Mark Larabee
03/04/03 (The Oregonion) - The spiritual leader of a Portland mosque pleaded guilty Monday in federal court to bilking the Oregon Health Plan, assuring he will get little or no jail time despite his highly publicized arrest and prosecution by federal antiterrorism agents.
The investigation of Mohamed Sheikh Abdirahman Kariye, became public Sept. 8 when agents of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force cleared a concourse at Portland International Airport and arrested Kariye as he was boarding an airplane with his two children and his brother.
"When he was leaving the country, they didn't know what they had and they panicked," Stanley Cohen, Kariye's lawyer, said of the antiterrorism squad's action.
But he said the government's case ended up being more about saving face than the fight against terrorism. He said the FBI has spent two years looking into the past 10 years of Kariye's life and emerged virtually empty-handed.
"The government spent a lot of time looking and trying and digging and came up with nothing," he said. "And the government can't stand up and say, 'We have nothing.'"
Federal officials last year indicated that Kariye's arrest and those of other prominent Muslims across the country reflected the FBI's post-9/11 strategic shift from investigating crimes to disrupting potential threats and future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Prosecutors and the FBI had no comment on that issue Monday as it related to Kariye.
Kariye, 41, is the imam - prayer leader - at The Islamic Center of Portland, or Masjed As-Saber. Last fall, he was indicted on violations of Social Security fraud as he was leaving the United States for a teaching job in the United Arab Emirates. Those charges were dropped Monday as part of the plea bargain, as were eight similar counts included in a new federal indictment issued by a grand jury in January.
Kariye pleaded guilty to two new counts unsealed Monday: lying about his income to qualify for Oregon Health Plan benefits and using a false Social Security card to obtain those benefits. The illegal activity happened in September 2001, the indictment states.
As part of his agreement to plead guilty, Kariye will pay $5,109 in restitution to the state for benefits he received.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, he could be sentenced to as much as six months in prison, but Cohen expects him to get probation. Kariye spent five weeks in jail after U.S. Customs inspectors said his luggage contained traces of explosives. But subsequent tests by the FBI crime lab found no such evidence and he was released.
U.S. District Judge Owen M. Panner set sentencing for May 12.
Cohen said Kariye underestimated his income by less than $1,000 when applying for state health benefits and said the false Social Security card was the unintended result of Kariye's attempt to flee the civil war in his home country of Somalia.
He said Kariye lied about his age in the early 1980s to get an exit visa from Somalia and avoid conscription into the military. After arriving in the United States in 1983, he applied for a Social Security card using the phony birth date. Five years later, Cohen said, Kariye applied for another card because he had lost the first and used his actual birth date, which made him two years older.
After the hearing, Assistant U.S Attorney Charles Gorder noted that Kariye was in the United States, not Somalia, when he lied about his birth date and his income.
"The question is: Why is a major religious leader cheating on the Oregon Health Plan," Gorder said.
Although the case against Kariye appears all but over, there are rumblings that Cohen might be back in Portland as a member of the defense team for those being held on charges that they conspired to wage war against the United States.
The government is holding five people in an alleged plot to travel to Afghanistan and fight with the Taliban. Their trial is scheduled to begin in October.
Cohen, a controversial and sought-after New York attorney, has taken on several high-profile cases defending Muslims. The fact that he's Jewish has not stopped him from representing the political head of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government for suicide bombings in Israel.
He said he had "no comment at this time" regarding his possible involvement in the case against the Portland group.
Cohen greeted a throng of reporters and television cameras Monday on the courthouse steps to tell them just what he thought about the government's tactics in the case against Kariye.
He said the Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which include local police officers and whose members are based in FBI field offices, should be abolished as counterproductive and a feel-good program that does nothing but frighten the American people with color-coded alerts and vague references to intangible terrorist threats.
"I guess (U.S. Attorney General) John Ashcroft will have to hold a new press conference and announce a new bad guy," Cohen said. "I think we'd be much happier, I think we'd be much safer if (the FBI) went back to doing drugs cases."
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