FBI Terror Plot: How the Government Is Destroying the Lives of Innocent Peopl
The FBI is using informants to stir up fake terror plots, destroying lives in the process.
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.
Before he approached Akili, Hussain was pivotal in securing convictions in 2006 against two Muslim men in Albany, New York-an imam and a local pizza shop owner. He had lured the two into a loan transaction that prosecutors later alleged was a deal to launder the proceeds of an illegal missile sale, though neither man had any prior criminal record or history of violence. In a separate case in 2008, Hussain was dispatched to Newburgh, New York, where he spent nearly a year enticing a group of indigent African-American and Haitian men, some of whom converted to Islam in prison, with offers of as much as $250,000 to participate in a plot to bomb a Bronx synagogue and Jewish community center. After the men were convicted at trial, the judge in the case, Colleen McMahon, said it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here” and criticized the FBI for sending informants “trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role-any role-in criminal activity.” The men were sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
The FBI’s expanded deployment of informants over the past decade is the result of a mandate to catch terrorists before they can strike next, an effort that has fundamentally refocused the bureau from its traditional law enforcement mission to gathering intelligence on potential threats. Within a year of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had reassigned nearly half its field office positions formerly devoted to the “war on drugs” to the new “war on terror” and launched nearly 3,000 new counterterrorism investigations. Since then, the bureau has been increasingly devoted to counterterrorism efforts: its current $8.1 billion budget allocates $4.9 billion to intelligence and counterterrorism, approximately $1.7 billion more than all other federal crimes combined.
Informants are crucial to producing the raw field intelligence that the bureau uses to justify these vast new expenditures. Under the FBI’s Domain Management program, modeled after the NYPD’s CompStat initiative, FBI Director Robert Mueller holds periodic “accountability” meetings with field offices, in which his agents report on a series of intelligence-gathering metrics in the geographic areas they oversee-among them the production of raw intelligence gathered by informants or electronic surveillance compiled in “information reports” and disseminated to law enforcement agencies. These informants operate in a post-9/11 environment of relaxed guidelines that allow the FBI to engage in lengthy and extensive surveillance of individuals and communities with little or no evidence of any wrongdoing afoot. Where once agents needed to have a “predicate” to launch such an investigation, these days none are required.
The FBI has kept the details of the full scope of its informant network a closely guarded secret. It has not revealed the number of official and unofficial informants (the latter known as “hip pockets” in bureau parlance) on its payroll; or how much it budgets for these informants; or what kinds of targets they track, particularly in Muslim communities. In its 2008 budget request the FBI disclosed that it had been working since November 2004 under a classified presidential directive that mandated an unspecified increase in “human source development and management.” In 2009, after civil liberties groups sued for some of these details under the Freedom of Information Act, the bureau made public its internal investigative guidelines but redacted nearly the entire section on “undisclosed participation” of confidential informants.
More at the source.
Alternate source at The Nation
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.
Before he approached Akili, Hussain was pivotal in securing convictions in 2006 against two Muslim men in Albany, New York-an imam and a local pizza shop owner. He had lured the two into a loan transaction that prosecutors later alleged was a deal to launder the proceeds of an illegal missile sale, though neither man had any prior criminal record or history of violence. In a separate case in 2008, Hussain was dispatched to Newburgh, New York, where he spent nearly a year enticing a group of indigent African-American and Haitian men, some of whom converted to Islam in prison, with offers of as much as $250,000 to participate in a plot to bomb a Bronx synagogue and Jewish community center. After the men were convicted at trial, the judge in the case, Colleen McMahon, said it was “beyond question that the government created the crime here” and criticized the FBI for sending informants “trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role-any role-in criminal activity.” The men were sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
The FBI’s expanded deployment of informants over the past decade is the result of a mandate to catch terrorists before they can strike next, an effort that has fundamentally refocused the bureau from its traditional law enforcement mission to gathering intelligence on potential threats. Within a year of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had reassigned nearly half its field office positions formerly devoted to the “war on drugs” to the new “war on terror” and launched nearly 3,000 new counterterrorism investigations. Since then, the bureau has been increasingly devoted to counterterrorism efforts: its current $8.1 billion budget allocates $4.9 billion to intelligence and counterterrorism, approximately $1.7 billion more than all other federal crimes combined.
Informants are crucial to producing the raw field intelligence that the bureau uses to justify these vast new expenditures. Under the FBI’s Domain Management program, modeled after the NYPD’s CompStat initiative, FBI Director Robert Mueller holds periodic “accountability” meetings with field offices, in which his agents report on a series of intelligence-gathering metrics in the geographic areas they oversee-among them the production of raw intelligence gathered by informants or electronic surveillance compiled in “information reports” and disseminated to law enforcement agencies. These informants operate in a post-9/11 environment of relaxed guidelines that allow the FBI to engage in lengthy and extensive surveillance of individuals and communities with little or no evidence of any wrongdoing afoot. Where once agents needed to have a “predicate” to launch such an investigation, these days none are required.
The FBI has kept the details of the full scope of its informant network a closely guarded secret. It has not revealed the number of official and unofficial informants (the latter known as “hip pockets” in bureau parlance) on its payroll; or how much it budgets for these informants; or what kinds of targets they track, particularly in Muslim communities. In its 2008 budget request the FBI disclosed that it had been working since November 2004 under a classified presidential directive that mandated an unspecified increase in “human source development and management.” In 2009, after civil liberties groups sued for some of these details under the Freedom of Information Act, the bureau made public its internal investigative guidelines but redacted nearly the entire section on “undisclosed participation” of confidential informants.
More at the source.
Alternate source at The Nation