http://www.democracynow.org/2010/10/6/entrapment_or_foiling_terror_fbis_reliance Entrapment or Foiling Terror? FBI’s Reliance on Paid Informants Raises Questions about Validity of Terrorism Cases
For several months, Democracy Now!’s Anjali Kamat and Jacquie Soohen of Big Noise Films traveled through Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey to track the Newburgh case and two others. In all three, Muslim men were arrested on terrorism charges. In all three, no terrorist crime was actually committed. And all three cases relied heavily on hundreds of hours of surveillance recorded by a paid government informant. Today, a Democracy Now! special investigation. The report also looks at two older cases, that of the Fort Dix Five, five young men from suburban New Jersey who were convicted last year of conspiring to attack US soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base, and a case in Albany, New York, where two men were convicted in 2007 of money laundering and conspiring to support terrorism.
Karen Greenberg from New York University’s Center on Law and Security says informants have become a crucial part of the post-9/11 domestic counterterrorism strategy.
KAREN GREENBERG: The use of informants in the fifty most high-profile terrorism cases since 9/11 is 62 percent. The conviction rate for those cases that involved informants is almost a hundred percent; it’s 97 percent. So that gives you a kind of sense of how important they are and how useful they’ve been.
ANJALI KAMAT: The FBI did not respond to our request for an interview, but we did speak to a former FBI agent who worked with multiple informants during his thirty-five years at the bureau. James Wedick told us that informants are unreliable sources.
JAMES WEDICK: Look, informants are the most dangerous individuals on the planet. If you don’t monitor them, something can go wrong.
ANJALI KAMAT: A former street agent, Wedick says the line between uncovering terrorist plots and creating them has become increasingly blurry.
JAMES WEDICK: I’ll venture to say in 90 percent—90 percent of the cases that you see that have occurred in the last ten years are garbage.
**
ANJALI KAMAT: The feds caught on to Shahed Hussain’s license scam, and in 2003 he was arrested in a sting operation. But as Muslim communities in America came under increased scrutiny after 9/11, Shahed Hussain proved to be very useful. He was a Muslim willing to spy on fellow Muslims in exchange for amnesty. Instead of sending him to jail or deporting him, he got off on a plea deal, and the FBI hired him as an informant.
KAREN GREENBERG: When you’re dealing with informants, you’re dealing with people who have been convicted of or threatened with conviction or found in the act of some kind of criminality. And there is everything in their interest to make sure that they do what the FBI wants.
***
JAMES WEDICK: What they’re looking for is money, because they’re desperate. They’re looking for a job. They’re looking for some way to feed their family. And so, they’re there because this informant is flashing money around, driving a fancy car, and maybe living in a fancy apartment. And they, too, want part of that prize.
ANJALI KAMAT: By 2007, the informant in the Albany case, Shahed Hussain, showed up in the impoverished largely African American community of Newburgh. He arrived at the Al-Ikhlas mosque one day, flush with funds and driving a BMW.
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ANJALI KAMAT: The imam recalls that one man was willing to listen to the informant’s stories and happy to be driven around in his car and treated to free meals. James Cromitie is a forty-four-year-old petty criminal who had been in and out of prison numerous times.
The FBI began secretly recording conversations between James Cromitie and the informant in October 2008, after the informant reported that James had made extremist anti-American statements. The informant promised James $250,000 to help him carry out a plot to bomb a synagogue and a Jewish community center in the Bronx and attack military planes at the Stewart International Airport near Newburgh.
Within a few months, the informant was urging James to recruit more people to act as lookouts while they carried out the plot. That’s when Alicia McCollum’s nephew David Williams entered the scene. At the time, his twenty-year-old brother, Lord, had just been diagnosed with a deadly liver disease. The doctors said he needed a liver transplant to survive, but the family couldn’t afford the surgery.
ALICIA McWILLIAMS-McCOLLUM: You know, I’m like, OK, Lord was sick, OK. He needed money, alright. I’m like, ooh, he got caught up in a bad situation. Then I heard "informant." Informant?
ANJALI KAMAT: The informant had promised to give David Williams at least $25,000 and drove him to visit his brother in the hospital.
ALICIA McWILLIAMS-McCOLLUM: He’s a manipulator. I’m from the streets. He’s a manipulator. He’s a con artist.
This is a damn bad motion picture. They should be ashamed of theirself.
ANJALI KAMAT: In court, the government has admitted that the FBI picked the targets and supplied the men with the fake bombs and the missile. But the government says the fact the men actually planted the bombs near the Riverdale synagogue is evidence of their willingness to commit terrorism.
KAREN GREENBERG: The big story is who took the lead here, who created the story of the crime that was going to ensue, and who made it happen.
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