NWO on a roll... This guy was railroaded!!!
Lodi man convicted of terror charges
Mistrial for father in separate case
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
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(04-25) 16:48 -- SACRAMENTO -- A 23-year-old Lodi man was convicted today of charges that he trained at a terrorist camp in his family's homeland of Pakistan and returned to the United States last summer to await orders to attack Americans.
Hamid Hayat was also convicted in U.S. District Court of charges that he initially lied to FBI agents about the alleged training when they confronted him last June, after he returned from a two-year trip to Pakistan. He faces up to 39 years in prison.
The jury of six men and six women deliberated nine days before returning the verdicts at 3:45 p.m.
Wazhma Mojaddidi, Hayat's attorney, said she was "clearly devastated and disappointed" by the verdicts.
"I believe they are wrong in their decision," Mojaddidi said of the jurors. "Hamid Hayat never attended a terrorist training camp. This fight is not over, and ultimately Hamid Hayat will be proven innocent."
After hearing the verdicts, Hamid said, "It's OK," recounted Mojaddidi, who said she plans to begin working immediately on a motion for a new trial on a variety of grounds.
Prosecutors scheduled a news conference on the case at 4:45 p.m. today. Sentencing is set July 14.
A separate jury of eight women and four men deliberating the fate of Hayat's father, 48-year-old ice cream truck driver Umer Hayat, told Judge Garland Burrell Jr. Monday that they had deadlocked, and he declared a mistrial this morning.
The dual juries deliberated separately after a two-month trial.
Federal prosecutors must decide by a May 5 hearing whether they will retry Umer Hayat, who faces up to 16 years in prison. McGregor Scott, the U.S. Attorney for California's Eastern District, said in a brief written statement that the government "will evaluate its case against Umer Hayat and determine what course of action to pursue."
The judgments were a mixed result for federal authorities, who said they had broken up a budding al Qaeda-linked terror operation after the arrests last year but presented a murky case during trial that revolved around controversial confessions.
U.S. intelligence director John Negroponte said in February that a "network of Islamic extremists" in Lodi represented a "homegrown" jihadist cell.
The cases were the product of an aggressive FBI probe of Muslims in Lodi, a San Joaquin County city with a close-knit community of about 2,500 Pakistani Americans. The FBI began the investigation soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The FBI hired an informant to infiltrate the community and get close to a pair of Pakistani clerics who were in this country on religious-worker visas. One was the imam of Lodi's only mosque; the other was spearheading an effort to build a private school for Central Valley Muslim youths.
The informant, 32-year-old Pakistani native Naseem Khan, stumbled upon Hamid Hayat, an aimless young man with a sixth-grade education and some radical views, in the summer of 2002. Khan, who had lived in Lodi before moving to Oregon, became Hayat's best friend while instigating talk of holy war, and while wearing a hidden microphone.
The younger Hayat was born in Stockton; his father came to the United States from Pakistan 30 years ago and is a naturalized citizen.
The main charge against Hamid Hayat was providing "material support" -- in this case, his own body -- to terrorists.
Prosecutors have often relied on the statute in recent years. In 2004, then-Justice Department criminal division chief Chris Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee that authorities would "much rather catch terrorists with their hands on a check than on a bomb."
Results have been mixed: Prosecutors won convictions in Lackawanna, N.Y., and in the case of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh. But the statute didn't stick in high-profile cases in Detroit, Tampa, Fla., and Idaho.
The dual trials in Sacramento centered on the FBI's lengthy, videotaped interrogations of the Hayats last June 4 and 5 at the agency's office in the capital. The younger man's provocative talks with Khan had made him an investigative target.
The father and son spoke matter-of-factly with agents about paramilitary training and the alleged existence of a terrorist cell in Lodi. Hamid Hayat, who was interrogated for more than eight hours over one afternoon and night, said he went to a camp in late 2003 or early 2004 at which trainees fired guns and exercised.
Prosecutors placed the training camp outside Balakot. They produced a Defense Department analyst who said satellite images showed a "possible camp" in the area and that what he saw on the photos matched Hamid Hayat's description.
Defense attorneys said the men had been manipulated into telling agents whatever they wanted to hear, and had cooperated in a misguided attempt to be helpful. The men often gave answers suggested by agents, who did most of the talking. The confessions also featured conflicting and sometimes bizarre details.
Umer Hayat, for instance, told FBI agents that he had visited his son's camp out of curiosity in late 2004.
And, although the son told agents he had trained with as few as 35 men in a mountaintop field outside the Pakistani city of Balakot, the father described a basement in a different province where 1,000 masked men, including Americans, fired machine guns, swung swords and learned to pole vault across rivers.
During closing arguments in the trial, prosecutors acknowledged that Hamid Hayat had "flat-out lied" during parts of his confession. But they said he did that in an effort to minimize his role in training for terrorism.
What jurors did not hear, because of rules regarding a defendant's right to confront witnesses, was that FBI agents had shown clips of his son's alleged confession to Umer Hayat before the father began to make admissions. Then, after he made those admissions, agents showed clips of the father confessing to Hamid Hayat.
"You're not helping your father here by giving me information that doesn't agree with him," agent Timothy Harrison told the younger Hayat.
The father's jury was not shown the son's confession, and vice versa, and thus neither was aware of the conflicting statements.
The witness rules are intended to protect suspects from being harmed by the words of co-defendants who, because they are on trial, cannot be confronted on the stand. In this case, both defendants exercised their Fifth Amendment right not to testify.
Prosecutors also spent a lot of time painting a dark picture of Hamid Hayat in an attempt to convince jurors that he was the type of person who would have joined a terror plot. The young man pasted together a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about the Taliban and other radical groups, and told Khan in a taped conversation that he was "so pleased" with the 2002 slaying of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl by radicals in Pakistan.
Defense lawyers said the rhetoric was mostly garden-variety for a young man who had spent half his life in Pakistan.
Defense attorneys attacked Khan's credibility as an informant, saying he had lied when he told agents he had seen three of the FBI's most wanted terrorists in Lodi as late as 1999, including al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
Those claims helped prompt the FBI to start its Lodi probe in late 2001 but turned out to be false. Prosecutors said Khan had simply been mistaken.
The FBI paid Khan more than $225,000 in salary and expenses for his work in Lodi, and he remains employed by the agency.
Two clerics who were in Lodi on religious-worker visas, Shabbir Ahmed and Muhammad Adil Khan, were detained along with the Hayats last June but were never charged in connection with terrorism. Both agreed to be deported rather than fight immigration charges.
Umer Hayat reacted to his mistrial by telling his lawyers that he should be released from jail, where he and his son have been since their arrests.
A bail hearing is set Friday, and defense attorney Johnny Griffin, who has said that Hayat's son never went to a training camp, urged prosecutors to drop the case.
"The government in my view put its best foot forward -- and slipped and fell," Griffin said.
Jury forewoman Debra Kiriu, a 53-year-old Lodi native and call center manager who now lives in neighboring Woodbridge, indicated that jurors were "evenly split," said James Wedick, a retired FBI agent and lead defense investigator who spoke briefly with Kiriu.
Burrell warned jurors that a public airing of their deliberations could have a "chilling effect" on the nation's jury process.
Outside court, Umer Hayat's family members -- his wife, Oma, his 17-year-old son, Arslan, and his 11-year-old daughter, Raheela, along with nephew Usama Ismael, 20 -- told reporters they wanted to move on from the case.
"He wasn't guilty, like I told you guys," Arslan Hayat said of his father. "The jury didn't find him guilty, and he's gonna be home, and we want him back."
E-mail Demian Bulwa at [email protected].
Born with the wrong sex???
Facing facts
Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
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Claire Roberts had tried plastic surgery: two nose jobs, plus a surgical procedure in which her jawbone was shaved down to create a softer contour.
But nothing really worked. A transsexual who decided late in life to transition to female gender, Roberts went to San Francisco plastic surgeon Douglas Ousterhout last fall and requested a new face. She wanted to "pass," which in her case meant altering a Governator jaw, a large nose and a low, protruding brow line that "made me feel about as feminine as one of the females in 'Planet of the Apes.'
"I felt like I could not shift over to a full-time gender position until my face -- my identity -- was correct," explains Roberts. The 59-year-old Seattle musician and retired business executive is 6 feet tall and has a 25-year-old son. He found out about Ousterhout's innovative facial feminization surgery online and decided to take the leap. The results, five months later, are dramatic: instead of the receding hairline, lantern jaw and (actor) Geoffrey Rush profile, Roberts is a perfectly plausible female.
Ousterhout, who practices at the California Pacific Medical Center's Davies campus on Castro Street, is widely considered the country's foremost facial feminization surgeon. This is because of the cranial and maxillofacial techniques he developed to change the shape of the skull. Unlike most plastic surgeons with their standard menu of tummy tucks, eyelid lifts and rhinoplasties, Ousterhout, 70, brings skills he acquired at the Center for Craniofacial Anomalies at the UCSF Medical Center, where for 25 years he was head surgeon and worked on children born with severe skull deformities. In 1998, when HMOs reduced reimbursements for skull surgery ("I wasn't going to be able to afford my practice"), he switched to female feminization surgery full time.
"Most plastic surgeons aren't bone doctors," Ousterhout says, "and never spend time really analyzing the difference between the female and male skull." None, he claims, delivers the radical results he's achieved with 918 procedures beginning in 1978.
Surgeons who perform the work are rare. Ousterhout declined to estimate the current number, but Chicago plastic surgeon Mark L. Zukowski, who performs 80 to 100 facial feminizations per year, guesses there are "at most 12 (doctors) in the world, with three or four top people." Beverly Hills surgeon Gary Alter, whose practice also includes sexual reassignment and labiaplasty, is one of the more prominent specialists and does about 50 facial feminization operations per year.
For $22,000 to $40,000 -- roughly twice the cost of sexual reassignment surgery -- Ousterhout's patients undergo as much as 10 1/2 hours of surgery. They remain in the hospital two days after surgery, then transfer to the Cocoon House, a bed-and-breakfast facility run by two nurses in Noe Valley, for eight days of convalescence.
Eighty-five to 90 percent of Ousterhout's patients are transgender. Ninety-five percent come from outside the Bay Area. "I have one patient who wants the surgery so badly," he says. "She's in a coal-mining town somewhere in Kentucky and she says, 'I don't dare dress as a female where anybody can see me. Literally, I'll be killed.' And she's probably right."
Most of Ousterhout's patients, like Stacy Windsor of British Columbia, grew up thinking they were accidents of nature. "I figured out that I was supposed to be a girl when I was 5, when I was in kindergarten," she says. "For some reason there'd been this terrible mistake."
At 24, Windsor (not her real name) is one of Ousterhout's youngest surgical patients. Six feet two and lanky, a computer programmer who started taking female hormones and dressing as a woman at 19, Windsor came to San Francisco after researching Ousterhout on the Internet and reading testimonials.
Her mother, Karen, has flown in from southern Ontario to be at her child's side throughout the surgery and recovery. "She's my baby," Karen says. Not supporting her would be unthinkable, she adds, especially when "one of three transsexuals ends her life before the age of 30."
"It's pretty rare, sadly," Windsor says of her parents' support. "I had read all these horror stories on the Internet saying, 'If you're still living with your parents, be packed and ready to go when you come out to them.' And of course they were both totally fine with it."
Windsor, who looks like Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry" -- only much more feminine -- is speaking in a private room at Ousterhout's office, its walls covered in plaques and diplomas from Ousterhout's long career. She's nervous about being exposed, especially at work, where everyone assumes she's a biological female. She asks not to be photographed for this story, or identified by her real name.
The procedure, she hopes, will help her not only to pass but also to feel more "integrated" in her female identity. "I'm having the jaw tapered," she says. "And I'm going to have the chin reduced and brought forward."
The male skull, Ousterhout explains, has more hooding over the eyes, whereas females have a more "open, convex orbit." During facial feminization surgery, Ousterhout pulls the face back from the forehead and removes part of the forehead bone, leaving a more feminine contour. The chin, which in men is wider and 20 percent longer than the female mandible, is reduced to female size and shape through a process called a sliding genioplasty. "It's like taking out the salami between two pieces of bread," he says.
"I also don't like the width of my nose," Windsor adds. In fact, it's as masculine and unavoidable as Adrien Brody's. The surgery will also lift her upper lip closer to her nose, allowing for a more feminine smile. It's a subtle difference, Ousterhout says, but men have a vertically longer upper lip than women. It's not noticeable when they smile, but when a man's lips are parted a few millimeters, the upper teeth are hidden. Ousterhout shortens the upper lip by making an incision immediately beneath the sill of the nose.
Last of all, the most obvious factor and biggest giveaway for transsexuals is the thyroid cartilage, or Adam's apple. While many surgeons make a small transverse incision in the front of the neck, immediately above the cartilage prominence, Ousterhout approaches it through an incision just behind the chin to leave less obvious scarring.
Eight days after her surgery, a few hours after her sutures and bandages are removed, Windsor welcomes me to the Cocoon House, where she's been napping and blunting the post-op edge with a series of gradually less potent pain pills. Her face is a bit pumpkin-like with orange and purple bruises and swelling around her nose, chin and jaw. Her voice is a tad weary.
"It's a horribly painful operation to recover from," Stacy says. "I was under anesthesia 13 hours. Transplants don't take 13 hours!" When the bandages were removed and she saw her new face, "I popped a Valium. It's such a huge change from how I looked before." For the next six weeks, Stacy has to take saline nasal spray six times a day. She can't wear glasses, a bicycle helmet or any kind of protective headgear for six months. Six days after our last visit, she sends an e-mail from British Columbia:
"My scalp incision shed a lot of hair around the edges, making me sensitive about people noticing it. And there's new stubble there, which will be a complete pain in the butt to style in about a month. I can't pluck my eyebrows because of risk of infection. ... I basically look like Stalin, or Bert from 'Sesame Street.'
"It's all stuff that's going to be just fine in the long term," she adds. "It's just gross now."
Stacy sees the facial surgery as being more about identity than vanity. She was homeless and on drugs two years ago, and says the expensive procedure -- $35,000 in her case -- was possible only because a family friend volunteered to front the cash. "Even if I'd found work in a field where I did well financially, it would've taken 10 years to save that much money."
"Ten really difficult years," her mother adds.
"I have a new opportunity here with the new face," Stacy says. "For the majority of Dr. O's patients, it's the difference between a very successful life and a sad and lonely, little life."
Not everyone agrees that FFS is desirable for transitioning transsexuals. San Francisco entertainer Veronica Klaus had genital reassignment surgery and breast augmentation but decided against facial surgery. "While I think it can be an important step in realizing one's potential, it's more important that one's self-esteem come first from the inside."
Lannie Rose, a San Jose author and transgender person. recommends facial feminization surgery only "if you have particularly masculine features and are having a difficult time passing in most circumstances." In her book, "How to Change Your Sex," Rose warns, "Although FFS is startlingly effective in feminizing the face, it only creates confusion if you wind up with a feminine-looking face on top of a linebacker's body; or very feminine features on a face that's still too damn large."
She's got a point: Think of Roberta Muldoon, the professional football player-turned-lady played by John Lithgow in "The World According to Garp." Or Roy "Ruth" Applewood, a Midwestern husband and dad, played by the bearish Tom Wilkinson, who shocks his family by coming out as transgender in the cable drama "Normal."
In fact, Ousterhout says, the size of the face is modified through FFS: "By reducing the forehead length through scalp advancement to a female position, and by reducing the vertical height of the chin in the sliding genioplasty, the face is made smaller in all regards."
For patients like Roberts, who go through life thinking of themselves as women despite a body that claims otherwise and then gradually find the courage to make the transition, Ousterhout's makeovers are life-changers. "The best way to describe this procedure and its impact on my life is that for the first time in 59 years my outside looks something like my inside."
Before FFS, Roberts says, "I thought I was ugly. I finally figured out that I didn't regard myself as ugly, but rather 'wrong.' The image in the picture was not me. Now it is, and that fact is so profound for me that I am still giddy from it!"
When the work was finished and she looked in the mirror, Roberts adds, "I said, 'Oh my God, I look like my mother!' While most women make this statement with chagrin, I made it with real joy. Actually, it's quite an overstatement since my mother was truly beautiful -- but I can now see much of her is in me, which touches me deeply."
E-mail Edward Guthmann at [email protected].
Compound Eye's engineered
BERKELEY
Eyes like dragonfly's developed in UC lab
Team builds device that can see in all directions at once
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor
Friday, April 28, 2006
Bug Eyes. Chronicle graphic by John Blanchard
A UC Berkeley engineer, entranced by the uncanny ability of insects like dragonflies and bumblebees to peer in all directions at once, has for the first time created microscopic versions of their compound eyes in the laboratory.
Luke Lee, professor of bioengineering and leader of a research team he calls the Bio-Poets, is reporting today that his synthetic devices made of complex plastic materials can "see" in all directions simultaneously, and could well find uses in fields as varied as medicine, 3-D cameras and even espionage.
The bulbous compound eyes of many insects contain thousands of individual lenses, each of which sees in a single direction, but whose images are melded into a single, wide-angle view that allows the insect to survey its entire neighborhood at once.
Lee confesses that he can't figure out how nature could develop the complex devices that function so well in living organisms, but the team's success in creating a synthetic fly's eye, described today in the journal Science, is only the beginning, Lee said in an interview Wednesday.
Lee's team of Bio-Poets -- the term stands for a mouthful of jargon: Biomolecular Polymer Opto-Electronic Technology and Science -- works on many projects at the frontier of bioengineering, and in the near future, he said, the group will be developing miniature diagnostic kits that patients could use under medical supervision to keep watch over obscure illnesses.
The team plans to create microscopic syringes for medical use that mimic the proboscis of mosquitoes and other insects that can stab and suck up blood or inject poisons, and they even hope to create bioengineered retinas so the blind can see.
"I'm always fascinated by how nature makes these complex things; I don't understand it, but I think engineers need to use nature as a model to make such useful devices in the laboratory," Lee said.
The compound eyes he and his colleagues have developed consists of exactly 8,370 individual lenses, each no larger than a pinpoint, and all clustered like a honeycomb in a single hemisphere about the size of a pinhead -- all in all, a true compound eye working on the same principle as the eye of a fly or a bumblebee.
In Lee's tightly controlled and rigidly sanitary lab, each crystalline lens is linked to a "waveguide," a microscopic length of synthesized plastic designed to carry each image from a single lens to a detector that would act the way the eye's retina captures images and transmits them through optic nerves to the brain.
But instead of retinas, Lee and his principal colleagues, Ki-Hun Jeong and Jaeyoun Kim, plan to link their synthetic waveguides to clusters of photodiodes -- light-detecting devices similar to those used in digital cameras and camcorders that can register the images permanently.
Tests have shown that the compound eyes created by the Bio-Poets group can, in fact, detect light signals coming from virtually all directions -- better than the best fish-eye lenses of today's cameras, Lee said. They can also swiftly detect moving lights as they pass from one lens to another across the smallest distances -- an extremely useful ability, he suggested, for covert surveillance devices.
The lenses in the compound eyes of insects are called ommatidia. The common housefly has about 10,000 of those in each eye, while a dragonfly's compound eye holds no fewer than 30,000 ommatidia. Lee said that in his lab, there's no limit to the number of lenses his team could pack into the artificial compound eyes.
"I don't really understand how nature can make such complex eyes," Lee said, "but in the lab we certainly can. There's a lot of bioengineering to it, but a lot of poetry, too."
E-mail David Perlman at [email protected].
