The Muslims Are Coming!
Page 23
By now he was planning to travel to Pakistan or Afghanistan.
Each and every Muslim in this country … knows that America is at war with Islam and they’re not doing anything about it … No one is stepping up to do anything. We have to be the ones to pull that trigger.15
Soon the plan to travel abroad changed to carrying out an attack on a local army recruiting center in Catonsville, Maryland. Martinez asked the informant to purchase a rifle for the purpose. The FBI undercover agent suggested that instead he could arrange to provide a car bomb. At another meeting three weeks later the undercover agent showed Martinez an SUV and what he said were bomb components and a detonation device. The only problem was that Martinez could barely drive, so he had to practice driving around a parking lot. The attack was planned for the next morning. Martinez parked the SUV, laden with the fake bomb outside the target—the Armed Forces Career Center on Baltimore National Pike—before retreating with the informant to a vantage point and attempting to detonate the bomb, in what he thought would be his first strike against the Muslim-oppressing US military. But instead of the expected explosion, FBI agents rushed in and arrested him. Martinez was charged with the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempting to murder federal officials. He later pled guilty and was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
Martinez’s story is far from unusual—it is in fact a textbook case of current FBI tactics in the domestic war on terror. Investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson has examined forty-nine terrorist prosecutions since 9/11 which involved an FBI agent provocateur. Among them were most of the high-profile terrorism cases over the last ten years. In all of them someone working for the FBI “provided not only the plan but also the means and opportunity for the terrorist plot.”16 Without the FBI’s help in supplying money, weapons, and often a specific plan of attack, the accused would not have had the capability to carry out any plot. In many cases, there is evidence suggesting that FBI agents provocateurs manipulated vulnerable people with mental health or drug addiction problems into conspiring in acts of planned violence they would otherwise have had no intention of carrying out. The most significant conversations between the agents provocateurs and the defendants were not recorded on these occasions (which, as Aaronson notes, is implausibly explained by technical failures).
I Was an Islamist for the FBI
In December 2001, the FBI arrested Shahed Hussain for running a fake driver’s license scam. He was a Pakistani immigrant granted political asylum in the 1990s, and now faced federal charges and deportation. Like many Muslim immigrants after 9/11 who were charged with criminal offenses, he was offered the chance to stay in the US without time in prison if he agreed to work as an informant for the FBI. And Hussain soon discovered that his abilities as a fraudster could be of use to the government. In 2003, based in Albany, New York, he manipulated two law-abiding men—Mohammed Hossain and Yassin Aref—into involvement in what they thought was a business loan deal. When prosecutors brought the case to court they presented the deal as a terrorist fund-raising operation, and the two men received fifteen-year sentences. When the prosecuting attorney was asked by journalists whether there was anything to connect Aref to terrorism, he said: “Well, we didn’t have the evidence of that, but he had the ideology.”17 The FBI then used Hussain for other covert work, in Pakistan and London, before he returned to the US and settled in Newburgh, a dilapidated, poverty-stricken town sixty miles north of New York City, where he implanted himself in the local Muslim community, posing as a wealthy businessman. After a year searching for would-be targets, most of whom guessed he was an FBI agent, he met James Cromitie, a forty-five-year-old African American who was an occasional visitor to the local mosque. He worked night shifts at Walmart, and had served two years in prison in the 1980s for selling crack cocaine. When they first met in the mosque parking lot, Cromitie said: “Did you see what they did to my people over there? In Afghanistan. Those motherfuckers.” Hussain had found his quarry.18
Hussain worked on Cromitie for four months, showering him with flattery, cash, and free meals. These conversations were not recorded by the FBI (and many later recordings had gaps—again, equipment malfunction was blamed), but by the end of it, it seems Cromitie was captivated by the lavish generosity of his new rich friend and happily joined in conversations laced with anti-Semitism about attacking synagogues. But he was less than enthusiastic about doing anything beyond talk. When Hussain gave him a camera to photograph potential targets, he immediately sold it for fifty dollars. For months, he did nothing. Then he disappeared for six weeks, telling Hussain that he was moving to North Carolina; in fact, he remained in Newburgh and just wanted Hussain to stop pursuing him. But Hussain kept up the pressure, telling Cromitie he had not done anything to advance the plan: “You’ve not started on the first step, brother. Come on.” Only when Cromitie lost his job and became desperate for money did he get back in touch with Hussain, who offered to pay him $250,000, provide him with a two-week holiday in Puerto Rico, a barbershop business, and a BMW if he agreed to participate in a scheme to bomb two Bronx synagogues. “I told you, I can make you $250,000, but you don’t want it, brother,” Hussain said. Cromitie, who knew Hussain by the fake name Maqsood, gave in: “OK, fuck it. I don’t care. Ah, man. Maqsood, you got me.” Hussain later testified in court that “$250,000” was code for the plot, not an offer of payment, but this seems unlikely—he acknowledged that he had told neither his FBI handlers nor Cromitie about the sum’s supposed secret meaning. Later Cromitie tried to withdraw from the scheme, telling Hussain he could not do it, to which Hussain replied that his terrorist “brothers” might cut off his head.19
Cromitie was given the task of recruiting others from Newburgh’s Muslim community. Three other African-American men—Onta Williams, Laguerre Payen, and David Williams (not a relative of Onta)—were all roped in and also offered large sums of money. Onta Williams, whose mother had a crack cocaine addiction, had started selling drugs at the age of fourteen and had spent time in prison. Payen suffered from schizophrenia, had been in and out of mental health facilities, and kept bottles of urine in his bedroom.20 David Williams had become a Muslim as a teenager after an uncle had introduced him to the religion. But other relatives had introduced him to selling drugs, and he served five years in prison. He settled in Queens, New York; when he was released at the age of twenty-four he found a job in a restaurant and enrolled in college. But when his younger brother Lord fell ill with liver cancer, he decided to return to Newburgh to help his mother, who had to leave her job to care for him. Realizing David feared for his brother’s life and the family was unable to afford adequate health care, Hussain offered to pay for a liver transplant on the understanding that David would join his scheme.21
Payen said barely anything in the meetings between Hussain and the four other Newburgh men. But Cromitie and the two Williamses soon realized that the more extravagant their conversations about criminal activity became, the more money Hussain handed out. They began to put on a show for him, saying things they thought he would like to hear and expecting to be rewarded with cash. Cromitie claimed to have stolen guns, thrown bombs at police stations, been jailed for murder, and visited Afghanistan, none of which was true. Little did he realize that Hussain was manipulating him far more effectively than he was manipulating Hussain. When Hussain was not around to harangue the others into developing the plot, nothing happened. The supposed terrorists preferred to sit around getting stoned and playing video games. According to his aunt, David Williams was hallucinating on PCP throughout the entire period, barely aware of what was happening.22 Indeed, he would have likely been in prison at this time were it not for FBI agents pulling strings to postpone a pending larceny case against him so he could be caught in their sting instead.23 None of the four men had money, cars, contacts, weapons, or ideas of their own to contribute. Hussain supplied the plan, the vehicles, and the equipment. When Hussain gave Cromitie eighteen hundred dollars and asked him to buy a
gun, the supposedly hardened criminal was unable to score a deal and had to return with the money unspent.
A few days before the attacks Hussain had planned, he drove the four men to Connecticut and showed them a fake missile system that he said could be used to shoot down military airplanes—they talked about using the weapon at Stewart Airport, near Newburgh. It is far from clear what the four Newburgh men were thinking at this point. They later claimed they were planning to scam Hussain for the money they had been promised (which they had been told was waiting for them in a UPS mailbox) and then disappear without actually doing anything. To a certain extent, this is consistent with their behavior. On the other hand, Hussain’s promises of vast sums of money may have tempted them to be part of a plot; there is some evidence that they thought it would only involve property damage to empty buildings. What is certain is that without Hussain’s money and manipulation, they would never have been involved in terrorism.
On May 20, 2009, Hussain drove the four men to the Bronx, where Cromitie had the job of placing what he thought were explosive devices in the trunks of parked cars outside two synagogues while the others acted as lookouts. An FBI SWAT team appeared as Cromitie returned to Hussain’s car, smashed through the car’s windows, and arrested the men, charging them with attempting to use weapons of mass destruction. The news coverage of the case presented the four as America-hating terrorists dedicated to mass violence and motivated by radical Islam.
In reality, there was nothing to suggest Cromitie and his crew were potential al-Qaeda recruits. What seemed to initially draw Cromitie into the FBI’s plot was his anger at US foreign policy. For the other three, it was being Muslim, poor enough to be vulnerable to cash inducements, and gullible enough to believe they were really going to receive thousands of dollars for an operation they were completely incapable of carrying out. The three had not expressed radical views or outrage at the oppression of Muslims in other parts of the world prior to Hussain’s appearance. The Newburgh four were simply struggling to survive in the face of poverty, addiction, and mental health issues. The money spent by the government on securing their convictions—Hussain received $100,000 in wages and expenses—could have given them the support they needed to turn their lives around, whether a living wage in a regular job or the health care services they needed. David Williams’s aunt, Alicia McWilliams, characterizes the case as a television show put on by the government rather than a genuine criminal investigation.
Instead of wasting all this money to make a TV production, you could open up a job training center in Newburgh. These are all ex-offenders. You know what Newburgh looks like. Newburgh is the most impoverished county.
She compares what happened to her nephew to earlier government programs directed at African-American activism.
COINTELPRO. The Black Panthers. The use of informants in churches, back in the 1940s and 1950s. This is happening all over again. But now the profile is Muslims. It just has a different name, and they’re using different terms.24
Although Judge Colleen McMahon gave each of the Newburgh four twenty-five-year prison sentences, she nevertheless criticized the FBI’s approach.
Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr Cromitie, a man whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in its scope … I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that there would have been no crime here except [that] the government instigated it, planned it, and brought it to fruition.25
In theory, the FBI’s provocation tactics should be held to account when cases come to trial, but this has not happened. In every case where defendants have attempted an entrapment defense in post-9/11 terrorist trials, it has been unsuccessful. Such a defense involves two parts: first, showing by a preponderance of the evidence that the government induced the defendant to commit the crime; second, if the defendant succeeds in proving inducement, the burden is on the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had a predisposition to commit the crime. In the end, these cases come down to a subjective judgment of whether the defendants were predisposed to terrorism. So far juries have accepted the prosecutors’ flawed argument that radical views—such as anger at foreign policy—are evidence of a predisposition to commit terrorist acts. Implicitly, juries in these cases have endorsed the central proposition in the official analysis of radicalization: ideology causes violence.26 In effect, Muslims have been criminalized for behaviors associated with the early stages in a fallacious model of radicalization—though such behaviors are entirely lawful, according to the First Amendment.
Even putting aside such civil liberties issues, there are serious problems from a pragmatic point of view. At the very least, a significant statistical correlation between the ideological indicators of radicalization and terrorist violence would have to be demonstrated in order to give some support for the view that ideology causes terrorism. It would also be necessary to show that provocation is the most effective way for a counterterrorist system to respond to it. On both counts, there are serious objections. As we saw in Chapter 4, academic attempts to substantiate a link between radicalization indicators (such as expressions of religious ideology) and terrorist violence fall flat when properly scrutinized. Such studies always seek to trace the ways in which an individual’s belief in a radical ideology emerges, on the assumption that radical ideologies cause violence—but this is precisely what needs to be demonstrated rather than assumed. In fact, expressing particular religious beliefs or anger at foreign policy are poor predictors of the likelihood of an individual becoming a terrorist. Moreover, a counterterrorism system that monitors radicalization indicators, assuming that they have predictive value, may well be worse at avoiding attacks than one focused more narrowly on individuals inciting, financing, or preparing to carry out acts of terror. Amassing vast quantities of information on large numbers of so-called radical persons makes it harder to spot the terrorism intelligence that is actually significant. More often than not, when the US government has failed to prevent terrorist acts, it is not because the intelligence was missing but because its significance was not identified amid the huge tracts of surveillance data the national security state collects.
Since 9/11, this problem has become far worse, as the FBI increasingly sees its counterterrorism role as collecting broad-based intelligence on radicalization that is unconnected to any specific criminal act. Key to this shift have been changes to the FBI’s internal rules, known as the Attorney General’s Guidelines. These were originally introduced in 1976, following the revelations of abuses in the FBI’s Hoover-era countersubversion programs, such as COINTELPRO, which sought to discredit, harass, and criminalize legitimate political movements. The guidelines clarified that the FBI’s role was not to conduct open-ended domestic intelligence operations. Intrusive investigative techniques could only be used when there were
specific and articulable facts giving reason to believe that an individual or group is or may be engaged in activities which involve the use of force or violence and which involve or will involve the violation of federal law.27
The basis for starting such investigations had to be recorded, so that an audit trail was available if allegations of government abuse were later raised. However, over time, the guidelines were gradually adjusted so that the authority to collect information became less and less dependent on having evidence of completed or impending criminal acts.
After 9/11, the FBI adopted a preemptive stance on countering terrorism—what John Ashcroft, then attorney general, repeatedly promoted as a new “paradigm of prevention.”28 The belief was that the usual principles of the rule of law—investigating individuals when there was a reasonable suspicion of criminal intent—were insufficient for tackling terrorism. Surveillance had to be broadened to a wider group suspected of radicalization. In line with this, Ashcroft revised the FBI’s guidelines so that the threshold for counterterrorism investigations was significantly lowered.29 Whereas earlier, informants could be used only when there was strong evidence of crim
inal activity, after 9/11 they could be employed much more widely. Philip Mudd, who in 2006 became associate executive director of the National Security Branch of the FBI, explained the consequences of the new preventive approach: “By definition, if you are preventative, there will be people dragged into those investigations who did not do something wrong.”30 Mudd was recruited to lead the process of transforming the FBI into a spy agency on the model of Britain’s MI5, of moving the bureau beyond investigating individual cases to a wide-ranging gathering of information on American Muslim communities in general. He had previously been deputy director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, during the period when it tortured terrorism suspects, and in the run-up to the Iraq war, when he liaised with then secretary of state Colin Powell prior to his notorious speech at the UN, which was based on fabricated intelligence. Mudd introduced a program at the FBI called “domain management” that involved producing electronic maps showing in detail where ethnic groups were clustered, cross-referencing such information with databases of financial transactions, charitable-giving activities, jobs held, and so on. This then became the basis for allocating resources and informant recruitment to specific neighborhoods—effectively, a form of ethnic profiling.31 The FBI’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, which implements The Attorney General Guidelines, calls on agents to refrain from profiling “solely” on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. But they permit the collection of information regarding ethnic behaviors “reasonably believed to be associated with a particular criminal or terrorist element of an ethnic community”—which, given the FBI’s model of radicalization, would allow for all kinds of Muslim religious practices to be subject to surveillance. Also permitted is the identification of “locations of concentrated ethnic communities [and] the locations of ethnic-oriented businesses and other facilities,” which presumably includes mosques.32