelessness about how to deal with my time at Al Haramain. I was usually quick enough on my feet to deftly avoid discussion of this period of my life. My conversation with Steve was one of the rare instances where my evasive-ness showed.

  A few months later, I would no longer be able to avoid the issue.

  It was early February, and I had been working on a fairly important case for a couple of weeks. I had trouble believing that I’d been called onto this case only two weeks ago, and I had no idea how many hours I’d billed since then. I’d put in a lot of time, that’s for sure.

  I had just pulled an all-nighter putting the final touches on our brief, and had stolen maybe three hours of sleep the night before, three or four hours of sleep the night before that. I was tired, but the end was in sight.

  I had been working for Bob Silver, who was regarded as the firm’s unofficial number four partner; he was David Boies’s protégé. Bob had a reputation at Boies Schiller, as Boies had once called him the smartest person he’d met in the field of law.

  The most noticeable thing about Bob at first glance was his tan, which was too strong for a guy who spent so much time cooped up in an office. But the fake-and-bake was inevitable. The summer before I began working as an associate at Boies Schiller, I’d briefly been over to Bob’s house in Connecticut. At the time, it was the most impressive private residence I’d ever set foot in, mansion-sized with perfectly trimmed grass in its expansive backyard. There was even an Olympic-sized swimming pool. It came equipped with poolside Internet access, so Bob would never have to leave his work behind.

  During the visit, I met Bob’s celebrity personal trainer, a perky bleach-blond who went by the name of High Voltage (and even showed Amy her credit card to prove that the world really knew her by that name). I found out later that Voltage, who was fifty-five years old when I met her, boasted a stable of clients, including Katie Couric, Kelsey Grammer, and RuPaul. Voltage didn’t feel that her job ended with retooling Bob’s fitness routine and diet. She was also actively revamping Bob’s wardrobe and image.

  Sadly, Amy and I were unimpressed by the “upgraded” friends that Voltage urged upon Bob. These included a mother and daughter tandem (with the daughter a mere sixteen) who were both discussing their recent Botox injections, as well as a male neurologist who had a Botox practice on the side. At one point, Amy, a Boies Schiller paralegal named Ken Lashins, and I were sitting at a table with the neurologist when he started to tell us about a letter to the editor he had written (unpublished) which said that 9/11 was foreseeable and there should have been a missile battery on top of the World Trade Center. When we began to argue the point, the neurologist switched subjects and began to describe a different letter to the editor he had written on a less interesting topic. I quickly determined the man was a bore and left Ken and Amy at the table with him. Both Ken and Amy were too bashful to get up and leave the other alone with the neurologist, so ended up spending an entire hour listening to stories about the man’s full repertoire of letters to the edi
tor.

  Back at the office, Bob openly flouted the firm’s ban on indoor smoking, going through cigarette after cigarette while we worked on the case. He also had the most explosive temper that I had then seen. It seemed as if he was perpetually livid, every third or fourth word out of his mouth an obscenity, even when he was relatively happy. My first day on the case, Bob screamed at our cocounsel for fifteen minutes over the speakerphone. They sat there and took it, sometimes offering a timid defense of their performance.

  Now, with the sun inching over the horizon, my work for Bob was almost done. I put the finishing touches on this draft of the brief and then eyeballed it, looking for typos, blue-booking errors, bad writing. Satisfied, I e-mailed the brief to Bob and our cocounsel.

  I was running on nothing but adrenaline at this point, but felt oddly peaceful. I watched cars pull into the parking lot outside, another work-day beginning. I thought about how, in just a few hours, mine would end. I could already feel myself curling up in bed back at my apartment, in a warm blanket, with the heat on, getting my first sustained sleep in a long time. It was a Thursday, and Bob had promised me Friday off.