The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  With $3 billion directed at counterterrorism, the FBI can’t come back to Congress and say, “We spent all the money, and the good news is that we didn’t find any terrorists.” Having a well-financed counterterrorism program means that the FBI must find terrorists to justify the program’s existence, and terrorism sting operations provide a convenient and efficient means to show that a threat exists. However, the fact that there haven’t been any terrorists who have been active members of U.S. Muslim communities, outside of those lured into stings, supports the assumption of former FBI agents like Myron Fuller that there aren’t capable terrorists in those communities.

  In using sting operations to pin up a “Mission Accomplished” banner in the war on terrorism, the FBI has had a powerful, if naïve, ally—the news media. Whenever the FBI announces a new terrorism sting, the media turns up the fear dial a notch, making it easy for the Bureau to demonstrate how it is ferreting out terrorists within the United States. For example, on September 25, 2009, ABC’s Good Morning America woke up Americans with news that the FBI had apprehended a man who tried to set off a car bomb in the garage of Fountain Place, a sixty-story late modernist skyscraper in downtown Dallas. “The thousands of people inside the sixty-story skyscraper in downtown Dallas did not know it yesterday, but the FBI says a man was outside, trying to kill as many of them as he could,” reporter Pierre Thomas told television viewers that morning. “According to authorities, Hosam Smadi, an illegal immigrant from Jordan who had declared his love for Osama bin Laden, parked what he thought was a powerful car bomb in the tower’s basement, his goal to, quote, ‘bring down the building.’ The FBI says Smadi eagerly dialed a cell phone to trigger the blast by remote.”

  The program then cut to a woman identified as Smadi’s friend. “He babysat our kids. He, you know, if anybody needed anything, he was always there,” she said. The show then went back to Thomas, who continued: “It was a sting. The explosives were fake. Smadi had been set up by the FBI, who learned of his alleged call for jihad on the Internet last March. The Bureau then laid a trap, introducing Smadi to a cell of operatives who were actually working for the FBI. His friends don’t believe it.”11

  As with most reporting on FBI terrorism sting operations, everything in the Smadi story was front-loaded, with the media distributing unchallenged the government’s narrative that Smadi was a dangerous terrorist, reinforcing the perception that a threat is out there and a terrorist could strike at any time. But what came out later in the Smadi case, well after the story was off the national broadcasts, was that the so-called terrorist was a twenty-year-old kid whom the FBI had discovered mouthing off on an online chat room for Muslim extremists. When Smadi first met with an undercover FBI agent as part of the sting, he wasn’t interested in attacking the United States at all, but instead wanted to fight with the Taliban in Pakistan. Bombing a local target was actually the undercover agent’s idea, and the FBI provided the fake bomb, the cell phone that was supposed to trigger that bomb, and everything else Smadi needed for the attack.12 Viewers of Good Morning America on September 25, 2009, were left with the thought that the FBI had saved them from a would-be terrorist, when the truth was that the FBI had turned an angry young man caught ranting online into someone seemingly capable of causing mass destruction.

  Nearly a year later, the media again offered unchallenged the government’s view when the FBI and the Justice Department announced the arrest of Farooque Ahmed, a thirty-four-year-old Pakistani-born computer engineer who had plotted with undercover FBI agents to bomb the Metro system in Washington, D.C. Ahmed had provided drawings and information about Metro stations to people he believed were Al Qaeda operatives.13 The bust made national news, once again fueling the perception that there were dangerous and capable terrorists in the United States. However, authorities were forced to admit that the public was never in any actual danger during the Ahmed sting. In a press conference for the Washington, D.C., news media, Michael Tabor, chief of the Metro Transit Police Department, explained that the would-be terrorist never had any opportunity to terrorize anyone. “Now I want to make myself perfectly clear that at no time were any patrons, employees, facilities associated with the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit System in jeopardy,” Tabor said.14

  Even when it comes to in-depth reporting, the traditional news media have been unwilling to cast a critical eye at terrorism sting operations. For an example of this, let’s turn back again to the case of Antonio Martinez, the twenty-two-year-old Baltimore man who tried to bomb a military recruiting center. In January 2011, Frontline on PBS aired a collaborative story with the Washington Post documenting the enormous growth since 9/11 in the number of government contractors involved in the surveillance of U.S. citizens for counterterrorism purposes and how this industry is kept largely secret from the general public. Toward the end of the twenty-one-minute segment, Frontline attempted to show that despite our growing surveillance state, the terrorism cases we’ve heard about weren’t thwarted by privacy-invading technology. One of the examples the program used was Martinez, who initially came to the government’s attention after a private citizen reported his Facebook rants to the FBI. Frontline used the Martinez case to show that, despite all the investments in surveillance technology, none of it was used to catch this apparent terrorist.

  “I’m trying to think of any other technology that would have helped in this case,” reporter Dana Priest said in an interview with FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Richard McFeeley.

  “This was good, old-fashioned police work by a lot of different police agencies coming together,” McFeeley responded.

  “Okay. So not so heavy on the technology,” Priest said.

  “That’s correct,” McFeeley said.

  The point being made was that all this intrusive surveillance technology wasn’t helpful in finding terrorists. But Frontline never questioned if someone such as Martinez, who was lured into an FBI sting by an aggressive informant, could legitimately even be considered a terrorist if he lacked the capacity to commit acts of terror on his own. Since the media have largely abdicated the role of defining who is and is not a terrorist to the FBI and Justice Department, the government has been able to push forward cases with no links to real terrorists and use the resulting publicity to demonstrate a terrorism-thwarting job seemingly well done.

  In addition, without critical questioning from the media, or any kind of independent verifying organization, law enforcement is able to use its own data to create the narrative that dangerous terrorists are targeting us. For example, in March 2012, the New York City Police Department published a list of fourteen terrorism cases since 9/11 that the NYPD had seemingly prevented. A flattering June 2012 Newsweek profile of New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly cited those fourteen cases, as did U.S. Representative Peter King, a New York Republican who held controversial congressional hearings on homegrown Islamic terrorists.15 The problem with the NYPD’s list was that only two of the cases involved real terrorists in New York—planned subway bomber Najibullah Zazi and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad—while another was a plot in the United Kingdom only tangentially linked to New York. The other eleven plots either never had credibility in the first place or involved FBI informants, such as the Newburgh Four and the Herald Square bombing plots. To justify its own success, the NYPD cited its own data, which is something the FBI has been doing with terrorism since 9/11—using data of its own creation to prove the point that terrorists are a growing threat that the Bureau is addressing.

  Because the FBI has the luxury of determining alone who is and who is not a terrorist, simply by labeling them as such to the public, the government is able to create the very data by which its success can be measured. When the Justice Department asked Congress to allow prosecutors to put 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in Manhattan—a plan DOJ officials later scuttled for security reasons in favor of Guantanamo Bay as the venue—Attorney General Eric Holder provided congressional representatives with a list o
f more than 400 international terrorism-related defendants the Justice Department had prosecuted since 9/11. Holder provided this list as a way of showing that the DOJ had a near-flawless record in prosecuting terrorism defendants inside the United States, and thus was more than capable of putting Mohammed on trial. While the list did include one dangerous terrorist, Najibullah Zazi, as well as people who were raising money for or sending money to terrorist groups such as Hamas, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, others who made the list were terrorists only because the Justice Department had labeled them as such. The list included several sting targets whose terrorist acts were only made possible by the FBI, such as the five convicted members of the Liberty City Seven, Mohammed Hossain, and the Fort Dix Five. Other inclusions seemed arbitrary, if not deceitful. Amr I. Elgindy, an Egyptian-born stock trader who received confidential information from an FBI agent that he used to manipulate stock prices, was on the list, even though he had no connections to terrorism whatsoever and evidence showed that his motivation was greed, not religion or ideology. Also on the list were New Jersey men Hussein and Nasser Abuali and Rabi Ahmed, who were busted in a storeroom full of Kellogg’s cereal worth nearly $90,000. No evidence linked them to terrorism, and they were never charged with a terrorism-related offense. “This case had no connection to terrorism unless you consider cornflakes weapons of mass destruction,” Michael Pedicini, a lawyer for one of the men, said.16 Yet the Justice Department was able to include the cereal bandits on a list of dangerous terrorists because no one independently audits the terrorist data by which the government is measuring itself.

  Congress allocates billions to the FBI to find terrorists and prevent the next attack. The FBI in turn focuses thousands of agents and informants on Muslim communities in sting operations that pull easily influenced fringe members of these communities into terrorist plots conceived and financed by the FBI. The Justice Department then labels these targets, who have no capacity on their own to commit terrorist acts and no connections to actual terrorists, as terrorists and includes them in data intended not only to justify how previous dollars were spent, but also to justify the need for future counterterrorism funding. In the end, the tail wags the dog in a continual cycle.

  9. ONE MAN’S TERRORIST, ANOTHER MAN’S FOOL

  He sent the email in the middle of the night on March 9, 2012, and it went to dozens of people—journalists, lawyers, activists. The subject line read “Shahed Hussain.” Khalifah Al-Akili, a thirty-four-year-old living near Pittsburgh, had found the article I’d written for Mother Jones about FBI informants, which detailed, among many things, Hussain’s life and work with federal law enforcement. Al-Akili discovered while reading the article that his new friend “Mohammed,” pictured alongside the text in my story, was one of the FBI’s most prolific terrorism informants. What Al-Akili didn’t know, however, was that the man who had introduced to him to Hussain was another one of the FBI’s favorite informants, Theodore Shelby, the former Black Panther and tollbooth robber who had led the sting against Tarik Shah, the jazz-bassist-turned-terrorist from New York City.

  In the email, Al-Akili said that he first met Shelby outside Jamil’s Global Village, a store in Pittsburgh, in October 2011. As he had during the Shah investigation in New York, Shelby went by the name Saeed Torres. Al-Akili saw Shelby again at his mosque, An-Nur Islamic Center, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, where the informant told him that he lived just down the road from him, on Kelly Street. “He offered to ride me home when we was leaving, and I left with him,” Al-Akili wrote. “Over time we continued to meet at the musjid for the prayer, and then he began to pick me up and take me to the musjid.” Shelby told Al-Akili that he was interested in fighting and that he knew some people who had the means and desire to fund an attack. He also asked Al-Akili several times his opinions on jihad, which made Al-Akili wonder if Shelby was working for the FBI.

  Later that month, Al-Akili told Shelby that he was going to Philadelphia for a few days. “I want you to see if you can get me a roscoe,” Al-Akili remembered Shelby telling him, using an antiquated term for a gun. “I have some young boys selling drugs in front of my house, and I need some protection in case one of them gets out of hand.” Al-Akili returned from Philadelphia three days later, and Shelby asked if he had the gun. No, Al-Akili told him, as he didn’t “deal with brothers on that.” Shelby continued to press. Did he know anyone in Pittsburgh who could get him a gun?

  The agitation from Shelby never stopped. For example, when Al-Akili mentioned that he was interested in opening a Halal restaurant in Pittsburgh, Shelby told him he knew someone who could put up money for the eatery—but he’d need to do something in return. Al-Akili knew that “something” meant violence. “When he would talk like this, I would just remain silent for the most part and not really comment back,” Al-Akili wrote in his email. He began trying to avoid Shelby, but he’d still end up running into him since the two lived so close to one another.

  On January 15, 2012, Shelby told Al-Akili that he had a brother coming to town and that he wanted the two of them to meet. His brother was a man of the “struggle,” to use Shelby’s word, which he intended to mean jihad. When and where could they meet? The next day at one o’clock, Al-Akili told him. But after thinking about it, Al-Akili changed his mind. He sent a text message to Shelby, telling him that he had to cancel because he was going to see his ill mother.

  A week passed, and on January 19, Al-Akili was walking to his apartment when he saw Shelby’s truck and waved. Because of the truck’s darkly tinted windows, Al-Akili couldn’t see inside. The truck pulled up next to him, the passenger-side door opened, and a slender man of South Asian descent got out and approached. “As-Salamu Alaykum,” the man said, kissing both of Al-Akili’s cheeks. The man told Al-Akili his name was Mohammed, and that he’d been looking forward to meeting him. He’d heard so much about him, he said. Mohammed, as Al-Akili would later discover, was FBI serial snitch Shahed Hussain.

  Hussain asked if they could have coffee together. Al-Akili declined, saying he had to go see his mother, who was ill. Shelby could drive him there, Hussain offered. Again Al-Akili declined, saying he’d take the bus. “So as they left, and as I was walking home, I had a feeling that I had just played out a part in some Hollywood movie where I had just been introduced to the leader of a terrorist sleeper cell,” Al-Akili wrote.

  Al-Akili told a friend, Dawud, about what had happened. As they were discussing the encounter in Al-Akili’s apartment, the phone rang. Shelby and Hussain were on the line, and they were downstairs. Al-Akili told them he wasn’t at home, a lie. “I just thought maybe you and Dawud might be upstairs just sitting around,” Shelby said.

  He wasn’t home, Al-Akili told Shelby again.

  “I really want to meet you, brother, and I have a card for your mother because she is not feeling good,” Hussain said. Al-Akili knew then that he was being watched. The next morning, as he was walking down the street, Hussain turned the corner right in front of him. “As-Salamu Alaykum,” he said, and asked again if they could have coffee together. There was a McDonald’s nearby, so Al-Akili agreed.

  Over coffee, Hussain told Al-Akili that he had an import business, the same story he had told Mohammed Hossain in Albany and James Cromitie in Newburgh. But with Al-Akili, Hussain didn’t waste time with pleasantries. He said he was from Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, and that his people were in the business of jihad. “I hear you want to go to Pakistan,” Hussain said.

  “No, I don’t want to go to Pakistan,” Al-Akili replied. He then told Hussain he had to go, and asked the informant to write down his phone number, email address, and the name of his business. Hussain scribbled the information on a McDonald’s receipt. “He kept attempting to talk about the fighting going on in Afghanistan, which I clearly felt was an attempt to get me to talk about my views or understanding of that matter,” Al-Akili remembered.

  When he got home that evening, Al-Akili pulled out
the receipt and sat down at his computer. First, he Googled the business name Hussain had given him—Seagull Enterprises—but couldn’t find anything relevant. He then Googled the phone number—518-522-2965—thinking that might bring up information about the business. But it didn’t. Instead, the first search result was an FBI transcript of a recorded phone conversation between Hussain and James Cromitie on April 5, 2009, which had been entered into evidence in the Newburgh trial and posted online. Since the Newburgh investigation, the FBI had never bothered to change Hussain’s phone number. Al-Akili then Googled “James Cromitie” and found a Wikipedia entry mentioning Hussain as the informant in the case. Finally, Al-Akili Googled “Shahed Hussain,” stumbled onto my Mother Jones article and the picture of Hussain, and realized that the man who said his name was Mohammed was in fact one of the FBI’s most effective and productive terrorism agent sprovocateurs. “I would like to pursue a legal action against the FBI due to their continuous harassment and attempts to set me up,” Al-Akili wrote in his email. “This is just the latest attempt of the FBI to entrap me in their game of cat-and-mouse.”