Looks don't make a person a terrorist

By MACARENA HERNANDEZ
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
In the predawn hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, a Saudi Arabian radiology resident, still wearing his blue pajamas, was handcuffed and whisked from his San Antonio, Texas, home by FBI agents. While Dr. Al-Badr M.H. Al-Hazmi sat alone in a New York City jail, local and national media spread his stoic-looking passport photo across the country. News stories speculated about whether he was the 20th hijacker or what role he may have played in the deadliest terrorist attack in U.S. history.
At the time, I was a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, and I remember standing in our newsroom, watching televisions flash Al-Hazmi's photo and hearing a co-worker near me mutter, "The guy looks like a terrorist."
But what do terrorists look like?
Do they look like the three North Texas men, all Palestinian-Americans, charged last week with collecting or providing materials for terrorist acts after they bought 80 prepaid cell phones at Wal-Mart?
Do they look like the two dozen suspects, believed to be mainly British Muslims, who were arrested last week after being implicated in a plot to blow up as many as 10 trans-Atlantic jetliners with liquid explosives?
One thing is certain: They do not look like Al-Hazmi, who spent 12 days sitting through countless interrogations and bearing the nation's suspicion before he was cleared and released. Overnight, a string of coincidences turned the soft-spoken devout Muslim into a main suspect.
I met him shortly after he returned to San Antonio. A thin, slightly built man not much taller than I, Al-Hazmi told me how he cried, prayed and read the Quran during his detainment. When he began to question God about why this was happening to him, he thought about the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks and knew his pain couldn't compare to the families who had lost loved ones.
Run out of town
Even though he was cleared, Al-Hazmi understood there would always be those who would consider him guilty because he had been accused. He tried to resume his life in San Antonio but decided he had to send his wife and three children back to Saudi Arabia. He had to change his phone number and move out of his two-story townhouse. Nine months after the ordeal, he, too, returned to Saudi Arabia.
"Know that in every society you have people who are extreme and people who are in the middle," he told me a few days before he left the country. "We need to minimize the extreme and maximize the mainstream."
No doubt there are ruthless terrorists out there relishing our collective panic and fear, plotting their next attack. But since Sept. 11, too many cases trumpeted as major breaks in the fight against terror end up turning into next to nothing. Remember those wannabe terrorists in Florida who asked an informant for uniforms?
And the case involving the three North Texas men has quickly unraveled. Looks like they bought the phones to turn a profit from resale, rather than to blow up a bridge, as authorities originally suspected. Though cleared of terror charges, the three men have since been arraigned on federal conspiracy and money-laundering charges.
Similarly, in a separate incident in Ohio last week, two American-born men of Arab descent were arrested after their bulk purchase of cell phones. Charges alleging terrorism have since been dropped there, too.
It's a dangerous combination -- law enforcement officials who've been sensitized to jump at anything out of the ordinary and a hungry media filling pages and airtime with speculation. When suspects are finally cleared, the story is often buried.
Meanwhile, it's no wonder that so many in this country have begun to look at Muslim-Americans as one giant sleeper cell. In the process of all this craziness, an entire community that should be an essential ally ends up marginalized.
After the London arrests, news reports indicated it was a Muslim who tipped British authorities after overhearing a disturbing conversation. This sort of brave act -- not our own fear -- is what we should be encouraging.
"We understand that America is scared," Diana Houssaiky, the sister of one of the two men arrested and released in Ohio, told the Associated Press. "But America needs to understand that we're part of America."
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.