FBI Terror Plot: How the Government Is Destroying the Lives of Innocent People

AlterNet

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]

How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

Rolling Stone

May 15, 3:10 PM ET | By Rick Perlstein

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling "very pressured" by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: "We're in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don't cut it," he said. "And it's actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that." Though when Cleveland's NEWS Channel 5  broadcast that footage, they headlined it "Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence."

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. ("They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items," one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. "I'm not sure," he responds, "I just downloaded it last night.") It’s a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now they’re white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that's not what they're doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/how-fbi-entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-20120515#ixzz1v6Oe9X4z

Fake terror plots, paid informants: the tactics of FBI 'entrapment' questioned

Critics say bureau is running a sting operation across America, targeting vulnerable people by luring them into fake terror plots

UK Guardian

David Williams did not have an easy life. He moved to Newburgh, a gritty, impoverished town on the banks of the Hudson an hour or so north of New York, at just 10 years old. For a young, black American boy with a father in jail, trouble was everywhere.

Williams also made bad choices. He ended up going to jail for dealing drugs. When he came out in 2007 he tried to go straight, but money was tight and his brother, Lord, needed cash for a liver transplant. Life is hard in Newburgh if you are poor, have a drug rap and need cash quickly.

His aunt, Alicia McWilliams, was honest about the tough streets her nephew was dealing with. "Newburgh is a hard place," she said. So it was perhaps no surprise that in May, 2009, David Williams was arrested again and hit with a 25-year jail sentence. But it was not for drugs offences. Or any other common crime. Instead Williams and three other struggling local men beset by drug, criminal and mental health issues were convicted of an Islamic terrorist plot to blow up Jewish synagogues and shoot down military jets with missiles.

Even more shocking was that the organisation, money, weapons and motivation for this plot did not come from real Islamic terrorists. It came from the FBI, and an informant paid to pose as a terrorist mastermind paying big bucks for help in carrying out an attack. For McWilliams, her own government had actually cajoled and paid her beloved nephew into being a terrorist, created a fake plot and then jailed him for it. "I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone," she told the Guardian...[Full Article]

FBI Entraps Two More Muslims

Veterans Today

by Stephen Lendman

By now, the familiar storyline sounds more like a film plot than criminal indictment, especially when Muslims are involved, and the most recent case repeats the same scenario used last December.

Then it involved Antonio Martinez, aka Muhammad Hussain, accused of plotting to attack an armed forces recruiting center. An undercover FBI agent lawlessly entrapped him, supplying an inert bomb, then stopping him after he allegedly tried to detonate it by remote control. A previous article discussed him, accessed through the following link:

• FBI Sting Entraps Another Victim

In fact, like dozens of others, he was maliciously ensnared by an FBI orchestrated sting operation, entrapping him to declare another war on terror victory. Innocence or guilt doesn’t matter, just the illusion that America is now safer when, in fact, each conviction assures greater insecurity, leaving many to wonder who’s next...[Full Article]

Accused Backpack Bomber Pleads Not Guilty

FoxNews.com

ctober 20, 2010 - 12:36 PM | by: Ruth Ravve

CHICAGO- A 22 year old who allegedly thought being a terrorist would make him some quick cash, plead "not guilty" today in federal court. Lebanese immigrant Sami Samir Hassoun is charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction.

Police say Hassoun placed a backpack, that he thought was stuffed with explosives, near a busy intersection just outside Chicago's Wrigley Field. Hassoun thought the backpack was lethal because undercover FBI agents told him so, as part of a sting operation.

Hassoun, wearing the standard orange jailhouse jumpsuit, gave a big smile to his family who were sitting in the courtroom. Defense attorney Myron Auerbach, who told the judge he needs more time to go through "more than 100 hours of video surveillance tape" says "my client is not a terrorist...arresting authorities made it clear that he has no terrorist connections". Instead Auerbach characterizes Hassoun as "a troubled young man who got himself into something that took him way beyond where someone else would've gone.....he's a big talker...he just talks too much". While he won't go so far as to use the term "entrapment", Auerbach does blame the FBI for giving Hassoun the (fake) bomb and cash for the deal.

The next status hearing for Hassoun is scheduled for November 3rd, although Auerbach says he will try to postone that date so he will have time to go through all the evidence against his client.

FBI Gets Convictions Against Entrapped Dupes Who Planned to Blow Up Synagogues in Bronx

Four men convicted of plot to blow up New York synagogues
Four men face life in prison after being convicted of plotting to blow up synagogues in New York and shoot down military planes.

James Cromitie (centre) Photo: AP

David Williams Photo: AP

The group - James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen - were caught in an FBI sting operation.

Shahed Hussain, an undercover informant, was hired by officers in 2008 to infiltrate a mosque in Newburgh, about an hour north of New York.

A court heard that there he hatched a plan with Cromitie, 44, to blow up synagogues in the Bronx area of New York with remote-controlled bombs.

The other men, aged between 28 and 24, were recruited to the scheme and planned to shoot down cargo planes with heat-seeking missiles.

The men were seen in secretly filmed video footage practising with a missile launcher and praying together in a warehouse in Connecticut two weeks before the planned attack.

They were arrested last year after planting bombs, which they did not know were FBI-supplied fakes, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx...

[Full Article]


Jury convicts four men in New York synagogue bomb plot after 'Big Brother' style surveillance

Four men have today been found guilty of 30 out of 32 counts stemming from the May 2009 plot to bomb two Bronx synagogues and shoot down military aircraft at a National Guard airbase in Newburgh, New York.

James Cromitie had been accused of scheming with a government informant he met at a mosque in Newburgh but the plot was foiled by a perfectly executed FBI sting.

Prosecutors said Cromitie recruited the three co-defendants David Williams, 29, Onta Williams,29, and Laguerre Payen,28, to fire heat-seeking missiles at cargo planes and blow them out of the sky.

In what was was called a terrorism version of Big Brother, the accused architects of the bomb plot were followed and listened to by law enforcement officials at all times.

The Muslim converts were under constant surveillance from early on in their plans until they were busted by cops last year.

The sting apparently never put New Yorkers at risk but the defendants 'thought this was real - real bombs, real missiles - every step of the way', according to Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin.

The federal court jury in Manhattan deliberated for eight days before finding the four defendants guilty of charges including conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles to kill U.S. officers and employees.

Cromite and David Williams were convicted of all eight counts, while Onta Williams and Laguerre Payen were convicted of seven out of the eight charges.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement that homegrown terrorism was a 'serious threat' and added: 'We are safer today as a result of these convictions.

He said the defendants agreed to plant bombs and use missiles 'they thought were very real weapons of terrorism'.

The trial featured 13 days of testimony by undercover mole, Shahed Hussain who met Cromitie at a mosque north of New York City.

The paid FBI informant helped make hundreds of hours of audio and video tapes between the terrorists which were given to officials and used as evidence.

The defence had argued that the government entrapped their clients but the prosecution were determined to avoid the complication that has derailed previous terror cases and took necessary steps to avoid that.

Authorities had bugged the Newburgh home of apparent ringleader Cromitie, the other three defendants as well as some of their haunts...

[Full Article]


Related Article:

FBI stings for alleged would-be terrorists not unusual