The FBI is using informants to stir up fake terror plots, destroying lives in the process.
June 14, 2012 | The following article first appeared in The Nation. For more great content from the Nation, sign up for its e-mail newsletters here.
It wasn’t long after he met the man called Shareef that Khalifa Al-Akili began to sense he was being set up. Within days of their seemingly chance meeting, Shareef was offering to drive Akili, a 34-year-old Muslim living in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, to the local mosque for prayers. Shareef told Akili he was “all about fighting” and “had a lot of resources at his disposal.” But when Shareef began to probe Akili about his views on jihad and asked him if he could obtain a gun, Akili grew nervous. “I begin to try to avoid him, but would still see him due to the fact that he lived two minutes’ walking distance from my apartment,” Akili said later. In January of this year, Shareef showed up with a “brother” who called himself Mohammed and was keen to meet Akili. Mohammed told Akili that he was a businessman from Pakistan involved in jihad. “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,” Akili recalled. “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.”
Out of curiosity, Akili did an
Internet search on the cellphone number he’d received from Mohammed.
Much to his surprise, he discovered that the man was, in fact, an FBI
informant named Shahed Hussain, who had played a pivotal role in at
least two major terrorism-related sting operations in recent years. In a
lengthy posting on his Facebook page recounting these events, Akili
wrote, “I would like to pursue a legal action against the FBI due to
their continuous harassment.” He also set up a press conference in
Washington with Muslim civil liberties groups to publicize his fear that
he was being entrapped. But it was too late. In mid-March, Akili was
arrested and charged with being in possession of a .22-caliber rifle at a
shooting range several years earlier, an act deemed illegal because of a
decade-old drug conviction. Though his arrest was on
nonterrorism-related charges, at his bond hearing FBI agents and US
Attorneys told the judge they’d seen unspecified “jihadist literature”
at his apartment and also alleged that he’d told one of the informants
of his desire to go to Pakistan and join the Taliban. The judge ordered
Akili held without bail.
“The
government is basically saying [the charges have] nothing to do with the
informant,” Akili’s attorney, Markéta Sims, told me. “But I’ve been
doing this a long time, and I’ve never heard of someone being charged
with felony possession for handling a gun at a shooting range.”
The FBI has employed informants
ever since its inception as the Bureau of Investigation in 1908. In 1961
director J. Edgar Hoover established the Top Echelon Criminal Informant
Program, in which FBI field offices were instructed to develop live
sources in the “organized hoodlum element.” By 1975 the Church Committee
found that the bureau was employing more than 1,500 domestic
informants. But while the FBI has long used undercover informants to
infiltrate criminal networks and build cases against potential suspects,
in the domestic front of the “war on terror,” informants have come to
play a far more proactive role in surveilling communities deemed suspect
by the bureau.
According to the
Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, there have been 138
terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since
2001, and more than a third of those have occurred in the past three
years. Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has
involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government
informant. In these cases, the informants—who work for money or are
seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own—have crossed the line
from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and
assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by
the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the
weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory
political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of
terrorism.-[Full Article]
