In El Paso, a border town once known as the Six Shooter Capital of the West and lately threatened by the Juarez drug wars, the mountains and desert can seem oddly reminiscent of Afghanistan.
A prison gate here is marked with a Homeland Security warning - "Threat Level: Elevated" - a throwback to the Bush administration's preoccupation with finding al-Qaeda agents inside U.S. frontiers. Yet inside the jail is an Arab prisoner whose secret story resuscitates many fears that so shook the world eight years ago. Here, he speaks publicly for the first time.
His name is Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi. He is a 46-year-old Lebanese national, who was an Afghan training camp instructor in the early 1990s. The FBI accused him of being an alleged al-Qaeda sleeper or cash courier - suggesting he helped the 9/11 hijackers who left from Boston. "The government's evidence suggests some amazing coincidences," reads a secret U.S. deportation ruling. "... He was in Boston the same time the 9/11 hijackers took off from Logan Airport."
Within weeks, his time in the United States will be up. He is to be sent to Lebanon and, he fears, torture.
His impending return to the Middle East represents a new chapter to an old story. Mr. Elzahabi says his case ties into those of Canadian Arabs tortured in the Middle East after 9/11. "It's all connected to me," he said.
Mohamad Elzahabi passed through the Afghan camps and fought battles against Russian forces while fighting with Chechen insurgents. For a time he lived with family members in Montreal, and then in the summer of 2001, he headed south across the border. (He complains that he was refused Canadian citizenship in the 1980s.)
His intent, he says, was to become a cab driver or a long-haul trucker in the United States. But four days after he arrived in Boston, al-Qaeda killed 3,000 people in Washington and New York.
"That's my problem," he said. "I show up in the wrong places at the wrong time."
These days, his home is a 12-by-6-foot cell. He is subject to "administration segregation order I-886," a strict prison code that keeps him from other prisoners. He said it takes him a month to place a 10-minute phone call.
Though branded an al-Qaeda terrorist, he was never charged with such an offence. When his case came to trial, he was convicted simply of immigration fraud.
Complaining of being kept "incommunicado" for years, Mr. Elzahabi now wants his case raised with the U.S. President. "Go straight to the White House and ask Obama - 'Are you going to torture this guy?' "
His immigration judge in Texas played down those concerns. "The presence of torture as a tool for Lebanon's security services and police agencies is apparent," Judge William Lee Abbott ruled earlier this year. But he found that Mr. Elzahabi's pleas do "not compel a finding that people like him are tortured at least 51 per cent of the time."
"It's a gamble, the court recognizes this. But it's not a sure bet."
Bald and middle-aged, 5-foot-11 and 170 pounds, Mr. Elzahabi pauses to reflect, before speaking quietly.
He wore a red prison-issue suit and handcuffs. In the cinderblock interview room, he wondered aloud who was listening and watching him from the other side of one-way glass.
"I'm supposed to be like Houdini or something," he said. "They made me big. I am nobody."
"I'm not al-Qaeda," he said. "I'm no sleeper cell. I've nothing to hide."
A delay in Washington
The Globe and Mail's interviews with Mr. Elzahabi took place over three days last month. Prison authorities who usually respond to interview requests within 48 hours took 10 months to process the request. Pressed about the delay, they would say only the tie-up was "in Washington."
Mr. Elzahabi said the reporter was his first non-lawyer visitor during his five-year incarceration. "In isolation you talk only 10 words a day," he said, explaining he was happy to tell his side of the story.
His first question was whether men he says he knows in Canada had gotten any compensation for the torture they suffered in overseas prisons. Last year, two Canadian Arabs, Ahmad Abou El Maati and Abdullah Almalki, were found by a judicial inquiry to have been wrongly branded as "imminent threats" to Canadian public safety by the Mounties.
(Their compensation packages have yet to be decided.)
The FBI had placed Mr. Elzahabi on a terrorist watch list days after 9/11, apparently unaware he was in the United States. But he was actually working as a long-haul trucker in the Midwest, carrying a valid green card at the time.
It was only after a random FBI record search in late 2003 revealed his whereabouts that agents got wiretaps. They tailed him. They put an informer in his rooming house.
And they found no evidence of crime.
So, after months of watching, the agents swallowed their pride and approached their target. Would he consider talking to them?
Mr. Elzahabi obliged them. Why? He feared they would send him to worse torture if he declined co-operation.
"I knew they sent [Maher]Arar to Syria," he said. "All these things are going on in my mind."
He agreed to bunk into a shared hotel suite with the FBI, and was never left alone. He consented to searches and polygraphs. He gave agents his passwords for his Internet accounts.
He never called a lawyer. For 17 days he talked.
"They said 'Why did you lay low? ... you are coming up with something,' " Mr. Elzahabi said.
He was arrested the moment he tried to leave. But before that happened, he ran over his incredible story with the FBI again and again, just as we did together under the stark white lights of the prison interview room in El Paso.
In Afghanistan
In the late 1980s, he went to Afghanistan in hopes of battling the Russian Army. "You have to defend fellow Muslims from aggression," he said matter-of-factly.
But the Russians withdrew and their proxy government fell. The "Arab Afghans" took up arms, in an increasingly amorphous cause. Their jihad became a factionalist quagmire leading to civil war, and 1996 saw the return of Osama bin Laden from Sudan.
"Is al-Qaeda on the right side or the wrong side? I don't know," Mr. Elzahabi said. "I'm not in a position to judge." A devotee of armed jihad, he said he never joined al-Qaeda, and never harboured grievances against the United States or Canada.
"What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas," the detainee said, his English lightly accented and filled with strange metaphors.
Though a self-confessed sniper and a crack-shot with the Russian-made Dragunov assault rifle, Mr. Elzahabi is not close to being a straight shooter. He tends to play down his movements and associations just about as much as the FBI plays them up.
"They make a big deal out of everything," he said, when asked about his time as a small-arms instructor in the infamous Khalden training camp.
He became an instructor, he said, but only because it was better than being a recruit. "A trainer gets more privileges," he said. "Better food."
A number of eventual al-Qaeda suspects passed through Khalden, and Mr. Elzahabi admits he got to know some of them. Men like Abu Zubaydah, the Palestinian detainee now known to have been waterboarded an astonishing 83 times by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.
"What did he say about me?" Mr. Elzahabi wondered at one point. He explained how he was briefly put in charge of Abu Zubaydah, as he commanded a faction of Arab fighters during the Afghan civil war. (He said Abu Zubaydah's lawyers are now trying to arrange a visit, as they prepare their client's defence.)
During a battle in Kabul in 1995, Mr. Elzahabi was shot. He stood up in the prison-interview room to describe how a bullet passed through his hip, into his rectum, causing an infection that nearly killed him. "I'm not supposed to live, but I did."
He credits his younger Canadian brother, Abdelrahman, a Montreal mechanic, with getting him out of Central Asia and back to North America to heal, after a stay in a Peshawar hospital. (During his convalescence he was visited by Ahmed Said Khadr, the Canadian killed eight years later in a shootout in Pakistan, whose son Omar is currently held in Guantanamo Bay.)
Back safely in North America, Mr. Elzahabi became involved in a venture exporting two-way radios to Pakistan. Then he drove cabs in Boston. But by the late 1990s he ventured out again.
He first joined Islamist guerrillas in the mountains of Lebanon, then lingered in the forests of Chechnya. American intelligence indicates someone trusted him with $300,000 to run to the Chechen rebels.
Mr. Elzahabi doesn't deny this. But he argued being a cash courier was never his intent. His real plan, he said, was to help Muslim orphans in the restive Russian republic - maybe find a bride. "There are so many beautiful women there," he said. "Blonde hair, blue eyes ..."
Then he got roped into doing somebody a favour.
"What happened is this guy said, 'We're crossing the border,' " he said, as he described being given a package. "It's normal. You go in, he says 'Take it with you.' ... he can't send it by mail."
He says he mostly used his assault rifle as a crutch while wading through deep snow during the year he spent with the rebels. He does recall firing a bullet at a Russian soldier driving a bulldozer, but says he doesn't know if he hit his target.
Mr. Elzahabi said he cheated death more than once and that, when he escaped, he headed back to Canada.
A Canadian friend
It was a Canadian friend who inspired him to drive trucks, Mr. Elzahabi says, a burly cohort he had gotten to know in Afghanistan.
This was Ahmad Abou El Maati. Both men had passed through the same Afghan training camps. Both enlisted in the same fighting faction during the Afghan civil war. They stayed in touch, sporadically, after they quit Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.
The FBI thought "that Ahmad Abou El Maati is up to something and that I am part of what is going on," Mr. Elzahabi said. "They wanted him bad."
(Mr. El Maati has never responded to Globe questions about Mr. Elzahabi.)
Mr. Elzahabi denies there was anything suspicious in their relationship. He said he wanted to learn the ropes of the truck-driving business from Mr. El Maati, and in order to do so, he job-shadowed him across the border before being dropped off in the U.S. south in August of 2001.
Suspicions about a North American "logistical-support" cell snowballed after the 9/11 attacks.
In November, the Toronto trucker, Mr. El Maati, flew to Syria. He was arrested and tortured there. He was beaten into making a series of "confessions" - fabricated, he says - along the lines of smashing a Cessna or an 18-wheel rig into government targets.
Another Canadian Arab was also arrested after flying into Syria. This was Abdullah Almalki, similarly branded an "imminent threat" by the RCMP. Once a volunteer for an Afghan charity in Peshawar, he returned to Canada, where he ran a business shipping hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of radio equipment to the Pakistani Army.
Mr. Almalki may have hired the wrong helpers. "I know him from Canada," Mr. Elzahabi, the El Paso detainee said. He explained he once had a job boxing components in the radios-to-Pakistan business.
The RCMP followed Mr. Almalki before his arrest and he was spotted talking to a fellow Syrian-Canadian: Maher Arar, a telecommunications engineer.
Passing through a New York airport months later, Mr. Arar was detained and grilled by the FBI. U.S. agents declared him to be a terrorist simply because he "admitted knowing" the Toronto trucker, Mr. El Maati, and also of the Almalki radios-to-Pakistan business. He was put on a CIA jet bound for the Middle East, and torture.
These cases were the essence of the RCMP's "Project O Canada" investigation - and its massive fallout. Canadian judges Dennis O'Connor and Frank Iacobucci wrote volumes exploring the detentions, finding they happened only after the RCMP had first branded the men - wrongly - al-Qaeda members.
The detainees were never the threats they were made out to be, the judges found. And police should have been a lot more careful about broadcasting guilt-by-association suspicions into the wider world, and more skeptical about the intelligence that boomeranged back from dungeons in police states.
American authorities - who declined to participate in the judicial inquiries- have never once apologized for complicity in foreign torture. Nor have they ever explained their parallel probes.
'Abu Kamal'
By 2004, the FBI was convinced it was on to something significant: a man whose n om de guerre was "Abu Kamal," who had served as a sharpshooter in Afghanistan and Chechnya.
From inside the El Paso prison, Mr. Elzahabi mocked the court-filed allegations describing him as an "terrorist trainer" or a "cash courier." "Wow," he said. "I'm a dangerous guy - look out!"
But to FBI agent Harry Samit, the case was no laughing matter. The detective who arrested Mr. Elzahabi was the same agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui at a Minnesota flight school in August of 2001 - the only case the U.S. government has ever prosecuted involving an al-Qaeda 9/11 conspirator. Weeks prior to those attacks, Mr. Samit gave unheeded warnings that an al-Qaeda hijacking conspiracy was planned against the United States.
It was Agent Samit who took Mr. Elzahabi in for questioning. Was he the man counterterrorism agents were looking for?
When he got a chance to grill the man, he asked why he was in Boston at the same time as nine soon-to-be hijackers moved through the city?
The FBI also inquired after a bank deposit - a $30,000 cashier's cheque Mr. Elzahabi placed in a Boston bank on Sept. 10, 2001. (The U.S. 9/11 Commission raised concerns about cashier's cheques disguising cash flows, but never found evidence the hijackers had helpers.)
Recalling these conversations, Mr. Elzahabi told The Globe: "You have to have a cheque. You can't travel with that much cash."
"There again," he added. "I was at the wrong place at the wrong time."
His explanation? He was bouncing from city to city in search of paid driving work. He was buying a cellphone in a Boston Radio Shack, he said, when the World Trade Center towers were hit.
Mr. Elzahabi says he believed he would be rounded up in a security sweep if he stuck around. So he moved to Minneapolis, where he got jobs driving school buses, and then trucks.
Though a drifter, he wasn't poor. The $30,000 deposit represented his life savings, Mr. Elzahabi says, adding that he used the money to buy an 18-wheel rig later that fall.
It was a three-year-old Freightliner, he said, with leather seats.
"If you want to blow up something, why pay cash?" he said. "Why get a nice truck?"
He drove it for more than two years, and drew attention from authorities only once during that period, when he was cited in Colorado for an equipment violation.
FBI questions
It was an FBI agent in Boston who decided to run Mr. Elzahabi's name through a computer one day in 2003. That search made the overlooked suspect the focus of a national security investigation. Why had he applied for a hazardous materials driver's licence? Who did he know in Canada? How did he get immigration status and his green card? These questions and hundreds more were put to Mr. Elzahabi when he consented to the 17 days of questioning.
The FBI never really figured out what to do with Mr. Elzahabi. He spoke at length, until he was shown a photograph of three men, whose identities have never been revealed. At that point he clammed up and the FBI arrested him.
He was held as an alleged material witness, but he refused to testify. "They wanted to send me to New York for two weeks," he said. "I had nothing to say."
Then federal agents charged him with lying about his involvement in the radios-to-Pakistan business. But that was dropped, too.
In the end, prosecutors aimed lower, taking a so-called "Al Capone" approach. They charged Mr. Elzahabi with simple immigration fraud.
When the case got to trial, a jury convicted him inside a week.
Agent Samit and his colleagues had been resourceful. They found a drug-addicted ex-stripper who testified that a Lebanese student named something like "Lazahabi," paid her to marry him so that he could get a green card.
That was back in 1984. "The marriage wasn't perfect ...," Mr. Elzahabi said in the El Paso prison.
But he still insisted it was legit.
His green card is a memory now. He has no status inside the United States. Officials aren't saying when he'll be deported, but he figures he has until the end of October - maybe.
Last year he was hustled, manacled, onto a small jet, he says, with about eight soldiers guarding him as he was flown from a jail in Elk River, Minn., to the immigration holding centre in El Paso. He expects the experience will be repeated when goes overseas.
He says he represented himself at this deportation hearing. Prosecutors fared better. "This might be the best presented case over my 16 years on the bench," Judge Abbott ruled, as he dismissed the torture concerns and ordered deportation.
Mr. Elzahabi fears his fate on Earth. But "God, he is the ultimate judge," he said.
Before the interviews wrapped up, he talked of Heaven and hellfire.
The detainee confided he still thinks he has an outside chance of getting the Islamic martyrs' Heavenly reward - even if he dies in jail and not on any battlefield. "Seventy-two virgins are nothing to God," he said. "God created Heaven and Earth."
PROJECT O CANADA
Ahmad Abou El Maati
This Toronto trucker emerged as an RCMP "Project O Canada" target after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The Mounties passed his travel itinerary to the CIA immediately before he was arrested flying into Damascus in November, 2001.
He was beaten into making statements during two years in Syrian and Egyptian prisons. A judicial inquiry found the Mounties were wrong to have branded the trucker an "imminent threat" before his overseas travels.
Abdullah Almalki
This Ottawa exporter, who shipped two-way radios to Pakistan, also emerged as an RCMP Project O Canada target. The Mounties faxed a list of questions to Syria for use in his interrogation after he was arrested flying into Damascus in spring of 2002.
He was tortured during a two-year incarceration. The RCMP circulated warnings he was an "imminent threat" - which was "inflammatory, inaccurate and lacking investigative foundation," a judicial inquiry found.
Abdelrahman Alzahabi
This Montreal mechanic was placed under a microscope in the RCMP's Project O Canada investigation, but he was never arrested anywhere.
He is the younger brother of Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, a former Afghan training-camp instructor jailed in the United States since 2004.
Maher Arar
This Ottawa engineer was never a target of the RCMP's Project O Canada investigation - but he knew people who were.
Sloppy intelligence exchanges led to his year-long detention in a Syrian jail. He later received $10-million in compensation from the Canadian government for his ordeal. "There is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada," a judicial inquiry found.
Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor
During a multiyear, multimillion-dollar inquiry into the Arar Affair, Judge O'Connor found that Canadian counterterrorism agents should hold themselves to a higher standard. "Torture can never be an instrument to fight terror, for torture is an instrument of terror," his 2006 report says.
Mr. Justice Frank Iacobucci
This judge's follow-up report revealed that the Arar affair was not a one-off - other Canadians were wrongly tortured in overseas jails. His 2008 report said that "mistakes of various kinds will be made," in the fight against terrorism, but Canadian agents must do better.
Colin Freeze