07/21/14 – Maria McFarland – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our next guest is Maria McFarlane from Human Rights Watch, and they've got a brand new report out, Illusion of Justice, Human Rights Abuses in U.S. Terrorism Prosecutions.
You can see the pretty lengthy and informative splash here at hrw.org.
Human Rights, U.S. Terrorism Prosecutions, often an illusion.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Maria?
Thanks very much.
I'm doing well, thanks.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here, and thank you for doing this work.
It's such an important story, and there was a time where hardly anyone would point this out.
I almost wrote a book about it at one point myself a few years ago, but was told I wouldn't be able to get it published, so don't bother kind of thing, and probably should have anyway.
But anyway, what a great story, and it's not focused exclusively on the 50 or so, probably closer to 60 now, outright entrapment jobs, as Trevor Aronson has documented in his great book, The Terror Factor.
But you go beyond that and talk about a lot of the kind of just trumped up charges, too, that on TV and the Orange Alert and everything, it sounds like, oh my God, they saved us from an al-Qaeda sleeper cell, but it turns out it was much less than that.
But anyway, so I was hoping you could focus more on that angle than the outright entrapments, but we could talk about entrapments, too.
But anyway, I'll let you just go ahead and give us an overview of this thing here.
I'm very excited, you can tell.
Sure, yeah.
Well, since 9-11, there have been nearly 500 terrorism-related prosecutions, according to the federal government.
And I'm sure many of those involved people who were, in fact, planning or financing terrorist acts.
But when we took a close look at 27 of those cases, involving over 70 defendants, we found abuses at all stages of the case, from the moment of investigation, where in many cases we found the FBI did lure people into the supposed terrorist acts, and through to trial, where often material support charges are used that are overly broad, where there is inflammatory evidence that is introduced, and on through to the punishment phase, where not only are people being punished with excessively harsh sentences due to the terrorism enhancement, which leads to basically a minimum 17-year sentence, as well as the problem of solitary confinement.
Many of the people who end up with terrorism convictions are held in solitary confinement, sometimes pre-trial, and many others are under SAM, Special Administrative Measures, which prohibit their contact with anybody except prison guards, for extended periods of time.
And all of those...
And you're saying pre-trial?
They're isolated like that, even pre-trial?
Or both?
We found a lot of cases of solitary confinement pre-trial for months on end.
Thank you, I'm sorry, I just wanted to clarify.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I'm sorry, please continue.
Yeah, so you're basically with a situation where somebody could just be a vulnerable person, mentally ill, poor, who wants money, and they get targeted by the FBI, usually these are people in American Muslim communities, at least those are the ones we focused on, who get picked on by an informant, convinced to take some steps towards the Terrorist Act, and then get prosecuted in these unfair trials, and then locked up for decades in these horrific conditions.
And that's just unjust, it's cruel to the people involved, to their families, but it's also having a pretty profound impact on American Muslim communities, which are precisely the communities that the Obama administration and the FBI have repeatedly said they want to work with as partners to prevent terrorism.
Instead, these sorts of abusive investigations and prosecutions are creating fear and mistrust, and a sense among these communities that they're constantly being watched, and that they can't trust any outsiders.
All right, so yeah, a lot of important things to go back over there.
One thing I want to hit on, or let you elaborate on, would be what you just mentioned there about, it's mostly Muslims, but it's not all, and that's such an important point to make, even though it kind of shouldn't be, right?
But it is, because people just go, ah, well, it's just a bunch of Muslims, and I'm not one, and I don't even know any, and so what the hell do I care, kind of a thing.
But in fact, they do this kind of thing to white people too, they do this to right-wing, you know, the Hutteri militia, and all this kind of nonsense that they try to entrap and set up, and they do the same thing to earth-first or type left-wingers all the time, including all the enhancements and special administrative measures that you mentioned and all that, right?
Well, the terrorism enhancement would apply for any crime of, any terrorism offense, and But that could mean lighting a Ford Expedition on fire at a parking lot because you're a hippie kind of a thing, that they try to, they try to blow up into an al-Qaeda attack.
If they frame it as a terrorism-related offense, yeah.
I mean, we focused in this report on cases involving the American Muslim community precisely because it's having this very profound impact on that community, and you know, the American people in general should be upset that this is what the FBI is using its resources for.
You know, 40% of the FBI's budget now is supposed to go to counterterrorism, and they've adopted this approach that they say is preventive, but in fact, it's really, in many cases, the FBI going into communities on fishing expeditions, finding someone who's vulnerable, who's mentally ill or very young, and basically turning them into would-be terrorists.
Well, and meanwhile, real attacks like Detroit, Times Square, Boston happen right under their nose because they're too busy trapping some idiot into, oh yeah, you're going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch, kid.
Say you love Osama, I'll give you $20,000.
Yeah, you could ask a lot of questions about it.
I mean, is the FBI properly spending that many resources on counterterrorism as opposed to other sorts of crimes that are being committed, corporate crimes, for example?
And then, even within counterterrorism, why on earth are they trying to build cases against these people who, under no imaginable circumstances, would even be capable or competent of carrying out these crimes on their own, much less have the resources to do so, if it hadn't been for the FBI?
Yeah.
Well, and I think it is, the way Trevor Aronson counted up, is about 50 of them were the outright entrapments, and the worst one to me was Hamid Hayat, because I guess just he was the youngest, the kid in Lodi, California, who the FBI put the words in his mouth that his grandfather's training Al-Qaeda in his basement in pole vaulting techniques for, I guess, Al-Qaeda's role in the upcoming Olympic Games at the time, or whatever it was the FBI agent was fantasizing about when he put those words in the kid's mouth.
And the jury went ahead and put him in prison, 25 to life, over such nonsense, such outright nonsense.
Now, one of the cases that I find most disturbing is the one of Rezwan Ferdow, who was a young man who was, the FBI agents recognized from the beginning, mentally unwell.
And they decided to send an informant after him, and his mental condition deteriorated throughout his entire time talking to the FBI, to the point that he was wearing diapers and his father had to quit his job to take care of him, yet they continued to push him forward towards carrying out some kind of action that the FBI itself was funding, and you know, they themselves hashed the plot for.
I'm sorry, which city was that in?
That's how I memorize these, is by the town.
That's in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, no, I don't even know that one.
Yeah, and then there's another case that is actually going to be the focus of an HBO documentary this evening, which is the case of the Newburgh Four in Newburgh, New York.
And that case involved four men who were poor, they were indigent.
One of them was approached by an informant who had just been hanging out at the local Newburgh mosque, for no reason we can make any sense of, and you know, he'd just lost his job at Walmart, and he was this guy who, you know, the judge described him as a buffoon.
I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I have to interrupt you here, Maria, we gotta take this break, but when we get back, we'll pick up with that story of the buffoon's entrapment at the hands of some other buffoons at the FBI here.
Okay, thank you.
Maria McFarlane from HRW, hrw.org.
One sec, y'all.
Alright, you guys, well, so, she had to go.
That was Maria McFarlane from Human Rights Watch, US terrorism prosecution is often an illusion, I guess we weren't really clear in the email about how long she could stay, so she emailed me and she had to go.
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