Nick is based in our DC bureau, where he covers national politics and civil liberties issues. Nick has also written for The Economist, The Atlantic, TheWashington Monthly, and Commonweal. Email tips and insights to nbaumann [at] motherjones [dot] com. You can also follow him on Facebook.
Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (D).
On Tuesday, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) went birther on Elizabeth Warren. "Serious questions have been raised about the legitimacy of Elizabeth Warren's claims to Native American ancestry," Brown said in a statement released to the press.
But given the available evidence concerning Warren's ancestry, Brown is essentially implying there may have been an elaborate, years-long effort to fake his opponent's heritage—not unlike the conspiracy envisioned by right-wing activists who sought "answers" about President Obama's citizenship. (The Brown campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
This faux controversy stems from a series of articles in the Boston Herald, which reported that Warren had listed herself as Native American in a Harvard Law School faculty directory. (Brown's top adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, is a former Herald reporter.) This fueled criticism on the right that Warren had falsely claimed Native American status to advance her legal career. Now this bizarre kerfuffle has snowballed well beyond that, as conservatives pursue an in-depth probe of Warren's great-great-great grandmother's ethnicity and whether Warren's great-great-great-uncle lied about it.
What's known is this: As the Heraldreported after publishing its initial story on Warren's background, researchers at the New England Historical Genealogical Society believe that one of Warren's great-great-great grandmothers, a woman named O.C. Sarah Smith, was Cherokee. If O.C. Sarah Smith was full-blooded, that would make Warren at least 1/32 Cherokee. (While that may seem insubstantial, Bill John Baker, the principal chief of the Cherokee nation, is also 1/32 Cherokee.) The NEHGS based its claim on a March 2006 newsletter referencing research by a woman named Lynda Smith. The newsletter reports that while digging into her own ancestry, Smith found a marriage application in which William J. Crawford, a son of O.C. Sarah Smith, listed his mother's race as Cherokee.
The NEHGS considers the newsletter to be a legitimate source, says Tom Champoux, a spokesman for the group. "Genealogists do reference research conducted by others, with further verification sometimes provided," he said in an emailed statement. "In the case of Native American research, it's not uncommon for families to pass down family histories orally, especially with earlier generations, as paper evidence and primary documents were not kept." But in this case there is a primary document cited—the marriage application.
Even this, however, has not been enough for Warren's critics. A day after publishing its story revealing the marriage application, the Herald published a follow-up implying the document may not actually exist. The article argued that genealogists had been "unable to back up earlier accounts" of Warren's ancestry because a copy of the marriage application has yet to be produced. Over at Breitbart.com, Michael Patrick Leahy, whose hobby is genealogy, has chimed in with a new wrinkle. Based on Census and other records, he argues that William J. Crawford either lied or was mistaken about his mother's race:
[W]hy would Ms. Warren's great-great-grand-uncle make up such a thing? Perhaps he showed the same kind of tendency towards ancestral "embellishment" that she herself seems to exhibit, or perhaps there was some logistical or tactical benefit in the Oklahoma Territory of 1894 to him and his intended bride that encouraged him to make the claim. Or perhaps he believed it to be true, even though in all probability it was not. We will likely never know.
(It's hard to imagine why a man wouldn't know his own mother's ethnicity. At a time when Native Americans were being herded onto reservations at gunpoint, it's unclear what conceivable benefit there would have been to falsely claiming Native American status. And even if William J. Crawford did lie for some reason, it's hard to see how Warren could have known about it.)
By jumping into this controversy, Brown seems to be embracing the same tortured, birther-esque arguments as the conservatives who are trying to paint Warren (and her great-great-great-uncle) as a liar. Perhaps the better question is why Brown is raising these "serious questions" to begin with.
Last month, Mother Jonesbroke the story of Yonas Fikre. An American Muslim now living in Sweden, Fikre claims he was tortured in the United Arab Emirates at the US government's request after refusing to become an informant for the FBI. On Tuesday, less than three weeks after Fikre's allegations were made public, the Justice Department charged Fikre, his brother Dawit Woldehawariat, and a third man, Abrehaile Haile, with conspiring to hide $75,000 worth of money transfers to the UAE and Sudan from the government, all in violation of federal reporting requirements for large international financial transactions. Woldehawariat, Fikre's brother, was also charged with failing to file a tax return in 2009 and 2010.
There are no allegations of terrorism associated with the charges.
Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who has been working with Fikre, told Mother Jones on Wednesday that the federal charges were retaliation for Fikre's refusal to cooperate with the FBI. "It is disappointing but not surprising that the FBI is retaliating against Yonas by filing specious charges against him after they promised to make his life difficult after he refused to become their informant," Abbas wrote in an email. "While FBI agents lied to Yonas about many things, in this case, it seems that they have kept their word."
Thomas Nelson, Fikre's Portland, Oregon-based lawyer, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday that he was unaware of the charges against his client. But Abbas said he's been in touch with Nelson since then and the two are working together to decide what to do next.
Buried in a Republican bill to give states more say over health care funds is a provision that would restrict how they spend their own money on abortions.
A group of congressional Republicans is pushing a bill to put key health care decisions in the hands of the states, rather than the federal government. But language buried in the legislation would do the opposite on one key issue: abortion.
Rep. Todd Rokita's (R-Ind.) State Health Flexibility Act, also known as HR 4160, contains a provision that would force 17 states, including California, Massachusetts, and New York, to either discontinue programs that help low-income women pay for abortions, or spend a lot more money to purchase new insurance plans for those women. Thirty House Republicans have signed onto Rokita's proposal since it was introduced in March*, and the Republican Study Committee, a group of conservatives that includes over 70 percent of the GOP caucus, made HR 4160 part of its official budget plan.
If passed, the bill "would block the only avenue left to states that wish to make safe and legal abortions accessible to low income women," says Sara Rosenbaum, a health law expert at George Washington University.
Yonas Fikre, who claims he was detained and tortured at the behest of the US government, is shown here in a still image from a video recorded by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Earlier this week, I broke the story of Yonas Fikre, a 33-year-old Muslim American from Oregon who claims that he was detained and tortured in the United Arab Emirates on behalf of the US government. Fikre is now in Sweden, where he and his lawyers were scheduled to hold a press conference on Wednesday morning. On Wednesday, Portland's Willamette Week and Oregonian published stories on Fikre's ordeal. Oregon Public Broadcasting adds the detail that Fikre has applied for asylum in Sweden.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, which has been helping Fikre, has given me a copy of a letter the group sent to Thomas Perez, the head of the Justice Department's civil rights division, describing Fikre's ordeal, asking that Perez investigate "whether Mr. Fikre was detained and tortured at the behest of any agent of the U.S. government," and demanding that he be allowed to return to the United States without "further unconstitutional interference." You can read it here:
Last June, while Yonas Fikre was visiting the United Arab Emirates, the Muslim American from Portland, Oregon was suddenly arrested and detained by Emirati security forces. For the next three months, Fikre claims, he was repeatedly interrogated and tortured. Fikre says he was beaten on the soles of his feet, kicked and punched, and held in stress positions while interrogators demanded he "cooperate" and barked questions that were eerily similar to those posed to him not long before by FBI agents and other American officials who had requested a meeting with him.
Fikre had been visiting family in Khartoum, Sudan, when, in April 2010, the officials got in touch with him. He agreed to meet with them, but ultimately balked at cooperating with FBI questioning without a lawyer present and he rebuffed a request to become an informant. Pressing him to cooperate, the agents told him he was on the no-fly list and could not return home unless he aided the bureau, Fikre says. The following week he received an email from one of the US officials; it arrived from a State Department address: "Thanks for meeting with us last week in Sudan. While we hope to get your side of the issues we keep hearing about, the choice is yours to make. The time to help yourself is now."
"When Yonas [first] asked whether the FBI was behind his detention, he was beaten for asking the question," says his lawyer. "Toward the end, the interrogator indicated that indeed the FBI had been involved."
Fikre made his way to the UAE the following year, where, he and his lawyer allege, he was detained at the request of the US government. They say his treatment is part of a pattern of "proxy" detentions of US Muslims orchestrated by the the US government. Now, Fikre's Portland-based lawyer, Thomas Nelson, plans to file suit against the Obama administration for its alleged complicity in Fikre's torture.
"There was explicit cooperation; we certainly will allege that in the complaint," says Nelson, a well known terrorism defense attorney. "When Yonas [first] asked whether the FBI was behind his detention, he was beaten for asking the question. Toward the end, the interrogator indicated that indeed the FBI had been involved. Yonas understood this as indicating that the FBI continued to [want] him to work for/with them." Nelson, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Council on American Islamic Relations are assembling a high-powered legal team to handle Fikre's case in the United States.
Fikre's story echoes those of Naji Hamdan, Amir Meshal, Sharif Mobley, Gulet Mohamed, and Yusuf and Yahya Wehelie. All are American Muslim men who, while traveling abroad, claim they were detained, interrogated, and (in some cases) abused by local security forces; the men claim they were arrested at the behest of federal law enforcement authorities, alleging the US government used this process to circumvent their legal rights as American citizens.
As Mother Jones reported in its September/October 2011 issue, the FBI has acknowledged that it tips off local security forces on the names of Americans traveling overseas that the bureau suspects of involvement in terrorism, and that these individuals are sometimes detained and questioned. The FBI also admits that its agents sometimes "interview or witness an interview" of Americans detained by foreign governments in terrorism cases. And as several FBI officials told me on condition of anonymity, the bureau has for years used its elite cadre of international agents (known as legal attachés, or legats) to coordinate the overseas detention and interrogation by foreign security services of American terrorism suspects. Sometimes, that entails cooperating with local security forces that are accustomed to abusing prisoners. (FBI officials have told Mother Jones that foreign security forces are asked to refrain from abusing American detainees.)
It's difficult to confirm US involvement in the detentions of Fikre or other alleged proxy detainees—indeed, plausible deniability is part of the appeal of the program. But what's clear is that Fikre was on the FBI's radar well before his detention in the UAE. (The FBI declined to comment on his case, as did the State Department.) Fikre, whose only previous brush with the legal system came when he sued a restaurant for having ham in its clam chowder, may have drawn the FBI's interest because of his association with Portland's Masjed-as-Saber mosque, where he was a youth basketball coach.
The mosque has been a focus of FBI scrutiny ever since the October 2002 case of the "Portland Seven," in which seven Muslims from the Portland area were charged with trying to go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban in the wake of 9/11. (Six are now in jail; the seventh was killed in Pakistan.) Masjed-as-Saber was in the news again in 2010 when Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali American who sometimes worshipped there, was charged with trying to detonate a fake car bomb provided by an undercover FBI agent.
More recently, three other men who attended Fikre's mosque—Mustafa Elogbi, Michael Migliore, and Jamal Tarhuni—have found themselves on the no-fly list after traveling abroad. (The government's use of the no-fly list to prevent American terrorist suspects from returning home after traveling overseas is currently the subject of a major ACLU lawsuit.)
Fikre's case "really does make a mockery of the FBI's use of watchlisting as a means of protecting the US," says Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "It's not a means of protecting America—it's a tool the FBI uses to put people in vulnerable positions."
It "really does make a mockery of the FBI's use of watchlisting as a means of protecting the US."
Fikre, who is currently living in Sweden and believes that it would be unsafe for him to return to the United States, has given a series of videotaped interviews detailing his ordeal. His presence in Sweden beyond the three-month window allowed for tourist visas suggests that he has applied for permanent status there, and local media have so far refrained from reporting on the story for fear of affecting his case to stay in the country.
In the interviews, Fikre describes a series of events that are similar to the 2008 case of Naji Hamdan, a Lebanese American auto-parts dealer from Los Angeles who was then living in the UAE. Like Hamdan, Fikre claims he was detained in the UAE, tortured (including with stress positions and beatings on the soles of his feet, so as to not show marks), and asked about his activities in the United States. Like Hamdan, Fikre believed a western interrogator was present in the room at some points during his detention, because when he could peek out under his blindfold ("after being kicked/punched and falling over," Nelson says) he occasionally saw western slacks and shoes. "In those occasions there was a fair amount of whispering," Nelson added.
The similarities between the two cases were so striking that Michael Kaufman and Laboni Hoq, lawyers who are representing Hamdan in his separate case against the government, initially thought that Fikre had simply parroted Hamdan's story. But once they heard more, they decided "the backstory of why the government was interested in him was reasonable and something that didn't sound fabricated," Kaufman said. "It seemed like a long way to go for a lie," Hoq added.
A key difference between Hamdan's and Fikre's stories is that Hamdan eventually confessed—under torture, he now emphasizes—to being a member of several terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. He ultimately spent 11 months in UAE custody before being deported to Lebanon, where he now runs a children's clothing store. Despite an extensive FBI investigation, he was never charged in the United States.
Fikre, his lawyer says, "never confessed to anything"—"thankfully."
"The FBI does this stuff because they can get away with it," Nelson says. "But the bureau has totally destroyed any relationship it had with the Muslim community in Portland."
UPDATE, Wednesday, 1:00 p.m. EST: Fikre's lawyers have released a video of him talking about his ordeal (they've also written a letter to the Justice Department). You can watch the video here:
