06/29/15 – Murtaza Hussain – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Here from noon to two Eastern time on Liberty Radio Network every weekday.
Our first guest up on the show today is Murtaza Hussein.
And he is co-author with Razan Galani.
Yeah, sorry.
This great article at The Intercept.
Christie's conspiracy, the real story behind the Fort Dix five terror plot.
And of course, Christie is a reference to the current governor of New Jersey who's fixing to announce that he's running for president.
He already is really running for president.
And it turns out this case, he kind of rode on the back of it in order to get into the governor's office in the first place.
It sounds like I guess we don't know what would have been otherwise, but certainly made his bones on it.
So that's very interesting.
We all knew from the very beginning that the Fort Dix pizza plot was a giant hoax.
Once you say informant, then we all know it was a giant sting operation.
And the same thing that the FBI has done scores of times as covered, especially by Trevor Aronson, formerly of Mother Jones, and now also at The Intercept in his book, The Terror Factory.
But this is the best deep dive into the Fort Dix pizza plot that I've ever heard of.
Very happy to see what you've done here.
And I guess, first of all, I'll welcome you to the show and then ask you to please pronounce your co-author's name correctly for us.
Sorry about that.
Yeah, thanks for having me on the show.
The co-author is Rezaan Al-Saleem.
All right, great.
I guess I was kind of surprised to find out about this one.
Not only was this an entrapment job, but that actually it was only a half-successful entrapment job at best when it comes to the actual entrapping.
And yet the people that the government failed to entrap, they were all sentenced to, was it life in prison anyway?
Yeah, life in prison.
So, essentially, there were five guys that they were teaching to entrap.
One guy, they basically got a 22-year-old, Muhammad Shnur.
He went along with the informant, who was about 36, 37, quite a bit older than him.
There was another guy, Sardar Sattar, who was actually trying.
He called the police and told them that I think this guy, the informant, who he didn't know was an informant, was a terrorist.
He tried reporting him to the police a number of times, tried recording him.
But somehow he also ended up getting entrapped because they gave him a map that he asked for.
He didn't get life, he got 30 years.
And then the guys we focus on in the story, the Duker brothers, they didn't know about any plot or any map or anything at all.
They didn't know about it, but due to their relation to Muhammad Shnur, he was a brother-in-law of one of these guys, and they ended up being charged with the crime anyways.
And at trial, the prosecution and even the judge conceded, well, there's not any evidence these guys actually knew about the plot per se, no direct evidence was used.
But under conspiracy law in the United States, you don't have to prove that direct evidence.
All you have to do is prove that they seem to have potentially known about it, although there was no evidence that they did.
All right, now, so rewind a second to the guy who you say that when the FBI sent the informant to entrap him, the first thing he did was call the cops and say, hey, some guy's trying to get me to do a terrorist attack.
And then what happened after that?
Well, he had been trying to talk to this guy saying, you know, we should do something, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And this guy, essentially, he called the police.
He was a police officer who knew him.
He used to come in to his 7-Eleven every morning to have coffee, told him, look, I think this guy's a terrorist, and I've been recording him on my cell phone with some of the things he's been saying.
And this guy, Sardar, actually wanted to be a police officer himself.
He'd actually asked that police officer several times if he could go along on ride-alongs with him and so forth.
And the police officer said, well, I'll put you in touch with someone from the FBI.
And then three weeks passed and no one from the FBI contacted him.
And finally, when someone did, they came by and told him not to worry about it and tried showing him the recordings and said, well, I don't know what this is and just forget about it.
And then the same FBI agent was the guy who ended up coming to arrest him a few months later when this plot was uncovered, quote-unquote.
And what's even more egregious is that the prosecution at trial said that these guys had gone on a trip to the Poconos to train.
And they go on an annual Poconos vacation.
This is how they first aroused suspicion.
And Sardar actually invited the police officer along on one of his trips, and he declined to go because he said, look, I think I want you to check out this guy.
And so, you know, he tried everything he could to actually report the informants to police.
Yeah, that's amazing.
So, and now, yeah, I'm sorry for – I should have had a better structure to my questions here.
So let's go back to that, the trip to the Poconos, because that's where the FBI first got interested in these guys, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So these guys had gone to the Poconos mountains for a vacation in December of 2006, and they went there and they made a home video of themselves, like, climbing trees and, like, riding horses and skiing, and they went to a shooting range as well.
And they went to drop off this video of the shooting range and everything else to Circuit City because they thought it was just an annual vacation video, which they always take.
And the Circuit City saw these, like, Muslim guys, you know, at the shooting range and doing this other stuff, skiing and so forth, and they caught alarm and they called the police, and then the police initiated this investigation, which took about almost two years to try to infiltrate them with informants and so forth, and then it resulted in these arrests.
But it all was triggered by this dropping off of the home video at Circuit City.
Well, a couple of things there is, you know, you can figure that they thought, well, geez, you know, maybe the police ought to check this out, but it probably never occurred to the people who called 911, you know, the rat at Circuit City.
It probably never occurred to them that, well, if they're innocent people, the FBI will entrap them and frame them for a crime and then lock them in prison for the rest of their lives, and then it'll be all our fault.
They never considered that for a minute.
They just wanted to make sure everything's okay, if you see something, say something, and all these kinds of things, do the right thing, when in fact they're the worst criminals, the people at Circuit City who violated the privacy of their customer and then turned the most violent force on the planet against them.
Yeah, it was pretty awful.
And then there was actually a lot of stories about the Circuit City guy afterwards, kind of like lauding his heroism and so forth.
Well, people might remember, too, like that's probably the most memorable part about this case, other than the so-called, you know, pizza part.
Was there going to be an attack on soldiers from a pizza man or whatever?
Was that, you know, this hero at Circuit City, you know, found the evidence, and it didn't get by him, like you're saying.
Yeah, he was lauded, and his behavior was lauded, and that the tape showed terrorist training was absolutely taken for granted.
If people remember it at all, they remember, oh yeah, the terrorist training tape.
But like you're saying, no, it's just some guys camping in the woods and behaving as men behave, shooting rifles at targets and such.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, one of the most odious things was at trial, there was like a pretty long video, like an hour-long video they made to share with everybody, and they were doing these other things, like skiing, like goofing off in the Poconos.
But at trial, the prosecution only showed a little clip of them in the gun range to give the impression that this actually was like a training video, like an al-Qaeda video where they just had recorded their tactics with the guns.
So yeah, it was just awful, awful.
And that guy at Circuit City, I mean, he was just doing what people, you know, see something, say something, he was going along with what society was sort of instructing him.
But I mean, the FBI, after realizing that there wasn't actually a plot or anything, the fact that they kept, you know, pouring all this money and time into still manufacturing was just unbelievable.
Yeah.
Well, you know, they've got to pretend that there's a terrorist threat, or else they might have to get real jobs, and so they don't want to do that.
Right.
Apparently.
All right, so now, the guy that you say who originally went to his friend the cop and to the FBI and said, one of your informants is trying to entrap me, so to speak, that he eventually, I think as you put it in here, inexplicably, turned around and gave a map to a guy, one of the informants who, had he already pegged that guy as an informant, or this was the other informant that he gave the map to, but he already could or should have known that they were going to use it for ill?
Is that right or not?
Yeah, that was the whole, like, in my interpretation of the event, the informant left from reading the transcripts, and again, the informant was coming to him all the time and badgering him for this map, like, give me the map, give me the map.
All right, hold it right there.
I'm sorry, we're at the break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Murtaza Hussain from The Intercept.
Firstlook.org slash The Intercept.
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All right, guys, welcome back here.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Murtaza Hussain from The Intercept.
Christie's conspiracy.
Terror plot of the Fort Dix Five.
Obvious bogus.
Entrapment job from the very beginning.
It's kind of amazing to me how the FBI doesn't mind admitting, yeah, an informant was in on it the whole time.
The public was never actually in danger.
Yeah, in other words, you framed some guy, and we're not impressed.
But they just happily admit that every single time.
And so, you know, it's not too hard.
But here, these guys have done a real deep dive here, Murtaza and his co-author, on what really happened here.
And I'm sorry we got interrupted by the break because I asked you a question right before the break because I wasn't looking at the clock.
And it was the passing of the map.
The guy who felt like someone was trying to pressure him into doing something wrong and was so worried about it that he even went to the FBI over it, eventually gave in to the rat and gave him a map.
And then is that the basis of this guy's entire conviction, then?
Or did he?
Oh, now I'm sorry.
The important question is, what did he know about what that map might be used for at the time, that kind of thing?
Because even if he's entrapped, still, you don't give a map to a guy who says he's going to use it to kill people, probably, right?
I think that what happened was, like, from the transcript, he was being badgered about all the time.
He was like, even when he was giving the map, like, I don't think he should do anything with it.
But I think what really got him in trouble is that the FBI, this was in between the three weeks from when he told the police officer when the FBI actually showed up.
That's when the map, he gave him the map.
And the FBI officer, when he came, he asked him, he told him about the map.
He said, so did you give him the map?
And then he got scared and he said, well, no.
So I guess he kind of bumbled himself into the plot.
But it was a very haphazard way.
You could say, well, maybe the informant, in this really messed up way, succeeded in trapping him.
But he also did try to recruit him.
Well, wait, on this guy, though, did this guy do anything other than hand over the map, or that's it?
And lie to the FBI about it?
No, that was it.
That was it.
Okay, and then, I'm sorry, about the brothers?
And the brothers, they never even knew about the map.
They never knew about the plot.
No one ever raised this with them over hundreds of hours of surveillance.
The other co-defendant, the one who died, who was really a nun, who was really going along with the informant, Muhammad Stewart, he wrote a letter to the judge saying that, you know, I made these false statements about the brothers.
They didn't actually know anything.
The informant himself, who we tracked down and talked to in the piece, he also told us that the brothers never said anything to him about any plot and they didn't know about it.
So, like, it's pretty resounding that these guys had nothing to do with anything.
And yet, they're sitting in ADX Supermax, a few of them, in solitary confinement, 23 hours a day, serving life sentences.
And so, okay, so one entrapped guy, one guy who was under the influence of an informant, had bragged to that informant that, oh, yeah, the brothers, I got them all lined up, they're cool, but that's all they ever had was that hearsay and no actual evidence that the brothers even knew about it.
And then, I think, as you say in here, make sure I'm right about that, but also, you have them quoted from, I guess, the surveillance in jail or something, where the brothers are saying to the other guy, you told them what about us?
It rings very believable.
Yeah, exactly.
And the guy, when they're yelling at him, he pretends to be asleep because he's kind of embarrassed that he's done all this.
So, yeah, that's basically the gist of what they had, was this statement of Muhammad Schneuer, which you later recanted.
And then, basically, they were, like, conspiracy law is such a dangerous sort of law because all they have to do is prove state of mind with these guys.
At the time, to try to prove there's no evidence, let's just try to prove their state of mind.
So they went through the Google history or the YouTube clips and tried to say that, hey, by the way, these guys actually are terrorists, blah, blah, blah.
But they had not any evidence.
And anything they could produce was, like, you know, counterveiled by a million other things.
So it was just, like, an unbelievably shocking prosecution.
And I guess they must have made a big deal about the guns to the jury, right?
They're like, oh, no, a foreigner with a gun.
But they just, basically, they got them on a gun control possession charge for having a gun without first having their whatever level of green card or citizenship status.
Is that right?
Yeah, exactly.
So another part of the conspiracy law is you have to prove that someone took one overt act towards the conspiracy.
So they said that buying the guns from the informant was that overt act.
But, you know, actually, in the video which we have of the gun deal happening, you can hear them saying, oh, this is great.
Now we don't have to wait in line for the Poconos the next time we go because whenever they go to the Poconos, they have to wait in the line for people who rent guns.
So the whole time they thought that they were doing this.
Actually, the informant, he tried to tell, like, when he offered them some guns, he said his friend at a gun store was selling at a cheap price.
He offered them RPGs and, like, heavy machine guns and the type of things you'd use if you wanted to carry out a terrorist attack.
And the guy got very alarmed.
He's like, I don't want any of this.
He's like, and everyone was like, okay, I'm okay with the other normal stuff.
So, like, well, what's up with this?
If something's going on, please tell me.
And he said, no, nothing's going on.
It's fine.
He actually declined the offer of these really hardcore weapons because he thought he was using them as a little Poconos.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, imagine.
It's just like in the mind of every cop in America, apparently, where there's 300 million privately owned firearms.
If anybody's holding a gun, they must be trying to kill you with it, so kill them.
You just, you know, project whatever fear you want onto somebody holding a gun, even though this is America, the land of the gun, where everybody has a gun and most people don't mean any harm by it whatsoever.
But anyway, it makes for a great scary story for a bunch of terrified jurors, I guess.
But now, so this guy Schnur, he was the idiot dumb enough to get all the way entrapped into this thing.
How entrapped did he get?
He really was going along with these informants into planning to go to Fort Dix and massacre American soldiers on their base.
Is that even true at all?
You know, one thing about Schnur is, like, he's kind of responsible for everyone being in jail.
But whenever you talk to the Duca brothers, they refuse, even the family, they won't say anything bad about them because it says, yeah, he did do it, but, like, we all knew him.
He was like a child.
His behavior was so childish.
He was always trying to be tough and impress us.
We were from Brooklyn, and he was a younger guy, and he thought that he just wanted to be cool in front of us.
So this older informant who was almost 40 starts talking to this guy who was 22 and sort of gasping him up and telling him, you know, you should be doing stuff, and what's wrong with you, blah, blah.
So he was trying to be tough and going along with him.
Should be doing stuff about what?
Like the wars and, like, getting revenge or, like, really, like, the harebrained kind of class, like, talking about it amongst themselves.
And he was, so he did go along with it.
He kind of admitted that he went along with the informant.
But the thing is, like, before the informant came, nothing was even going on, even with him.
The one guy who, like, seemed to be, like, receptive to it, and he was just kind of dumb.
Like, you know, if you hadn't introduced this grown man into his life and was trying to influence him this way, even with him, nothing would have happened.
Right.
So, I mean, just even his case, like, we didn't talk about him as much in terms of the problems and the prosecution, but it clearly is.
Like, the FBI's behavior, even with him, is insane.
Right.
Yeah, yeah.
No, that's an important point.
I mean, it's just so outrageous that these three brothers who, for, you know, are the best example where, you know, the feds apparently just completely failed to then trap them into doing anything but buying a gun without a license, which, what the hell is this, Germany or something?
North Korea, where you have to have a license to buy a gun?
Not to carry one out in public, God forbid, but to own one.
Oh, got them on an unlicensed firearm charge and then try to spin that into terrorism.
And then, as you're saying, they're in the Supermax with Ted Kaczynski, with Ramsey Yousef.
Yeah, two of the guys are in the Supermax and it's, like, the worst conditions possible.
We get one 15-minute phone call a month.
They're sitting in a box 23 hours a day.
Even the one hour they get out, it's not like, you know, your recreation hour is basically you get to stand outside in a cage, which is the same size as your cell.
So, unbelievable, torture.
Yeah.
And then, yeah, it's really important, as you point out, about how impressionable the one kid was who then implicated everybody else because that's something that we see over and over again, too, where the informant just, that's the qualification, right?
They don't even find somebody who's really upset about foreign policy necessarily or really into Salafism or something like that.
They just find who's the dumbest kid down at the Islamic bookstore that they can manipulate.
And, as you say, this guy, all he ever wanted to do was get approval from people who were a little bit older than him.
He's a very impressionable young kid, always trying to act tough and whatever.
He's the perfect mark for an FBI con artist, basically.
Yeah, exactly.
He was the absolute perfect mark, and, you know, it worked.
He went along with it, and not only did he go along with it, he put in all his friends, too, and he got them all sent to jail for life.
So he's doing life, too, and, yeah, it's just awful.
Yeah.
Well, and remember, everybody, how much mileage the national security state got out of this one.
Oh, my God.
A plot, a terrorist plot to attack our heroic soldiers at Fort Dix.
They were going to use the pizza man's knowledge of the place to kill them all, and, boy, did people eat that up, especially in mainstream media.
Just repeat that like another 9-11 had been thwarted by our FBI heroes, when, of course, it's never the case.
If it was a real 9-11, they'd let it happen, right, like Boston.
All right.
Hey, thanks so much for your time, Murtaza.
Great work here.
Murtaza Hussein, everybody.
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