ALEXANDRIA, Va. — One hundred feet before drivers reach the parking lot of the jail where alleged terror associate James Ujaama is being held, a sheriff's deputy springs from a makeshift checkpoint.
Visitors are asked the purpose of their visit. Identification is inspected. Those surviving this scrutiny are allowed to pass. And that's just to reach a parking lot.
Ujaama, a 36-year-old Colorado native arrested July 22 and alleged to have ties to Islamic terrorists, is being held in the same facility as American Taliban fighter John Phillip Walker Lindh and the so-called "20th hijacker," Zacarias Moussaoui, both of whom are awaiting trial in the Eastern District of Virginia federal courts.
But ask for James Ujaama at the Alexandria Sheriff's Department detention facility and you'll be told that no such person is in custody there. Ask for James Ernest Thompson — the name he was given at birth 36 years ago in Denver, and you get the same response. Even if you ask for "Ahmed Bilal," yet another name Ujaama has used, the answer comes back no such person.
But if you request "Bilal Ahmed," the answer is yes, he's here.
"Bilal" is the name Ujaama used Sept. 20 to register the Internet domain StopAmerica.org in Karachi, Pakistan. That site, highly critical of post-Sept. 11 U.S. foreign policy, is now defunct.
It was not until Tuesday that his mother, Peggy Thompson, finally realized her son was being held under a name even she didn't recognize.
"I didn't even know they could hold you under a name that is not yours," said Thompson, from her home in Seattle. "This is the first time I found out that he is not there under his name"
Thompson said several civil rights groups have called her, asking how they might assist Ujaama's case — but that these groups are finding it impossible to even find him in the federal system.
The Christian Science Monitor even erroneously reported that he was being held with captured al Qaida fighters at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on Aug. 5.
"They don't have a record of any James Ujaama there (Virginia). Everybody's working under a false impression. Everything is just getting weird," she said, lamenting "all this cloak-and-dagger stuff."
Authorities in Virginia will say nothing about Ujaama — under any name he might have.
"We are not commenting on the case at all," said Sam Dibbley, press officer for the U.S. Attorney's office in the Eastern District of Virginia.
"I can't release any of that information. It's under seal. I would be breaking the law," said John Hackman, acting chief deputy U.S. marshal for the same district.
Ujaama was arrested July 22 at his grandmother's home in Denver on a material witness warrant issued by a judge in the Eastern District of Virginia. His status as a "material witness" means his testimony is sought by a grand jury hearing evidence here and authorities fear that he might flee.
Published reports have said that Ujaama is suspected of having supplied laptop computers to the Taliban before Sept. 11 — which he denied, in a July 23 interview with the Rocky Mountain News — and may have ties to Abu Hamza al-Masri, a London-based Islamic fundamentalist with alleged al Qaida ties.
Federal authorities also are probing allegations that Ujaama might have been involved in efforts to establish an Islamic terrorist training camp on a ranch in Bly, Ore.
Jill Savitt, a spokeswoman for the Washington office of the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights, learned of Ujaama's case only Wednesday.
"There has been a level of secrecy that is uncomfortable, in dealings with all of these detainees," Savitt said. "I don't know if booking him under another name is any more egregious than denying them counsel."
Ujaama has been permitted to see a lawyer, Greg Stambaugh of Manassas, Va. But Stambaugh declined to discuss his client's case, and claimed that even talking about the status or conditions of Ujaama's incarceration was limited by the same grand jury seal order that the government cites in its refusal to acknowledge Ujaama's arrest.
Ujaama is "just trying to stay upbeat," Stambaugh said.
Thompson has been told that her son won't have another court date until at least Aug. 27, so there's no expectation that Ujaama will be free before that time. She recently tried to send Ujaama medicine that he needs for stomach problems and was told that they had arrived in damaged condition.
On Wednesday, a reporter who was turned away for a third time in a bid to see Ujaama — a meeting Ujaama initially sought — was warned not to set foot on the jail property again.
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