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Rabat – Abdulrahman Farhane, a 67-year-old Moroccan-born naturalized US citizen is at risk of being deported from the USA and losing his citizenship after being sentenced twenty years ago to 13 years of imprisonment for “involvement in a terrorism case.”
In 2001, Farhane was entrapped by an FBI informant who frequently visited his bookstore in Brooklyn and secretly recorded his talks with the store owner three months prior to the 9/11 attacks.
The FBI told US authorities that Farhane had “radical views of Islam,” reports the Washington Post.
In the recordings, the FBI informant inquired about Islamic charities and asked Farhane to send money to militants overseas for “wireless communications and advanced weaponry,” the source noted.
Malika, Farhane’s wife, and his six children have long maintained that the case was unjust.
Fearing a longer prison sentence, Farhane said he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder money and lying to FBI agents because his then-lawyer warned him that, “No Muslim would get a fair trial.”
Although Farhane pleaded guilty to the charges against him, he has always denied his involvement in terrorism.
He pleaded guilty for having “financed Afghan and Chechnya mujahideen between November and December 2001,” and after serving for 11 years, he won an early release in 2017. He hoped that his and his family’s life would then change for the better.
His family never found peace as the imprisonment of the father, costing them many lost opportunities and, above all, their rights to live peacefully in a foreign land while constantly countering discrimination.
Years after 9/11, Islamophobia continues to haunt Farhane’s family and right when they thought the nightmare was finally over, the US Justice Department delivered them a new blow in the summer of 2018.
A letter received under the Trump administration informed Farhane that he was now facing a loss of US citizenship, stressing that the US government plans to “revoke your US citizenship.”
Farhane’s former attorney failed to inform him of the consequences of accepting a guilty plea and that it would jeopardize his citizenship under laws that allow the government to reverse naturalization in some cases.
Historically, this punishment was used for war criminals, mainly for naturalized Americans who have lied about their involvement in atrocities committed during the Nazi era or in the Balkans.
Read Also: France Strips Moroccan Man Convicted of Terrorism of Citizenship
Farhane is now awaiting the verdict of a federal appeals court to which he has filed an appeal arguing that his lawyer in 2006 had given him insufficient guidance and that his constitutional rights had been violated.
The unexpected news added more anxiety and uncertainty to the family since two of his children who had obtained citizenship through him are also at risk of being deported.
However, winning the legal battle means that possibly overturning his 2006 guilty plea would allow the government to prosecute him again and perhaps subject him to more prison time.
“We’re constantly trying to escape that period,” his child Salah said, “and they’re constantly trying to drag us back in.”
With many dreams that are still unfulfilled, the family waits for the day where Farhane can prove his innocence and overcome the social stigma and unhealed wounds they have been carrying for 20 years.
FBI’s culture of racism and wrongful retaliation
Amid indications that Farhane might have been set up by an FBI agent who preyed on his vulnerability and ignorance of convoluted legal procedures in the US, the Moroccan-born’s sad story adds to a pile of similarly heartbreaking tales of lives ruined by the Bureau’s anti-Muslim bias.
Over the years, many US investigative journalists and specialists of security surveillance — many of whom are former FBI agents — have shown that scores of minority Americans or immigrants leading clean lives have been victims of misdirected FBI retaliation.
On November 30, for example, The Intercept published a gut-wrenching account of the plight of Swad Khan, a Pakistani man whose life was torn apart for declining an offer to become an FBI informant.
Michael German, a former FBI agent who is now a liberty and national security fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Intercept: “Agents need to have informants, which is why they go on these fishing expeditions. When people refuse, they often become vindictive. They take the attitude that, ‘We gave you a chance to prove yourself on our side and your refusal to aid us means you’re against us.”
In an even more damning indictment of the FBI’s deep-running culture of racism and various forms of anti minority bias-motivated malpractice, Terry Albury, a former FBI investigative specialist turned whistleblower, recently told the New York Times that he “helped destroy [innocent] people” while working for the FBI.
“I was very idealistic when I joined the FBI…. I really wanted to make the world a better place,” Albury said. “But the war on terror is like this game, right? We’ve built this entire apparatus and convinced the world that there is a terrorist in every mosque, and that every newly arrived Muslim immigrant is secretly anti-American, and because we have promoted that false notion, we have to validate it.”
