08/05/16 – Murtaza Hussain – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, Charles, introducing Murtaza Hussain from The Intercept.
Brand new story out.
Widely reported DC Metro police terrorism arrest involved gift cards, not violence, and a little bit more to it than that, too.
Welcome back to the show, Murtaza.
How are you doing?
Good.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, I've got to say, if the FBI is going around entrapping people into committing acts of terrorism, I'm not going to get too upset when they do it to a cop, because if they've got to do it to somebody, but anyway, in this case, they've entrapped a cop into some BS.
In this case, almost $250 in gift cards to an FBI informant.
That sounds pretty bad.
What's going on here?
Yeah.
It's a really disturbing case, because first and foremost, it was originally reported as terrorism plots and a suggestion that there was a threat to DC Metro.
That was the tenor of the news reports about it.
Reality, what happened was very different.
There's an individual, for six years or so, I had been talking to him with informants and trying to get him to commit any illegal act, and he just wasn't doing it.
In 2010, they first got in touch with him, and in 2014, he met a guy who we thought was his friend who pretended to leave the country and join ISIS.
The guy in this case actually tried to dissuade him from that at some point, saying, you know, you don't have to do this, et cetera, et cetera, and then when he thought that that guy had left the country, but in reality, he was an FBI agent, he left in 2014, quote, unquote, and then in 2016, he contacted him, reached out to him again just now, and said, can you please send me some gift cards, I really need help, and you can see from the dialogue which is excerpted in the criminal complaint, he was really trying to guilt him in saying, you know, we need this stuff to communicate, please can you just send me some gift card codes, and the accused in this case is very paranoid, he's like, well, maybe I can send it, but you know, it's very dangerous, et cetera, et cetera, but then ultimately sends him $250 of gift card codes, and then that becomes the basis for arresting him on terrorism charges.
So, you know, technically, you could say that's illegal, he didn't send anything to actually any terrorist groups and to an informant, but the idea that there was a violent threat or something, it's the anyone, anywhere, is very different from the reality of the case.
Yeah, and now, was the guy saying, I'm here with Omar Baghdadi now, and I need money for a new AK-47, or was there anything incriminating like that in it?
He indicated before that he wanted to join, he wanted to leave there and go to Syria, and you know, the individual was under the impression that maybe he'd been successful in doing that.
They kind of lost touch, they reached out to him again and said, you know, I really need some money, and we need it to communicate, et cetera, et cetera, can you please help me, please, you'll be rewarded, et cetera, et cetera, and the guy said, okay, fine, after a while, he's like, fine, I'll send you a little bit of money, and then he did, and then here he is.
Yeah.
And now, so it says here too, and I had seen this reported as fact, but you phrase it much more carefully here in The Intercept, it appears from past communications that Young had also previously told FBI agents that he fought with rebels seeking to overthrow Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, although I guess all the al-Qaeda guys in that one were heroes, and so that wasn't a problem as far as material support or anything like that, huh?
Yeah, so that is something in 2011 he told, he told, it's not really confirmed, but he told the FBI that he fought with Aleppo, with, I'm sorry, Libyan rebels against the government.
Now the thing is, he freely admitted that, and I think the reason he did is because at that time it was, like, encouraged, like that was an encouraged thing to do, viewed positively, and in fact he's not the only one who took part in the Libyan uprising with the encouragement of the American government, and now has been scrutinized for it later, so it looks like they didn't like him, and they were suspicious of him, but the whole basis for the suspicion it seems like was based on something that at that time was completely above board, he was totally on side with American foreign policy.
So that, as has been suggested by some in the government, was the basis for scrutinizing him.
It's very ironic.
It's kind of a bit, I kind of find it a bit disturbing, because you're going after him for something that you encouraged him to do.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there was one guy who was prosecuted for material support for going to Syria to fight, and his father said, I thought quite credibly, that he at least believed he'd been recruited to go over there by the CIA.
And how can the FBI and the Justice Department be prosecuting him when the jihadis are the good guys in Libya and in Syria, right?
Where am I going off the story here?
The father complained, as his son was pleading guilty to spare himself a life sentence.
It's really ironic.
And the thing is, like, you know, they soured on the revolutions, and they didn't go well, and then they decided they wanted to get rid of everyone who went along with them earlier.
Maybe the lesson is, don't encourage people, or don't allow people full stop to take part in foreign conflicts.
If you don't like how it turns out later on, you can't penalize them for the thing that you were positively exhorting them to do or valorizing them for doing.
Yeah.
Or at least imprison Obama and Hillary, too, so it's fair.
Sure.
They supported the uprising, too.
They added a lot more support to the uprising than anybody else.
Oh, yeah.
So going after these guys is kind of crazy.
So now this guy, you say that they had, he's a D.C., again, a Washington, D.C., metro police officer.
You say they've been trying to bait him into breaking the law for years, and it just wouldn't take, right?
And yet the, I guess the CNN take I saw last night was for years this guy had been threatening different forms of violence, and finally he went too far in his support for the terrorists.
Was there, to put it another way, if you told me that, yeah, this guy had a real problem in life, I might believe it.
You know what I mean?
If he was the carbon copy of the Orlando shooter or whatever, cops are like that sometimes, right?
Yeah, he was clearly a very strange guy, and also some of the news reports also indicated he was a Nazi, because he collected Nazi memorabilia.
And I mean, I could see how, in the abstract, people could decide they don't like him, and they want him to not be a cop, and not just not be a cop, he should be out of society.
Now the thing is, that's a very slippery slope, though, because if you're not committing a crime, but people just don't like you, and then the government tries to get you to commit a crime just because they want you out of circulation, that's like what they did to the Soviet Union.
They tried to get rid of undesirables.
And many other authoritarian countries, it's routine practice.
So I think that if you're not breaking the law, and like, you know, throughout this time when he was, quote unquote, so dangerous, you know, no one fired him from his job or suspended him from his job, he's continued to be a cop, and there was no indication that he was looking to commit violence.
When you try to get into this whole thing of stopping pre-crime, it can become a very, very slippery slope, and I think it's very troubling, and I think this is really a good case to scrutinize government overreach, because, you know, it's very easy to scrutinize the cases when the guy is clearly sympathetic, when the guy is, you know, from the criminal government's version of events, a bit unstable.
That actually deserves more scrutiny, because that's the case when you can cement power and cement practices with public acquiescence, which in reality can be the most dangerous when they're applied more broadly, as tends to happen over time.
Right.
Well, now, in terms of him not being fired, eh, you know, he'd have some really bad cops with some really good unions, and they're not going anywhere.
But did he have any kind of, do you know if he had any kind of local record of, you know, complaints?
You know, his own boss is keeping a file on his kookier moves on the job or anything like that?
There's no indication.
He had, like, domestic violence stuff before.
He seemed to be erratic in some ways, but it doesn't seem to be any evidence he was suspended or got in any legal trouble that would lead him to no longer be a cop during the period of this investigation.
Yeah.
Well, that's interesting.
You know, I guess I wonder if maybe some other cops will rally around him a little bit and this will get a little bit more publicity for the larger trend here of the FBI going around and manufacturing these terrorism cases, as they've done so many times, you know, more than 50 at the time that Trevor Aronson's book was published.
It must be, you know, 75 or 100 by now of these outright entrapments.
And, you know, the cops, boy, that thin blue line and all that, they protect their own.
So maybe they'll rally around this guy a little bit and instead of throwing him under the bus.
And maybe that'll, you know, help shed a little bit more light on this kind of overarching, you know, pattern of injustice that we've seen since the early 2000s here.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's just it's just getting more and more.
It's not decreasing.
They'll even do it to a cop.
Now, guys, that's how out of control they are.
There's the line for us.
All right.
Well, listen, great work.
Appreciate you coming on the show.
Talk about it.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
So that's Murtaza Hussein.
He's at the Intercept over there with Jordan Smith and Trevor Aronson, too.
And this one is called Widely Reported D.C.
Metro Police Terrorism Arrest Involved Gift Cards.
Not violence.
And you can read about that at Antiwar.com as well.
If you want.
Thanks.
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