Legal Commentary

Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before

By Ethan Brown

Reading about a federal indictment of several Muslim men accused of plotting to bomb a synagogue in the Bronx I couldn't help but be reminded of terror plots past: the plot to bomb the Sears Tower; the plot to
attack Fort Dix; the plot to destroy the 34th Street subway station in Manhattan.

What do these indictments have in common? Well, they all involve defendants who allegedly chose huge targets that would take a very skilled and organized terrorist to take down. Yet in each and every case the defendants in question were far from organized and, more disturbingly, did not remotely have the means to pull the plots in question off. Perhaps worst of all, in most cases the defendants did not even initiate the terror plots--the plots were hatched by informants. [More...]

In my book Snitch, I closely examined the 34th Street terror plot. In this case, an FBI informant in New York befriended a young Muslim man named Shahawar Matin Siraj who worked at an Islamic book store in Brooklyn. The informant showed Siraj pictures of the torture at Abu Ghraib and urged him to "do something" to retaliate against the United States. The informant then told Siraj that he could facilitate terrorist acts against the U.S. because he was connected to a shadowy terror network called "The Brotherhood." The organization, the informant explained, could even provide financial assistance to Siraj and his family should he decide to join.

Siraj was impressed by the informant and he and the informant discussed what they might do to retaliate against the U.S. for the war in Iraq and its torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The pair decided to mount an attack on the 34th Street subway station, yet neither had any real sense of how this could be accomplished--and neither man obtained or even sought to obtain explosives. And as the informant discussed the attack, Siraj grew increasingly nervous and told the informant "I don't want to do it."

No matter: the feds had been recording Siraj's conversations with the informant and on August 28, 2004 Siraj was taken into custody and charged in federal court with four counts of bombing conspiracy. Incredibly, it turned out that the informant was not only not a member of "The Brotherhood"--the organization was made up the informant. And the informant was paid $100,000 by the NYPD for his work.

Just like the Bronx synagogue indictment today, the Siraj indictment received huge headlines and even fawning coverage in New York Magazine. The Siraj case was cited as an example of why New York had not been hit by a terrorist attack after 9-11 one sub-hed in the New York magazine story proudly proclaimed "WE HAVE INFORMANTS EVERYWHERE."

This thin, informant driven case unfortunately brought a guilty verdict: on January 8, 2007, Siraj was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.

The equally absurd Sears Tower case also brought guilty verdicts.

These so-called "preemptive indictments"--in which defendants are charged based on their intentions and not their actions--are a perversion of justice and a cruel joke, every bit of a joke as the theory of "preemptive war" that led us to Iraq. And yet it is this legal theory that drives our anti-terror strategy in the U.S.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 21, 2009 (boomark / email).