Stage-Managing the War on Terror

Informers have by now become our first line of defense
in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending
domestic war on terror. They regularly do the dirty work -- suggesting
and encouraging the plots, laboring as bag men to move the money,
fashioning the bombs, and eliciting the flamboyant dialogue, even while
following the scripts
of their handlers to the letter. They have attended to all the little
details that make for the successful and now familiar arrests, criminal
complaints, trials, and (for the most part) convictions in the
ever-distracting war against... what? Al-Qaeda? Terror? Muslims? The
inept? The poor?

The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah
Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four -- each has had their fear-filled day in
the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could
they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds -- provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones -- provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition -- issued by the authorities; facilities
for carrying out the transactions -- leased by those same authorities.
Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax
of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be
touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.

A band of virtually homeless and penniless men in Florida, we were
told, were planning to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. They just
needed the right combat boots to pull it off, and a little free money.

A cell of New Jersey roofers, handymen, and cab drivers was scheming to use a laminated pizza delivery map to guide them through a devastating attack on Fort Dix, the enormous military base in Burlington County, south of Trenton.

Ex-cons in Detroit, mostly known for patronizing a weekly soup kitchen to stave off hunger, were also planning to set up their own country in Michigan under Islamic law.

And a band of Orange County New York parolees and former drug peddlers placed bombs
at two Bronx synagogues and was preparing to launch missile attacks on
military cargo planes at Stewart National Guard Air Base in Newburgh.

In the Liberty City Seven case, which revolved around two informants paid
in excess of $130,000 for their services, the government tried the
hapless defendants three times before finally wresting a conviction
from a jury. One defendant was acquitted at the first trial, another in
the third, and five were eventually convicted of at least some
terrorism-related charges. In the Fort Dix case, jurors were shown
horrific films said to be on a computer owned by one of the defendants,
who claimed an FBI informant demanded more and more videos for viewing.

Another defendant actually called
the Philadelphia police, mid-plot, and said he was being pressured to
commit radical acts by what turned out to be an FBI informer.
Prosecutors dismissed this as an obvious decoy maneuver. The key
informer in that case -- the FBI eventually paid two people to spy on
the group -- an Egyptian on probation, received $236,000 for his
services.

Most recently, this duplicitous landscape of war-on-terror "success"
has been illuminated yet again by the case of four alleged Newburgh,
New York, conspirators -- the Newburgh Four -- and in the botched
arrest and fatal shooting (a first for federal authorities) of an
African American imam in Detroit, leader of the so-called Ummah
Conspiracy. As the details have slowly emerged, these two cases offer
vivid examples of how government-scripted many of the terror plots
"uncovered" in the U.S. in recent years have turned out to be. Each
case, in fact, offers a window onto a stark world in which nothing is
what it seems to be.

The "Un-Terrorism Case"

In the years following 9/11, when I was reporting my book, Mohamed's Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland,
many defense and immigration attorneys I interviewed insisted that the
mere mention of "terrorism" has often been enough to knock down any and
all defenses. In the Newburgh conspiracy, however, the federal judge,
Colleen McMahon, has shown a more questioning attitude toward what, in
a May 28, 2010, pre-trial hearing, she took to calling the "un-terrorism case."

After their May 2009 arrests, the four Newburgh conspirators were portrayed
as Jew-hating Muslim converts who intended to blow up synagogues in the
Bronx and shoot down military planes based at Stewart Airport in
Newburgh. "It's hard to envision a more chilling plot," said Assistant
U.S. Attorney Eric Snyder at the time, describing the defendants as
"extremely violent."

The men were indeed arrested only after placing bogus bombs
(courtesy of the FBI) near two Bronx synagogues. New York Police Chief
Raymond Kelly said the plotters believed "it would be alright" to kill
Jews. The Simon Wiesenthal Center issued a statement noting that the
uncovered plot cooked up by "the jihadist terrorists" showed "that the
dangers from such fanaticism have not passed and that American Jews
must maintain their vigilance." New York's Mayor Michael Bloomberg
reiterated that vigilance remains a necessity for all concerned.

With their anti-Semitic bona fides established and the men caught in
the act, all that seemed left was a perfunctory trial, followed by life
in prison for James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and
Laguerre Payen. A decade earlier, Cromitie had been arrested for
dealing drugs behind a school. Payen, a Haitian immigrant, is a crack
addict and certified paranoid schizophrenic, often found living on the
street; his earlier deportation had been on hold due to his mental
instability. Onta and David Williams, not related, had pasts pocked by
drug busts and spotty work at minimum wage jobs scrounged from
Newburgh's depressed economy. All four men were black.

Almost immediately, however, questions about the conspiracy began to
arise. For one thing, the FBI informer who broke the case was a
Pakistani named Shaheed Hussain, who arrived in Newburgh in the summer
of 2008 driving a flashy Mercedes, showing lots of money, and promising
jobs to down-and-out African American hangers-on at Masjid al-Ikhlas,
Newburgh's main mosque. Convicted in a fraudulent driver's license
scheme in 2002, he agreed to work undercover for the FBI shortly
afterward to avoid deportation and turned out to have been an informer in a previous terrorism case in Albany in 2004.

The Albany case,
in which an imam and a pizza shop owner were convicted of money
laundering as part of a phantasmagorical scheme to kill a Pakistani
diplomat with a missile, was bitterly contested by defense attorneys.
They claimed that the elaborate plan had been concocted by Hussain
himself. The jury didn't buy it, convicting both imam and pizza shop
owner.

The
Newburgh case shares much with the Albany case, especially a fondness
for baroque plotting, the flashing of great wads of money in front of
needy people, and the aggressive use of an informant by the FBI in a
house of worship, in this case Masjid al-Ikhlas. The intricate plotting
and the use of an informer made it into the criminal complaint,
but all that flashing money didn't. There was no mention of the
enticing job offers made by the seemingly well-to-do informer. Nothing
about his offer
of a $250,000 payment for carrying out the plot. Nothing about the BMW
he pushed on Cromitie, who didn't even have a driver's license. Nothing
about the $25,000 he was ready to pay anyone willing to act as a
"lookout."

Maybe Cromitie wasn't the brightest hustler in town, but he was
quite capable of grasping the significance of such sums of money in
distressed Newburgh. He assured Hussain that dangling cash would lure
participants, no matter what. "They will do it for the money," he said.
"They're not even thinking about the cause."

Nor did the complaint mention, as the defense now maintains, that even the anti-Semitic talk
was triggered by the informant. He baited the defendants, telling them
that Jews were responsible for the U.S. wars in the Middle East and for
other acts of violence against Muslims. Cromitie had an unexpected
reaction during one of these conversations, according to government
transcripts. "I'm not gonna hurt anybody," he said, after being
badgered about possible attacks. "The plane thing... is out of the
question."

On the streets of Newburgh, relatives and neighbors say that they have never heard the four men even mention Jews or jihad,
let alone link the two together in murderous rants. Lord McWilliams,
the severely ill brother of David Williams, called such a
characterization "crazy." Hussain, he insisted, had promised his
brother so much money that he would have been able to pay for the liver
transplant that Lord desperately needed.

In fact, more substantial members of the mosque had pegged Shaheed
Hussain as an informer almost the moment he arrived, but had no idea
what to do about him. "Maybe the mistake we made was that we didn't
report him," Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, imam at Masjid al-Ikhlas, told congregants shortly after the May 2009 arrests. "But how are we going to report the government agent to the government?"

The Ummah and the Death of an Imam

Money also played a role in the deadly Detroit case involving
53-year-old Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, born Christopher Thomas, and
gunned down during a sting operation run by the FBI in a Dearborn,
Michigan, warehouse on October 28th of last year. For at least three
years, FBI informants
had filed copious reports on the conversations and activities of
Abdullah, as he ministered to his largely indigent congregation at
Masjid al-Haqq, a mosque so poor it could not even pay property taxes
in disintegrating Detroit. Al-Haqq was evicted from its long-time home
on Michigan Avenue early in 2009 and moved its operation -- a soup
kitchen and religious services regularly attended by several dozen
largely African American families, ex-convicts, former addicts and
alcoholics, and homeless men and women -- into a house on Clairmount
Street on Detroit's west side.

It is from this pathetic building, surrounded by an increasingly
vacant and collapsing neighborhood, that the FBI contends Abdullah was
plotting rebellion, hiding weapons, and planning efforts to move stolen
goods. A 43-page criminal complaint describes Abdullah as "a highly
placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group
consisting primarily of African Americans" whose "primary mission is to
establish a separate, sovereign Islamic state ('The Ummah') within the
borders of the United States, governed by Shariah law."

The complaint opens with page after page of over-the-top political
trash talk, provided by three informants listening to (and sometimes
recording) Abdullah's sermons and conversations, tying the imam to H.
Rap Brown, a 1960s radical and a former leader in the Black Panther
Party now serving life in prison for the shooting deaths of two Georgia
state troopers. According to the complaint, Abdullah was rarely without
a gun or knife. He daydreamed about cop killing, engaged in elaborate
revolutionary plotting, and enthusiastically told anecdotes about past
violent encounters, largely with police. In effect, the complaint
conjures up an old-time boogeyman: the angry, gun-toting Black Panther
given over to "anti-government and anti-law enforcement rhetoric" --
now dressed up with sympathy for Osama bin Laden.

But in its efforts to be all-inclusive, the complaint also features
an extraordinary section that describes an FBI informant offering
Abdullah $5,000 "to pay to have someone 'do something' during the 2006
Super Bowl in Detroit." The imam rejected the offer. "Abdullah said he
would not be involved in injuring innocent people for no reason," the
complaint blandly states. So much for entrapment on the political front.

Despite page after page of braggadocio from Abdullah, following the
rebuff over Super Bowl violence, no further effort was apparently
mounted to entice him into a terrorist "plot." The complaint outlines
no grounds for charges of treason, none for terrorism, and nothing even
for a charge of material support for terrorism (that reliable catch-all
used to ensnare dozens of American Muslims and institutions and even human-rights groups).
Despite the heavy emphasis on descriptions of violent radicalism, the
criminal complaint ultimately accuses Abdullah and several congregants
of the pettiest of fencing operations -- 54 powertools, 46 TVs, and the
like -- involving small amounts of money ($100, $200, $500).

FBI agents worked out a simple but comprehensive sting. Undercover
operatives rented a warehouse and offered the imam and his congregants
money for help in moving batches of furs and small electronic items.
Money, goods, trucks, warehouse, and plans were all supplied by covert
federal agents, and all activities were reported, virtually in real
time, by informers close to Abdullah and inside the mosque.

Then, as the sting unfolded on October 28th, Abdullah was gunned
down by FBI agents as they sought to round up the purported members of
the fencing operation. No one else was harmed. The FBI claimed Abdullah
fired first, killing a police dog, which was taken by helicopter to a veterinary hospital. After he was shot, the imam was handcuffed
behind the back and dragged from the warehouse into a trailer full of
TVs and other "stolen" goods. Presumably, at this point he was dead,
though no information has been released describing his condition or the
circumstances of his removal from the warehouse. Abdullah's body was
photographed in the trailer and picked up by the Wayne County medical
examiner, who then declined to release autopsy findings. The head of
the local FBI office claimed that he was "comfortable with what our
agents did" to protect themselves.

This whole murky incident with a still unfolding aftermath has
caused deep anxiety and not a little anger in Detroit's African
American and Muslim communities. Why was the imam shot in the back? Why
was the dog given emergency medical treatment and the imam handcuffed
and dragged around? Was he dead when the shooting ended? Did he even
have a gun?

Was Abdullah's death an instance of score settling for his
unrepentant association with Rap Brown, known as Jamil Abdullah al-Amin
since the 1970s? In a conversation I had recently with a black leader
in Philadelphia, he said that rumors are spreading on the street of
nationwide interrogations of African American Muslims who, in the past,
associated with al-Amin. (In Philadelphia, a mosque founded by
civic-minded entrepreneur Kenny Gamble, well known for his efforts to
assist the black community, has been attacked by anti-Islamic groups for its purported association with "The Ummah.")

Members of Abdullah's congregation and prominent Muslims in Detroit
told me that Abdullah was indeed incensed by the poverty and racism he
saw all around him and could indeed deliver harsh attacks on the
government -- but that hardly distinguished him in a city as ravaged
and beaten down as Detroit. Moreover, those who knew Abdullah insist
that they never heard him promote any violent separatist effort on
behalf of any organization.

National Islamic organizations,
such as the Muslim Alliance in North America, insist as well that "The
Ummah" is nothing more than an association of largely African American
mosques. ("Ummah" is an Arabic term that refers to the Muslim
community.) The alliance calls the FBI description of the Ummah "an offensive mischaracterization." (Abdullah El-Amin, an imam at the largest African American Detroit mosque, told the New York Times
that he had heard Abdullah discuss a separatism that would be "sort of
like the Pennsylvania Dutch have their own communities and stuff."
There are similar comments from Abdullah in the criminal complaint.)

In any event, the indictment
that followed Abdullah's death, naming 11 of his congregants and
associates, makes no mention of radical politics or the shadowy "Ummah"
or "offensive jihad" -- all highlighted in the earlier criminal
complaint. The 11 were indicted as petty criminals, charged with
selling and receiving stolen goods, tampering with vehicle
identification numbers, and weapons offenses.

Many officials and organizations, including Congressman John
Conyers, Detroit Mayor Dave Bing, the local chapters of the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim civil-rights and advocacy
organization, the ACLU, and the NAACP, have called for an investigation
of the killing -- calls unanswered so far by the Obama administration.
The U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division is reviewing the
case. The state attorney general named a prosecutor to look into the
matter after the FBI refused to hand over documents to the Wayne County
Prosecutor's Office because, the bureau said, the documents were "classified."

In early June, Cyril Wecht, a well-known forensic pathologist asked
by CAIR to review the autopsy findings (they were finally released in
February), said
Abdullah's face was pierced by wounds and lacerations consistent with a
dog attack. His jaw was fractured. Wecht also said there were two
gunshot wounds in Abdullah's back, not one. This prompted Wayne County
Medical Examiner Carl Schmidt to defend his findings and accuse Wecht of emotionalism, according to a Detroit Free Press report. "We don't always say what others would like us to say," Schmidt commented. "We can only describe what we see."

As the wait for reviews and investigations and answers drags on, the
immediate area served by Abdullah's mosque -- blighted, black, and
destitute -- frays further, and is in danger of losing a small but
critical social and economic resource. Abdullah ran a well-attended
soup kitchen for years, worked to rid the neighborhood of gang
violence, and sought to provide support for the poor, the homeless, and
ex-convicts. His family and his depleted mosque are now struggling to
keep the house of worship and soup kitchen going. Mosque attendance has
plummeted and contributions, never robust, have evaporated;
law-enforcement investigators continue to fan out through the community.

"People are still scared," said Omar Regan, one of Abdullah's 13
children, who makes his living as an actor, comedian, and motivational
speaker based in Los Angeles. "They are still interrogating people. The
more people push about injustice, the more they harass Muslims in that
area [of Detroit]. My father took care of all these people. They leaned
on him. He was a reason a lot of them didn't commit suicide. They came
for food. For shelter."

Regan is incensed that the FBI provided the money to acquire stolen
goods, the actual goods as well, and even the warehouses to store them
in, while working out plans for moving the goods through informants and
undercover employees clustered around Luqman Abdullah and the Masjid
al-Haqq mosque. And now Omar Regan's father is dead.

"It's the FBI setting the whole thing up," he lamented. "How can that be legal?"

It's a question more and more people are asking as the war on terror
grinds on, now directed by the Obama administration. If nothing else,
the cases of the Newburgh Four and the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy show
that street-smart accused conspirator James Cromitie knew what he was
talking about when he said that chronically poor people will "do it for
the money" and "don't care about the cause."

This simple fact underlies both the Detroit and Newburgh cases. The
FBI contends that the Detroit sting was not about terror, but about
mundane criminal activity. If that's the case, why was the criminal
complaint larded with characterizations of Luqman Abdullah's supposed
violent political views? What relevance does H. Rap Brown, now in
prison, have to moving stolen goods in Dearborn?

Beyond that, what justification do federal authorities have for
characterizing "the Ummah" as a threatening separatist movement? Many
Muslim leaders argue that such a characterization is a fantasy akin to
tales spun by the FBI's most imaginative informers. Both Newburgh and
Detroit are, indeed, instances of "unterrorism," as the Newburgh judge
said of the "plot" before her. Yet both are starkly framed by the
on-going war on terror, both involve elaborate set-ups arranged by
federal informers and covert agents, and both ensnared inept, virtually
destitute black people scrambling to get by in post-racial America.

It remains to be asked: How expansive will the stage become for
creative informers and their government directors now working the
theater of the Great Recession?