Mosab Hassan Yousef says he will be killed if he is deported from the US to the West Bank. The oldest son of one of Hamas’ founders, he was an Israeli spy for a decade, and he abandoned Islam for Christianity, further marking him a traitor.
He was scheduled to plead his case yesterday to an immigration judge in San Diego, four months after publishing memoirs that say he was one of the Shin Bet security agency’s best assets and was dubbed The Green Prince, a reference to his Hamas pedigree and the Islamists’ signature green color.
Yousef’s case seems straightforward: Helping Israel find and kill members of the militant group would make him a marked man back home.
Nearly two dozen members of Congress wrote US Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano this week that Yousef would be in “grave danger” in the Middle East. Former CIA director James Woolsey says his deportation would discourage other potential spies.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that such an action would set us back years in the war on terrorism,” Woolsey wrote in a letter released by Yousef’s attorney. “Mosab’s deportation would be such an inhumane act it would constitute a blight on American history.”
However, the Department of Homeland Security isn’t convinced and wants him gone, calling him “a danger to the security of the United States” who has “engaged in terrorist activity.”
Yousef, 32, settled in Southern California after stepping off a plane in Los Angeles with a tourist visa in January 2007. He remains free while his application for asylum is considered.
“Exposing terrorist secrets and warning the world in my first book cost me everything. I am a traitor to my people, disowned by my family, a man without a country. And now the country I came to for sanctuary is turning its back,” he wrote on his blog in May.
Asylum applicants can close their hearings to the public, but Yousef welcomes the publicity. He urges supporters to contact the Homeland Security attorney assigned to his case and invites anyone in the San Diego area to attend the hearing.
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency within Homeland Security that is arguing the government’s case, declined to comment, saying in a statement that it “respects the privacy of all individuals involved in the immigration litigation process.”
Homeland Security called Yousef a terrorist danger when it denied asylum in February last year and, in court documents provided by Yousef’s attorney, said he “discusses his extensive involvement with Hamas in great detail” in his recent memoir. It cites a passage in which Yousef identifies five suspects in a 2001 suicide bombing to a Shin Bet official and admits that he drove them to safe houses. It was not more specific in its pre-hearing briefing about the threat he may pose to the US.
Yousef says his intelligence work for Israel required him to do anything he could to learn about Hamas and that neither he nor Israel knew they were suspects in the suicide bombing when he gave them rides.
“Yes, while working for Israeli intelligence, I posed as a terrorist,” he wrote. “Yes, I carried a gun. Yes, I was in terrorist meetings with Yassir Arafat, my father and other Hamas leaders. It was part of my job.”
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