All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is Trevor Aaronson.
Keeps a website at trevoraaronson.com.
He's an investigative journalist formerly with the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee.
Also used to write for the Village Voice as an anchor down in South Florida.
And get this, he's a investigative reporting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, where he developed a year-long project about the FBI's informants in U.S.
Muslim communities.
He's also associate director and co-founder of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
He's got a new piece in Mother Jones.
Well, actually a few.
This one is called The Informants.
Welcome to the show, Aaron.
How are you, pardon me, Trevor, how are you doing?
I'm well, thank you.
I appreciate you joining us today.
And I appreciate this great piece of journalism that you put together here.
I admit I'm kind of jealous because I wanted to write a book like this, but they told me, no, that's really would be better as a university study.
Something like that.
So I'm glad that you did the work.
Let's get right to the heart of this thing.
The most important part of this thing is, as you say, there are three or four terrorism cases since September 11th in this country that weren't entrapments by the FBI.
Can you talk about those first, please?
Sure.
You know, I think everyone hears these announcements of cases where the FBI has made a significant bust in a terrorism sting.
And based on those, I think the average person would would believe that there have been dozens of true threats to the United States.
In fact, what we found in our review of terrorism prosecutions is that there were really only three significant threats where someone was about to commit some act of terror and for varying reasons wasn't able to pull it off.
One, for example, is Najib al-Azizi got very close to bombing the New York City subway system.
There was the attack that actually was successful of the LL ticket counter at Los Angeles Airport.
And of course, there was Faisal Shahzad who wasn't able to bomb Times Square.
As you remember, he was the one who parked a vehicle full of explosives and propane tanks in Times Square.
It started smoking, but in fact, did not explode.
Those were the three cases of more than 500 terrorism defendants in 9-11 that we could really point to and say, yes, this this person was a was a threat.
You know, and then, of course, that doesn't include Moussaoui, who they could have stopped the plot if they'd only done their job in the Moussaoui case.
He was arrested a month before the attack.
Right, right.
And by that, we linked Moussaoui with the 9-11 case.
So it wasn't that we were pretty much looking at cases that had happened since 9-11.
Well, then there's the underpants bomber, too.
And I wondered whether you just forgot about him or whether you were looking at all of the indications that one intelligence agency or another helped him change planes in the Netherlands and whether that counted as one of these government instigated acts or not.
We didn't look at that at all, because what we're looking at is what the FBI sees as the most significant threat, which is someone already in the United States who is going to be inspired by extremist message boards or the idea of Al-Qaeda's ideas and commit some kind of act of terror.
That is this kind of lone wolf idea is really what we wanted to focus on.
The underwear bomber is a very different type of case because, in fact, he came from overseas.
He was on a plane.
And in fact, there was failures of international intelligence as well.
What we specifically wanted to look at was the FBI's actions and specifically its prosecution of terrorism cases in the United States.
I see.
OK, so with that, I'll be quiet and let you go ahead and give us a rundown of some of these cases, especially, I guess, maybe the more famous ones that people will be reminded that I remember being scared of that when they put on TV.
Sure.
You know what we wanted to do was take a look at it as all of the terrorism prosecutions that have happened since 9-11 and there have been more than 500 and determine whether an informant was used and what the role of that informant was.
Our investigation found that the FBI now has 15,000 informants throughout its ranks, which is 10 times as many as there were during the during the 70s after COINTELPRO.
And actually, they're most of the increase in informants came after 9-11 through a 2004 presidential directive in which George W.
Bush ordered the FBI to increase what's termed as confidential human sources.
After that 2004 directive, we were able to see a very large uptick in the use of informants in terrorism things.
And certainly those raised questions about how much a threat these targets actually were.
You know, one example of this is that there was a gentleman and a man in Illinois named Derek Sharif.
He was down on his luck.
He was broke.
He didn't even have a place to live, was working at a video game store in Rockford, Illinois.
An informant comes up to him and offers him a place to live, you know, transportation that uses car, even food at his apartment.
And over the course of weeks, Derek expresses an interest to the informant in committing some kind of act of violence and the informant introduces Derek to an undercover FBI agent who's posing as an arms dealer.
The arms dealer offers Derek grenades as weapons to carry out this plot that he and the informant have conjured up to attack a shopping mall in Illinois.
But in fact, Derek really had no money.
He didn't even have a hundred dollars to buy the grenades from the FBI undercover agent who was posing as an arms dealer.
So the FBI agreed to accept as trade from Derek the only thing he had of value, which was a set of stereo speakers.
And so they traded the stereo speakers for these grenades and the government was able to prosecute Derek based on that, based on the terrorism conspiracy that he was, you know, obtained the grenades and was going to attack a shopping mall.
You know, I think clearly what a case like that, the questions raised in a case like that are whether Derek could have committed this conspiracy or been involved in this conspiracy were it not for the informant and the undercover agent offering him the means to be a part of that conspiracy, but by providing him with a place to stay, by providing him with encouragement in his plot, by providing him with the actual weapons necessary to make the plot happen.
And when what we looked at in case after case, sting case after sting case, is that that's been a pattern throughout that the FBI offers the opportunity and means for someone who wants to commit an act of violence or an act of terror to do so.
You know, last year a case that that made big news was, or made headlines was this case in Portland, Oregon, where a 19 year old wanted to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
In fact, what happened in that case was the FBI had an undercover agent go to this guy and they talked about what he wanted to do.
The 19 year old said that's what he wanted to do.
He wanted to bomb the Pioneer Square Christmas tree lighting ceremony, but he had no means to do it.
And so the FBI was the one that provided him with a van that he believed would, that had explosives in it.
So he parked the van in front of the Christmas tree lighting ceremony, walked away and dialed a cell phone number that he believed would detonate the bomb.
And of course it doesn't detonate and the FBI swoops in and arrests him.
Again, that's another example where, you know, certainly this guy had terrible ideas.
He wanted to commit an act of violence, but there was really no evidence to suggest that he would have ever had the means to do so were it not for the FBI and were it not for an informant making that possible.
All right, now, you know, maybe when we get back we can sort of go down the list and try to remind people a little bit of a lot of these different cases, but I want to make sure that I really understand you right.
That in none of these cases where it includes an FBI informant, as far as you can tell, I believe you're telling me, none of these include or, you know, involve the informant basically sitting back and listening and finding out about a real threat and alerting the authorities and they're getting an arrest.
Virtually all of these, I think you're saying, the informant is the one playing the most active part in making the thing go.
Obviously the informant's role varies by cases, but there are many cases where the informant does play the significant role in making the plots happen.
These aren't cases where there's a plot about to happen that a terror cell has bombs and they're about to place them tomorrow and an informant calls the FBI and says, this is happening, you need to stop that.
That hasn't been the case.
That isn't the case with these sting operations.
The informant is playing a role that helps facilitate the plot and then the people are arrested as they move forward with that plot.
Well, and you know, I don't want to, you know, completely let everybody off the hook either.
I don't think you are either, you know, because you can only be entrapped so much if you're really willing to go along, you're willing to go along.
There's some kind of degree of responsibility in there.
I guess the question is how the law has treated that thing, that kind of thing in the past and whether that's changed.
Maybe we can talk a little bit more about that with Trevor Aaronson.
He's got the new piece called The Informants at Mother Jones.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Trevor Aaronson.
He's got this piece called The Informants at Mother Jones about the FBI's habit of entrapping people into committing crimes.
Now, you talk in your article, Trevor, about how the mission of the FBI changed to prevention and pre-crime and all that kind of thing after September 11th, but I wonder whether the court precedents about what's entrapment and what's not entrapment have been changed under this deluge of so-called terrorist cases.
Right, and this is a good point to make.
You know, there's a very different...the legal definition of entrapment is very different from what you and I would probably think of as entrapment.
And, in fact, proving entrapment in a federal criminal court, whether it's terrorism or any other type of crime, is incredibly difficult.
In several of these cases that have gone to trial, defensive lawyers have used entrapment as a defense, and there hasn't been a successful case yet where a jury has found that these people were entrapped.
The best test case was one outside New York City involving an African-American convert to Islam named James Cromedy.
Cromedy was led in a plot by an informant named Shahed Hussain to bomb synagogues in the Bronx.
In tape conversation after tape conversation, it's clear that the informant leads him along and kind of pushes him toward the plot.
But nevertheless, the jury found Cromedy and three of his associates guilty.
But what's particularly interesting about that case is that even though a jury didn't believe that Cromedy and his associates were entrapped, at sentencing the judge had a great quote, and she said that the FBI had created acts of terrorism out of Cromedy's fantasies and fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true.
And so I think one of the things that's interesting about this is that while none of these cases have met the legal definition of entrapment, I think there's a lot of conversation within the legal community and within the Muslim community about whether the FBI is still going too far, that whether they're drawing in susceptible people, impressionable people, to get involved in these plots.
And in fact, in many of the cases that we've looked at, you know, these are not the brightest, the most well-off people who end up getting involved in these terrorist things.
They tend to be poor, economically desperate, and have very elementary understandings of Islam, all of which are often used against them.
And in the case of Cromedy, for example, the informant consistently offered him money, as much as $250,000, and also told him things that were in the Quran that he did, that actually weren't, and Cromedy didn't know better because he had such an elementary understanding of Islam.
The one in Lodi, California, it seemed to me, was really problematic.
This is one where the LA Times did a really great job overall, but then they had one especially long, in-depth report there in one of their Sunday issues about the entrapment of this boy and his father, and particularly the boy.
And at one point anyway, the video was available of the FBI interrogation of the kid, where the kid actually, it's the best part, where he's saying, yeah, Al-Qaeda trains in my grandfather's basement, and his house has moved from, you know, I think Karachi to Islamabad, to now it's in Kandahar, and Al-Qaeda's in the basement training down there.
Yeah, sure, whatever you say, FBI agent.
And the boy says, and he holds his hands out, like they have something in their hand, like he think maybe he's pantomiming stick fighting, or something like that.
And the FBI agent says, pole vaulting?
Were they pole vaulting?
And the kid says, yeah, they were pole vaulting.
Al-Qaeda's pole vaulting in my grandfather's basement.
This is the confession that sent this kid to prison for 25 years.
Right, exactly.
You know, the Lodi case is another that falls in line with this, where in addition to that particular interrogation, the informant played a very active role.
I think it's important to keep in mind that the defendant, Hyatt in this case, had a sixth-grade education, was seen by all as very much a social misfit, did not have a lot of friends, and the informant was able to take advantage of that to a certain extent.
And then when Hyatt is in Pakistan, where he's to be married, the informant has a phone conversation with him, where he's encouraging him to go to an Al-Qaeda training camp, and when Hyatt says no, he's not really interested in that, the informant, you know, lambasts him and calls him lazy, and says he should go to this training camp.
So indeed, there were a lot of questions about that case, and it's another example of potentially the FBI and an informant creating a situation that allows someone to say things or, you know, be on tape in such a way that they can prove a conspiracy charge against them.
That case is particularly interesting, too, because the appeal has been pending now for two years, and there hasn't been much movement on that case, but indeed, that was one of the early examples of how the FBI is able to use informants very aggressively.
Yeah, I mean, at least according to that LA Times piece, they really just put the words in his mouth.
The informant first, and then the FBI interrogator later, and the kid just parrots back whatever they tell him, because they've shortened his time preference down to, I want to get out of this room right now, not, you know, I'm worried about my trial later.
Right, exactly, and that confession ultimately came after, was not the first meeting he had with the FBI.
When he was traveling back from Pakistan, he had a layover in Japan and in Tokyo, and the FBI questioned him then, and at that point, he did not say that he had been to a terrorist camp.
It was only later that that he had said those things after a consistent interview by the FBI.
It's also interesting to note how that case started, which was, basically, there was a man who was working at a convenience store in Oregon who said that he'd heard that Anwar al-Awlaki, the spiritual leader of Al-Qaeda, had been in Lodi.
Most likely, that was a mistake, or the informant just made it up, but that was enough for the FBI to hire the informant and, you know, pay him to go to Lodi, and he spent months looking into a couple of imams who he wasn't able to build a case against, and was ultimately hired to.
He'd come to know, and was able to create a case against, but, you know, the premise of why they chose to investigate in Lodi ended up being not true, which was that there was some connection to Anwar al-Awlaki.
Right, but they found something to do while they were there.
Yeah, well, and, you know, they basically just infiltrated this family, right?
It was the son and the father were the targets, and according to that LA Times piece, he called the father dad, or father, or something like that.
They called him son.
He was like a, became a very close friend of this family, just found somebody dumb enough to fool into saying something into a microphone, basically.
Right, and it's important to keep in mind that in many of these cases, informants end up building relationships like that with their targets, where they become, you know, great friends, or even, you know, in the case of Lodi, where he's seen as almost a second son, and then ultimately they use that relationship to get close and build a case, and take conversations that then can be used against them, but again, you know, the Lodi case, for example, is not a case where there was any imminent threat to the United States.
The people involved never had access to any sort of weapons or explosives that we know of, or even involved in any specifically active plot, and so I think it's important to remember when we hear these cases of terrorism prosecutions, many of them did not, in fact, actually most of them did not, in fact, have any kind of link to a direct plot that put any Americans at danger.
Well, now, when you talked about the synagogue plot up in New York, wasn't it more or less the same thing down in Miami, where they thought that they were playing this informant, and getting a bunch of money out of him, and really he was playing them for a conviction and a paycheck of his own?
Right, that was one of the questions that was raised at trial, and it's certainly raised in the informant transcripts.
The leader of this group of Miami men, Narcille Batiste, consistently asked the informant Elie Assad, you know, when he was going to be getting his money.
You know, what he was looking for was $50,000 that he thought he was getting from this Al-Qaeda group.
And in fact, Narcille and his associates were having a lot of money trouble.
They were running a failing drywall business, and they worked out of a warehouse in Liberty City, the neighborhood of Miami, that they were having trouble paying the rent on.
And they ultimately, over the course of weeks and months, you know, consistently asked this FBI informant, you know, when's the money coming?
When's the money coming?
And the money never came, actually, of course.
And I think, you know, the obvious question that's raised is, if these were true terrorists who wanted to, you know, commit some kind of violence with the United States, I don't think money would be so important to them.
Well, now, we can't keep going on the list here because we're short on time, but it seems like the bottom line here is that each and every one of these and more amounted to a giant orange alert on the nightly news, especially in the run-up to the Iraq War.
Look at all these terrorist plots against us all the time.
Right.
They make great headlines.
One of the things that's interesting about this project is, I think, that what happens is that a case is announced, and it's on the front page of the newspaper, and then very few times are our readers able to see what actually happened in the case, and what the plot actually involved.
And I think that in many of these cases, in most of these cases, the threat was not nearly as grave as it was initially portrayed by the Department of Justice in these press conferences.
Well, now, this is very important work that you've done.
Is there any kind of movement among, I don't know, say, lawyers to kind of mount a campaign to have these cases reviewed, to have something done about this, you know, like along the lines of the Innocence Project, something like that?
Nothing quite like that.
There are groups that do work in this area.
Muslim Advocates in San Francisco does this type of work.
The Muslim American Society has an immigrant justice center that looks at cases where the FBI uses immigration as coercion or leverage to get cooperation from informants.
But, you know, and there are ongoing appeals.
Both the Liberty City case and Lodi have appeals going.
I'm sure the Cromity case in Newburgh will have an appeal as well.
Well, hopefully you'll be called as an expert witness on some of this, and explain to the jury what it really means when the FBI indicts somebody, you know?
Convicts them.
All right, well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show today, Trevor.
It's been great.
Great, thank you for your time.
Everybody, that's Trevor Aronson.
He's an independent journalist, and he's got one called The Informants at MotherJones.com.
We'll be right back.
