Alright, y'all welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, appreciate y'all listening today.
Our first guest on the show today is Stephen Salisbury, he's the author of Mohammed's Ghosts, an American story of love and fear in the homeland.
Welcome to the show, Stephen, how are you doing?
I'm pretty good, Scott, how are you?
I'm doing alright, this looks like an interesting book, I'll have to get my hands on a copy some day.
Well, please do.
It'll go on the giant pile of books I gotta read at some point.
And now, you got this piece at TomDispatch.com, we're featuring it in Tom's archives, Tom's section at AntiWar.com today, it's in the viewpoint section, people just go to AntiWar.com right now, you can pull it up, it's by Tom Englehart and Stephen Salisbury, Stage Managing the War on Terror, and I see here that it got picked up by CBS News, good work.
Well, yeah, it's been picked up by a lot of sites, that indicates to me that this is information that people need to know and don't even know that they don't know, to paraphrase Tom.
Alright, well let's get into that and your book, Mohammed's Ghosts.
Well, it's a story that grew out of a massive joint terrorism task force raid on a mosque here in Philadelphia, I'm in Philadelphia now, and in May of 2004, in which a mosque was raided and the imam was arrested as he was dropping his seventh grade daughter off at school, he was surrounded in front of the school by FBI agents and immigration agents and Philadelphia police and hustled into a car and taken off to jail and never returned home.
The mosque was ransacked and boxes of papers and copies of the Quran even were carted out, taken down to FBI headquarters, his house was raided, and no one would really accept responsibility for the raid, the FBI said it wasn't their call, the Philadelphia police said it wasn't theirs, and ultimately, they kind of pointed the finger at the IRS, and the IRS wasn't ever talking, but the warrant that they used, the search warrant, was for financial records at the mosque, and the government maintained all through the case that this was not a terrorism case, that it was an investigation of finances and whatnot, but nothing ever was turned up.
Eventually, the imam was deported and his family was destroyed, and as was the mosque, what became really obvious was that throughout the whole neighborhood, and particularly within the mosque itself, this is a house of worship, mind you, there were probably dozens of informers who were scooping up information of all kinds, any gossip or rumor or whatnot that was going around on the street, and then funneling it back to federal law enforcement agents, and then that information would then be used to pick up people for even the most minor immigration transgressions.
Eventually, something like a dozen people were arrested, half a dozen were deported, there was never any charges related to terrorism of any kind, but there was always the unspoken assumption that this was somehow connected with terror, and I turned up a bunch of documents that had been sealed by immigration court that indicate that the FBI was initially raiding the mosque because they knew that there was a terror training room contained within the mosque, which was in an old auto body shop, a very rundown section of Philadelphia, and in this terror training room was placed an airline seat for terror training, and there were also numbers of AK-47s that were wrapped in blankets that were hidden in this secret room.
Of course, none of that was true, and no evidence of this was ever introduced at any hearing or criminal trial, and what I eventually suspected, I mean, I did suspect it and pretty much was able to confirm it, that what was going on was that this was a rumor that was probably planted by one of these many informers who frequented the mosque, and it went around the way rumors do, from one person to another person to another person, until it finally was picked up by another government informer who then reported it back to his handlers as fact.
Now, I mean, there were other people in the mosque, just ordinary folks who had heard it, it was just nonsense, but it was enough to allow the immigration judges who were hearing various cases connected with this to seal the hearings, which was quite common, certainly in the early to mid-middle years after 9-11.
So that's what the story was.
I mean, what it really is, is a story about what happened to the people who were caught up in essentially this nightmare.
Yeah, well, and that, you know, last little detail there is a very interesting part, where it's basically just an IRS case and whatever, if you get to, if you make up a few terrorism charges or implications or something in there, then they can keep even just local reporters, anybody out of the courtroom to oversee, you know, the whole speedy and public trial thing, like in the Bill of Rights gets mooted in the name of national security.
Yeah, well, you remember that in the absolute, in the immediate wake after 9-11, all legal proceedings, whether they were criminal proceedings or immigration, it didn't matter, they were sealed, they were all closed.
And so it was impossible for reporters to get in.
And so the public, our readers had no way to judge what was going on, whether it was an appropriate use of, you know, the investigatory powers of the government or not.
And this went on for quite a long time.
And most of the proceedings, not all of them, but most of the proceedings connected with this mosque here in Philadelphia, the Ansarallah Islamic Society, were closed.
And not even family members were allowed in.
So there really was, it really was an impossible situation.
And, you know, in a sense, there was conflict within the law enforcement community as well, particularly between local and federal enforcement agencies, because local police, at least here in Philadelphia, and I think it's true in a lot of jurisdictions, with the possible exception of New York, local police understood that they needed, if they were seriously going to investigate, you know, possible terrorist activity, then they needed people to trust them.
They needed people to say, hey, you know, we're a little bit nervous about this guy over here, or that bomb picker over there, you know.
And what was happening is that the whole, you know, apparatus that was put in place immediately worked against that.
It worked to alienate the very people that law enforcement authorities needed support from.
I mean, you recall, they were like, almost immediately after the Trade Center attacks, the Justice Department called for, you know, 5,000 voluntary interviews of people who were simply of Middle Eastern descent.
And they were, all these people were hauled in all over the country.
And if you, you know, even though they were billed as voluntary interviews, Ashcroft said at one point that, you know, they were definitely going to go after, you know, all of those who didn't show up.
Yeah.
Well, and they used material witness warrants completely to use them too.
Now we got to go out to break here.
When we get back, we'll talk some more about some other bogus terrorism cases with Stephan Salisbury.
He's got a piece at antiwar.com right now, stage managing the war on terror.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Worden.
I'm in the middle of talking with Stephan Salisbury.
He's got a piece on antiwar.com today, Tom Dispatch at CBS News and all over the place, stage managing the war on terror.
And now, Stephan, it seems to me that if we were to, you know, kind of go down the list, or I guess the way I do it in my head is I just picture America and I kind of go around counterclockwise all the bogus terrorism cases, you know, city by city.
But I'm thinking that really, I guess the question is, which terrorism cases since September 11th have been legit?
I'll go ahead and throw out Massawi there.
And we got this guy Faisal Shahzad that just pled guilty in a pretty convincing way in a court in New York a couple of weeks ago or last week, whatever.
Have there been any terrorism prosecutions in America other than those that were actually legit?
Well, that's difficult to say.
I think there was a case out in Portland where some guys were involved.
Actually, they'd started.
I think they'd started before September 11th, but they were involved in going off to Afghanistan.
But wasn't that the same informant from the Lodi, California case?
No.
Okay, I'm confusing a different thing.
But in any event, you mentioned Massawi and Shahzad, the Times Square bomber.
One way to think about all this is if you look at the immense apparatus that the federal government has put up to investigate and prosecute and root out terror, you have all these cases that you're referring to on the one hand.
On the other hand, if you look at the cases where things were actually about to be done, in no instance were any federal investigators actively...
In no instance did the federal government actually draw out those terrorists.
Let me explain that a little bit.
In the case of Shahzad, he was a blip.
He had not even registered with the feds.
He was stopped by alert citizens.
If you look at the guy who sought to blow up the plane over Detroit at Christmas, he was stopped by alert passengers and crew members.
Same with, say, Richard Reed, the so-called shoe bomber, shortly after 9-11.
In the case of Massawi, again, he was fingered by a...
He was training to be a pilot, but his attitude raised questions with the people who were running flight school.
They reported it.
So in each of those instances, you have alert citizens simply responding to what they're seeing right before their eyes.
You don't have elaborate plots using very well-paid informers to draw out a bunch of sad sacks who are sitting around chewing the fat about what they might do, which is what essentially most of these other cases are.
That simply...
Well, and there's a lot of them, too.
Well, there are, yeah.
When I think of the high-profile ones, you got the paintball guys in Virginia.
You have Abu Ali, who was tortured by the Saudis into admitting to a plot to assassinate Bush.
You got the Lackawanna Six, who were told, like the paintball guys, either plead guilty or will turn you over to Don Rumsfeld and the CIA to be tortured.
So they went ahead.
That was their plea deal.
You got the bogus case in Detroit, where even the DOJ ended up trying to prosecute their own federal prosecutor for that one.
You got the pole vaulting in the basement over there in Lodi, California, with Al-Qaeda.
You got the Miami Seven.
And yet, I'm thinking there must be dozens and dozens that never became a big orange alert that I haven't taken notice of.
After all, I admit, I'm just a Texan, and I don't speak Arabic, and it's hard to memorize all these names.
And it's hard to stick in my memory the way other things...
Well, there are dozens of them.
There are dozens of them.
And now, you know, it's important to bear in mind, in the immediate wake of 9-11, the word came down from the White House that, you know, under no circumstances will anything further happen.
And that, you know, if, you know, the famous 1% doctrine, even if there's, you know, Cheney said, even if there's a 1% chance that something might develop, you know, we're gonna err on the side of prevention.
So all of that was just rigidly enforced.
And, you know, the fear of God went into every federal employee.
I mean, not just in, you know, the FBI and, you know, all these enforcement agencies, but, you know, throughout the government, nobody wanted to be the person who let the next terrorist in.
And if there was a chance that something might happen, then, you know, by God, they were gonna do whatever it took to stop it.
And, you know, I mean, so the whole preventive paradigm was developed to dominate law enforcement in this area.
And if you look back over, you know, over the decades of political prosecutions in this country, it goes...the same thing occurred, you know, during the 60s.
I mean, if you even go back to the, you know, the famous, you know, Palmer Raids and the Red Scare after World War I, which is where Hoover got his start, J. Edgar Hoover, if you look at those cases, all of those...there were about 10,000 people that were arrested by Hoover and his Bureau of Investigation at that point.
And almost all of them were arrested at meetings that were arranged by informers that Hoover had larded throughout, you know, the Socialist Workers Party, various unions, the Russian Workers Party.
I mean, all these organizations were filled with federal informers and covert agents.
Even then, that's in 1919.
So there's a long, rich tradition here that, you know, we're talking about.
Well, and, you know, something that's really important that you said in there was that the actual cases were thwarted by, you know, post-September 11th Attempted Terrorist Act.
It's all been citizens who have been able to save the day.
Same thing as, you know, if, you know, I don't know where you stand on guns, on airplanes or whatever, but at least it seems to me like, you know, the TSA, of course, is going to be in the middle of frisking grandma and her granddaughter while a terrorist walks right by him.
It seems like, you know, completely privatizing the security on the airlines, you know, which was not the way it was before or on 9-11, would be the solution rather than nationalizing it is decentralize all this.
Like you said, let the local cops handle it, you know?
Well, yeah, the of course, that there's a whole there's a whole the whole issue of privatization is affecting everything in the government.
I mean, look at the prosecution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Well, I don't mean a government contract of taxpayer money to a private company to do a government job.
I'm talking about abolishing the TSA and replacing it with the free market, which is a totally different model.
It's too bad they both use the word privatization to describe themselves.
But anyway, and I'm sorry, we're out of time.
In fact, is there any chance you stay another 10 minutes?
Because there's a lot to go over here in this article you've written today.
Sure.
Okay, great.
Everybody, it's Stephen Salisbury.
And go look at his article on antiwar.com right now.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton and I'm talking with Stephen Salisbury.
He's got this article stage managing the war on terror, throw that in your Google, it'll come up all over the place.
CBS picked it up.
It started out at Tom Dispatch, and it's at antiwar.com.
That'd be original.antiwar.com slash Englehart.
And you kind of go down the list, Stephen, here of a lot of the history of the bogus domestic terrorism cases since September 11.
But you focus toward the end here on the story of the Newburgh four.
And now, and I'm sorry that I left off the list, the Fort Dix and the New York tunnel flooding plot and the JFK explosions.
There's so many bogus ones, it's hard to keep track of them all.
But anyway, so tell us, these are the guys who are going to what, shoot surface to air missiles at a local Jewish temple or something?
Well, they were arrested, I think, now I'm, my head's spinning now.
I think they were arrested 2008, was it?
It's in the piece.
But in any event...
It says here, May 2009.
Okay, right.
Right.
That's right.
May 2009.
And at the time of the arrest, the story was that, you know, they were, these were four, basically Jew-hating, you know, Muslim converts who were arrested as they placed bombs, which were in fact bogus bombs provided by the FBI, in front of two Bronx synagogues, and that they had planned to acquire surface to air missiles to shoot down military aircraft coming out of, flying out of Stewart Airport in Newburgh.
And so they, and the Simon Weisenthal Center put out a statement denouncing their anti-Semitism and talking about this was a wake up call to Jews in America that they had to maintain their vigilance and so forth.
So essentially, these guys were established as anti-Semitic terrorists from the get-go.
And all of that made it into the criminal complaint.
Now, what didn't make it into the criminal complaint was the fact that this case centered around a government agent, an informer who had an interesting history, but putting that aside for a second, he had showed up at the Newburgh mosque in 2008.
And he was driving a very expensive Mercedes.
He was flashing a lot of money around and he was offering jobs to, you know, largely unemployed African-Americans who were hanging out around the mosque and, you know, drawing them into his circle.
And as revealed by subsequent government tapes that were finally obtained by defense in this case, you know, the anti-Semitic stuff was inspired by the informant.
He had promised these guys $250,000 to, you know, join him in jihad.
Well, now, hold on one second there.
Go back to the anti-Semitism part.
What do you mean the informant had provided the anti-Semitism?
He had, I mean, look, these guys were, they were largely, you know, former drug dealers.
One of them is a paranoid schizophrenic and a crackhead who, you know, could barely get up in the morning.
These are not the brightest bulbs of Newburgh.
And, you know, he was telling him, once he gathered them into his little circle, he was telling them, oh, you know, Israel's responsible for the war in Iraq.
It's responsible for violence against Muslims.
It's all the Jews, you know, or how are you going to, you know, how can you sleep at night by, you know, when, you know, Israel and Jews everywhere are directing and carrying out acts of violence against Muslims the world over.
And these guys, these guys got, well, you know, their attitude was, well, we don't like that.
And it seems like the informant would have said, don't you hate freedom?
Don't you hate freedom?
Don't you want virgins in heaven?
Why would he cite, you know, wars and stuff like that?
What does that have to do with anything?
Well, I mean, if you look at most of these, there have actually been academic studies on this that have been recently released.
And if you look at the reasons cited by guys who've been, like Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, or Zazie, the guy that was going to blow up Times Square that was busted.
These are guys who undertook their acts for political reasons that, you know, Shahzad was upset by the war in Afghanistan, by the use of drones and the killing of civilians throughout Waziristan and along the border there with Pakistan.
And he was not incited by Islam.
He was incited for very specific political reasons.
And the same is true here.
These guys were incited by, you know, if they were incited at all or inflamed at all, it was for political reasons, you know, that, and this guy made, the informer made it clear to them, if I could say that, that, you know, Israel and Jews were responsible for the violence that was being undertaken against Muslims.
And then he got them to repeat back anti-Semitic things, conflating all Jews.
Yeah, exactly.
And then, of course, in the course of one of these conversations, the main plotter, if you will, a guy named Cromedy said, well, you know, I'm not going to hurt anybody.
It's just out of the question.
But, you know, when $250,000 was dangled before you and you haven't had a job for who knows how long, it's very difficult to resist.
Now, the other factor Right.
And that was the part where I interrupted you to talk about the anti-Semitism thing was you were talking about the money.
This guy drove into town.
He's got a BMW.
He's got all this money.
This is really about money.
And in fact, if you look at a lot of these cases, they're about money.
Government agents coming in and basically saying, you know, $50,000, $250,000.
One of the plotters in Newburgh has a brother who's suffering, you know, from terminal cancer, liver cancer.
And the informer, you know, basically offered him so much money that he jumped at the chance because he would then be able to pay for a liver transplant.
And, you know, interestingly enough, in this case, the New York Daily News, which is not known for its kind words about, you know, so-called terrorists, sent several reporters up to Newburgh and they interviewed many, many people, not just, you know, the usual next door neighbor who said, oh, he was such a nice and quiet boy.
Who would have thought?
They interviewed dozens and dozens and dozens of people who were familiar with these four guys.
And not a single person could even recall them mentioning the word Jew or Jihad, let alone linking them in some kind of murderous rant.
So I think it's fair to say that, you know, that the anti-Semitism that was prominently displayed in the initial stories about these guys was largely cooked up by a federal agent, really, which I think people ought to be concerned about.
The other thing is that the amount of money that was involved here.
Now, it turns out this informant had been the central figure in an earlier terrorist case in Albany, in which a guy who owned a pizza shop and an imam were ultimately convicted and charged with money laundering in connection with an absolutely wild scheme to kill a Pakistani diplomat with a missile.
You notice the similarity of the kind of Baroque plotting here.
And it was there.
It turns out it was about money, too.
Pizza shop owner needed a loan.
And this guy offered a deal that would have allowed him to to walk away with five thousand bucks.
Let me hold you there.
But can I keep you ten more minutes?
So talk to her here.
OK, great, because I want to ask you all about Detroit, too.
It's Stefan Salisbury on antiwar radio.
We'll be right back.
You're.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Stefan Salisbury.
He's got this article at antiwar dot com today stage managing the war on terror.
It's also at CBS News dot com at Tom Dispatch dot com.
And she's I don't have the book's title in front of me.
I got to click on the thing.
It's Mohammed's ghosts and the rest of it is an American story of love and fear in the homeland.
And now, Stefan, one of the really important parts of this story here is the death of this imam in Michigan.
Yeah, that's a very disturbing case.
It's.
Last October, excuse me, during a bungled sting, the the first imam to be killed in the domestic war on terror was shot down by by FBI agents in Detroit, actually in Dearborn in a warehouse.
And of course, it's interestingly enough, turns out to be a black guy.
And also, interestingly, it turns out to be a black guy who goes back to the to the 1960s and with a association with a fellow by the name of H. Rapp Brown.
People may remember that name, but Rapp Brown was the guy who succeeded Stokely Carmichael as head of SNCC and became a leader of the Black Panther Party.
And he's now serving a life sentence in prison, I think, in the Colorado Supermax in isolation for the killing of two Georgia state troopers a couple of years ago.
And in Detroit, beginning about 2006, the FBI began a very elaborate surveillance of a man by the name of Lukman Amin Abdullah, who was born Christopher Thomas.
And Abdullah ran a very poor mosque in a very, very, very poor part of Detroit.
And he ran a soup kitchen.
He served as a focal point for homeless people.
He would provide housing for people.
And he was a Muslim who conducted services and prayers and so forth.
A criminal claim that was issued just prior to his killing, he emerges as the leader of a Muslim conspiracy to establish a separate state within the state of Michigan that would be governed by Islamic law.
Oh, no, I'm so scared.
And the complaint is...
It's the caliphate.
It's coming to get us all.
Everybody run!
Right.
Out of a warehouse in Dearborn.
But anyway, this complaint, it opens with about a dozen pages of essentially informers reporting on political conversations with Abdullah, which in their rendering largely is the imam bragging about his past exploits and talking about guns and that kind of thing.
But ultimately...
Talking about guns, that's very un-American.
We don't approve of that.
And well, yeah, we do in some instances, but not in others.
But in any event, what the imam was ultimately charged with in this criminal complaint, which is very long, it's about 43 pages, I believe, is the most minor of fencing operations.
I mean, he's supposedly served as a focal point for the transfer of like 40 power tools and some fur coats and a couple of TVs.
Anyway, and all of this, as it happens, was arranged by the FBI.
The FBI provided money for the imam supposedly to acquire these goods that were also supplied by the FBI and move them into a warehouse that was also provided by the FBI.
And in the middle of this, one of these operations, agents moved in to arrest Imam Abdullah and about 10 other people.
And the arrests went...
There was no incident particularly with any of the arrests, except in the case of Imam Abdullah, who was killed.
And subsequently, the FBI Detroit office said that he had opened fire and the agents were essentially defending themselves.
Now, as the story developed, it turned out, well, he had supposedly killed a police dog that was sent into the warehouse where he allegedly was hiding.
And it's when he shot the dog that agents opened fire on him.
The Wayne County medical examiner declined to release the autopsy.
Dearborn police actually ordered him not to, I think, because there was a killing involved.
The Dearborn police were going to investigate it.
That was the ostensible reason for not releasing any autopsy report.
It took several months before local activists were able to...
By local activists, I mean, essentially, the NAACP and other established rights groups of one kind or another, and justice groups, and civil liberties groups.
And ultimately, the mayor of Detroit, Dave Bing, and Congressman John Conyers ultimately were calling for more information for investigations about this case.
Finally, the autopsy was released.
It showed the Imam had been shot 21 times, including, according to the medical examiner, once in the back.
There was no information about the circumstances of the shooting, how he happened to be shooting, whether or not he had a gun, nothing.
So ultimately, the Justice Department, Civil Rights Division, said it was reviewing the case.
Because John Conyers, and the mayor, and all these other groups were understandably upset with the lack of information and the casual nature with which they viewed this killing as being dealt with by the government.
So the Civil Rights Division is still, at this point, reviewing whether or not to mount an investigation.
Now, the state of Michigan stepped in, and a prosecutor was appointed to also review the incident.
And that happened because the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office could not get the FBI to release documents related to the case because the FBI said that those documents were quote, classified, unquote.
So now a special state prosecutor is reviewing this.
But at this point, as of right now, there's been no information beyond what I've just told you that's been released.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations asked an independent forensic pathologist to review the autopsy report.
And this guy, who's very well known, operates out of Pittsburgh, his name's Cyril Wecht, did in fact review the findings.
Well, he's world famous.
He was the chairman of the Forensic Review Board, or whatever.
Yeah, I mean, he knows his stuff.
And he found something different.
Now, he did not examine the body of Imam Abdullah, which Abdullah's been buried.
He was not exhumed.
But looking at detailed photographs, which are also available on the internet, Wecht came to the conclusion that Abdullah had been shot twice in the back, and that his face displayed deep puncture and laceration wounds that were totally consistent with being attacked by a dog.
I should say one other thing that's gotten people very upset in Detroit is that the dog was medevaced out of that warehouse.
The Imam was just left lying on the floor.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, that's the rule of law in America.
Thanks very much.
Stefan Salisbury, everybody.
Look him up.
He's in the Viewpoint section today on antiwar.com.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
It was a pleasure.
All right.
Cynthia McKinney after this.
LRN.
FM.
