When Arthur Gotcho Cupp changed his name to Freedom Allah Siyam back in 1998, he had no idea that one day his identity would bring the FBI knocking on his front door. After years of working as a vocal antiglobalization activist in the Seattle Filipino community, Siyam recently discovered that he's on a government watch list as a suspected terroristâon October 4, agents showed up at his house bearing a page-long list of names and began questioning his 56-year-old mother. Siyam, his lawyer, and the rest of the Seattle Filipino activist community are afraid they're about to be sucked into a giant, spiraling investigation that's an eerie repeat of the widespread government scrutiny of Arab Americans after September 11.
Siyam, 29, has a shaved head, thick eyebrows, and Filipino parents. When he was 21, he changed his name. "Of course people automatically assume or associate Allah with Islam, but Allah is Arabic... I want keep God central to my goals and aspirations," explains Siyam, who is not Muslim. "Siyam means nine and I was into numerology at the time, it's the period of gestation for a child. And Freedom because I hope to see freedom for people on the planet, as well as for myself." He's a spoken-word artist with friends in the hiphop community like Blue Scholars, and has a day job as a social-history teacher for public-school dropouts. His real passion, though, is activism, serving as the regional coordinator for BAYAN-USA, a lefty Filipino-American organization that coordinates race-and-politics workshops for college students. "A lot of the work we do is based on an anti-imperialist, antiglobalization viewpoint," says Siyam, who also sometimes leads a handful of students on trips to the Philippines. In fact, Siyam travels a lot between the U.S., Philippines, and Canada, which may have raised red flags within the Homeland Security information mines.
Siyam's notion that the FBI is monitoring him was, until this summer, based on shaky, very unsubstantiated rumors. Two years ago, another activist told Siyam that he and other Filipino-American organizers were on a government watch list for suspicious political activities. In 2005, a family friend told Siyam that he'd been questioned by Homeland Security agents who'd asked whether Siyam was leading troops of youths into the Philippines to convert them into anti-American Muslims. This all sounds a little like postâSeptember 11 political-organizer paranoiaâthen in early July, Siyam got a phone call from the FBI.
Roy Woo, a Port of Seattle police detective who works with the FBI, called Siyam to tell him they had his passport and could he please come down and pick it up. On a trip to visit relatives in Canada, Siyam accidentally left his passport in a rental car. Somehow the passport had made it from the back seat of the rental car into the hands of the FBI. Suspicious, Siyam called a lawyer, Larry Hildes of Bellingham, whom he knew had worked on civil-rights cases for other activists. "I've never heard of the FBI being involved in a lost passport before," says Hildes, "We were immediately suspicious; this is not a normal situation."
On July 20, Siyam, Hildes, and a pack of 25 friends headed down to the Port of Seattle office to pick up the passport. Woo and FBI Agent Fred Gutt met them and, according to Hildes, tried to dissuade Siyam from bringing along his lawyer. Hildes refused to leave, and the agents led him and Siyam into a small room with a table and chairs.
"They were real cool and chipper and pretty chatty, too... offered me coffee," recalls Siyam, "They reiterated that it wasn't necessary for me to bring my lawyer, they just had some routine questions about my passport." According to Hildes and Siyam, the officers verified his address and handed over the passport without even checking his ID. "'Then they asked who I lived with, in case they stopped by," says Siyam. When he refused to answer, "[The officers] got a little uneasy and they said, 'Look, we were just wondering if you could help us understand the social-economic situation in the Philippines. Certainly the Philippines has been of interest to our government since 9/11.'" The Philippines are currently home to several al-Qaeda-linked Muslim separatists such as the Abu Sayyaf Group. Unsure of what the FBI wanted from him, Siyam refused to say anything. "They can read a book," he notes. The agents eventually told him he could goâbut only after making him take their cards and promise to call if he had any information.
The whole situation reminds Hildes of government investigations in the Muslim and Arab-American communities after September 11. "It would always start with, 'Well, we just want a little bit of information about the community.' Some of them would help the FBI and some of them would disappear." It's not clear whether the FBI initially invited Siyam in with hopes he could be an informant against terrorist groups in the Philippines. In the passport-reclaiming interrogation, the agents said his insights on Philippine politics would be "mutually helpful."
Whatever the case, in early August the agents contacted Siyam's ex-wife and her parents, asking for details about the divorce, the name change, and possible links to terrorist groups in the Philippines. Hildes sent the FBI a letter threatening legal action, but got a disheartening reply. "They kept telling me that there was an attorney general's directive telling them they can investigate anything of any alleged terrorist activity that they want," he says. This is an exceptionally bad time in American history to be a possible alleged terrorist suspect: Last week's House and Senate vote repealed the occasionally honored tradition of habeas corpus for enemy combatants in the war on terror, and for someone like Siyam there's the strong feeling that at any given point he might be handcuffed in his classroom and led away on "alleged terrorist" charges.
For two months after his ex-wife's questioning, it seemed like the FBI forgot about Siyam. He never got hauled away to an incommunicado detention center and, after his ex-wife, none of his friends reported being approached or questioned. It wasn't until October 4 that the two agents resurfaced in Siyam's lifeâshowing up at his door to interrogate his mother, Erlinda Cupp.
When the agents came knocking, Cupp refused to let them inside the house, meeting with them on her front walk. She says they showed her a page-long list of names and asked her if she recognized any of them. "I only know faces, not names," she replied and after a few minutes the agents left. Cupp immediately told her son what happened. One of the names on the list, it turned out, had been familiar: that of Chera Amlag, wife of Geologic of Blue Scholars, who is heavily involved with BAYAN. Now the fear for Siyam and other public Filipino-Americans figures is not just that they or a few of their friends may soon be wrapped up in an investigation, but the latent feeling that anyone working as an activist in the entire Seattle Filipino community could be the next suspect.
"I don't know what's going to happen next," Geologic posted to an internet message board last week, after he heard his wife was on the FBI list, "All I know is that this is the opening salvo, and that it's time to start the dialogue. I guess I just want to know who's gonna have our back when they kick down the door."
Hildes adds: "Whether they're intending to show up at his home or his workplace and spirit him away to a detention center somewhere, I don't know. But we're really concerned about it and we're really concerned that it just keeps going."
Since Siyam is a born-in-the-U.S. American citizen, it's unlikely he'll be whisked away by warrant-wielding Homeland Security agents, as he and Hildes fear. "With a lot of Arabs and Muslims, it wasn't citizens that were picked up, it was people whose immigration status was in question," explains Pramila Jayapal, executive director of Hate Free Zone, which has worked with Somali and Arab-American communities since September 11. "Citizens were questioned, but not whisked away into secret detention. We have that situation come up all the timeâwhere an FBI agent will either show up at someone's door or be in the community showing a photo of someone... they're investigating those people because they believe they might have information about a terrorist organization or a link to someone they're investigating."
After the FBI stopped by Siyam's home on October 4, Hildes called to complain to Dave Rubencamp, a Washington-based employee of the Joint Terrorism Task Force and Frank Gutt's supervisor. "He told me he had personally assigned Gutt to investigate specific leads they have developed, and threatened to file a charge against me for interfering with a federal investigation," says Hildes. What those leads are, who provided them, what evidence the FBI is looking for, and confirmation of whether there even is currently an investigation against Siyam are all confidential. Hildes says that when he got frustrated and asked for Rubencamp's supervisor, Rubencamp hung up on him. He and Siyam are currently considering seeking a federal court injunction or filing suit against the FBI for harassment. The FBI would not comment for this story. 
