The lawyer of a man nabbed in an FBI terror sting tells The Upshot he is considering arguing that his client was induced by federal agents to commit a crime he wouldn't otherwise have gotten involved in.
Lebanese citizen Sami Samir Hassoun is charged with plotting to detonate a weapon of mass destruction outside of Wrigley Field in Chicago after a Dave Matthews Band concert. The undercover agents gave him a fake bomb that he believed could cause casualties when he dropped it into a trash can, according to the criminal complaint (PDF) against him. A federal judge has denied Hassoun bail, on the grounds that he may be dangerous.
The fake bomb was the culmination of a lengthy sting operation. The FBI asked a cooperating witness to befriend the 22-year-old Hassoun after the bureau began to regard him as a possible terrorism suspect in the spring of 2009. (The FBI hasn't yet disclosed what the basis for such suspicions may have been.) Authorities say that Hassoun told the witness about a bizarre and sinister desire to unseat Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley via the use of fake bombs and similarly unfocused schemes — like poisoning Lake Michigan — and then the informant introduced him to two undercover FBI agents in July.
The agents paid him $2,700 so Hassoun could quit his job and focus on planning attacks. He scouted out potential bomb sites with an FBI-owned camera. When one of the undercover agents said Hassoun's attack would send a message about how America treats Arab people, Hassoun said he didn't agree, that he just wanted to wrest political power from Daley through attacks that would terrify Chicagoans. He said he didn't know how exactly the attacks would translate into political power.
"He's not a terrorist," argues Hassoun's lawyer, Myron Auerbach. "He doesn't have the training, he doesn't have the ideology, he doesn't have the skills."...
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