08/08/07 – Ronald J. Hansen – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
This is Chaos Radio 95.9, 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
And I don't know if you guys remember the case of the Detroit Sleeper Cell.
Four men arrested within one week of the September 11th attacks in Detroit.
A case that was hailed by the John Ashcroft Justice Department and by President Bush himself as a great success in the war on terrorism.
You may not remember because the story pretty much fell down the memory hole after the judge turned around and let all the convicted go free and the Justice Department turned around and indicted their own federal prosecutor for suborning perjury in the case.
Well, joining us on the show now is Ron Hansen from the Detroit News, who followed the case for that newspaper.
And he's going to help take us through and understand what happened in the story of the Detroit Sleeper Cell, the Detroit Four.
Welcome to the show, Ron.
Thank you.
Good to be here and nice to talk to you, Scott.
Yeah, it's good to have you on.
Very interesting case.
Just after September 11th, is that right, September 17th, these guys were arrested in Detroit?
That's right.
Six days after 9-11, the FBI in Detroit is part of the nation's overall dragnet for suspected terrorists who may have had something to do with that plot or others.
The FBI in this area was looking for someone else, Nabeel al-Marab, who was on the nation's terrorist watch list at the time anyway.
He was suspected to have had some contact with Al Qaeda, perhaps even as high as Osama bin Laden himself.
They went to the last known address in Detroit for him and instead found three men in a flophouse, in effect, in Detroit.
And they had some suspicious passports that didn't appear to be theirs and didn't appear to be legitimate and just seemed to be out of sorts with things anyway.
In that kind of environment, they kept these three guys and later linked another one to them.
And that's how the case got started.
Well, you know, it's funny.
I remember there was a news story that came out in, I don't know, maybe it was the early part of 2002 that said that conviction rates all across America had gone up after September 11th, as government had gained this new aura of credibility.
And now the fact of the matter is, a little more than halfway through 2007, George Bush's approval rating rivaling that of Richard Nixon and Harry Truman at their very lowest might be kind of hard for people to remember, or not too hard, but if you go back to 2002 and you remember the spirit of the times, it was that government can do no wrong.
And not only can the DOJ indict, but they can convict a ham sandwich at that point, basically.
Yeah, I mean, the greater context for the nation is important when you look at this case.
You can't separate the two.
I'm not sure that we should separate them.
This case began literally while the ground was still smoldering in New York, six days after 9-11.
They were indicted days before the first anniversary of 9-11, in the first indictments alleging sleeper cells in the United States.
This case went to trial in March 2003, just as the United States was invading Iraq.
And the verdict in the case came down a couple weeks after Mission Accomplished in San Diego.
And it was in that environment where the public was just pumped with the terrorist alert levels, the developments in Iraq, the search for weapons of mass destruction, and that terrifying environment where there was still a belief that the government had the proper intelligence and was doing the right things.
This case was germinating in that whole environment.
It started that way, and it went to trial that way, and it was only in 2004 that the case started to unravel, when I think that we had also begun to see that the problems in Iraq were much more difficult than what we were told they would be.
Wow, isn't that interesting, a heck of a time to be a defense lawyer for these guys, I suppose.
Let me ask you this, I want to go down this tangent briefly before we get too far into the rest of the story here.
The guy that they were looking for, Mirob, you said his name was?
Yeah, Nabeel Al Mirob.
And now, did they ever find him, and was he truly friends with Bin Laden, etc.?
Well, he was located in the Chicago area, I think he'd been working at a 7-11 or some type of convenience store at the time, they found him a couple of weeks later.
And he had a number of different encounters with the government that lasted well over a year, if I'm remembering correctly.
They took him to White Plains, New York, and was part of the grand jury proceedings that related to the broadest, most urgent investigation of what was going on with the 9-11 attackers.
In the end, I believe he was deported, I can't remember what the official grounds were, it may have been, just for violating his visa or some type of relatively obscure thing like that.
I don't recall that part specifically, but as far as his contacts with Al Qaeda and all that, I don't know how well established it was, but he did face the grand jury in New York on those matters because he was considered somewhat of a serious figure.
And now, was he indeed tied to the four men indicted as being part of the sleeper cell or did it just happen now in the same apartment after him?
Not at all, it may have been just the worst dumb luck of all, that they end up in the apartment that had previously been occupied by this man.
If there were more evidence of it, we never saw it that really definitively linked him to them.
Wow.
The thing to bear in mind is that it's not as much of a coincidence as it might sound like.
The metro Detroit area is the largest enclave of Arabic and Muslim immigrants in the United States, and there are pockets in this area in particular where you find a lot of them residing.
This was, as I said, something of a flophouse, it was the kind of place that people who don't really have much by way of financial means to live.
They lived out of garbage bags, and they were all struggling to get by, and Al-Marab, by all appearances, didn't have a great deal of resources either.
Wow.
So, wrong place, wrong time is really where this case starts.
Again, it's the 17th of September 2001, the cops go looking for this guy they think might be an Al-Qaeda terrorist.
They show up at the house where he used to stay, and they find these four guys and decide they're going to settle on them.
And now, if I have the story right, they basically found some videotapes of some tourist attractions, and they found paperwork that showed that a couple of these guys used to work at an airport and basically some things that might raise some red flags in the mind of an FBI agent in the days after September 11th.
You can see where the cops began building their conspiracy theory about these four.
Absolutely.
I mean, nobody, I don't think, has ever questioned that there was a legitimate basis to start this investigation and to treat them as very serious suspects in a terrorist type plot.
There was a lot there for people to be properly suspicious of.
It was only as you went deeper into the case and really started to look around that it should have become evident to anyone who was objective about it that the case had very serious problems.
One of the crucial pieces of evidence in this case was supposed to be a day planner that was found in that apartment.
It contained in a few places things that the government later construed to be threats and signs of a plot to attack an air base in what they later determined was Incirlik, Turkey, where the U.S. had an air base.
Looking at the sketches of planes and this map, it appeared to be signs of a plot, if that's how you wanted to view it.
One of my colleagues, Norm Sinclair, talked to one of his sources within the FBI who got a chance to look at the day planner and, frankly, his assessment was, Norm, if I had brought this case against these guys six months before 9-11, they would have brought me up on charges.
It was something that early on, there were people who weren't deeply invested in the case and could see that there were problems with it.
The feds, in any event, continued to push ahead even though there were obvious problems.
Right, the Justice Department eventually, at the end of the thing, came back and did this internal investigation and prosecuted the prosecutor.
In their review, they cite notes and internal emails and communications inside the FBI where they say, wow, this case is really thin.
If we're real lucky, we might be able to just push it by.
Apparently, one of the guys responded, well, we're getting some really good press out of this.
It just happened to coincide with a different terrorism case in Seattle and so we're all over the TV and it's really great.
We'd hate to give up this case now.
This case has always been about pressure and opportunity to me, the pressure after 9-11 to do something, to strike a blow after something as awful as 9-11.
There was always the opportunity that one could make a career off this case.
This is how people end up with impressive higher jobs within the Justice Department or within the FBI.It may have been more than they could resist.
I've never been completely clear just how far it went on the line of knowing better and pursuing it anyway or people who were just so taken by this cause and it's very troubling in either event because they should have been able to see the problems they had and walk away.
Yeah, it's a mistake I think a lot of people make that government employees are all benevolent and pretty much omniscient public servants who are not really individuals and don't have their own ambition, but of course that's not true.
They're just people just like everybody else.
Sure, and the agent in this case for the FBI was young, had not been associated with any major case previously.
The Assistant U.S. Attorney, Rick Convertino, who is awaiting trial at this point, was involved in a lot of big cases in Detroit, was seen as something of a rising star in the U.S.
Attorney's Office here.
And may have been overly ambitious, or at best you could say he was overly taken by this case, but they are human and that includes the full range.
They could be overly zealous, they could be overly taken with a case, they could be corrupt.
At what point do you recall, did you realize, wait a minute, this doesn't seem like a real sleeper cell to me?
The beginning of the case was something that was, I think, in a sense expected.
There were a lot of people, again, my colleague Norm and I, we always kind of expected that after 9-11 there would be a Detroit component to it, again with the demographics the way they are, with the sizable Arabic and Muslim population here, it was just almost unavoidable that there would be some kind of Detroit component some way sought by the government.
It was understandable.
What we were always looking for was how could they link this up to something that appeared to be as malevolent as the government would claim.
Right from the start we were troubled by the fact that when we saw these guys in court they didn't carry themselves in a way that suggested that they were defiant or angry.
They looked scared and almost hapless.
The person that was later apprehended and turned into the star witness, in this case Yousuf Nimza, seemed to have the most tangible evidence against him and that was all relating to identity theft and credit card theft for crimes that he had committed in the Chicago area.
There was something about it that just felt off.
You weren't seeing the kind of operational capability from the people that were accused of being in a sleeper cell that you would expect, especially given what we did come to find out about the 9-11 attackers themselves or Richard Reed, where you can draw some sort of straight line between someone who is a radical and has known ties to radical groups and takes action.
We didn't see that here.
We saw people who were living literally out of garbage bags, they were carrying their clothes in garbage bags, living out of a flophouse, bouncing from job to job, didn't have any special skills, they weren't computer savvy other than Nimza, they weren't especially ideological, they weren't especially religious as far as we could tell.
To charge them the way that they did, there was a lot there that just didn't seem to fit.
From the very beginning it sounds like.
Right.
From the start, we always were waiting for the other shoe to drop, we were always waiting for something that would link it all together and it never materialized all the way through the trial.
You mentioned radicalism and so forth.
One of the articles I read said that they, along with the video tapes and so forth that was found in the possession of one of these guys, that they found audio tapes of fundamentalist Islamic teachings.
I wonder whether they found anything political about, say, America's support for Israel or the occupation of Saudi Arabia or Bin Laden's speeches or his religious leaders' teachings, that kind of thing.
Because fundamentalism can mean a lot of things, right?
Sure.
The tapes that you're talking about, I'm trying to remember correctly, I believe that the most alarmist tapes that they had were tapes that it was unclear if they were even listened to.
They were all set basically at the beginning of the tape.
They may have been listened to, they may not have, you couldn't tell.
They had a videotape that they tried to say was a surveillance tape of Disneyland and Las Vegas' strip and the New York Times and different potential targets that the government claimed was a casing tape, as they put it, to show their targets without showing their hand that this is what they intended, never mind that the people shooting the tape clearly were not these men, and that the tape in any event was of a different standard.
I think it was a European standard tape that would not be visible on the VCR that you could buy in America, really.
You know, this is the kind of thing, it's not even clear that they ever viewed that tape, you know, could make sense of it.
So even the audio tapes, which I think are fairly described as being thunderous and perhaps out of the mainstream in Islam, I don't think rises to the level of something where you could say that this is on a par with Osama Bin Laden or some kind of fatwa declaring jihad against the West, you know, it's just not clear.
And the part that the government latched onto was only a small portion of what the entirety of the tapes included, which dealt with, as far as I could tell, according to the defense lawyers, would be considered fairly mainstream Islam.
And were the tapes just about religious topics, or about, you know, the West versus the East and that sort of thing?
No, I think that, again, this is according to the defense lawyers, the entire tapes were not played at the trial, there were portions of them played, and the tapes went on for some length.
But even though it's the part that they did play, was it about politics, or was it about, you know, anti-gay?
It was about politics as much as it was about just sort of more Islamic struggle and leading a devout Muslim life.
I don't want to misstate it, but again, the tapes went on for, it may have been as much as like 100 hours of tapes, and whatever one thinks, I mean, it was only a small portion that had any kind of bent to it at all that the government really seized on.
Yeah, well, and we know from, you know, Christian preachers in America, that you can have some serious fire and brimstone preaching that's all about you as an individual, and you being right with God and doesn't have anything to do with, you know, let's start a war with Iran or whatever, like some, like John Hagee and some of the people from different lines.
I guess, what I'm trying to get at here is, the government keeps wanting us to believe that Islam is the source of the terrorism, or some brand of it is, when in fact anybody who's, okay, anybody except Giuliani, who knows anything about the Al Qaeda terrorist movement since the early 1990s, knows that they are motivated and used for their propaganda, for their recruiting, all very earthly political topics as their motivation.
That's what they cite is troops in Saudi Arabia, support for Israel, support for local dictators and so forth, not, you know, North America is an unclean infidel place, and that's why we're out to get them, so it's kind of relevant.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that, you know, clearly, there are a lot of people who have negative feelings toward the US, to the West generally, and there may be even Muslim clerics who would articulate those things, but even at that, I don't know that you can build a terror case around it, and in this case, those tapes should have been linked to something else that would have made it very unmistakable that these guys had bad intentions, and it was that absence of anything beyond that that really kind of stood out.
It's Ronald J. Hansen from the Detroit News.
We're talking about the Detroit so-called sleeper cell that was, well, half of it was convicted and then released by the judge, and the prosecutor got prosecuted for his behavior in the case, and a big part of that, Ron, was withholding from the defense what's called Brady material, things that would tend to be useful for the defense.
Yeah, one of the important pieces of evidence, as we talked about earlier, was that day planner.
There was a sketch in that planner that was supposed to lay out different targets.
One was perhaps the air base, another would have been a target that they later believed was a hospital area in Amman, in Jordan, and the government, Rick Convertino and an FBI agent, traveled to the Middle East to look at these sites and later asked for others to help corroborate that those sites resembled the sketches that they found in the day planner.
The testimony in the trial had been that there were no pictures taken.
That is something that we have subsequently learned is apparently not true, that there were some pictures taken or transmitted or at least contemplated, and that when they didn't find a resemblance, somehow those pictures just never materialized.
It's something that, intuitively, it never made sense that you would go all the way to the Middle East to look at some hospital in Jordan or to an air base in Turkey and not take a picture.
That's just something that was troubling, and it was this kind of thing that the defense tried mightily to raise as a point for reasonable doubt at trial.
That's where I think, again, when you consider the context that the jury was sitting in, watching news accounts of the Iraq war in its infancy while they were listening to this evidence of these fantastic terrorist plots, it's hard to not be influenced by that.
Now, any doodle in a day planner that could just as easily be a map of the Middle East or a base of some kind in Jordan must have been a pretty vague, no-talent drawing, am I right?
It was a pretty crude drawing, I mean, it's almost like a Rorschach test.
I'm a Cleveland Indians fan, I'm telling you right now that the air base looked like an upside-down Chief Wahoo to me, and the planes that they were depicted were stick drawings, and it could have been a lot of things.
And the day planner, this is an important detail of it, the day planner had been in the custody for at least some period of a man who later wound up dead, known to have serious mental disease, and the man was just not right in the head and had delusions that he was a general for some country known as Arabia, and talked about military operations.
It could very easily have been his drawing, and I think that one other part of this is that the government could not identify with any real certainty that the handwriting or that the drawings had been done by any single person.
If I write a bogus check, they have handwriting experts who can say that I've reviewed the writing, I've looked at his samples, and I know that it's his handwriting.
They didn't have that in this case, and I think to some degree that speaks to a lack of real resources about the enemy that we're taking on these days.
And now didn't the mentally ill man, didn't his brother even tell the government that, oh yeah, I think my mentally ill brother did that, and it's a map?
Yeah, I mean there have been a number of people trying to say that that's who it belonged to.
They were telling the government that before the trial, and then the government kept that from the defense.
Yeah, I don't remember if that part was kept from the defense or not.
I think you're correct.
It's been a few years for me, but there were a number of things that were withheld from the defense, and that would have been just one of them.
And it all fit into a disturbing pattern that for the defense suggested that the idea was winning, not getting to the truth.
Right, yeah.
Well, you know, welcome to the real world.
I think that's the way it is in almost all these cases.
One of the things that really bothers me is the entire kind of decoding of so-called code speak of the terrorists.
This is part of the Padilla trial now, too.
Any time he says soccer ball, he really means grenade.
And now, don't get me wrong, I mean the fact of the matter is if Al Qaeda terrorists are in America and they're on the phone with their buddies overseas, if they're not stupid, they're using some kind of code and hopefully one that, you know, won't be that recognizable to the cops from their point of view, it makes perfect sense.
But then we come to trial and we basically have these federal agents just playing conspiracy theorists and saying, well, we're just pretty sure that this word means that word and this word means that word.
And if you accept our premise, well, then you can see how dangerous this soccer game he's talking about really is.
Yeah, there was a lot of evidence like that, that they used a code that included things like jersey numbers from the Moroccan national team, I believe.
And that is not outside what you would consider plausible.
It does make sense, as you said, that people would use codes and talk in ways that don't make entirely clear what their intentions are.
But that's where you have to look for other signs of a threat.
And as I said, these guys didn't have any natural skills.
The only two that had any skills were Yousef Mimza, who was the government star witness, and the last man dragged into the case, Abdullah El-Mardoudi, who was most likely operating with Mimza as, you know, career ID thieves.
And these two guys had some natural skill that would have been useful for a criminal operation.
But there was no evidence that they were operating closely with the others towards some kind of goal that was tangible.
And Mimza's testimony was all over the board.
They wanted shoulder missiles, they wanted shoe bombs, they wanted truck bombs.
You know, if these things cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to pull off, these are people who had no money.
How is it that they were going to jump from going from some malevolent intention to operational capability?
And I understand that they talk in codes, and we shouldn't make light of that, but that's not enough.
You have to move beyond that, especially when this was billed as a sleeper cell that was nearing its capacity to take action.
Now, you mentioned Mimza, the star witness, and El-Mardoudi.
Now, these guys worked together, you said?
Well, they apparently had had some contact with each other.
Uh-huh.
Now, one of these is the witness, and one of these is the convicted, is it?
That's right.
These guys had a personal falling out, and I'll fix you good.
I'm going to tell the FBI that you're al-Qaeda?
Pretty much.
The way the case unraveled is that the government had another person that they were prosecuting, a fairly notorious drug dealer in these parts known as Butch Jones.
And Jones was incarcerated next to Mimza's cell and kept fairly scrupulous notes of his conversations with Mimza, so much so that it became evident that he knew too many personal details about Mimza's life, somebody who nobody would have known previously, and details that had never been made public in the media.
And based on those notes, it made clear that he had, in fact, talked to Mimza.
You were able to give some weight to his testimony that Mimza told me he didn't really know these guys.
He didn't know what their story was, and Mimza had the most to lose.
He was looking at theft charges in Illinois that would have put him away for up to 81 years.
He faces a plea agreement with the federal prosecutors in Detroit that allow him to basically get out in a handful of years, and all he has to do is make it sound really bad for these other guys, who he really doesn't know.
He stayed with them for a short period of time before he bolted for Iowa.
He was easy money for Mimza, in a sense, and Elmer Duty was just somebody that Mimza had known and consorted with, perhaps, on a couple of theft operations previously.
Elmer Duty really didn't have any demonstrated ties to the others that said, here's how we're going to continue to steal, this is what I need from you.
Now did this evidence from the cellmate Butch Jones, did that make it to trial, or only after the conviction?
Well, not at the trial for these guys.
What it did, it was obtained in a hearing after the trial that sort of served as the tipping point in this case.
The cops knew it during the trial, though?
Well, yes, they did know about it previously, and they did not disclose this until after the case was over.
Okay, let me make sure I understand you right here.
I'm talking with Ron Hansen from the Detroit News, we're talking about the Detroit Sleeper Cell Case.
Now, we have, and forgive me everyone, because I'm not going to get any of these names right, Kobriti, Elmer Doughty, Hanan, and Hamoud.
And Mimza.
Okay, so out of these five guys, Mimza is the one who's got the worst charges hanging over his head.
That's correct.
And he points his finger at this guy, Elmer Doughty, who's been arrested with these other three only because they happen to be at the same flophouse as someone used to live at that the FBI was looking for.
Yeah, Mimza used to know the other three, Hamoud, Hanan, and Kobriti.
They were the ones who were arrested all at the same time.
Elmer Doughty's not arrested until more than a year later in North Carolina.
They pick him up on a bus, and he was thrown in with the other three.
And now he was a fugitive on the identity theft and all that, is that right?
That's correct.
And he was wanted for crimes in Minnesota.
And these are crimes that he is now serving a federal prison sentence for, and properly so.
I mean, his own lawyer admitted that he was an accomplished shoulder surfer, as he put it.
Elmer Doughty was a very good thief, and that's what he was, but that didn't make him a terrorist.
Yeah.
Now, the prosecutor, Covertino, says that it's all the DOJ's fault, not his, and that the only reason they're going after him is because he testified in front of Senator Grassley's committee on the Hill, and that they're after him.
I have to tell you, the idea that the prosecutor is now being persecuted rather than just prosecuted sounds plausible to me.
The FBI, the Justice Department gets caught with their pants completely down.
They want to blame it on the local guy out there in Detroit, rather than take responsibility in D.C.
Is there any plausibility to the idea that this is really all the DOJ's fault, and Covertino was just one of them?
Well, I mean, that's the part that remains to be resolved.
Rick's trial has not yet occurred, and it will be interesting to see what evidence the government brings out on this.
It does seem clear, from what we've seen in the indictment and some of the documents since, that Rick had some free-wheeling that may have been outside the bounds of normal Justice Department procedure, but that doesn't mean that he was operating without authority.
How this plays out, where it comes down, what he was doing, and who knew about it, all remains to be determined, and we'll all be watching to see that, and that's why I reserve judgment on that.
Clearly, there was an interest in this case in Washington.
How could there not be?
It was the first trial for a terrorism case after 9-11.
It was a sleeper cell, the first sleeper cell indictment in the country.
This was a case that was on the radar screen at Maine Justice in Washington.
How involved the others were in putting this case together and skimming along as it appears they did, that we don't know.
Rick's position has been that everything he was doing was with the authority of his superiors and that they've sort of made him into a fall guy.
After this case ended, and before it fell apart, Rick was called to testify before a subcommittee was called by Senator Grassley relating to identity theft.
One of the people who was at that hearing as well was the star witness, Yousuf Minza, talking about what he could do.
Rick appeared under subpoena, and he was able to say, I didn't do this voluntarily.
I did it because I was called to testify.
His superiors, according to Rick, felt that this was a violation of protocol, if not grandstanding by a prosecutor who had made a name for himself with this case.
Interesting.
He could have just got the President to invoke executive privilege or something, right?
Real quick, I believe it was in your article that you said that there were at least some indications in the White House and at the Department of Justice that there were talks about whether they should just call these men enemy combatants and turn them over to Donald Rumsfeld to be tortured.
I don't know about that part, actually.
It was something that has been ever-present in all the terrorism cases across the country.
The Buffalo Six from Lackawanna, I talked to one of the attorneys in that case, and he told me that one of the reasons that they agreed to plead guilty and end that matter the way that they did was because they feared becoming designated as enemy combatants.
It's something that has always been a sub-current for anybody facing these kinds of charges.
How far do you want to push it?
Does the government always seem to have that option, and where that legal line rests in the minds of the Justice Department these days is still unclear and threatening enough that if you had an opportunity to plead guilty and serve time in an American prison, that seemed like a better deal than possibly being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay or a brig off the South Carolina coast.
Straight out of an episode of Law & Order, right?
Here's your plea deal.
You either plead guilty to all charges and accept the maximum sentence or will turn you over to the Navy to be tortured.
It is a fear that people have had, and it's hard to not consider that a genuine threat when you look at the other cases.
Oh, man.
Now, again, for those just tuning in, you might have missed it.
These guys were all innocent.
This prosecution was completely bogus.
The 12 jurors suckers who condemned innocent people to be held in cages simply because the government presented the weakest case probably ever presented in a federal court or pretty close.
These men were convicted and then released.
This is my little moral lesson I want to throw in here at the end.
This is why we have trials is because prosecutors are not angels.
They're just people, too.
When they're not deliberately conspiring with the State Department, the military and the FBI to perjure themselves on the stand and convict innocent people, they make mistakes.
This is why we don't just turn people over to the Navy because they're bad guys.
This is why we give them trials and we have appeals and we have the Bill of Rights to make sure that innocent people don't end up getting the chair for being a terrorist when really they're just some schmuck.
Sorry, I just had to throw that in.
Now, I wanted to ask you also real quick, who is the most talkative of the defense lawyers of these guys that I need to try to talk to?
I would talk to Bill Swar, William Swar, S-W-O-R.
He was one of the lawyers.
I think his client was Elmar Doody.
Jim Thomas was also counsel for Ahmed Hanan and basically they were all pretty good and fairly accessible afterward.
I think they did the best they could under extremely difficult circumstances and I think that these days in particular, they're probably more than happy to say what they experienced.
Let me tell you this, I sure appreciate your time today.
This has been a very good backgrounder.
I'm trying to do all the research I can on this case and I think it's of concern.
You mentioned the Lackawanna 6 and I'll probably want a lawyer's email address from you about that case too, but the Lodi case in California, the Miami plot to bloat the Sears Tower, the Fort Dix 6 and a great many of these terrorist plots seem to be a lot of hooey about a lot of nothing.
It doesn't take much to see that these things sometimes are not what they seem.
But this Detroit so-called sleeper cell case being the first one seems to me like a pretty bad indicator of the road we're going to start going down from there on and I guess we've stayed pretty much true to that since.
Well, when you look at that Miami case in particular, it's something that one would have hoped that after the Detroit case fell apart that the government would be a little bit more circumspect about these kinds of allegations.
I didn't cover the Miami case but from an armchair quarterback perspective it does look like it has some of the same weaknesses.
Alright everybody, Ronald J. Hansen from the Detroit News, thanks very much for your time today.
We'll see you next time.