The knock on the door came about 7:20 a.m. Dec. 30. It was so loud and insistent that neighbors in a Hawthorne apartment building poked their heads out of their doors to hear FBI agents rouse Naji Hamdan and ask the auto parts dealer: "Do you know Osama bin Laden?"
Carol Brunetti got a knock on the door that day too--as did at least 16 of her friends in Southern California. The Anaheim fund-raiser for an Islamic charitable organization says that two FBI agents, in dark suits and red ties, asked her if she knew anyone with ties to Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian man arrested near Seattle on Dec. 14 for allegedly trying to enter the United States with explosives in his car.
The questions shocked and annoyed Hamdan and Brunetti, who say they know no terrorists and wonder why they were selected for questioning. "Who do they think we are?" asked Brunetti, who converted to Islam 10 years ago. "That we Muslims have a terrorist in every family? Sometimes it just gets ridiculous."
The episode--and similar ones like it, played out several dozen times recently across the nation--revealed the aggressive and sometimes controversial tactics the FBI employed to head off the threat of a millennial terrorist attack.
The FBI won't say why it questioned Hamdan and others. But agents in Los Angeles acknowledged last week that their interviews turned up no evidence linking anyone in the area to terrorist activity or Bin Laden, the Saudi exile suspected of masterminding the bombing against two U.S. embassies in East Africa. Two Algerians arrested in Boston as part of the recent terrorism-related roundup, meanwhile, were cleared of all links to violence.
FBI supporters credit the government's aggressive posture with averting any much-feared millennial attacks, and argue that the extraordinary threats of the last few weeks required extraordinary measures. Beginning the day before New Year's Eve, FBI agents in at least seven states interviewed about 70 people across the country in connection with Ressam's arrest.
Although FBI officials refuse to discuss details of their investigation, they insist that they had reason to believe that each person they contacted might have information about the case--suspicions that were based in part, they say, on telephone logs seized in the case.
"We'd be doing ourselves a disservice if we didn't follow every possible lead," said Los Angeles-based FBI Agent Ramiro Escudero. Defending the line of questioning about Bin Laden, he added: "He's a terrorist, so I think it's a pertinent subject to ask, even if it's a dead end."
