The Confession Tapes (2017) s02e04 Episode Script

1 Now, my understanding, Hamid, is that you attended some camps.
Bring me up to speed a little bit.
Um, you mean what kind of camp were they? - Yes.
- They were like training camps.
How many people discussed or talked about being martyrs? - Murders? - Martyrs.
How many people talked about being suicide bombers? Oh, none of them were like suicide bombers over there, what I would see.
I need you to tell me details about targets, what they said, and this is where I need your memory to come back.
They said that you have to go to America for jihad.
I said, "Okay, I will.
" Regrettably, we are not immune from the threat of homegrown jihadist cells.
The government took the position after 9/11 that they were going to do everything and anything to prevent any kind of terrorist act here on US soil.
The bill before me will help law enforcement to identify, to disrupt, and to punish terrorists before they strike.
This was not a case about a building that was blown up, where forensic investigators collect physical evidence.
Material support for terrorism requires that you get inside the defendant's mind.
Hamid admitted that he had, in fact, attended a jihadist training camp in Pakistan.
He also confirmed that the camp was run by Al-Qaeda operatives and that they were being trained on how to kill Americans.
What we had was evidence that he had traveled to Pakistan, gone to a jihadi camp, and that he had come back with the intention of committing some act of violence.
Lodi in central California, you know, it's a small town, historically a farming town.
Everyone kind of knew each other.
Pakistani farmers working with Latino farmers.
I mean, everyone kind of just, you know, got along.
A lot of folks at that mosque were from the same village.
They knew each other for a long time, and that was kind of the center of the community, kind of the social, spiritual center.
After 9/11, you saw talk of, "There's sleeper cells around America waiting to be activated.
" Some in the government thought that there was going to be a terrorist training camp right in the middle of rural Lodi, next to a church and next to the community.
The government was getting tough on terrorism, and so there was pressure on the Bureau to the Department of Justice to bring a case.
The Sacramento office had a surveillance team down in Lodi.
My understanding is they had an informant, and the informant told them that he attended mosque in Lodi and he had observed Ayman al-Zawahiri in the Lodi area.
Zawahiri is Bin Laden's number two man.
And so the fact that the informant was reporting that Zawahiri was here in Lodi, in California, was remarkable.
And that was the basis for their undercover operation.
Hello.
Testing, testing, testing.
Hello, hello, hello.
Testing.
Today is March 2003.
I am going to the second meeting with Imam Shabbir.
Begin recording now.
A government informant, Naseem Khan, worked at K-Market convenience store, making $7 an hour.
All of a sudden, he's now employed by the FBI.
He was housed at an apartment right behind the mosque.
So he was there on a regular basis, interacted with the community.
His cover was the computer IT guy, and so pretty much he was going around helping everyone with their computer issues.
He was looking to the imams.
Naseem Khan started to realize the imams, there's nothing on them, there's no case against them.
But there was this young man, Hamid Hayat, who kind of just ran his mouth.
He portrayed himself as a radical, and so the focus turned to him.
That was the beginning of the whole ordeal.
They said that Hamid was a jihadist.
This is Hamid as well.
They thought we're gonna have guns, bombs, knives, but we're a normal family living here in America.
This is Hamid when he was just three years old.
Hamid Growing up with him was really fun.
He was the brother that always took my side.
We used to watch wrestling.
Then we would always get together in the garage, my cousin, my dad, my brothers, and we would just lay down anywhere and watch the wrestling together.
He wasn't a big, strong person.
He was really skinny because of the meningitis.
Meningitis is a brain infection that he got when he was young.
He got it in Pakistan.
So that affected him a lot through his personality because as he was growing up, he became more and more like a kid.
After the meningitis, he didn't want to go out of the house.
He wouldn't focus on school.
He wanted to play more video games, just stay at home most of the time.
Naseem Khan, he was my brother's best friend.
He told my mom he doesn't have a mother.
So because of that, she treated him closely, as her own child.
He had really nice cars.
Hamid was like, "What kind of friend do I have with nice cars?" Hamid was kind of a loser.
Like, he didn't really hang out with any other kids.
All of a sudden, this really cool guy, ten years his senior, started paying a lot of attention to him.
I mean, Naseem Khan gave Hamid the attention that he craved that he wouldn't get from anyone else.
Because Mr.
Khan was an undercover informant, the nature of his relationship with Mr.
Hayat was that they were buddies.
It began with the statements that Mr.
Hayat made to Naseem Khan about his admiration and, um delight, really, in some of the activities of some of the most violent jihadi groups in Pakistan.
He spoke to Mr.
Khan about the murder and mutilation of Daniel Pearl and talked about what a good job that was and how they would never be able to send Jews to Pakistan anymore.
I'm going to fight for jihad.
You don't believe me, do you? Why can't we go? It's our duty as Muslims to go and help other Muslims.
When we go for training, we will go to Mansehra, right? That's up to you.
You wanna go to Mansehra, go.
Okay, okay, okay.
The biggest training camp of all is in Kashmir.
Have you seen this place? - I've seen a video of it.
- You've seen a video of it.
If one goes for jihad, go to the one in Afghanistan, or to the one in Iraq? Anywhere in the world where Muslims are attacked.
Jihad is the duty of every Muslim.
In April, 2003, we went to Pakistan as a whole family.
We went to Pakistan for my sister's wedding and to look for a bride for Hamid as well.
My mom found a bride for Hamid in our village, Behboodi.
So everyone was really happy.
After the actual wedding day, we did joke around.
I'm like, "Hey, so was your, you know, wedding?" He goes He was like, "Dude, it was better than I expected.
Beyond my expectations.
" In Pakistan, it's a tradition, you know, when somebody gets engaged, we shoot guns.
We told him, "Hey, it's your wedding day.
You should shoot.
" He's like, "No, no, no.
I'm too scared," you know.
"What if it goes up and it comes back down and hits me in the head or something like that?" He would act like he was, like, a bold person, like a big shot, but he wasn't in reality.
He was a bit of a storyteller, yeah.
If he would meet somebody new, Hamid's like, "Oh, yeah.
My dad, you know, he owns Kmart and all these stores in Lodi," and we were like, "Why would you even tell them that?" He's like, "Don't worry about it.
" He just wanted to be that person, you know? Before his wedding, his mom bought him a cell phone.
Naseem Khan, he would constantly call and call.
He would call, and Hamid would be telling his mom, "Hey, you know, I'm not home right now.
I'm sleeping," or something like that.
One day, I think he was watching a cricket match or was playing cricket.
He left the match, came home and broke his phone because he was like, "Why did you give him my number? Because I'm tired of him.
He's not a good person.
" The informant was getting desperate.
Naseem Khan was calling and trying to convince him to go to a training camp.
No, no, no vacation, man.
You're sitting there in Pakistan.
You told me, "I'm going to a camp.
" You're sitting idle.
You're wasting time.
And I can't do nothing, man.
There's no choice, see? God willing, when I come to Pakistan and I see you, I'm gonna force you, get you from your throat and throw you in the madrassa, in your grandfather's madrassa.
- I'm not gonna go with that.
- Oh, yeah, you will go.
Yeah, you will go.
Maybe I can't fight with you in America, but I can beat your ass in Pakistan, so nobody's gonna come to your rescue.
So in 2004, during that conversation with Naseem Khan, the informant, and Hamid, you know, he threatens him to go to a camp and or to get training, and then that was it.
After that contentious call, they didn't speak after that.
The government had a theory that he left his village of Behboodi, took a bus to Balakot, where supposedly he went to train for six months.
And the FBI believed that his intent was to come back to the United States to attack our country.
After the wedding, I spent two years with my family in Pakistan.
My dad was rebuilding our house in our village in Behboodi.
Was there a moment when Hamid could have slipped off to go and train? No.
He went to his friend's wedding, to Multan for one week.
That's the whole period of time that I haven't seen him while we were there together for two years.
But other than that, I mean, he didn't go anywhere else.
Coming back in 2005 was the worst.
And they announced that there's someone sitting here in this plane that's very dangerous, so we have to go back all the way to Japan.
When the plane was about to land in Tokyo, the air hostess came by and asked Hamid, "Are you guys the Hayat family?" There was cameras flashing and asking something that's in Japanese, and Hamid was kind of angry, like, "Why are they taking pictures of us?" When we went inside, there were these two FBI agents.
They were asking if they could interview Hamid in a different room.
I was sitting down with my mom and my sister, and they're asking me, "What were you guys doing in Pakistan? What kind of friends did Hamid have? Were they tall? Were they big? Did they have beards?" Hours later, they told us that everything got cleared up for Hamid and all of you can go back.
Some days later, an FBI agent came knocking on the door, saying that they want to talk to Hamid.
Little did we know that that was the last day we were gonna spend together.
Friday night was the last day eating together, talking.
And after that, we never seen him.
Lots of Muslims in the world do have issues with the United States right now, and that's okay.
It's not a bad thing.
You're free to have those kinds of issues.
You're free to explore those thoughts.
That's not There's nothing illegal about that.
Okay? And the old Hamid had issues with the United States, and so I want the new Hamid to be honest with me about the old Hamid.
Does that make sense? Okay.
Well, my take on this, I mean, one thing that's true is that after 9/11, Robert Mueller said, "I am gonna convert the FBI into a national security agency," and I think that Sacramento thought they had made the big-time.
To quickly recap, he was interrogated in Japan on his way back to the United States And then he voluntarily agreed to go to the FBI office where he was questioned and he denied.
You know, this is his third time being questioned about this.
But they did not record all the times he denied going to training camp.
It wasn't till much later, after a long interrogation, that they started recording.
In the interrogations, you see certain tactics being used.
One is, in this case, saying to Hamid Hayat, "How would you explain that we have aerial surveillance showing you that you're in a camp," which was false.
Look, we know and we see a lot of things.
As has probably been explained to you, we have satellite imagery and all sorts of other things that give us an idea of things that are going on.
So you're in camp for three to four months? - Is that - Yeah, something like that.
I thought you guys had information like that.
Okay.
Once they broke him with, "Oh, we have photographs of you in the camp," you know, the bullshit started, and he thought that he would go home at the end of the session.
Most of the camps, you have weapons training, you have explosives training.
Over there in the camps? And you They do karate or I didn't see no karate over there.
That's the thing I was thinking.
I was going to tell you, but I forgot.
I didn't see no karate over there, sir.
Did you run? Like run or jog or work out? Jogging, like running, yeah.
I told you, sir, jogging, you know.
Looking at my body, they knew that he's not that tough or anything like that, - any big thing like that so - So Um, and then different kinds of weapons training.
They have a variety of different kinds of weapons.
Yeah, I got to do the pistol.
That's it.
So you did pistol training I did it.
I'm not good at it, either.
When I do it, "You're not doing it right.
You have to do this, do that.
" It's like - Do you remember what kind of gun it was? - No.
It was a black one.
I can remember the color, but I don't remember what the name was or anything like that.
So you take how many shots? I think I took, like, three or four shots.
Three or four shots.
Did you reload? - Because normally - I didn't know how to reload it.
I didn't I mean, I'm sure in three, four months, three and a half, four months, they teach you how to reload.
The thing is, they put, like, bullets in there for us up there.
Not in the thing.
Up there.
Oh, one at a time? - One at a time, yeah, like that.
- Okay.
You know, they grew frustrated afterward 'cause he was saying yes to everything, so it showed that, you know, he was just making stuff up.
It just The stories were so far-fetched that anyone who heard them would just start laughing.
Tell me about rifle training.
There's Oh, rifle training is very hard, sir.
They made me stand over there, and I said I barely couldn't pick it up 'cause it's very heavy.
I'm skinny, you know.
They said, "You can't shoot that again 'cause you don't have that much power.
" And I was thinking, "God, that" You know, I don't want to do that again.
How many times can you go back before they send you out for jihad? Do they have, like, you have to be here for so much training before you go to jihad or I think so, for six months, seven months Six or seven months.
So you were getting close.
Yeah, like that, but, you know, I didn't get trained that much or anything.
They were using me, like, for the kitchen and the cooking, but I don't know how to cook or anything.
You don't know how to cook? Did you learn? - No, I - No? I was washing vegetables and everything like that.
Oh, okay.
Hamid tells the FBI that he shot it so bad that they never allowed him to shoot again, and they put him in the kitchen to help cook and all that because he's a lousy shot.
The agents asked him, you know, whether or not how he was going to receive his marching orders, whether to blow something up or something else.
You came to the United States, you've got to go to jihad, and you left with marching orders.
- What's that? - You know what that is? - No.
- Here's what your mission is, what you do.
So, what did they want you to do? They didn't tell me nothing.
They say you can go right now, and if we need you or anything, they'll let me know.
Who was gonna tell you? 'Cause they're not Are they gonna call you up from Pakistan? I don't think so.
I think somebody Maybe send a letter or anything like that, maybe.
I don't think they'll send a letter.
His answer is that he thought maybe they'd send him a letter.
I mean, that just has to give you his state of mind, what he thinks he's involved in here.
He was gonna get some kind of certified letter delivered by the United States Post Office? Absurd.
This is all I'm trying to That's all I'm trying to understand here is what they said.
They said that you have to go to America for jihad.
Okay.
To fight? Yeah.
Yeah.
America, you know, to fight.
That's what they told.
To go to America to fight jihad? All right.
That's all I'm trying to hear.
That's all I want to hear is just what they said.
All right.
That night, for sure, he didn't understand what was going on, and I don't think he ever really got it until he probably went to prison.
So I come back here tomorrow again? No, you're not leaving here tonight, no.
No, I mean tomorrow.
I'm gonna be here tonight, staying here? - No, you're gonna go to jail.
- You're going to jail.
So do I get a place to sleep over there like that? It's jail, Hamid.
You know that? I know it's a jail, but can I lay down because my head is hurting? I want to sleep.
I'm just saying, will I come back here again tomorrow? On Monday, the FBI came to search our house.
They had a search warrant.
They called on the house phone, said, "Umer, open the door," and, boom, the door opened.
They pour into the house like you know how an ant goes out of a hill? Like Like that, with their guns drawn.
I was sitting on the sofa, and I was crying because they had the gun held to my mom's head.
I thought they're gonna shoot her.
She's gonna die right there on the scene.
And they had a gun pointed right here to my head right here as well.
And they said, "Go stand next to your mom.
" And they shattered everything in the house.
In his scrapbook that was found in his home, he collected articles about political parties and other political groups that were devoted to violent jihad.
Assuming that Mr.
Hayat truly had gone for jihadi training, and assuming that he came back here with the intention of awaiting direction to commit some act of violence, that's dangerous.
And we'll never know exactly what the danger was, but that's part of preemptive prosecution is that you cut that off, rather than waiting.
The traditional approach to these things had been to wait to see specifically what risk was being posed, but the additional risk that you accept when you do that is you might not be able to stop it before it happens.
Well, a suspect, Hamid Hayat, is due in federal court in Sacramento.
A judge will determine whether he is a danger to the community.
Meantime, some of his family members say they are under surveillance and are being asked to take lie detector tests.
Many journalists who were sitting in the audience were in shock.
They were like, "This is a scary day for America.
" In this climate of fear, they're gonna go after individuals who might have inclination towards radical ideas.
They never committed a crime.
They said, "This is a new era we're heading into," and sure enough, it was.
One of the most important pieces of evidence was a piece of paper in his wallet at the time that he traveled to Pakistan.
It was called the ta'wiz.
It's a supplication in Arabic that spoke about, "Oh, Allah, we place you at the throats of our enemies.
" And the experts who testified at trial talked about the fact that this was something that would be carried by a person who expected to go into battle against an enemy.
It would also be something that if it were found on his body if he were to perish, that it would identify him as a martyr.
So all of those facts all were evidence that was presented to the jury as something that was evidence of his intent to commit violence.
You know, this is the note that the government called "the throat note," and, you know, in a book that almost every Muslim household has, Riyâd-us-Sâliheen, under The Book of Etiquette of Travelling, "Supplication If One Fears Harm.
" This prayer, it's under the chapter of travel.
A prayer that Muslims use for protection in travel all of a sudden is being weaponized, that this is a jihadi prayer for war.
I mean, it was just one scary thing after the other for our community.
And a lot of people were afraid, too.
Afraid to speak about this case.
A lot of people were afraid to come forward and to show support for him.
Ready to go.
How do you feel about the jury selection yesterday? I feel good about the jury.
I'm confident that they'll make the right decision.
Wazhma Mojaddidi.
My impression of her was that she was passionate about this case, felt it was a grave injustice, and absolutely convinced of her client's innocence.
Wazhma saw the confession as the evidence, okay? It was It was unequivocal.
It was the government's case.
But she considered it weak evidence because it seemed so discombobulated to her.
You're all over the map here, yeah, and you're not helping yourself by doing that.
Yeah.
I'll say Balakot.
That's the first thing I'll say.
- Where's the camp, Hamid? - That's what I'm trying to say to you.
The camp will be in Elaqa Ghair, Tora Bora something or at Torkham.
Near Afghanistan? Bora Bora, are you talking about? This is the place where you were, where you trained.
You were there for six months.
You know where it is.
The final thing I'll say, it was in Afghanistan.
Now you're in Afghanistan? We're not playing a game here.
This is at the heels of a four-year undercover operation.
So I was expecting that the agents would have known or would have had some verification where a camp was.
It brings to mind that something's wrong and you need to try to corroborate what in fact happened.
I don't believe that there was an effort to investigate Mr.
Hayat while he was in Pakistan.
But there were at least six times that Mr.
Hayat mentioned Balakot.
So there were satellite photos that we were able to use from the Department of Defense, and these were commercial-quality versions of photographs taken from satellites.
The FBI has a major office in Islamabad.
They've been arresting people related to 9/11 all over Pakistan.
They've got CIA and FBI in Pakistan, and this supposed camp is a drive up a road from Islamabad.
They say the camp's at Balakot.
And look at this case.
Look at its importance and so forth and so on.
They didn't drive up the road to see if it was there.
Why didn't they do that? I submit to you it's 'cause they know there was no functioning camp.
What is incredible to me was that the government really thought that Hamid was such a terrorist that they would have done more to corroborate and document what he was doing.
Did he go to a terrorism camp? You know, that was a question they never really answered.
What the expert says is, "Okay, here's four photographs.
" Well, they've got some buildings there.
There's a 50% chance that it's a militant camp, and there's a 50% chance that it's a Pakistani military facility.
That's nothing.
If you say that something is either an apple or an orange, equally, you haven't offered any proof that it's an apple or that it's an orange.
But the government doesn't offer any photographs that positively show people training with rifles on the ground, I mean, with sufficient detail that you can detect that.
Any good lawyer would have pressed the government on this point.
"Let's see all the photographs.
" But in order to do that, you have to have what's called the security clearance, and Wazhma Mojaddidi never got a security clearance.
The fact that the government never investigated the camp was not something that the jury heard, which we now know is true, and it's because she didn't get a security clearance.
I don't know why the defense attorney in the Hayat case chose not to receive a clearance.
I know that in the years I've been a defense attorney since I left the government, I've been cleared in cases, and I've considered it important to review the information that's classified that's provided to me to make sure that there's nothing there that would assist my client or contradict the Government's case.
Why did you ultimately decide that you didn't need to obtain a clearance? Um I don't honestly remember right now.
But at the time, the strategy seemed sound and rational and it made sense.
This is a lawyer who had never tried a case before, was two or three years out of law school.
This is a case that needed a lawyer who had done a hundred trials.
The government had four highly-skilled, highly-trained lawyers on the prosecution side.
It's just a punch in the face, you know, to think of a lawyer with no experience attempting to defend this case.
Her heart was in it, but, frankly, there was a kind of hubris and ambition that blinded her.
She said that she had to learn on the job.
When somebody's facing, you know, the rest of their life in prison, you don't have a lawyer who has to learn on the job in order to defend them.
And those are her words.
What was your thinking on why you were qualified to represent Hamid in this very serious case? I thought that it could work.
I thought that I mean, even though I had never been in a criminal courtroom, I felt comfortable in the courtroom.
I thought it was something I could handle if I had some guidance on just the procedural stuff.
Uh, and I was willing to learn it.
I was willing to get in and do it.
The news just out of federal court today, Hamid Hayat has been sentenced to 24 years in a federal penitentiary.
Hamid Hayat never attended a terrorist training camp.
This fight is definitely not over.
There will be a motion for a new trial, and ultimately, Hamid Hayat will be proven innocent, as he is.
It is my hope that any others out there contemplating taking the path chosen by Hamid Hayat will see this sentence as a wake-up call and change their course to a more favorable one.
They really sent a dangerous message to to not just the American Muslim community, but the future of our democracy and the rule of law.
They knew he was innocent, but they were afraid if he does do something, how could we live with ourselves? But for American Muslims in a post-9/11 climate, you get a different type of justice.
And the bar beyond a reasonable doubt we lower it to just the minimum, just even the idea that someone might do something.
In the beginning, we didn't know who did all of this.
We didn't know the person, so When they brought Naseem Khan inside the court, telling Hamid and our family members this is the guy who was after Hamid, we were like, "How could he do this to us?" It was literally like an earthquake because my mom treated him as a son.
They felt very heartbroken.
The FBI let this guy, this informant, getting paid $235,000, you know, who before that was just working in a 7-Eleven, you know, at a cash register.
And then not to pick up the aggressive nature of his conversations with this 18, 19-year-old kid, that kind of behavior is not acceptable.
You know, it blew my mind.
It still blows my mind.
I have chosen to conceal my identity today because this is a very painful subject for me to talk about.
Most of my community members don't know about Naseem as my son.
I personally am very humiliated to have to say that I'm the mother.
Naseem is very, very clever.
He was capable to say all kinds of things.
He deceived his own mother and was using the FBI and everyone else that he came in contact with for his own gain.
I truly feel very badly for the Hayat family.
I have an obligation as a Muslim to speak the truth, to give up any knowledge that I have of a situation which will rectify an injustice.
It was really hard to see my parents like this.
My mom, she's such a nice person.
She loves everyone.
And now when I look at her, she's always sad, depressed, crying.
She's always on medication now.
Her first child, all his happiness, just gone.