This LA Times piece is worth a read. The FBI planted an informant Naseem Khan in the house Hayat house in 2002 who tape-recorded conversations with Hamid and tried to get him interested in Jihad. After his trip to Pakistan in 2003 he was arrested and interrogated unprofessionally, producing a videotaped "confession" consisting largely of "um-hms" in response to a large range of mutually contradictory questions:
The Agent Who Might Have Saved Hamid Hayat
For 35 years, James Wedick had been a star at the FBI. When his former colleagues prosecuted a suspected terrorist, he came to the side of the defense and was branded a traitor.
By Mark Arax, Times Staff Writer
May 28, 2006
Before the wins and losses are tallied up and the war on terror goes down in the books as either wisdom or folly, it might be recalled what took place this spring on the 13th floor of the federal courthouse in Sacramento. There, in a perfectly dignified room, in front of prosecutors, defense attorneys and judge, a tall, gaunt man named James Wedick Jr. was fighting for a chance to testify, to tell jurors about the 35 years he spent in the FBI and how it came to be that he was standing before them not on the side of the U.S. government but next to two Pakistani Muslims, son and father, whose books and prayers and immigrant dreams were now being picked over in the first terrorism trial in California.
Wedick watched the prosecutor from Washington stand up and call him a hired gun for the defense and say that any criticisms he had about the investigation would only confuse the jury and waste the court's time. He wanted to answer back that he had been the most decorated FBI agent to ever work out of the state capital, and for years prosecutors, judges and juries had nothing but time to ponder the way he busted dirty state senators and mobsters and cracked open the biggest health scam in California history. Yet he could only sit and listen as the judge ruled that by the weight of legal precedence, he would have to be muzzled. In eight weeks of trial, 15 witnesses for the prosecution and seven witnesses for the defense took the stand, yet the one whose testimony might have changed everything never got to tell his story. He never got to trace his metamorphosis to a Sunday morning last June, when he woke up thinking he had seen all the absurdities that a life of crime fighting had to offer only to find the FBI videotape—the confession that would become the heart of the terrorism case—on his doorstep ...
Hayat shifted in his chair, and his voice grew submissive. One hour, two hours, yawns, cigarette break, yawns, candy break, exhaustion. The freefall never came. Instead, each new revelation, each dramatic turn in his story, was coming from the mouths of the agents first. Rather than ask Hayat to describe what happened, they were describing what happened for him and then taking his "uh-huhs" and "um-hmms" as solemn declarations. He was so open to suggestion that the camp itself went from being a village of mud huts to a building the size of Arco Arena. His fellow trainees numbered 35, 40, 50, 200. The camp was run by a political group, a religious school, his uncle, his grandfather, yes, it was Al Qaeda. The camp's location was all over the map—from Afghanistan to Kashmir to a village in Pakistan called Balakot. As for weapons training, the camp owned one pistol, two rifles and a knife to cut vegetables.
Wedick was troubled by the inability of the agents to pin down the contours of one believable story. They didn't seem to know the terrain of Pakistan or the month of Ramadan. They didn't seem to fully appreciate that they were dealing with an immigrant kid from a lowly Pashtun tribe whose sixth-grade education and poor command of the English language—"Martyred? What does that mean, sir?"—demanded a more skeptical approach. And then there was the matter of the father's confession. Umer Hayat described visiting his son's camp and finding 1,000 men wearing black Ninja Turtle masks and performing "pole vaulting" exercises in huge basement rooms—100 miles from Balakot. The agents going back and forth between the two interrogations that night never attempted to reconcile the vast differences in the confessions ...
http://www.latimes.com/features/magazine/west/la-tm-wedick22may28,0,4951185.story?coll=la-home-magazine The "confessions" seem to be the only real "evidence," as suggested by this sterling bit of testimony:
U.S. expert sees terror camp in Pakistan
Wednesday, Aug 02, 2006
Washington: Eric Benn, an imagery expert with the Defence Intelligence Agency of the United States, has disputed Pakistan's claim that it does not have terrorist training camps in its territory ... The FBI rolled out Mr. Benn, who on the basis of satellite photos of areas, initially argued that there was perhaps a 50 per cent ``possibility'' of a ``militant training camp'' in northeast Pakistan. But after viewing Hamid's confession to the FBI, the analyst concluded that there was 70 per cent ``probability'' that the satellite images pointed to a militant training camp ...
http://www.hindu.com/2006/08/02/stories/2006080220231400.htm Two separate juries failed to convict Umer Hayat, so the Feds pled him out on an unrelated charge:
The Record
Published Friday, Aug 25, 2006
Umer Hayat walked out of a Sacramento federal courtroom this morning a free man ... Following June 2005’s allegations, Hayat spent 11 months in jail and the past 3 1/2 months under house arrest in Lodi ... But authorities couldn't convince a jury that Umer Hayat wasn't just making up his tale of touring paramilitary training camps run by Islamic extremists in Pakistan in 2003, when FBI agents interviewed him last summer. After a two-month trial, jurors in April deadlocked on two charges that Umer Hayat, a U.S. citizen, lied about his knowledge of terrorist camps and his son's attendance at one. Although prosecutors initially announced they would seek a new trial, they quickly accepted a guilty plea from Umer Hayat on a charge he lied to federal agents in 2003 about the amount of cash he was taking to his native Pakistan ...
http://www.recordnet.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060825/NEWS01/60825002/1001 Hayat is free after sentence of time served
By Denny Walsh -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 11:23 am PDT Friday, August 25, 2006
Umer Hayat, the Lodi ice cream vendor who fought the government to no verdict on terrorist-related charges and then pleaded guilty in an unrelated matter, was sentenced Friday in Sacramento federal court to the 11 months he spent in jail awaiting trial ... He was previously tried on charges that he lied in 2005 to the FBI about his son's support of terrorism and his own firsthand knowledge of terrorist training camps in Pakistan. The jury split 7-5 for conviction on one count and 6-6 on a second count and a mistrial was declared. While he was happy to have his prosecution behind him, Hayat told reporters Friday, "My family’s still hurting about my son's situation" ...
http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/story/14307507p-15194103c.html It looks right now to me like they've framed a kid, couldn't frame his father (despite having a "confession"), so they're illegally preventing the father's brother and the kid's cousin, who are USA citizens, from re-entering the country.