Mohammed Mosharref Hossain | |
---|---|
Born | |
Occupation(s) | Proprietor of an Albany New York pizza parlour; Founder of the Masjid As-Salam mosque in Albany, NY |
Conviction(s) | Guilty |
Criminal charge | Conspiring to aid a terrorist group and provide support for a weapon of mass destruction, as well as money-laundering and supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Mohammed. |
Penalty | 15 years in prison |
Mohammed Mosharref Hossain is the proprietor of an Albany New York pizza parlour, and a founder of the Masjid As-Salam mosque in Albany, [1] who was arrested by Federal authorities on August 6, 2004, as part of a counter-terrorism sting. Hossain and an associate, Yassin M. Aref, were convicted of conspiring to aid a terrorist group, supporting a foreign terrorist organization, and money-laundering, and sentenced to 15 years in jail. [2] In July 2008 the appellate court upheld the convictions, rejecting all of the defense's arguments.
Hossain was born in Bangladesh.
The Albany Times Union reports that US forces found Aref's name, address, and phone number in a notebook found in a bombed out Iraqi encampment. [1]
The FBI sent an informer to make contact with Aref through Hossain, to try to get them to participate in an illegal arms deal.
The Times Union reported that their lawyers filed motions to learn whether the pair were subjected to warrantless surveillance by the NSA. Normally the NSA is not authorized to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans, only foreign nationals. [1] However, in December 2005, the New York Times revealed that President Bush had taken the controversial step of secretly authorizing the NSA to expand its surveillance to within the United States. Bush claimed that the US Constitution empowered him to authorize warrantless wiretaps when the US Congress granted him the authority to use force in Iraq.
According to their lawyers, if it is determined that President Bush's authorization of warrantless wiretaps were unconstitutional, and Aref had been investigated through warrantless wiretaps, the prosecution's case would be "jeopardized". [1]
A grand jury indicted Hossain and Aref on October 1, 2005. He was convicted of conspiring to aid a terrorist group, supporting a foreign terrorist organization, and money-laundering, and sentenced to 15 years in jail. [2]
In June 2020, Mohammed Hossain, who was imprisoned for nearly 15 years following his arrest for money laundering in a 2004 FBI militant operation, would leave federal jail early after a federal judge approved his legal appeal for early release. [3]
The PATRIOT Act was a landmark Act of the United States Congress, signed into law by President George W. Bush. The formal name of the statute is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, and the commonly used short name is a contrived acronym that is embedded in the name set forth in the statute.
Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation (AHIF) was a charity foundation, based in Saudi Arabia. Under various names it had branches in Afghanistan, Albania, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Comoros, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Tanzania, and the United States, and "at its height" raised between $40 and $50 million a year in contributions worldwide. While most of the foundation's funds went to feed poor Muslims around the world, a small percentage went to Al-Qaeda, and that money was "a major source of funds" for the terrorist group. In 2003, Saudi authorities ordered Al-Haramain to shut down all overseas branches, and by 2004 Saudi authorities had dissolved Al-Haramain. However, US intelligence officials believed it had reopened branches under new names.
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Yassin M. Aref is religious scholar, writer, and poet of Kurdish background who was the central figure of a controversial sting operation leading to years of incarceration in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A resident of Albany, New York, Aref was arrested by Federal authorities in August 2004 as part of a counter-terrorism sting operation, convicted in October 2006 of conspiring to aid a terrorist group and provide support for a weapon of mass destruction, as well as money-laundering and supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and sentenced to 15 years in prison in March 2007. In July 2008, the appellate court upheld the convictions, rejecting all of the defense's arguments. The decision caused outrage amongst the local community, as supporters maintained the position that he was being persecuted. After finishing his 15-year prison sentence in October, 2018, Aref was deported to Iraqi Kurdistan in June, 2019.
American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security Agency, 493 F.3d 644, is a case decided July 6, 2007, in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit held that the plaintiffs in the case did not have standing to bring the suit against the National Security Agency (NSA), because they could not present evidence that they were the targets of the so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (TSP).
The Terrorist Surveillance Program was an electronic surveillance program implemented by the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was part of the President's Surveillance Program, which was in turn conducted under the overall umbrella of the War on Terrorism. The NSA, a signals intelligence agency, implemented the program to intercept al Qaeda communications overseas where at least one party is not a U.S. person. In 2005, The New York Times disclosed that technical glitches resulted in some of the intercepts including communications which were "purely domestic" in nature, igniting the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. Later works, such as James Bamford's The Shadow Factory, described how the nature of the domestic surveillance was much, much more widespread than initially disclosed. In a 2011 New Yorker article, former NSA employee Bill Binney said that his colleagues told him that the NSA had begun storing billing and phone records from "everyone in the country."
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