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All right, introducing Trevor Aaronson.
He wrote an article way back when called The Terror Factory for Mother Jones.
And then he put out all of this documentary evidence, too, that went with it.
You can find all at Mother Jones.
And then he turned it into a book, The Terror Factory, a great book about FBI sting operations.
Well, Trevor is now at The Intercept.
And he has this huge new project with Margo Williams that he's done here.
And well, I'm about halfway through part three now.
But it's what, a big five, six part sort of series all at once that you've done here.
Trevor, welcome back to the show.
How are you?
Of course, Scott.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Yeah, this is a four part series that we released, there are four different stories.
And then it also includes a fifth part, which is kind of a data visualization and interactive with the database that you can, you know, go through the database yourself.
Or you can kind of play with the visualizations and change the filters to look at what the data shows.
Cool.
Yeah.
Very good stuff.
And that's, that's actually on the introductory page there is all the data.
You can start with that and open up the articles and new tabs to dig through.
Well, I'm going to, I promise, even after I'm done interviewing you, I'm still going to finish part three and four here because I love this stuff and you do such a great job on it.
And it's so important.
So the terror factory, by that you mean J. Edgar Hoover headquarters there in Washington, D.C., huh?
I guess so.
Yeah.
You know, I might, as you know, my research over the last, I guess, six or seven years now, it's focused on the FBI's counterterrorism practices and specifically, you know, the use of sting operations and informants to, in the FBI's view, you know, find the terrorists of tomorrow.
In most cases they're, they're finding, you know, homeless people or poor people or mentally ill people and setting them up in sting operations in which, you know, they provide everything that the person, person needs to move forward in a, in a, in a terrorist act.
But of course, you know, there's, there's significant questions because of the nature of the investigation of whether any of these people would have been able to, you know, move forward in a plot were it not for the FBI providing all of the means and the opportunity.
And so, you know, when you mentioned the terror factory, I mean, that was really the focus of the terror factory in questioning, you know, essentially whether we're creating the very terrorists that we're claiming to be hunting.
And so a big part of that was, you know, building a database of cases that, that ran from September 11th, 2001 to the 10th anniversary in 2011.
And and so for this more recent series in the intercept trial and terror Margo Williams and I updated the database to the current date, but we also added a number of fields and one of the new features of this iteration and what we felt was really important was including BOP data, excuse me, data from the Bureau of Prisons, because what was fascinating as we started this project was realizing that, you know, about half of the people in our database had actually been released.
And, you know, to us, this was a public, you know, a public policy question and a very curious question, which is, you know, if these people were so dangerous and they were locked up on terrorism related charges, why is it that, you know, so many of them have been released and and what has happened to them since then?
And so, you know, that's a large focus of our new project.
Yeah.
So now let's break down some of these numbers.
And, you know, this is it's more than just data.
It's information.
We'll get into what it all really means in a second here.
But you say there's right around almost just for short, 796, almost 800 terrorism related convictions in America since September 11th.
Half of those 400 have already been released, as you're just saying there.
And then you also say that about 300 of these have been sting operations.
And you know me, that's my favorite part of this.
But I mean, all of it is very important.
But on the sting operations, I was wondering how well you're able to break down how many of these.
And this is something we've talked about before.
How many of these are just tragedies?
Like you talk about in the current piece about the Liberty City seven or poor Hamid Hyatt.
I always think about poor Hamid Hyatt out in Lodi, California, where it's just a travesty what they did to this kid, you know, with the just complete setup.
And there are quite a few like that.
On the other hand, though, I think, you know, we've talked about, too, that maybe it's a good idea to have undercover FBI informants and trap some of these guys.
Maybe they actually are dangerous.
And maybe it's simply good police work to go ahead and get them to push a button on a fake bomb or to go ahead and tell the camera that they love Osama or whatever it is will get them off the streets.
Because they really are dangerous.
And I just wonder how well you're able to parse through that.
How many of these stings might even be legitimate stings versus just poor Hamid Hyatt put up jobs?
So this is a very difficult thing to quantify in a kind of any sort of data specific way, because all of the sting operations are different and they involve defendants who all come from, you know, very different circumstances.
Yeah, I'm more asking your opinion here than than for a data set.
You know, I know that it's basically you're experienced on this.
So I just kind of wonder your ballpark sort of feeling about it.
Yeah.
So what we can say is, with the preface that, you know, all of these people are different and, you know, certainly you can make arguments for some being more dangerous than others.
There has yet to be a sting case where the FBI, you know, found somebody who was about to move forward in a plot and had weapons of their own and had bombs of their own.
And were it not for the FBI sting operation, this person would have done significant damage and possibly killed people.
In all of the sting operations, it's the FBI providing the means, you know, either the transportation or the bomb itself, and then the opportunity, you know, helping them deliver it to the specifically planned target.
And so, you know, while you can quibble over how dangerous specific people in sting operations might have been, you know, you can say very clearly that, you know, the FBI, through all of these, what, 400 sting operations or 400 defendants caught in sting operations, you know, has not found anyone who was on the verge of an attack.
I mean, that's really the strongest argument you have against the FBI's current policies, which is that while sting operations are really good at finding the aspirational terrorists, the ones who, you know, say they want to do something but don't have the means or opportunity, these same things are very terrible at finding the operational ones, because sting operations to date haven't found any operational terrorists.
It's all people who say they want to do something, and then the FBI makes it possible through these elaborate sting operations.
I guess maybe that's what I, the way I should have tried to parse it better was, how many of these guys didn't even have the motive before they were entrapped by one of these informants?
I mean, that's the case with Hamid Hayat.
That's the case with the Liberty City Seven that I'll let you talk about in more detail here in a second.
But that's the ones that really get me.
Maybe some of these guys really did have a negative motive.
They didn't have the means or the opportunity, and the informant really created a case where there never really would have been one.
But it's worse when it's Hamid Hayat's more or less adopted older brother going, say it, say you love Osama, say it.
And he goes, fine, fine, I love Osama.
And then they give him 25 years, you know?
Right.
You know, there are definitely cases on the egregious side like Hamid Hayat's and the Liberty City Seven where, you know, these guys didn't have a specific motive for an attack and the FBI very much manufactured a case around them.
You know, of course, there are also things where people did have a motive, you know, despite not having the bomb or the means to acquire a bomb, their motive stated even before the influence of an informant or an undercover agent was they wanted to bomb some building.
And so there was motive in some of those cases, but it was, you know, fantastical rather than operational.
And so whether the defendant had a motive or whether the motive was largely constructed by the FBI in the case of the Liberty City Seven or the Hamid Hayat case, you know, these are all people who will ultimately kind of fall prey to these types of operations.
All right now, so back when we covered the Liberty City Seven case on this show, really the whole time, as you point out, they were tried three times before they finally got convictions here.
But a couple were acquitted on the way.
It was hung juries twice, but each of those hung juries acquitted one guy each, I think you say in this current piece, right?
That's right.
During the three trials, one person was acquitted in the first trial.
The rest were hung.
Second trial resulted in a fully hung jury.
And then the third trial resulted in the acquittal of one person and the ultimate conviction of five people.
And, you know, to me, I mean, you know, as you've seen through my work, I mean, this is obviously not the first time I've written about the Liberty City Seven.
I've written about them in other cases, as well as in my book.
To me, what's great about their story is that it's a way of describing kind of the narrative of all of these post 9-11 things through this one case, because in many ways, what's happened to the Liberty City Seven, while, you know, among the more egregious types of sting operations, you know, is indicative of what's happened to defendants in all of these sting operations.
And so to me, like in initially telling the story, the story was really about the abuse of these sting operations and how they're catching people who are truly dangerous.
And now I think in this most recent series, the narrative is really about, you know, what's happened to these guys, right?
Like, you know, the Liberty City Seven 10 years ago were portrayed by the Department of Justice as being, you know, terribly dangerous.
And now we find out that, you know, of those convicted, only one of them hasn't yet been released and he's about to be released this summer.
And so this idea that these were dangerous people and yet we released them and never say a word about it really flies in the face of the government's claim that, you know, these are people are dangerous and these types of aggressive counterterrorism policies are necessary to get would-be terrorists off the street.
Because, you know, if Liberty City Seven were really dangerous, if they really were would-be terrorists, then, you know, they're a threat today.
And, you know, there's clearly no indication that anyone is watching them as they readjust to, you know, life, you know, as your neighbors and as fellow Americans.
When you went to Haiti and found a couple of these guys, right, one one who was acquitted and one who got out.
Is that right?
Right.
Yeah.
So of the of the of the original Liberty City Seven, of the seven guys who were who were prosecuted, two of them, LeGlantin Lamorin, who was acquitted in the first trial and Patrick Abraham, who was convicted in the third trial, were both Haitian nationals.
And so in LeGlantin Lamorin's case, you know, in a cruel case of what is essentially double jeopardy, he was acquitted of the Liberty City Seven criminal case.
But as soon as he was acquitted, he was taken into custody by immigration officials.
And then they used the same evidence against them, the same evidence for which they couldn't gain a criminal conviction.
They used that against him to justify his removal to Haiti.
And so he was removed to Haiti shortly after, excuse me, about a year after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010.
And then Patrick Abraham was ultimately deported after his prison term when he was released about a year ago.
And so, you know, the irony is that, you know, these two guys who were part of this alleged terror cell are now kind of living in obscurity in Haiti and and living together in a small one room house that that LeGlantin built with his family's help in Leogane about about two hours from Port-au-Prince.
Yeah.
Now, I thought it was so important the way you said in here.
And there had already been a few cases like this before this.
But you say in here that this was I guess you quote some other expert even, if I remember it right, saying bellwether was the term Liberty City Seven was the bellwether when they this it was a test case.
In other words, when they found out for sure when the when the jury confirmed for them on the third try that, yes, they can get away with this, then that that policy then spread through the rest of the FBI, that this is what we're doing.
Just go find some idiot Muslim and entrap him.
In fact, he doesn't even have to be a Muslim.
Let's go find a black guy and entrap him.
Right.
So the expert I quote is a former FBI agent named James Weddick, who described it as the Liberty City Seven case as a bellwether case.
And certainly I've talked to other FBI and Justice Department officials about this case as well.
And while it wasn't the very first counterterrorism thing case, it was seen as a bellwether case because, you know, in 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, there was a debate within the Justice Department about how far these cases could go from a jury standpoint.
You know, how much of a case could they build for terrorism without any concrete links to a terrorist organization or a terrorist himself?
So in the Liberty City Seven case, there really was no connection to terrorism or terrorists.
It was the FBI's undercover informant, Elie Assad, who was pretending to be something of a of an al Qaeda operative who had been sent by Osama bin Laden.
And so the conspiracy play in the Liberty City Seven case was that, hey, here's this pretend al Qaeda operative in this government sting operation.
And because these guys move forward with it, even though there really wasn't any real terrorists, let's charge them with terrorists and see if we can get convictions.
And even in the Liberty City Seven case, they didn't even move them as they do in other cases toward an actual kind of attack.
In many sting operations, they'll give them a fake bomb and have them pull the trigger.
And you know, that ends up being the end of the sting operation.
In the Liberty City case, they had an even weaker prosecution because all they had the Liberty City Seven guys do was give this, you know, Boy Scout style oath to al Qaeda and go around Miami taking pictures of the criminal courthouse and the FBI office.
And so from a Justice Department standpoint, there was a question of like, OK, this is a weak case.
This involves a conspiracy where there isn't any real terrorists.
If we can get convictions in this case, then that bodes well for us to get convictions in other cases around the country.
And so, as I said, it took the Liberty City Seven prosecutors three trials to ultimately win convictions against five of the seven.
And those convictions came in 2009.
And if you look at our data and the visualizations, you can see a huge spike beginning in 2009 in the number of sting cases around the country.
And that's post Liberty City Seven conviction where, you know, the Justice Department felt like, yeah, OK, we can get a conviction in this case.
That means in these other cases where there's a stronger piece of evidence such as the defendant, you know, pushing a button, believing that a bomb is going to go off, then there's no reason that we can't get convictions in those cases as well.
And certainly, you know, history has backed up that perception because, you know, there's a near perfect record of conviction in terrorism related cases.
And the number of sting operations and the aggressive use of them has only increased, you know, since the Liberty City Seven conviction in 2009.
All right.
So, yeah.
Now, a big part of this and you say right up at the front of this special investigation that you've done here in the data set and all of that is that the charge that most people are convicted of in these schemes is material support.
And that's a term that I guess, as I understand it, as I understand it, the court understands that term to mean basically anything.
If if the federal prosecutors want to bring those kind of charges, unless it's Howard Dean and Rudy Giuliani shilling for the Mujahedini caulk, then in that case, it's perfectly fine since they're in the club.
But otherwise, material support.
I wonder whether you and I are guilty of material support for pointing out that the FBI are basically running around framing up innocent people and therefore we're undermining their ability to continue to do their lousy job framing up innocent people and therefore we're materially supporting terrorists.
Why not?
Am I going to regret that?
I just said that later when I was joking around.
I don't I don't think you and I are at risk of being being prosecuted for material support for what we do.
But that isn't to say that, you know, these material support prosecutions aren't overreaching or, you know, aren't involving, you know, support that is that is highly questionable.
You know, I mean, you don't necessarily I mean, I don't even need to practice an adverb.
You don't have to be, you know, helping someone, you know, pack explosives into a bomb in order to be charged with material support.
I mean, if you had a friend who was associating with al Qaeda or believed he was associating with al Qaeda and, you know, he was planning an attack and and your help to him was providing him with a weekly grocery run.
So every week you're going to the store and picking up his groceries so that he would have time to do whatever terrorist activity he's planning, then potentially you could be charged with material support for terrorism just for that.
You also don't necessarily need to be supporting actual terrorists.
You just need to believe that you're supporting terrorists.
And so in many of these sting operations, the FBI will have an undercover agent or an informant posed as a terrorist and they'll tell someone, hey, you know, go to RadioShack and get me this, this, this and that, all of which are needed for my, you know, supposed bomb.
And when the person does that and buys those pieces from RadioShack and brings them to the informant or the agent, then that's enough to charge with material support because he believed he was aiding ISIS or the al Qaeda or al Qaeda or whatever terrorist group the undercover agent or informant claimed to be from.
And so, you know, what's significant from the data is showing that, yes, there are 800, nearly 800 terrorism defendants since 9-11, but most of these defendants weren't involved in cases where there were actual bombs or actual plots.
I mean, the half of them were charged with material support, which just means that they were charged with a very vague non-violence offense that the government alleges involves providing some sort of support, however small, to someone that may have not even been a terrorist, but was just claiming to be a terrorist.
And so, I mean, this kind of gives us a security theater of federal terrorism prosecutions in that so many of these cases, you know, aren't involving actual plots, but are just involving providing some sort of support to someone, usually an undercover FBI agent or an informant, you know, claiming to be a terrorist.
And so, you know, in most of these cases, there actually isn't any real terrorist involved.
It's just kind of the fantasy of the government in creating these situations.
But they're not, for example, prosecuting people for providing actual support to someone who it turns out they have no reason to think is a terrorist at all.
Like you say, doing a grocery shopping run weekly for somebody who then later it turns out was pretending to somebody else he was a terrorist, but not to the person who was doing the grocery shopping.
Are they stooping that low?
They've never prosecuted anyone for delivering groceries.
I use that as a fun example of what might be possible.
Yeah, but I mean, yeah, me too, though.
But I just mean, they're not, you're saying that they have to believe that they're helping a terrorist, whether it's a real terrorist or not.
And I'm just saying, how hard and fast is the they have to believe rule?
Or is the FBI kind of getting away with saying, well, geez, they should have known or, you know, that kind of thing.
No, so the rule is basically whatever juries will allow.
Right.
I mean, you know, there was there was there was a case in Florida involving a man named Jose Medina, who is this homeless man who had a history of making violent threats to his family members.
And he met an informant and the informant encouraged him in a plot to bomb synagogues near Miami.
And Jose Medina never said anything about ISIS or al Qaeda or any terrorist group.
And it was actually the FBI informant who is caught on tape saying, well, let's let's do this and let's like let's credit ISIS for the attack.
Right.
And and that was enough for him to be charged material support because even the FBI informant brought this up that ISIS.
And so in the FBI's view, Medina had in fact provided material support to ISIS because he was conspiring in this attack that would be credited to ISIS.
And so you could certainly make an argument that a homeless man with a history of mental illness probably didn't have the capacity to really say, yes, I'm doing this for ISIS.
But the circumstances of the case allowed the government to make that argument.
And so, you know, really what they believe and how committed they are to providing support to this supposed terrorist organization, you know, it doesn't really matter.
It only matters whether the jury is willing to believe it.
And, you know, what these records show is that, you know, juries find it very, very difficult to acquit people on terrorism related charges, no matter how questionable the evidence at times.
And so this gives the government kind of an enormous incentive to bring these types of cases because they can, you know, bet on a near perfect record of prosecution.
You know, when when they bring these cases of material support, it can come with mandatory minimum sentences of of 30 years or more.
And so defendants, you know, see the track record, see that if they take this to trial, they might go to prison for 30 years or even in a smaller minority of cases, spend life in prison or they can take a plea deal and go to prison for 10, 11, 12 years.
And the reason that you see so many plea agreements is that, you know, the data clearly shows that a Muslim or someone that a jury perceives to be Muslim charged with terrorism in the United States, you know, has it has a hell of a hard chance, you know, beating that case.
And so, you know, if your your goal is to get out of prison, you know, before you're a senior citizen, your best bet is to take a plea deal and spend a decade in prison, which is what most of them do.
Right.
So, yeah.
And in other words, it's kind of a good PR stunt for the FBI to say, look at the job we're doing and get on the news and that kind of thing.
And and at the cost of people's lives for decades of their lives.
And unless you really believe in Hinduism and reincarnation and all that, you only get one of these things seems pretty valuable.
Seems like a lot to take from somebody based on a bunch of nonsense, you know.
But they, as you're saying, they're all their incentives are to keep doing this.
And when I'm sitting here trying to think of what incentive do they have to not do this other than being criticized by you and me?
I mean, the only thing I can think of is the other cops laughing at them and saying, wow, congratulations, you entrapped a retard into saying he loved Osama.
Way to go, detective.
And just mock, you know, what other what other check and balance do we have?
And I'm not even saying I can count on the other car.
I don't even think I can count on the other cops to ridicule the ones who come up with these cases.
I mean, and there's but there's no other accountability other than the intercept.
Yeah, I mean, it's this is like a really.
I mean, this is a difficult thing in a sense that, you know, the FBI has few incentives not to do this and huge incentives to do this.
And so the big incentive to do this type of work is that, you know, every year the bureau receives three billion dollars in funding for its counterterrorism program.
And, you know, it can't go to Congress and say, like, hey, we didn't catch anybody or hey, we caught this one guy.
You know, these thing operations provide them with a very easy way to say, hey, look, we spent all this money and here are all the bad guys that we caught.
And that's why these cases are announced with such fanfare and with press conferences and with press releases.
And which is why I felt telling the story of how so many had been released was was hugely important because it showed the the contrast.
Right.
Like when they arrest these guys, they have this big press circus and they say another dangerous man caught by the FBI.
But when they release them, they don't say anything.
And, you know, so clearly this kind of gets at the security theater of all of this.
And we're seeing very little government oversight of this type of work.
There's the question.
Why would they accept a plea deal in the first place from somebody who they have a case dead to rights is guilty of some terrorism related offense.
They're in the federal court system.
They have all the money and time in the world.
Why wouldn't they refuse to accept a plea and go ahead and prosecute everybody?
The Nth degree.
It's because even in federal court, they're worried they don't really have a case.
That's why.
It must be the same reason that when they're when they're free, as you say, it's not like they're under continual surveillance.
They never really were terrorists.
No, I think I mean, the latter part is definitely true.
I mean, these people were never terrorists.
These people were never, you know, for the most part, dangerous on their own.
I don't know that I would agree that the prosecutors would fear losing the case.
I mean, I think, you know, there's enough cases that have gone to trial to show that, you know, juries are really unwilling to acquit these people, you know, with the exceptions of a couple of defendants in the Liberty City case.
You know, I think this is more just, you know, the way that the federal prosecutors operate.
I mean, the vast majority of defendants in any type of case plead guilty just because, in general, beating federal charges is terribly difficult.
I don't remember the exact percentage, but I think the overall conviction rate of of federal prosecutions is over 90 percent.
I want to say it's 95, but it might be slightly lower.
You know, with terrorism, it's even higher.
So whether you're charged with a white collar crime or terrorism or whatever it might be on the federal level, you know, you're facing terrible, terrible odds of acquittal.
At the same time, you know, if you do go to trial, you're you're facing mandatory minimum sentences that were intended to take the the discrepancies out of, you know, sentencing and create a uniform based on charges.
But in some cases, particularly for terrorism, what that means is like very draconian sentencing levels of 30 years or more that most federal judges aren't willing to provide downward departures from.
And and so you're looking at a situation where, you know, these guys are not particularly bright in the first place.
Some have mental illness.
Most of them have public defenders.
They get charged with with federal terrorism.
And it's like, OK, you can take this to trial and face 30 years or you can go to, you know, take a plea for 10 and they choose the plea.
And I think from the Justice Department standpoint, you know, that means they get another conviction with a lot less work than taking this to trial.
And, you know, they'll just move on to the next case.
And, you know, it creates a situation where, you know, the government is very much emboldened to continue with these types of practices that, you know, are not proven to find actual terrorists, but, you know, are proven to create a nice kind of national security theater that that justifies very, very large funding levels for FBI counterterrorism program.
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Yeah.
You know, man, I never thought I'd say this, but I think Matlock is really destructive and terrible for American society.
I always loved that show so much, I guess, in previous generations as Perry Mason and all that.
But the mythology that if you're charged, especially with some serious crime, that you'll have a fair chance to defend yourself in front of decent people, you know, is it's such a lie.
I don't know if other countries have that or something, but, you know, when you talk about the the police system, the way it's set up, it's not just the feds on terrorism charges.
It's virtually all levels of prosecutions in this country where you have these insane numbers of pleas compared to actual trials.
And I'm reminded of one recently where you probably heard of this.
It made the news because the kid was had great potential as a ballplayer.
I think he was a college ballplayer, but he was headed toward the NBA and he was falsely accused of rape and he was convicted.
He pled guilty and went to prison.
But then his brother got the lady on tape admitting that she had lied and made the whole thing up.
So the kid got out of prison.
They let him out of prison.
And then they asked him, they interviewed him on the local news, I guess it was, and said, but why did you plead guilty?
And he said, well, because my lawyer told me, look, you're young and black and you're accused of rape and there's a ninety nine percent chance you're getting convicted here.
The fact that you didn't do it has nothing to do with it.
And so your best bet is to take the 10 years, kid, and give up your brilliant NBA career, give up your life because it's not worth the risk to try to fight for your life because of what will happen to you if you lose and you're virtually guaranteed to lose.
So then now you got an Arab on a terrorism charge.
You think about being in that position, you know, something like that.
It just goes to it's one of those things, Trevor, I think, where it ought to be like a light bulb goes off for people that, wow, you know, the Bill of Rights, especially amendments five and six, they read real good.
And Matlock portrays the thing as though the system works, you know, mostly smooth.
And the prosecutor would be happy to drop the charges if it turns out he actually had made a mistake.
And this kind of thing, when in real America, this criminal justice system is absolutely as crooked as can be.
And even I don't even mean just corrupt like, oh, they're making money sense, but just it's just broken.
It's all completely out of whack.
It can't possibly be supposed to work this way.
We can't possibly be supposed to accept that this is how it's just going to be that if they came to you, Trevor, came to me with a bunch of charges that we would have no choice either but to just plead guilty and go to the penitentiary.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, even if you if you have the best possible circumstances for, you know, beating a beating a case and you're a clean cut white guy, you know, I mean, facing off against federal prosecutors is terribly difficult.
You know, even if you are able to beat it and you are innocent, you know, you're looking at, you know, potentially kind of a financially calamitous event in that it will cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend yourself in a in a large criminal trial because you're facing off against the Justice Department that has virtually unlimited resources.
And there really is in all of these cases, no matter who the defendant is, there's this real David and Goliath situation when anyone faces criminal prosecution, particularly on the federal level.
It's even more bleak, I think, as you point out, for, you know, Arab men charged with terrorism or African-American men who are Muslim and have names that are are viewed as Muslim.
I mean, I think, you know, there are real questions given the history of trials post 9-11 of whether anyone charged with terrorism who is Muslim or perceived to be Muslim will get a fair shake from a from a trial, from a jury trial today.
And, you know, I've studied and I've seen a number of cases that I think are very weak and certainly suggest entrapment.
You know, I mean, the Sami Asimakash case in Tampa being one or the Newburgh case outside in New York City being another and jury still convicted on those cases.
And, you know, so this idea that, you know, that that kind of a patriotic federal prosecutor somewhere will look at a file and think, oh, well, these guys really aren't that dangerous.
They wouldn't have done it had we not pushed them along.
Let's not prosecute them.
I mean, that's a naive thing to think.
I mean, in these cases, you know, the FBI spends months, even years and millions of dollars pursuing defendants.
And they refer those cases up to federal prosecutors who have an interest in, you know, moving up, maybe going into politics and terrorism cases play really well.
And it's just it's also a situation where the bureaucracy, having spent so much money on this investigation, you know, isn't really set up or incentivized to create a situation where the federal prosecutor declines that very easily.
And so all of these factors combine to create a situation where, you know, let's face it, if you're charged with terrorism today, your likelihood of going to prison is almost guaranteed.
And if you wanted to fight it, you're going to spend lots of money or have a federal public defender defend you and you're likely still to go to prison.
And so it creates a situation where the Justice Department is fully emboldened to pursue very aggressive counterterrorism policies because it can be, you know, readily assured that those cases that are prosecuted will result in conviction.
All right.
Now, last big point here, and it's a big one.
It's section two of this thing is about how the more guilty you are, the better off you are.
In fact, it reminds me of James Bovard's joke about how they justified in the Supreme Court.
He's got an article about this today, in fact, where he mentions this.
They had a thing in the Supreme Court where anybody with a flush toilet is qualified for a no knock entry because if they have a small amount of drugs, they could flush it down the toilet.
And then the other lawyer argued in front of the Supreme Court.
Yeah.
But what you're saying is that if somebody had giant crates full of drugs, the more drugs they have, the more entitled they are to a knock on the door instead of having it kicked in.
Is that what you mean?
And, you know, we got the the priorities and the incentives are all screwed up.
So here you have this guy Zazie, I forgot his first name.
Was it Najibullah Zazie?
Najibullah Zazie, who went and actually teamed up with Al-Qaeda, came back to America, made some bombs, was not put up to it by the FBI in some hoax, made some bombs, traveled from Colorado to New York, and they nabbed his ass and now he's living the high life.
Apparently somewhere not in prison, palling around with these cops, telling them what they want to hear, whatever it is.
And and then you list there quite a few like that, where these guys actually were friends with Al-Qaeda or were associated with Al-Qaeda or some like group.
And so they're the ones who get away with it.
They get to become valuable informants where the Liberty City Seven, those guys were nobodies from the ghetto.
What use are they as an informant?
They couldn't even entrap other poor black guys from the ghetto, so they're no use.
They have to go to the pen for 10 years.
No, I mean, I mean, this was kind of one of the amazing findings in this project, which was that, you know, the the less dangerous you are and the less likely you are to have any sort of connection to real terrorists, the more likely you are to spend years or decades in prison.
And by contrast, the more dangerous you are and the more direct connections you have to international terrorist groups or specific terrorists, the less likely you are to go to prison because that's valuable information that you can trade to, you know, basically save your ass and keep yourself out of prison.
And so what we're seeing are people caught up in thing operations where the FBI provides the means and opportunity, but who, you know, don't have any real connections to terrorists.
You know, they're going to prison for decades and in some cases, you know, for life.
But someone like Najibullah Zazi, you know, Zazi was in the United States, went to Pakistan, trained with al Qaeda on how to build bombs, went to Colorado, had bombed chemicals or beauty chemicals in his uncle's garage, then moved those chemicals to a hotel room in Denver where he was preparing backpack bombs and nearly made his way to New York and delivered those bombs.
Fortunately, he was caught not in a sting operation, but just thanks to intelligence from both the NYPD and the FBI.
And, you know, here's a guy that Eric Holder, upon his upon Zazi's arrest, described as the most significant threat to the United States since 9-11, and he hasn't been in prison.
He's working as an informant.
And in fact, we identified more than 30 people like that who did have dangerous backgrounds, did have evidence that suggested they were involved in real kind of terrorist plots, but never went to prison because they, you know, became a cooperating witness.
And and we were able to identify this just looking at the patterns in the database on on on sentencing and convictions.
And the government has a very clear pattern for how they handle people who become cooperating witnesses like Zazi.
And what they do is they get that person to plead guilty to their their case, but then they delay sentencing for for years and years and years.
And then, you know, upon the end of their cooperating agreement with the government, the government will go before a judge and say, OK, hey, this guy cooperated with us.
He's a really nice guy and he helped us save X number of lives.
And so you should be lenient in sentencing.
And and judges generally are.
And so as an example, in Zazi's case, you know, he was convicted and convicted in 2011, I believe.
Six years later, 2017, he still is not has not been sentenced.
And so that means that he's not been turned over to prison.
He's under productive custody somewhere, working with the FBI, providing information, doing who knows what.
And and so I think that's the great irony in all of this, which is that the really dangerous guys meant to be prosecuted and imprisoned in this counterterrorism program by the Justice Department are actually not being in prison.
They're becoming, you know, part of the counterterrorism force itself by being cooperating witnesses or informants.
Yeah, well, you know, there's something called criminally stupid.
And I guess anybody who lets themselves get entrapped by an FBI agent into anything on the level of even the Miami seven deserves at least a good, you know, day and a half in the county lockup for being an idiot.
I guess, you know, I don't know.
Most of these guys, it seems, are no more guilty than the Liberty City seven, from what I can tell, or poor Hamid Hayat out there in Lodi, California.
So and, you know, me, I just I'm going to presume I'm innocent, their convictions notwithstanding.
I mean, I don't I just I don't believe them anymore.
And I guess that's the only, you know, ultimately the only check is for the American people to say we're not impressed by these skits anymore.
You know, you guys, first of all, should stop making more real terrorists for us.
And then second of all, instead of trying to scam nitwits into falling for traps should really be on the lookout for dangerous men.
And we've seen I think for years we probably if you go back to our first interview, I bet we talked about how lucky we are that we haven't had any real terrorist attacks in the country, really, in the war on terror era.
But that started to change.
And now we have had some attacks.
Most of them, I guess all of them, right, are, quote unquote, lone wolf attacks, I guess Hassan had been emailing back and forth with Al-Aulaqi, but I don't know if Al-Aulaqi actually ever told them to do anything down there at Fort Hood.
But we've had a handful of these things.
The Garland attack, there was one that was the FBI was, you know, quite well aware of.
I don't know if you want to talk about that, but it seems like, you know, most of these are things where the FBI, the real ones, they had no idea because they were too busy chasing their tail and trapping some moron instead of doing their actual job, looking out for somebody who's really dangerous.
And that doesn't I don't mean to presume that they could necessarily stop every attack if they were only doing their job, because that's not right either.
You know, maybe San Bernardino would have just happened under their nose no matter what.
But it seems like they spend a lot of time.
In fact, was it you, Trevor, that wrote the thing about how while the Boston brothers seems like the older one may have been at least a former informant or had some relationship with the FBI himself, although it doesn't look like he was entrapped into that plot or anything like that, but wasn't it you that wrote that they were busy entrapping some other idiot in Boston?
The FBI Boston branch was distracted from watching this guy, Tsarnaev, that they knew of and that they should have been watching because they were busy entrapping some guy who wasn't really a threat.
Yeah, that's a good memory, Scott.
Yeah, I wrote about that for Mother Jones, and it was it involved a case involving a young man named Reswan Ferdows.
And what basically what happened was that the same month that the Russian intelligence services provided information to the FBI that they believed Tomalin Tsarnaev was involved with extremists, there was a drug addicted informant who claimed to the FBI that this guy named Reswan Ferdows was interested in getting involved in a terrorist plot.
And so they spent months and dedicated half a dozen agents to a sting operation.
At the same time, they were ignoring Tomalin Tsarnaev.
And it's impossible, of course, to know whether had they not done that, they could have stopped Tomalin Tsarnaev.
But it's a reasonable question to ask whether these sting operations are distracting the FBI from the really dangerous guys, whether we're spending so much time and so much money and so much resources on people that maybe one day could be dangerous or are dangerous once we provide the necessary ingredients and sting operations.
But because we're focused so much on those cases, we're actually missing really dangerous threats.
And, you know, you can also look at the Orlando shooting involving Omar Mateen.
You know, the FBI had two bites at that apple.
Right.
I mean, they they they investigated him twice and to try to see if he was someone who was interested in violence.
And ultimately, nothing ever came of it.
And so, again, it shows that the people that the FBI is catching in sting operations are not necessarily the ones that are becoming violent.
You know, these sting operations are not identifying Omar Mateen or the San Bernardino shooters or Tomalin Tsarnaev or any of these other more recent attackers that we've seen.
And yet that hasn't at all changed the FBI's policy.
We're continuing to see the aggressive use of sting operations, you know, despite the records showing that the attackers who've gotten away, you know, has slipped through a pretty extensive dragnet that we now have the United States and, you know, did not in any way appear susceptible to being caught in one of the FBI's sting operations.
Yeah.
And Mateen also, when he went to try to buy a rifle at the first store, they call the FBI on him.
I think not even the local cops.
They called the federal cops and said, man, this sketchy guy came in here trying to buy a rifle and you ought to look at him.
And they came and asked, but they didn't bring a photo lineup or anything.
And you would assume that they brought a picture of, well, here's some guys we've been looking at in this area recently.
Is this the guy if he had said, yeah, that's the guy.
He came in here trying to buy a semi-automatic rifle that maybe they could have got on his case.
Maybe they could have stopped.
And it seems like a real plausible scenario, even at that late point that when that just fell in their lap.
Now, I don't know if being distracted by other, you know, fake plots that they were in on, you know, was really if there's a causal thing there.
But it just sure seemed like a lot of times when they could be doing their job and it seems like there's a real good chance it would have made a difference.
They're busy doing something else.
Right, right.
You know, and I think it's worth noting, you know, that catching actual terrorists is a hugely difficult thing.
Like if you look at someone like Omar Mateen, right, like it's possible that when he was first investigated by the FBI, that he actually didn't plan to do anything.
Maybe he had some extremist views and maybe he looked at some ISIS propaganda, but maybe he didn't plan to do anything at the time he was investigated.
And so the FBI didn't have enough to push that case forward at the same time.
Like what might have ultimately been the thing that pushed him over?
Right.
Like was it about ISIS or was it that he was, you know, a closeted gay man who was self-loathing and was interested in killing gay men in Orlando and then, you know, crediting it to ISIS was a way of of building more publicity for his really heinous act.
You know, it's hard to know those things, but it's but that means, you know, that's a long way of saying that the drivers that make someone a terrorist and make them do things like this are often very complicated and very difficult to see before they become clearly evident after an attack.
And and the FBI, you know, is like every agency, an imperfect one.
And these these people go missing.
At the same time, though, I think, you know, we can all agree that no agency would ever be perfect and be able to find these every attacker, even though I think from a public policy standpoint, the demand on the FBI is that they do that, that they find everyone before they attack.
But given that demand and given that, you know, accomplishing that demand is an impossible task.
You know, I think sting operations are a very good way for them to show that they are being proactive, even if the end result isn't that the people caught in these thing operations are dangerous threats that were taken off the street.
You know, in many ways, these are people who, you know, never would have accomplished anything like Mateen or the San Bernardino couple, you know, and then in turn, I think it's worth noting what the FBI would say.
It would be like, hey, we're creating a very inhospitable place for would be terrorists, even if that means the people we're catching aren't really would be terrorists.
And by that, they mean, you know, these cases are announced and it's clear that an informant or an undercover was part of a sting.
And so there are real terrorists out there.
They'll hear about these cases and they'll think twice about doing something with someone else for fear that that person is an FBI informant or an undercover agent.
And, you know, this is the same type of kind of investigative philosophy that was used during the Mafia investigation, that you create a hostile environment for mafiosi by, you know, making them wonder at any time whether they've been infiltrated by the FBI.
And, you know, that's certainly being applied to terrorism.
The question is, like, how effective is it?
You know, is it really dissuading people like the San Bernardino shooters and the and Omar Mateen, particularly when, you know, most of the recent attacks we've seen have been lone wolf terrorists who, you know, did not need someone else's help or participation to move forward in any sort of attack and certainly didn't need any help acquiring weapons on their own.
I mean, if anything, sometimes I'm amazed that we don't see more attacks just given how easily obtained weapons are in the United States.
You know, I think, you know, it's still pretty amazing that, you know, if you look at death toll numbers of, you know, lone gunmen versus, you know, terrorists with Islamic State sympathies or or al Qaeda sympathies, I mean, you're still talking more people killed by, you know, lone wolf shooters than by supposed terrorists.
And so I think, you know, it's an interesting conundrum, right?
Like we're dedicating billions and billions of dollars to counterterrorism.
Are we catching the right people?
And at the same time, you know, we're still living in a state where, you know, the threat of terrorism is real as we're seeing, like in cases like these.
Right.
Well, and yeah, and that really gets right to the real bottom line here, which is I know is a little outside your purview, but this is all blowback.
Omar Mateen, he was a wife beating psycho and he was maybe a closeted gay guy with some issues and whatever.
But while he was killing those people and writing on Facebook and calling 9-1-1 about it and claiming ISIS to get the attention, but conflating ISIS and Nusra and, you know, whatever, that wasn't the part that he meant.
The part that he meant, though, was you've got to stop bombing Iraq and Syria and Afghanistan, his home country.
That was what he was saying.
That was his motive.
And that's what they all say.
Even when it's the FBI informants and trapping them, they don't say, boy, doesn't your love for Mohammed make you hate Christians and happy people and feminists and movies and where they say, don't you hate American foreign policy?
That's how they trick these guys into agreeing to the plots in the first place, virtually every time.
I'm pretty sure that's in your work, but I already know that myself anyway.
It's the same story over and over again is that it's the foreign policy that motivates them.
And, you know, guns is one thing, but trucks is another.
I mean, anybody can crash a truck into anything.
We've been seeing this in Europe lately, too.
And this should have been the real point of September 11th.
Those guys didn't have a single jet in their air force.
They had to steal our planes to crash them into stuff.
But then stealing stuff and crashing it into stuff is a pretty simple concept and pretty easy to mimic.
And so as long as you have ballgames and as long as you have, you know, anything, schools, any place where people gather, you have the ability of some guy to crash into them and take out a couple of tens of them at a time anyway.
And that's enough to cause trauma, to cause reaction, to to get the political work of terrorism done.
Not that I'm trying to give people ideas, but I'm just trying to say we're we're still wide open to this.
If you've ever been up in an airplane and seen how big America is, there's there's no way to be a free society and not be wide open to these kind of attacks as long as our government, as long as we allow our government to continue to provoke them, which they do.
Right, right.
No, I agree.
I mean, you know, to use a business term, you know, the barrier to entry for terrorism is low.
Right.
You don't need much.
And so in some ways it is rather extraordinary.
Book of matches, you know, right.
You could burn down half of downtown with some matches in the middle of the night if you really meant to.
Right.
And it's not like our, you know, it's amazing that we don't see more.
And it's hard to believe that the the reason we don't see more is because of counter terrorism practices like sting operations.
I mean, obviously, you know, terrorism and attacks like it are real threats.
But in a nation of 300 million people, these are these are very, very infrequent incidents.
And, you know, in general, I think Americans have a have a poor ability to assess risk.
And we worry about terrorist attacks when we're far more likely to die in a car accident or, you know, and any number of other ways that Americans lose their lives tragically.
And yet we devote significant resources to countering a threat that, while real, is not kind of particularly common in the United States.
And, you know, I don't mean to advocate that we shouldn't have a counter terrorism policy in practice by the federal government.
And I think that would be silly.
Of course we should.
But at the same time, I think there we don't necessarily think about these things in very reasonable ways.
And we don't assess how effective our current policies have been and maybe what's even driving, you know, people to commit acts of terrorism.
And I mean, as you point out, you know, the among the drivers for people getting involved in terrorism is a feeling that the United States itself is committing acts of terrorism on other parts of the world.
I mean, when we drop the mother of all bombs on Afghanistan, for example, we don't call that an act of terrorism.
But, you know, if you lived in the village nearby, you probably would consider that an act of terrorism.
And so, you know, this gets that kind of an old debate about, you know, how much of the terrorism we are inspiring and how much is being inspired by others.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thanks very much for coming back on the show, especially for staying so long with me here to talk about this.
Of course.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Such great work, Trevor.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks.
Have a great day.
All right, so that is Trevor Aronson now at The Intercept.
The book is The Terror Factory, and he put this thing together with Margo Williams.
It's a big four part series and it's called Trial and Terror.
And so there's a whole database there to go through.
There's a section on 400 people who've been convicted and released on the informants themselves, the ISIS sympathizers entrapped and then also a thing we didn't get to talk about here is about it's called The Government's Own Data Shows Country of Origin is a Poor Predictor of Terrorist Threat.
So there you go.
The great Trevor Aronson and Margo Williams at The Intercept, Trial and Terror.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org, 4000 something interviews there, libertarianinstitute.org, where I'm the managing director.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Sorry in advance if I'm rude to you there.
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