A federal judge stripped U.S. citizenship from Iyman Faris, an al Qaeda terrorist linked to 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and who’d plotted to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.
Faris, 50, a Pakistani-born naturalized citizen, was sentenced in 2003 for supporting terrorism. This included a post-9/11 plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge using gas cutters; passing coded messages about the plot to al Qaeda; meeting with Osama bin Laden pre-9/11; doing research on ultralight planes for al Qaeda; and arranging for airline tickets for terrorists.
Faris confessed to the FBI, though he later recanted, and worked as a double agent for the bureau before being sentenced in October 2003 to 20 years in prison. His sentence concludes in August. The Trump Justice Department has worked for years to revoke his citizenship.
“The United States of America has produced clear and unequivocal evidence that defendant Iyman Faris obtained his naturalization unlawfully,” U.S. District Court Judge Staci M. Yandle ruled this week. “The December 16, 1999 court order admitting Iyman Faris to citizenship is hereby revoked and the certificate of naturalization No. 23952581 is hereby cancelled.”
President Trump’s DOJ greeted the ruling as a big win.
“A top priority at the Department of Justice is protecting our national security, and one of the things we do in support of that goal is tirelessly pursue denaturalization of known and suspected terrorists,” said Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt. “What Faris did is unconscionable — he pretended to support the United States and the Constitution to naturalize while he actively supported Osama bin Laden and senior al Qaeda leadership in their plans to attack the United States.”
“Iyman Faris is a traitor to the oath he took renouncing foreign allegiances and pledging to defend the Constitution and our American way of life,” said U.S. Attorney Steven Weinhoeft for the Southern District of Illinois.
Faris immigrated to the U.S. in 1994, marrying a U.S. citizen in 1995 and obtaining U.S. citizenship in 1999 under false pretenses. He was accused of fraudulently using another person’s passport to enter, lying under oath to naturalization examiners, and meeting with and providing information to senior al Qaeda leaders. Faris worked in Columbus, Ohio, as a truck driver when he was arrested a couple of weeks after Mohammed was swept up in Pakistan in early March 2003.
Since Faris no longer is a U.S. citizen, the DOJ said he “may be subjected to removal proceedings” from the U.S. after his sentence at an Illinois penitentiary concludes this summer.
“We are disappointed that Mr. Faris will not be afforded his day in court in a full-blown trial where the government’s war on terror tactics and promises could be fully aired,” Tom Durkin, a defense lawyer for Faris, told the Washington Examiner. “This is a dangerous precedent being set that could well have serious consequences for all U.S. citizens.”
Faris has found himself at the center of the debate over the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation techniques, which critics call torture.
“The CIA provided the ‘identification,’ ‘arrest,’ ‘capture,’ ‘investigation,’ and ‘prosecution’ of lyman Faris as evidence for the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Democratic committee’s report stated. “These representations were inaccurate. Iyman Faris was identified, investigated, and linked directly to al Qaeda prior to any mention of Iyman Faris by KSM or any other CIA detainee.”
In response, the agency wrote in a memo to Congress: “The CIA most often represented accurately that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s information enhanced the FBI’s understanding of the role of lyman Faris, a US-based extremist whom KSM tasked to support an attack against the Brooklyn Bridge. In a few cases, we incorrectly stated or implied that KSM’s information led to the investigation of Faris, but we should have stated that his reporting informed and focused the investigation.”
“CIA, FBI, and Department of Justice documents show that information obtained from KSM after he was waterboarded led directly to Faris’s arrest and was key in his prosecution,” the Republican-led Senate minority response stated.
The successful move to revoke Faris’s citizenship by the DOJ followed the controversy stemming from the early release of “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, who was sentenced to 20 years behind bars in 2002 for supporting terrorism but was released with conditions in 2019 after less than 18 years.
Lindh, then 20, grew up in California and traveled to Afghanistan in early 2001 to fight alongside the Taliban and spent weeks at al Qaeda training camps, where he met Osama bin Laden. He stayed with al Qaeda and the Taliban following 9/11 and was captured by Northern Alliance fighters in November 2001. Lindh was taken to the Qala-i-Jangi fortress, where an uprising by prisoners killed CIA officer Mike Spann.
A D.C.-based federal judge ruled last year that so-called ISIS bride Hoda Muthana was not a U.S. citizen and couldn’t return to the U.S. from Syria.
