01/04/13 – Trevor Aaronson – The Scott Horton Show

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For Pacifica Radio, January 4th, 2013, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, everybody, and welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Friday night from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
My website is scotthorton.org, and you can find all my interview archives there.
I have more than 2,500 of them now, going back to 2003.
The following is an interview I recorded this afternoon with Trevor Aronson, author of the new book The Terror Factory, Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism.
He is the associate director and co-founder of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
Welcome to the show, Trevor.
How are you doing?
Great, great.
Thanks for having me.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And, of course, many people are probably familiar with the great work that you did for Mother Jones on this very question.
And it's something that, well, I guess maybe this should be my first question for you.
When you delve into the subject of the epidemic of big, bogus, FBI-created terror plots in America, did you find that most Americans can see right through this?
It's so obviously ridiculous?
Or do the American people really think that Osama bin Laden had 500 sleeper cells all over America for the last 10 years?
I think that's a hard question to answer.
But my perception is that most Americans don't realize that the FBI is actually behind many of these plots.
And the reason for that is that the government, and this is true of most crime stories, but particularly of terrorism stories, the government is very effective at controlling the narrative.
And by that I mean the government and the Department of Justice hold a big press conference, and they say, hey, look, we've caught this group of four or five guys, and they were plotting to bomb the subway or blow up a skyscraper.
And just before they were about to strike, we stepped in and arrested them.
And only later do we find out that that really wasn't the case.
The story wasn't that simple.
The real story was that the FBI, through an informant or an undercover agent, acted as an agent provocateur and found these four or five guys and said, hey, if you want to bomb the subway or if you want to bomb a building, I can give you the bomb.
And I can give you the means to do it.
And by the time that information comes out, the story is off the front page and off the broadcast news.
So Americans are really only left with that first impression largely, which is, oh, my gosh, there was this terrorist plot, and it was dangerous, and people could have been killed.
But the truth is that that was never the case.
And in almost all of these terrorism things, in almost all of the terrorism plots we've heard about since 9-11, it was actually an FBI creation, and these people never on their own had the capacity to commit acts of terrorism.
And I don't think that's particularly well known.
I don't think most Americans realize that the FBI has actually been behind the majority of the terrorist plots since 9-11, that they weren't real – I'm sorry, the majority of terrorist plots since 9-11, they weren't real terrorist plots.
They were these FBI sting operations intended to lure out people the FBI says were interested in committing acts of terrorism, but who evidence suggests had no capacity on their own for terrorism.
Well, you know, the magic word for people to pay attention to when these stories break, because you're right, whenever the story first breaks, it's, oh, no, terror plot busted.
This guy was going to fly an unmanned aerial vehicle and attack the Pentagon with it, and this guy was going to blow up everybody at the JFK Airport.
And boy, it's a good thing we stopped them, but then even sometimes the same night, usually it's the next day or a few days later, you hear the word informant.
That's right.
You know, the press and the media are getting better at more aggressively questioning the DOJ initially about these types of cases and asking them specifically, hey, was there an informant involved?
Did these people actually have connections to al-Qaeda or a terrorist organization?
And, you know, I think a critical reader or a critical news consumer in hearing these stories should do exactly what you're saying, which is to ask themselves, like, what role did this informant play?
You know, were these people actually connected to terrorist organizations?
And, you know, in the majority of these cases and all of these thing operations, what we find is that, you know, the informant plays an extraordinary role.
You know, in most cases, the informant is posing as an al-Qaeda operative, and the targets are largely hapless people who, you know, in many cases have mental problems and other cases have financial issues.
And, you know, the informant who is either making a lot of money by working for the FBI or, you know, is hung up on a criminal charge of his own, has an obvious incentive to try to create a plot to bring a case because, you know, he's basically on the FBI's leash and he needs to show some results.
And so that combination creates, you know, an informant who is very aggressive meeting a target who is rather susceptible.
And, you know, what we end up having are these terrorism, these sting operations that seem fantastical and seem dangerous, but they're really not.
You know, I mean, I think, you know, one thing to keep in mind with these things is that, you know, it isn't hard to commit an act of terrorism in the United States, right?
Like, if you consider how many people have died from lone gunmen and what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, you know, you can carry out a terrible, you know, terrorist attack for cheap and not have to, you know, have, you know, these great resources.
But, you know, the people that are coming up in terrorism sting operations aren't even capable of that.
You know, these are people who are on the fringes of society, who are incapable of minor offenses, yet are then lured into FBI sting operations where they say all kinds of odious and terrible things about how they want to, you know, destroy America and kill innocent Americans.
But they never had any means to do any of that.
They never had any means to, you know, carry forward the bomb plot or any kind of attack, were it not for the FBI informant or an FBI recovery agent saying, hey, here I am, let's do this, I can provide all the means you want.
And I think this should raise clear questions for Americans about entrapment.
You know, if these people were never able to commit terrorism on their own and they never had connections to any terrorist organization, I think there's a real question about justice and the administration of justice in the United States, if we're, you know, putting these people forward as terrorists and then prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law in U.S. criminal courts when, in fact, you know, the evidence suggests that these really weren't terrorists at all.
All right.
Now, on the original question about, you know, whether the American people get it or not, I guess really the problem is until the rest of the journalists in America take your attitude, I mean, I forget exactly how you break down the numbers.
There are hundreds of bogus cases, but there are, I think you say in the book, at least 49 or 50 that are outright agent provocateurs came in, did everything but hold a gun to their head and make them do it and then put them away.
I think it's very important, and you do touch on this in the book a bit too, that they ought to be under terrible pressure for this.
What they're doing actually is a really lousy job, and the next time some real terrorists try to kill some real people in this country, they're probably going to get away with it because the FBI is screwing around chasing their tail and trapping the slowest kid at the Islamic bookstore in some town that never saw a terrorist attack in its entire history.
Absolutely.
You know, I think, as I mentioned in the book, that this is something I feel that the traditional media and mainstream media have been very complicit in and have been kind of almost a naive or, you know, a naive ally to be as critical as I can toward the media and with the FBI.
And by that I mean, you know, when these plots are announced, it really isn't met with, as you're saying, a lot of criticism or even skepticism.
Often it's taken, you know, swallowed whole that, yes, he must have been dangerous.
And, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the law enforcement with most crime stories, but terrorism in particular, is able to control that narrative initially by saying, you know, look, here are guys that wanted to do terrible things.
You know, one of the more recent examples of this is a young Bangladeshi man who was accused of wanting to bomb the New York Federal Reserve building.
And it turned out that, you know, he had no capacity on his own to do it.
The bomb was provided by an FBI undercover agent, and he was lured into the plot by an informant.
But, you know, the initial reports of that were that this was a dangerous man who, you know, was ready, able, and willing to, you know, blow up a bomb at the Federal Reserve, killing, you know, hundreds, if not more.
But the truth is that in the beginning the media was really resistant and hesitant to question whether this was a real terrorist.
You know, I would say that he wasn't because he never had the capability on his own.
And I think what happens a lot is, you know, particularly with the mainstream media, you know, there's an unwillingness to want to be cut out from information.
You know, the more critical you are with the law enforcement, the less likely you're going to get information from them because they see you as a critic of the agency.
That's true of, like, a local cops reporter, and it's also true of people like me who cover the FBI and national security.
If you're, you know, consistently critical of them, it can be harder to get information as a result.
At the same time, I think the media have been concerned about this story because there's always the question of, well, what if there is an attack?
You know, and then we write, you know, very critically and report a story very critically about FBI counterterrorism, and just as we're about to release it or maybe the day after we release it, there is a real terrorist attack.
And I think that concerns media enough that they don't want to be critical of these types of programs.
But I think that the tide is slowly turning.
I mean, I'd like to think that, you know, some of my work is having an effect on this, that you're seeing more and more skepticism of the media, even though it's probably not as strong as I would like.
You know, it's worth acknowledging, for example, that, you know, the New York Times in reporting about the New York Federal Reserve building bomber in the fifth or sixth paragraph had a pretty meaty summary of, you know, why these types of sting operations are controversial and some of the entrapment issues involved.
And that wasn't something the mainstream media was reporting on even a year ago.
And so I think there's slowly been some change with this, but not nearly enough as there should be.
I mean, I think, you know, obviously the media is supposed to be watchdogs in government, and that includes, you know, the largest federal law enforcement agency we have.
And so I think, you know, instead of, you know, taking for granted that when the government says someone is a terrorist, they're a terrorist, we should be questioning that and saying, well, is this person a terrorist?
Because the media in many ways has kind of abdicated the labeling of terrorism and terrorists to the government.
So anyone the government labels a terrorist, the media then says, okay, well, that person was a terrorist.
But I think the media needs to do a better job of being more skeptical and questioning the people that the FBI and the Department of Justice are labeling as terrorists and question them.
Why is this person a terrorist?
If he never had connections to actual terrorist groups and he never had the capability on his own to commit terrorism, is he a terrorist?
And I think most people would say that he's probably not a terrorist under that definition.
Well, and it's going to take media pressure like your book and other reporting, and it has to be a big deal because, as you talk about in the book, the only standard that the FBI uses to check themselves whether they're doing a good job or not is whether they're getting away with it or not.
And so they need to know that out here in the country they're a laughingstock.
And we think the FBI is a big joke when they're going around tricking a kid who's borderline retarded and saying something stupid into open microphone.
And we think they're a joke.
And the reason I really emphasize that is because that's all they care about, the FBI, is public relations themselves.
And so I think we ought to all be laughing at the FBI.
It's the only way to stop them.
Absolutely.
And I think one of the things that would help with this is if there were greater congressional oversight over these types of prosecutions, the use of informants.
Right now the FBI uses informants, and many of whom are criminals, records of lying, largely with impunity.
There aren't congressional committees that look at this, that question the FBI, why did you use this informant?
Was this informant really the person you should be using?
And secondly, Congress has really been asleep in questioning the types of cases the FBI has brought to it in saying that these are terrorism cases.
If you look at the FBI director's testimony over the last three years to Congress, he cites specifically sting operations involving alleged terrorists who had no capacity on their own for terrorism but were lured into a plot by an FBI informant, and then all the means were provided by the FBI in the sting operation.
The FBI director has cited those as saying, look, we're doing our job, we're fighting terrorism.
And I think it's important to realize that this is really a bureaucratic phenomenon in many ways because every year the FBI receives $3 billion for counterterrorism, and it's the largest portion of its budget.
So they can't spend all that money and then come back to Congress and say, hey, look, we spent your $3 billion, and we didn't find any terrorists.
And so these terrorism sting operations end up being a way of justifying the $3 billion spent, their way of coming forward and saying, hey, look, we're doing our job, we're protecting America from terrorists.
But it becomes a wag the dog phenomenon in the sense that by justifying it with these sting operations, they're then justifying future money to be spent on counterterrorism, and ultimately then that's going to create more and more sting operations and more and more questionable defendants being put forward as terrorists as a result of these sting operations.
The number of actual plots since 9-11 where people in America were in danger and a real terrorist was about to strike are very few.
An example of that is Najib al-Azizi in New York who came close to bombing the New York subway system.
But you can count them on your hands, the number of plots that were actually significant.
The rest of the plots, and we're talking there have been more than 500 defendants since 9-11, the rest of these people had no capacity to commit acts of terrorism in the United States.
They were not dangerous.
They were in many cases like the New York Fed bomber, someone who was hateful and odious on his own, but not dangerous on his own, and it was only the FBI and the FBI informant who made him dangerous by pretending to be an al-Qaeda agent and providing the bombs he would need for any kind of terrorist attack.
When it comes to the actual terrorists in the country, there's so few.
I think it's just one hand you can count them on.
Faisal Shahzad, the attempted Times Square bomber, and Abdulmutallab, the attempted Detroit bomber, they were stopped by civilians, not by the cops.
Zazie, I forgot how it was he got busted, but I think you're right that he was an actual terrorist who meant the American people harm.
Do you know how it was that they caught on to what he was doing?
They had some information about him traveling overseas to Pakistan for training, and then were following him as a result of that.
But you're right, he wasn't identified through the use of an informant, and I think you bring up a really important point, which is that these sting operations where they're getting people through informants, there's yet to be a case where they can point to and say, look, our informant lured out this man who had the capability to become a terrorist and was about to move forward in a plot, and we were able to break it up because the informant was there and the undercover agent was there to break it up and stop it.
It's only these kind of manufactured crimes that the FBI and informants are able to move in on, which is people that say they want to be terrorists for whatever reason or say they want to commit an act of terrorism but don't have the means on their own, and the FBI provides those means.
There's never been a case that the FBI is able to break up a plot like that through the use of an informant, and there's also never been a case where a lone wolf, kind of a sad sap guy who says he wants to commit an act of terrorism but on his own is incapable of that, runs across and meets an actual terrorist in the United States who's there to provide him with weapons and bombs for a plot.
The truth is that no evidence that's public exists to suggest that there are al-Qaeda agents in the United States right now ready and able to provide bombs for people that want to become terrorists.
The only people providing these bombs and these weapons are FBI agents and informants posing as terrorists.
So the idea that we're stopping lone wolves, which is what the FBI would say, and preventing them from meeting actual terrorists and becoming operational on their own, isn't really supported by the data because no data exists to suggest that there are actually terrorist operatives in the United States ready and willing to provide the means that the FBI is through these operations.
All right, now I don't want to focus too much on this, but I think it bears mentioning, which is you say in the book that when the FBI is out looking for somebody to entrap on this, they're looking for sympathizers that could become operators in their lingo.
One of the first checkboxes on the list is, do they hate our foreign policy?
And I noticed, and maybe this is just because of your negligence, Trevor, but I didn't see anything in there about the FBI informants telling their marks, don't you hate being free and don't you hate American freedom and don't you hate that American men can send their daughters to junior college and to vote in primary elections?
None of that is in there at all.
It's all about what are the Israelis doing to the Palestinians and what is the American military doing in Afghanistan, Iraq, et cetera, correct?
Yeah, you know, the FBI informants and agents use a number of lines like those to try to figure out if someone is radical in their terms and under their definitions of what radical means.
They're looking for people that are espousing beliefs that are anti-government, that are against Israel, and that includes a typical line that the informants often use in sting operations.
It's becoming less and less common, but a few years back, a typical line was about Abu Ghraib and the torture in Iraq, and informants and undercover agents would often say that to people, like, well, isn't it terrible what happened in Abu Ghraib and we should do something about that.
And, you know, it is terrible.
I mean, I think that, you know, obviously we torture people and it's something that I think, you know, history will look poorly on us for, but it's also something the FBI now uses as a way of kind of luring out people to say, oh, well, that's terrible what they did in Abu Ghraib and we should do something about it.
We should take revenge or we should, you know, act in that way.
In other words, the FBI understands the CIA's principle of blowback and what it is and what it means, and they make it useful to them.
And this whole thing about they hate us because how good we are is simply for the roots.
You know, that's a good point.
I mean, I think, you know, one of the questions that will come of this situation and in these terrorism sting operations is, you know, through these sting operations, you know, there have been more than 150 sting operations since 9-11, and as you mentioned, more than 50 were people who were involved with an agent provocateur who had no capacity on their own, and the undercover agent or informant provided the means.
You know, I question what the blowback of this is going to be.
You know, for example, maybe someone that we've labeled a terrorist before actually later becomes a terrorist, and, you know, maybe the alienation that the FBI now has with the Muslim community in the United States, perhaps, you know, there will be a blowback and effects of people who, you know, feel that they are mistreated because of FBI policies in Muslim communities and take up arms or violence as a result of that.
So there's all kinds of blowback questions involved in this kind of stuff, and certainly it is interesting that we're using something like Abu Ghraib as an example of how to lure out people that we suspect of being terrorists.
You know, we kind of use our own crimes as a way of, you know, inciting others.
And now a big part of that blowback, I think, and you talk about this, you do a great job discussing at least the dangers of, I think, what's already happening and what could happen here as far as Muslim communities in America, because I guess most Muslims are first or second generation, and there's only a few million Muslims in America, but they're mostly first and second generation immigrants.
And they've always been very successfully integrated, right?
They own businesses, and they go to the universities, and they take part in their communities, and they're not like the Muslims in the ghettos of Paris or in other major cities in Europe where they're kept separate.
They really have been integrated very well, and yet they're being made to feel very unwelcome by the millions, and they're being treated, it's this Randy Weaver treatment, right?
They've become a snitch for us, or else who knows what hell might come down upon your head.
And how many people, if they've got 15,000 informants that they've coerced, obviously, most of them into being their informants, how many people, how many more than that have they threatened and harassed and messed with and questioned over and over again for no reason, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, tried to coerce into becoming informants?
I mean, that's going to change the entire future history of American Muslims, if you understand what I mean.
I think you discuss it very well in the book.
Absolutely.
I think if you look at, as you were saying, the Muslim community in the United States compared to Europe specifically, it's very different here.
These are largely affluent communities that have integrated very well into American life.
And I mentioned a Pew study in the book that looked at immigrant communities and compared, for example, Hispanic immigrants and Asian immigrants and Muslim and Arab immigrants.
And what it found was that Muslim immigrants, by and large, and by a much larger margin than other immigrant populations, are far more interested in fully integrating into American life, into becoming citizens.
And I think that's very telling, that the perception of Islamic terrorism is that these are people stuck in the very old ways of these Muslim countries, perhaps even before.
If you look at some of the brands of Islam that they practice, these are the brands of Islam that were practiced hundreds of years ago but aren't really even practiced today in the Middle East.
But that's not the case among Muslims in the United States.
I mean, Muslims in the United States are very well integrated, very affluent, far more affluent than other immigrant groups.
And if you look at studies that were done after 9-11, we had tremendous support from Muslim communities in the United States.
And there was really little to no evidence to suggest that Muslim communities in the United States were sympathetic to terrorism, were at all interested in harboring terrorists.
But because of the shock and awe of 9-11 and rather a very aggressive response to it, we began targeting Muslim communities with the belief that because they're Muslim, they must have some harboring terrorists or some sympathies there.
And as a result, we've recruited informants to an aggressive extent.
We've used informants to recruit other informants.
And this has created such a chilling of relations between the Muslim communities and the FBI that now, when you look at Muslim civil rights groups like Muslim Advocates and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, they tell Muslim Americans, if the FBI knocks on your door, don't talk to them, call your lawyer, because of the fear that just by cooperating in some way, they will be targeted to become informants for the FBI.
And I think this raises a really significant question about whether this blowback effect, which is that by using informants and using them so aggressively in Muslim communities that we've cut off kind of the voluntary flow of information from Muslim communities, if we're actually having a detrimental effect on our national security and counterterrorism.
And by that, I mean if Muslims in the United States are so concerned about cooperating with the FBI and so scared about cooperating with the FBI, then we're likely not to get the really kind of important information that we need for national security.
And to specify, if you're a business owner and you're a member of the local mosque, you know everyone in that community.
And you also know when someone suspicious is in that community.
Well, that's the person you want providing information to you.
That's the person you want calling the FBI and saying, hey, there's this new guy who is in the community and he's espousing really kind of dangerous things and he says he wants to do violence and no one here knows him.
Maybe you should check him out.
Instead, what we have are these paid informants who have an incentive to find people.
And they're the ones who are then targeting people and telling the FBI, hey, you know, this guy is dangerous.
But, you know, they have a financial incentive to find terrorists, whereas the local business owner is just interested in the safety of his community.
But because of this aggressive stance we've taken with Muslim communities, that local business owner or that local imam is too concerned to cooperate directly with the FBI that they end up not providing information or they just call their local care or Muslim advocates chapter and say, you know, hey, this is what I've heard.
And some of that information may get to the FBI.
But in many cases, that voluntary flow of information that's so important for law enforcement because those are the people in the best position to know is really being stifled by the FBI's activities.
Well, and, you know, they're right to be scared of the FBI.
These guys are completely ruthless.
I mean, as you describe in the book, some guy minding his own business.
And the feds come up and say, hey, we know you're cheating on your wife.
You're going to become a snitch for us or else we're going to destroy your whole life.
Pal, how do you like that?
And that's just one example, right?
Right.
You know, the FBI uses all kinds of leverage against people to become informants.
And that includes, you know, evidence of an extramarital affair.
You know, perhaps, you know, the person is interested, you know, likes pornography and is ashamed of it and the FBI finds that out.
And they say, okay, well, if you don't work with us, we're going to tell the community that you're very into pornography, which would shame him and the community.
And that's the type of information that they're able to use to recruit informants.
You know, even more significant, what they're able to use is immigration.
You know, if you're someone who has a green card or has immigration status that is a little bit shaky, you know, the FBI will use that against you to recruit you as an informant.
They will say, you know, unless you work with us as an informant, you know, you may get deported.
Or let's say you're in the United States and you're trying to get your relatives over from the Middle East or from Africa or Asia, and they say to you, you know, unless you work with us, you're not going to get your family over.
We're going to make sure that doesn't happen.
And through, you know, after 9-11, through the explosive growth of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, you know, the FBI and ICE work together very closely now so that there is that coordination.
So the FBI says, hey, you know, we're looking at this guy.
Can you pull up some information?
And an ICE guy will, you know, pull the information on the immigrant and find out that maybe he's got an immigration status violation, and they'll use that very effectively to recruit them as informants.
And I think that obviously creates a lot of mistrust.
You know, being an immigrant here, there's nothing illegal about being an immigrant here.
And so the FBI is using something that is considered a civil action, you know, immigration violation, some kind of immigration status problem, and using that as leverage to get them to become informants in the United States.
And we're not just talking about some guy that they busted him doing something, but even just regular people minding their own business.
And this isn't just the informants, but these are the people they're entrapping too.
Like, I was wondering, could you tell the story of the synagogue plot, the supposed synagogue plot, and the pizza man who, as far as anyone could tell, was just making pizza and living his life before the feds invaded him?
Right.
There was a man named Muhammad Hussein who lived in Albany.
And, you know, he was supporting his family.
He had a mentally disabled brother from Bangladesh and ran a pizza shop and would, you know, buy properties, run down properties at the city auction and fix them up and use them as rentals, and, you know, had done well for himself.
You know, it was kind of a cliché example of the American dream.
An immigrant comes here, works really hard, and is able to make a good life for himself and his family.
And he ended up getting involved in a plot in which the FBI used an informant named Shahed Hussein who was, you know, a criminal himself, was hung up on a criminal violation, and had evidence suggesting that he was committing bankruptcy fraud while he was working for the FBI.
And he and a local imam were interested in doing some kind of financial transaction, and Shahed Hussein said he would loan money to Muhammad Hussein who needed some money to help fix up one of his rental properties.
And the informant suggested that they get a religious man to oversee the transaction, and that was an imam named Yasin Aref.
And Aref was someone that the FBI was interested in.
It's still somewhat unclear why, but there was information from Iraq that suggested that Aref may have had very distant connections to terrorism.
You know, it's a complicated story, but to speed it up, what ended up happening was that the informant ended up, you know, making references to how he was bringing in Stinger missiles and importing them to Mujahideen in New York.
So he was importing missiles from China and then bringing them to terrorists in New York, and the money he was raising was, you know, as a part of that.
So what the federal government later alleged was that the money that Yasin Aref had counted and Muhammad Hussein had taken as a loan was actually laundered money to support terrorists.
And what came out of trial was the real question of whether any of these guys actually had any knowledge that what they were doing had anything to do with terrorism.
It was the informant who was very aggressive in mentioning things and saying, you know, under his breath almost about terrorism and, you know, Stinger missiles.
But the evidence really suggested that Muhammad Hussein really had no idea that this was about terrorism.
He was just taking a loan and was very much hounded by the informant as part of that.
So I interviewed Muhammad Hussein in prison, and he talks about how he had no idea about any of this.
He had no idea it was supposed to be terrorism until he was arrested and he hears what the government is claiming as evidence against him.
And this was a story that the local newspaper in Albany and the community was largely against the FBI.
They thought this was a grave injustice and protested outside the courtroom.
And ultimately they were convicted.
Yasin Aref is in prison for, I think, 20-some years and Muhammad Hussein for 15.
And, you know, these are men that never had any connections to terrorism that we can discern, were never involved in any sort of plot.
But because the grasp of the FBI informant made it appear that there was a financial transaction that had a tangential link to terrorism, that was enough to hang them up on terrorism charges.
And it's a real shame.
You know, I think what's amazing about that case is Muhammad Hussein, who owned the pizzeria and the Bangladeshi man, you know, he's not someone who would be a terrorist.
You know, this is a man who had children and had a business and had a great life in the United States.
What incentive is it for him to be involved in terrorism?
I mean, there's none.
You know, no person who has a comfortable life in the United States is really going to be interested in terrorism.
And that was Muhammad Hussein.
But ultimately, because of that aggressive informant, the FBI was able to get a conviction.
And that informant, Hussein, has been used over and over again.
You know, he was used in a plot involving four African-American converts to bomb a synagogue in the Bronx.
And then most recently, he was caught trying to trap a man in Pittsburgh, you know, in some sort of plot that ultimately failed.
And he's become kind of a super informant for the FBI, someone who's very good at lying and, you know, drawing out people that the FBI believes are terrorists and kind of trapping them in, you know, plots that by themselves they would have had no ability to get involved in.
Right.
Now, I'm sorry, because I messed up and I conflated the two different plots together.
The Albany plot and the synagogue plot.
But thank you for answering the Albany plot, because that is the one that I was talking about that I meant to refer to.
And what you're saying is they were after a local imam, but they needed a way to get in with him.
And so they targeted this pizza man just to get at the third man and screw him.
The pizza man doesn't matter.
He had no, as far as the way you paint the picture, he didn't even have politics, man.
He just had a family and a business.
Right.
And, you know, the FBI informant really kind of, you know, was aggressive in pursuing him.
You know, the FBI needed, in that case, the FBI wanted to get at the local imam, and they needed somehow a way to get at him.
And so they chose Mohammed Hossein, who attended the mosque, as an entry point, because they knew they could kind of work with him.
And so, you know, they ended up, for a year, the FBI informant aggressively pursued him and would show up at the pizzeria.
And, you know, the way he ultimately got in with Mohammed Hossein was he said he admired Hossein's faith.
You know, he was a very devout Muslim, and the informant said, you know, I want to be like you.
I want to practice Islam like you do, and can you tell me how to do this?
And, you know, Hossein, being religious, felt it was his duty to help someone who asked him for guidance on his faith.
And ultimately that's, you know, what the FBI exploited in getting the informant close to him.
And then over time the informant, you know, tells him, like, you know, I make a lot of money for my import business, and I can loan you the money to buy the boilers you need for your rental properties.
And all of that was largely a construct just to get the imam in to oversee the loan, because in Islam it's customary that financial transactions are overseen by a religious leader or an elder.
And that financial transaction was only, you know, used as a gambit in order for the FBI to focus in on this man Yassin Aref, the imam whom they believed was at least tangentially linked to some sort of terrorism in Iraq.
And later came out a trial that, you know, the evidence that the FBI had from Iraq was very circumstantial, and there really is no clear evidence that Yassin Aref had any clear connections to terrorism whatsoever.
Right.
The guy that they were really after, he was only knew a guy who knew a guy kind of thing anyway.
Exactly.
You know, this was a guy who happened to know a guy who knew a guy.
And in many of these terrorism cases, that's about as close to, you know, terrorist as many of them get.
You know, it's like someone knew a guy who knew a guy, or in Yassin Aref's case, he knew someone who knew someone while he was living in Syria as an Iraqi refugee, and that was enough to make the FBI very suspicious of him.
In other cases, you know, such as the other case I mentioned briefly about the synagogue bombing, you know, these were guys that had no connection on their own to anyone.
You know, they'd never left the country.
They'd really never even left New York State.
And, you know, they had no connection to terrorism whatsoever.
So, you know, in cases where there is a link to terrorism, that link is, you know, usually pretty obscure.
But in many of these cases, there really isn't a link to terrorism.
The only, you know, purported terrorist is actually an FBI informant who's posing as a terrorist.
And now on that synagogue plot, it's an interesting story because I think as you portray it in the book, the informant just went trolling for months and months until he could find a loser, loser enough to do as he was told with a little bit of bait, basically, is how he did this.
But then the guy that he convinced to go along with him on this, he sure isn't a very sympathetic character.
And I don't find myself feeling very sorry that he went to prison if he's that easy to convince to kill a bunch of people.
And so kind of screw him, right?
But then on the other hand, I wonder if that's not really the point.
The point is the FBI going around and doing this to people, not so much the individual cases.
I mean, obviously, the pizza guy was, as we discussed, just an innocent man they used to take down another innocent man.
But this guy in the synagogue plot, I wonder, as you're investigating all these cases, how sympathetic do most of these characters turn out to be, like, say, on the two extremes here?
Right.
You know, I think you've hit on the head an issue that's a real challenge in reporting on these types of cases.
And that is that many of them aren't sympathetic.
And, you know, there are people that they are caught on tape saying really hateful things, you know, that they want to kill Americans or they want to kill Jews and, you know, they want to get the blood bath.
And, you know, no good person says those types of things.
So these are people that, you know, based on the things they say, they're not very sympathetic.
And James Cromedy, the man who was involved in the Newburgh case involving the synagogue bombings, was an example of that.
You know, he talked consistently about how he wanted to kill Jewish people in the United States, how he wanted to, you know, get involved in some kind of terrorist attack.
But he was also, you know, not very bright, you know, to say the least.
You know, he had a history of mental problems.
And, you know, the challenge in a story like this is the fact that many of the people, through what they say, show themselves to be very odious people, you know, people that you wouldn't like, that aren't sympathetic.
But the point in this is that they, just because they're hateful people, just because they're odious people, doesn't make them terrorists because they never had any ability on their own to commit acts of terrorism.
You know, there's a lot of jerks in the United States, but not a lot of jerks actually become criminals and, you know, killers of some kind.
You know, I think if we were targeting communities, we would find all sorts of people like this, not just in the Muslim community.
But the significant part of this is that you need to tell the story of these odious people that are caught to show how the FBI, through its kind of dragnet approach in Muslim communities, is really catching these people on the fringe of the society.
You know, these people that are down and out, who are mentally troubled, who are, you know, in some cases, if not mentally troubled, not very bright.
And the FBI then uses them and pulls them in the plot and says, okay, and really stokes their anger, however misplaced that anger is and that hatred, and gets them to say, okay, I'm going to take this anger and I'm going to move forward in a plot to do something.
Because a man like James Cromedy, who worked at Walmart, who at one point had gone to jail for selling crack cocaine as a young man and admitted to a psychologist that he had mental problems, is not someone on his own who was capable of terrorism.
You know, he just never would have been able to do it.
But it was the FBI informant who says to him and, you know, really kind of gets him going and aggressively, you know, stokes his anger and says, you know, don't you want to take revenge for all the things that the Jews have done to you and the evil that Jews have done in the world, and shouldn't we bomb a synagogue?
And gets him to agree to that and then ultimately provides all of the weapons that he needs to bomb that synagogue.
Well, you know, what the case showed was that, you know, James Cromedy left to his own devices, wouldn't have done anything.
In fact, there was one period during the investigation that the informant left for a month and Cromedy just didn't do anything.
He sat around his apartment and watched TV.
And, you know, then the informant comes back and he's mad that nothing's happened, so he prods Cromedy into moving forward in the terrorist plot.
And what I like about that as an example is that it's so indicative.
You know, when the informant left, the guy doesn't do anything.
He's just an angry man who stayed in his crappy apartment and watched, you know, TV all day.
But when the informant is there, then the action happens because it's the informant who is driving that person along.
And so if that's the case, if nothing has happened, unless it's an informant or an undercover agent pushing the plot forward, then, you know, clearly these people aren't terrorists because on their own they're not going to have done anything at all and they won't do anything if an informant or FBI agent isn't there to carry forward with the action.
All right.
Now, the FBI that we're stuck with is a whole new kind of creature compared to what it was on September 10th, especially the way you put it in your book.
It really has become a lot like the British MI5, a domestic intelligence agency.
It's the kind of thing that I imagine, and maybe I'm crazy, but I imagine J. Edgar Hoover would have said, whoa, we can do that, or maybe he would have approved or not approved, but he would have been surprised how far they could go.
And he was J. Edgar Hoover.
Yeah, you know, everyone associates kind of the overreaches of the FBI to J. Edgar Hoover.
And while there was a lot of FBI overreach under Hoover, the things that are going on today never would have been approved under Hoover's leadership.
And what's happened is that the FBI has really shifted from being a reactive law enforcement agency to a kind of proactive intelligence agency.
And by that I mean, you know, before a crime would happen and the FBI shows up in their blue jackets and investigates and figures out what happened and then they put together a criminal prosecution and the person who's responsible for the crime is ultimately prosecuted.
But what happened after 9-11 was that there was a mandate from the White House that there couldn't be a second attack, like never again, this couldn't happen again.
And so the FBI overnight, you know, had to become an intelligence agency that stops crime before it happens.
So it could no longer be the organization that would go and investigate a bombing.
It had to become the organization that would stop that bombing from happening, you know, like a Jack Bauer-style thing that is most cliche.
And so that's what's happened, that instead of being this agency that goes behind and investigates, we've become an agency that tries to preempt that attack.
And that's meant all kinds of things.
And one of those things that it's meant is the very aggressive use of informants to lure out people that we believe or the FBI believes are capable of committing terrorism or may be interested in committing terrorism in the future.
You know, for example, when you look at how informants were used under Hoover, and, you know, keep in mind that under Hoover there were no more than 1,500 informants, and today there are 15,000 informants.
But under Hoover, informants only had, like, were only eyes and ears.
They didn't get involved in plots.
They were just people that would provide information to FBI agents to say, hey, you know, I heard about this or I saw this.
What's happening with FBI informants today is that they are becoming actors in the plots.
They are becoming a member of the terror cell, so to speak.
You know, they are the person that's, you know, getting involved in the plot, in many cases leading that plot, and then, you know, testifying in court about what they had done.
And that raises, you know, significant questions about entrapment that I think legal scholars are still wrangling with.
But none of that would have happened under Hoover.
And certainly, you know, the crazy pressure that the FBI puts people under to become informants was not something that happened under Hoover.
You know, under Hoover, informants were paid.
They had various reasons of being informants, but, you know, you certainly weren't using immigration or blackmail of any kind to get people to become informants.
But that's what's happening today where you have this huge network of informants creating information and then feeding that information in the databases, and then those databases are suggesting to FBI agents where to target further informants, and then they're just kind of creating more and more information and digging up more and more information on Americans in the name of national security.
You know, for example, if you could look at what are called warrantless wiretaps as well, electronic wiretaps where, like, the FBI, you know, without a warrant, without court approval, looks at people's information, looks into email.
There's been an explosion of that under Obama, and all of this is done in the name of national security, but these raise significant questions about privacy, about entrapment, you know, how far is America's law enforcement maybe overreaching in the name of keeping us safe.
And I think that's what people need to understand is that the FBI that exists today is not the FBI that existed on September 10th.
You know, this is very much an intelligence agency that is interested in not only investigating crimes that happen, but specifically in preventing crimes that happen, and in its efforts to prevent crimes, there's a real question of whether it's creating the very criminals it says it's investigating.
You know, the central question of my book really is, like, you know, we say we're fighting terrorism and we're chasing terrorists, but through the use of these sting operations, are we creating the very terrorists that we say we're hunting?
Well, and, you know, I think we've already seen with, you know, various undercover activities targeting, particularly left-wing activist groups, I guess, so far, when you have an entire, you know, the FBI's entire mission altered in such a powerful way, you know, the same reason that they're entrapping these innocent Muslims because they need something to do, they're going to more and more, they're just going to be entrapping regular people because they need something to do, and this is the kind of thing that is already happening.
If they got 15,000 informants now, why won't it be 30,000 informants in a few years?
And really, I mean, like you talk about in the book, this guy's making pizza, he's getting on with his family, and some guy insists on becoming his good friend, so he's, all right, jeez, I don't know.
We're starting to move into a situation like we're a bunch of East Germans where you really can't trust that.
Why does this guy want to be my friend so bad?
Maybe particularly if you're an activist type.
You know, who knows what he's going to try to get you to say into a hidden mic or lie about what you said when, for some reason, his microphone wasn't on accidentally.
Exactly, and I think we've already seen some expansion of these types of activities and these tactics, as you're saying, among environmental activists and activists on the left, and I think because there isn't the outrage in the American community that I think there should be, the FBI really isn't under a lot of pressure to stop these types of tactics.
As far as the FBI is concerned, these tactics work.
They get convictions, and so why wouldn't they expand them into other areas?
But I think the significant question in any sting operation is, could that person have committed the crime were it not for the FBI?
Would they have had the opportunity to do that?
If you look, I compare terrorism stings to drug stings.
When the FBI does a drug sting or the DEA does a drug sting, they find a guy who wants to buy cocaine, like a briefcase of cocaine or whatever, and say, okay, we'll give us however many thousands of dollars that's going to cost, and they hand over the empty briefcase, and when he realizes there's no cocaine inside, the FBI rushes in and arrests him and prosecutes him.
Well, someone like that, you know, you can buy cocaine in the United States, right?
There's plenty of drugs available in the United States to buy.
So a sting operation like that, well, if it weren't for the FBI, he was likely to buy his cocaine from somewhere else.
But in terrorism stings, and then not only in the Muslim community, but also, as you're saying, in the activist community, particularly among environmental activists, there aren't people out there, say, ready and willing to provide bombs like there are people ready and willing to sell drugs.
And so in an FBI terrorism sting, when it's the FBI providing the means and the opportunity, they are the only ones who have the means and opportunity to provide.
There's no one else out there willing to provide the bomb.
And so in that case, if they're only able to commit it through that sting operation, then I think there's a real question to be asked about whether that's ethical and that's effective because that crime never could have been committed were it not for the FBI.
So it raises real questions about whether that could have been committed at all and, in particular, whether that person wasn't trapped.
It's amazing.
You say in the book here that, and I'm not sure as of exactly which date this is here, but 508 cases.
Well, I guess I should say, first of all, as you mentioned, one handful of actual terrorists.
I guess if you include Moussaoui, you might get an entire handful of terrorists since 9-11 prosecuted, of actual dangerous guys, including Muttalib and Shehzad, right?
And then you have 508 other cases, terrorism cases, in the federal court system.
243 of those had an informant.
158 of them were stings.
And then you say 49 or 50 were just outright provocateurs.
I mean, that's really something to try to get your head around.
That's kind of fun in a way, just how corrupt this thing is, this domestic part of the war on terror.
Absolutely.
I think people should really think about those numbers.
And I hope they'll do what I do, which is think about what does this really mean.
And to me, what it means is that the terrorist threat that we've been led to believe by the government is out there really isn't out there.
The handful of people who have committed acts of terrorism, or were capable of committing acts of terrorism, pales in comparison to the dozens of people involved in agent provocateur sting operations and the more than 150 people who were involved in other sting operations, where they weren't led in the plot, but they had no means on their own to do it, that it was the FBI that provided the means and opportunity.
What I hope someone will take away from this conversation, and from my book, is that the next time the FBI and the Department of Justice hold a press conference and they tell you about this terrible, scary terrorism plot that they just foiled, they'll question whether that person really was a terrorist.
Did they actually have connections to terrorism?
What was the role of the informant?
And I think what they'll find is that these weren't actual terrorists.
About once every four to six weeks, the FBI announces a new case, and every case they announce, it isn't a real terrorist.
It's someone who was on the fringes of society, lured into a plot, and was given the means and the opportunity to commit that act of terrorism, but on their own had no way of committing that act of terrorism.
So I think we should question whether the U.S. government has really overblown the threat that currently exists, and what role are providing billions of dollars in counterterrorism funding every year is playing, and what effect that's having on justice in the United States and the administration of that justice.
Well, you keep summing up with these great statements like that, but then I've got to keep insisting on keeping you one minute longer to make one more point or pick up on one more thing that you said.
I'm sorry, but you mentioned how this is still going on.
You could say the rate again, but the point being that the Obama administration has not stopped this at all.
This is not just we're talking about the bad old days of George W. Bush, but Eric Holder and Barack Obama have pursued this exact policy with, I think you describe in the book, greater vigor.
If you look at the numbers, toward the end of George W. Bush's term in office, there began to become a steep decline in the number of sting operations that the FBI and the Department of Justice were pursuing.
Immediately after Obama took office, there was a huge increase.
In fact, there are more sting operations under Obama per year than there were under Bush, and he's been very, very aggressive in pursuing these types of terrorism sting operations.
I think a lot of people questioned whether that policy would change under Obama, and what we found is that Obama has been very aggressive on national security.
You look, for example, at the Bradley Manning case and many other cases involving national security.
Obama has been very aggressive, and that's true of sting operations as well.
There really hasn't been a very reflective approach from the Obama administration or Holder's Justice Department on whether these types of sting operations should be carried out, and whether they actually keep us safer, or whether the FBI is really treading a fine line between stopping terrorism and entrapping people who wouldn't become terrorists on their own.
I think that's something that surprised me.
It surprised many people that the Obama administration has become so aggressive on these.
Now that he has a second term, it's unlikely to stop.
I think it probably will even increase.
Even if Mitt Romney were elected, I still think we would be facing the same type of problems.
Oh, sure.
The only thing is, Obama still, like you said, even you're surprised, he gets the benefit of the doubt.
Even after years in power of waging so many of what would have been Bush's third term now into his fourth term type policies, he still gets the benefit of the doubt.
That's why it's worth emphasizing so much that he hasn't changed this one bit, even though one would just assume, maybe from listening to this conversation, that what we're talking about is still the mopping up of Bush's mess.
Absolutely.
This isn't mopping up at all.
This is doubling down on Bush's policies, really.
That's exactly what Obama's done on terrorism sting operations.
He's never fully addressed this.
Eric Holder is the one that's addressed it so far.
What he says is that he's adamant that this is an effective tool for law enforcement to find people who would be terrorists.
I think what he ignores in that is the question I've been underlining in the book, and it's part of this conversation, which is that how can someone really be a terrorist if they never had the capability on their own to be terrorists, if they only became terrorists because the FBI provided the bomb.
That's not something they've ever really been willing to address.
The most revealing talk about this, Eric Holder addressed Muslim advocates and Muslim leaders in 2011 and addressed some of these issues, but never really fully addressed that question.
If ever I could get the Obama administration to answer it, and I've never been successful in that, that's what I would want.
That's what I would want to ask.
How can we define as terrorist people who, on their own, never had any capacity for terrorism?
Especially now that, at least hypothetically speaking, they claim the power to, if you're more than 12 miles off the coast, they can kill you with a drone, and if you're inside the United States, still they could send you off to Guantanamo or Guantanamo North in Illinois somewhere.
Right, exactly.
As you're implying, there are federal prisons that lock down on communication, and no more than two or three people can pray at one time.
There are a number of drone attacks.
These are all things that have increased in frequency and have been an example of Obama doubling down on policies that were started under Bush, and I think things that people still identify just with Bush, not realizing that the Obama administration is really guilty of advancing and even expanding these powers.
Although what's funny, or it's kind of ironic, is if they did turn you over to Guantanamo and the so-called court system down there, you're more likely to be set free than if they put you in the federal court, where you have no chance whatsoever, no matter how entrapped you are.
I think that's another thing that's worth noting on these terrorism cases that I've looked at, is that I'm not sure that anyone really can get a very fair trial on a terrorism charge here, just because I think Americans are still kind of reeling from the 9-11 attacks, and it's very hard for an average juror to really question whether to let someone go free who says these terrible things and is accused of terrorism.
I think there very much is still, among the public and among jurors in these cases, a willingness, if not kind of a want, to believe the government when it talks about terrorism and talks about terrorists, and not so much a willingness or desire to question what the government is doing in this case.
All right, I won't keep you any longer.
Thank you so much for your time and for this great book, Trevor.
Great, thanks so much, Scott.
Everybody, that's Trevor Aronson.
The book is The Terror Factory, Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terror.
He is associate director and co-founder of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting.
And Trevor, the book's already out, or not quite yet?
No, it is out now.
It's available on Amazon as well as a local bookseller.
Okay, great.
And again, that's The Terror Factory, Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terror.
Great book.
Thanks very much.
Great, thank you.
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