The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  I wrote back to Al-Akili, and we arranged a time to talk by phone. But our conversation never happened, as less than a week after Al-Akili sent his email message, federal agents arrested him, charging him with being a felon in possession of a firearm. (Al-Akili, whose former name is James Marvin Thomas Jr., had pleaded guilty to two felony drug charges in 2001.) Included in the government’s evidence against Al-Akili, which the FBI disclosed in its affidavit to commence prosecution, was an email from July 4, 2010, with an attached photo and links to two short YouTube videos, which have since been taken offline. In the photo and in the videos, Al-Akili is seen holding a .22-caliber rifle—a gun that wasn’t his in 2010 and wasn’t in his possession when he was arrested nearly two years later. A federal judge ordered Al-Akili to be held without bond pending trial after FBI Special Agent Joseph Bieshelt testified that Al-Akili had told an FBI informant he planned to travel to Pakistan and fight with the Taliban.1 He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

  The charges against Khalifah Al-Akili were the culmination of the FBI’s latest sting operation involving Shahed Hussain, an accused murderer and con artist who in less than ten years has become one of the Bureau’s most valuable terrorism informants. The Al-Akili sting offers a window into how far the FBI is willing to go to create the very terrorists it’s charged with hunting. Given his previous drug charges, Al-Akili isn’t the nation’s best, most productive citizen, to be sure. But is he a potentially dangerous terrorist? An informant offered him money, and Al-Akili wouldn’t buy a gun. In addition, Al-Akili was never in touch with terrorists in the United States or abroad. The only evidence linking him to terrorism is an unsubstantiated claim by the FBI that Al-Akili told an informant he wanted to fight with the Taliban—an imagined crime at best, if it’s even true. Yet the FBI deemed this ex-con and convert to Islam so dangerous that agents assigned two of their most prolific and aggressive terrorism informants—men with histories of violence and fraud—to target him. When Al-Akili realized he was at the center of a setup, he sent an email nationwide sounding the alarm—not exactly the type of stealth behavior one would expect from a hardened lone wolf intent on wreaking havoc and carnage in America. After the sting operation was blown, the FBI arrested Al-Akili, labeled him a terrorist based on a comment he allegedly made to an informant with a record of lying, and prosecuted him using evidence from a two-year-old YouTube video clip in which he is seen holding a firearm.

  Since 9/11, the FBI has routinely labeled men like Khalifah Al-Akili as terrorists, despite the lack of evidence that these men would commit terrorist acts without the aggressive prodding and assistance of FBI informants. (In Al-Akili’s case, even the persistence of the informant was insufficient to push him into going along with a terrorist plot.) Part of the reason that the FBI is able to get away with this is because the public and the media don’t question whether the individuals the Bureau puts on display are real terrorists or just men on the margins made to look like terrorists. Even when the government is clearly putting on a show, neither the public nor the mainstream media have stopped it. In the prosecution in Houston of a man who worked with a person he believed was an Al Qaeda trainer, for example, the federal government put on the witness stand an informant wearing a black mask, telling the judge that the mask was necessary because showing the informant’s face could make him a target for terrorists.2 No one pointed out that since actual terrorists weren’t involved in the investigation, no real terrorists existed who would want to target the informant.

  For the FBI, terrorism sting operations net results, and results confirm to the Bureau that a problem or threat exists, thereby supporting the belief that more terrorism sting operations are needed. While this type of cycle could be created from any kind of crime and with any law enforcement agency, it is hard to imagine that the public would tolerate widespread sting operations and aggressive informants used in anything other than terrorism investigations in Muslim communities. Imagine, for example, if law enforcement sent informants and undercover officers into poor minority communities in South Los Angeles and offered cash for stolen cars—and then used the resulting rash of arrests to prove how well the police were curbing the growing problem of auto theft, a problem the police had created in the first place. Would the public, alerted by African American and Hispanic community leaders to what would appear to be entrapment and racial and ethnic targeting, tolerate such behavior from law enforcement? The answer is no. Yet since 9/11, leaders in Muslim communities nationwide have objected to the FBI tactics used against their people, without any kind of support from the public or the media. I can only believe that the public either does not understand how egregious the FBI’s practices are, or believes that keeping the United States safe from would-be terrorists justifies limits to justice and civil rights for a single minority group.

  To this day, the FBI continues to manufacture terrorism crimes in Muslim communities. By not challenging the FBI and the Justice Department, the public and the media have tacitly condoned sting operations against men with no capacity on their own to commit serious crimes. If the FBI’s top priority is to find and stop lone wolves, and these lone wolves are found only through FBI stings that border on entrapment and target easily influenced men with financial troubles or mental problems, providing the FBI with a deep pool of potential terrorists, then how will the Bureau ever know when terrorism is no longer a threat, and the time has come to shift priorities?

  I asked Arthur Cummings, the former executive assistant director of the FBI’s National Security Branch and one of the most ardent supporters of terrorism stings, about this. What I needed to understand, he told me, was that the FBI’s true enemies weren’t so much Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism but rather the idea of Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism. It was November 2010, and the Justice Department had in the previous couple of months announced a series of informant-led terrorism sting cases, which included plots to bomb Wrigley Field in Chicago and the Metro system in Washington, D.C. Cummings had retired from the Bureau a few months before the government announced these cases. We met at Southport Brewing Company in Connecticut, about a ninety-minute train ride from Manhattan. Cummings wore jeans and a light sweater and was drinking a pint of beer.

  “We’re at war with an idea,” Cummings told me emphatically.

  “But you can’t kill an idea, can you?” I asked him.

  “No,” he replied.

  “So that means this indefinite war, with terrorism stings, is something we’ll live with for decades?”

  “That’s right,” Cummings said.

  When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, his administration provided some early indication that federal law enforcement would deemphasize the targeting of potential terrorists in Muslim communities and focus more attention on right-wing extremists and other growing threats in the United States. In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis released a report titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment,” warning that violence could come from right-wing extremists concerned about illegal immigration, abortion, increasing federal powers, and gun control.3 Returning military veterans were particularly susceptible to recruitment into these extremist groups, the report said.

  A political storm gathered following the report, with Fox News providing inspiration with exaggerated interpretations such as: “The government considers you a terrorist threat if you oppose abortion, own a gun, or are a returning war veteran.”4 U.S. Representative Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, accused the DHS of “political profiling.” A House Homeland Security Committee inquiry followed, which the committee’s then-chairman, Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi, called “a GOP stunt aimed at embarrassing the new administration.” In fairness, three months before the right-wing report, DHS had released an assessment predicting increased cyber threats from left-wing extremists—but the federal government’s concerns about extremist
s on both ends of the political spectrum were cut out of the controversy, which became so great that Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano withdrew the right-wing report and ordered it rewritten.

  As a result, aggressively investigating right-wing extremism—a real threat in this country—became politically difficult, if not impossible, for the Obama administration. And so FBI investigations of perceived Islamic terrorists, and, to a much lesser extent, left-wing extremists, only increased. But then a deadly shooting in Arkansas—involving a right-wing domestic terrorist that the FBI had been monitoring but whose violence the Bureau chose not to preempt—forced the federal government to rethink some of its law enforcement priorities.

  On May 20, 2010, at 11:36 a.m., Bill Evans, a police officer in West Memphis, Arkansas, stopped a white Dodge Caravan with Ohio plates that was traveling east on Interstate 40. Sgt. Brandon Paudert, whose father was the chief of police in this city of 26,245, arrived as backup. Evans suspected the car might be involved in drug trafficking. West Memphis is at the intersection of Interstates 40 and 55, which cross the country east-west and north-south, respectively, and for that reason, police there are wary of suspicious vehicles that may be moving drugs across the country.

  Evans approached the white minivan and found forty-five-year-old Jerry R. Kane in the driver’s seat. A white man with short-cropped brown hair, a beard, and a large belly, Kane wore a white T-shirt and blue jeans. Next to Kane was his sixteen-year-old son, Joseph. Evans asked Jerry Kane to get out of the vehicle, and the two men walked to the rear of the minivan. A dashboard camera in the black police SUV recorded the scene, though there was no audio.5 Evans and Kane appeared to argue, and at one point, Kane pointed to his Ohio plates. Evans, seemingly unconvinced by whatever Kane was saying, decided to arrest the man and began to frisk him. That’s when sixteen-year-old Joseph emerged from the passenger side of the minivan holding a Yugoslavian-manufactured AK-47 assault rifle. Evans placed one hand on his gun and another toward the boy, palm out, as if to say, “Stop.” Kane opened fire, hitting Evans multiple times. Seeing his fellow officer gunned down, Paudert retreated behind the police vehicle for cover, pulled out his handgun, and fired several times at the teenage gunman, missing each time. But Paudert was in a weak tactical position, as his police-issued handgun was no match for the much more powerful assault rifle. Joseph Kane returned fire with the AK-47, and the ricocheting bullets struck Paudert in the head. The boy then ran back to the minivan. Evans was in the ditch, facedown and bleeding from multiple bullet wounds. Joseph opened fire again on the officer and then hopped into the minivan. He and his father sped off. A package delivery driver, passing by the shooting as it occurred, called 911.6 “Officers down!” the call went out over the police radio.

  Local police tracked the minivan to a nearby Walmart, where the Kanes had stopped to remove the Ohio license plate. The first to see the van was an Arkansas wildlife officer who heard the emergency call on the radio. He rammed his truck into the minivan to prevent the Kanes from getting away. A gun battle then ensued between the West Memphis police and the Kanes. Father and son were both killed.

  Bob Paudert, the West Memphis chief of police, soon arrived at the stretch of road where two of his officers—one of them his son—had been shot. Paudert’s wife was with him. “Stay in the truck,” he told her. “Don’t get out.”7 Brandon Paudert, thirty-nine years old, had been struck eleven times by the high-powered assault rifle and was pronounced dead at the scene. Evans, thirty-seven years old, had been shot fourteen times and died later at the hospital.

  The FBI was already there as Bob Paudert tried to take in what had happened. “We know who they are,” Paudert remembered one of the FBI agents telling him. “They’re domestic terrorists.” A former long-haul trucker with fervent antigovernment beliefs, Kane at the height of the nationwide foreclosure crisis scratched out a living giving seminars in small hotel rooms that purported to teach distressed homeowners how they could not only save their homes from foreclosure, but also cancel out their mortgage obligations altogether. He steadily built a fringe following among tax protestors, conspiracy theorists, and people who believed the U.S. government was somehow illegitimate and did not have legal authority over them.

  Kane followed a right-wing conspiracy theory known as redemption—a set of beliefs held by many members of the so-called sovereign citizen movement. Redemption theorists believe the U.S. government is a corporation that disguises commercial contracts as laws. By filing the appropriate paperwork with a county register, they believe, they can opt out of society’s laws. Kane’s foreclosure-avoidance techniques centered on filing inconsequential documents with the county recording office, which at best muck up the system and slow the pace of bureaucracy, providing temporary illusions of success when, for example, a foreclosure proceeding is delayed because the court needs time to sort through the bogus filings. Sovereign citizens, estimated to number more than 300,000 in the United States, are dangerous for law enforcement officers because they are typically well armed and something as a simple as a traffic stop can feed into their paranoid beliefs that government agents are persecuting them.

  This paranoia was exemplified in a seminar Kane gave in California during which an attendee asked him what he could do about an aggressive state revenue agent. Kane suggested that violence was a solution, describing how he felt under constant threat from the government. “I don’t want to have to kill anybody. But if they keep messing with me, that’s what it’s going to come down to,” Kane said. “And if I have to kill one, then I’m not going to be able to stop. I just know it.” A few months after that statement, despite having been tracked by the FBI since 2004 as possible domestic terrorists, Jerry and Joseph Kane murdered two law enforcement officers before dying in a gun battle with police. The bloodbath, which made international news, was something of a wake-up call for the FBI. An Ohio sheriff had warned the Bureau years earlier that he believed Kane was dangerous, and by the time the West Memphis shootings occurred, the FBI had built a substantial case file on Kane and his network of supporters—yet agents chose neither to act nor to share the information with local law enforcement in communities through which Kane and his son traveled.8 “The FBI has focused so much on international terrorists and spent so much time training local law enforcement about how to spot international terrorists that they allowed domestic terrorists to stay under the radar without sharing information with locals,” Bob Paudert, the West Memphis police chief who lost his son in the Kane shooting, told me when I talked to him two years after the killings. “What the West Memphis case brought to light was how we and most officers around the country had never heard of the sovereign citizen movement. The FBI knew about it—they had these guys in their database. But they never shared that information with us.”

  Paudert, now retired from the West Memphis Police Department, has lobbied the Justice Department to focus greater resources on right-wing domestic terrorists. He also travels the country providing training to local law enforcement officers on how to spot members of the sovereign citizen movement. He often hears complaints from local cops that the FBI wants them to focus on ferreting out Islamic terrorists when they are much more concerned about domestic threats. “They got zero training on domestic terrorists,” Paudert said. “Everything from the FBI and DOJ was catered to international terrorists—what to look for, how they might act. Nothing was ever discussed about domestic terrorists. I think the FBI has done a superb job protecting our borders. But they’ve done a lousy job internally. I think the most serious national security threat to us today is domestic terrorists. These people—and I say this in my talks every time I give one—they are no different than international terrorists. They are so committed to their cause they are willing to die for it. They are willing to kill and be killed. That was evident in the Kanes’ case. They were willing to die for their beliefs.” In September 2011, citing the West Memphis shooting, the FBI formally recognized the sovereign citizen movement as a “growing
domestic threat.”9

  If the FBI could miss—or ignore—something like the sovereign citizen movement, what else has it missed or ignored in the years since 9/11, being so hyper-focused on terrorism in Muslim communities? While cataloging missed opportunities is something of an exercise in speculation, there were enough major crimes over the decade that went unnoticed by federal law enforcement until it was too late to give credibility to that question. Main Street mortgage fraud and Wall Street financial fraud—which together created an economic toxin that pushed the United States into the worst recession since the Great Depression—were among the Bureau’s areas of focus prior to 9/11.10 So were financial Ponzi schemes, and in the decade that the FBI has kept one eye trained on terrorism, con men such as Bernie Madoff and R. Allen Stanford flourished, scamming away a total of more than $10 billion from investors.11 If the FBI had not been so obsessed with stopping a terrorist attack that never came, and creating “terrorists,” could they have stopped mortgage and Wall Street fraud before it spread globally like an uncontrollable contagion? Could FBI agents have taken down Ponzi artists before unsuspecting investors lost billions? Could agents have uncovered any number of crimes we have yet to hear of?

  These are unanswerable questions. But as I researched terrorism sting operations and talked with current and former FBI agents who complained that in terrorism stings the government was creating bogeymen from buffoons, I’ve thought a lot about these questions, which remind me of a line that Peter Ahearn, the retired FBI agent who directed the Western New York Joint Terrorism Task Force and oversaw the investigation of the Lackawanna Six, offered when we sat in a coffee shop in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. “If you concentrate more people on a problem,” Ahearn told me, “you’ll find more problems.” The corollary to that, of course, is that if you concentrate fewer people on a problem, you’ll find fewer problems. It’s conceivable that had the FBI not been chasing terrorists of its own creation, federal agents might have had the resources to prevent the financial crimes that ultimately brought the world economy to the brink of collapse—or stopped the sovereign citizen movement before men like Brandon Paudert were killed. However, since the U.S. Congress continues to mandate that the FBI focus on terrorism, and the FBI in turn churns out Islamic terrorism cases to prove that it is responsive to that mandate, it’s conceivable that the Bureau will not notice or arrive too late to address the real crimes and threats of tomorrow.