All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today is David K.
Schipler.
He is a Pulitzer prize winning author and former foreign correspondent for the New York times.
He's the author of rights at risk, the limits of liberty in modern America.
And he's got an op-ed here, a Sunday, uh, times magazine piece, terrorist plots hatched by the FBI at NY times.com.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Doing fine.
Thank you for having me.
Great.
I appreciate you joining us here.
And I appreciate, uh, you, I guess, uh, somehow you still have this leftover license to write in the New York times and you wrote a piece that I don't think I've ever seen anything like this in the New York times that there's something for the American people to be concerned about with all this, uh, endless parade of terrorism, domestic terrorism cases here in America.
Well, it turns out that the FBI actually has used a lot of confidential informants who are usually, uh, felons, convicted felons who are trying to get their charges reduced or their sentences reduced, uh, and also undercover FBI agents posing as Al Qaeda operatives or members of other terrorist organizations who approach people, they find online, or they hear talking in radical terms outside mosques and basically, uh, suggest or induce them to, uh, formulate plots to conduct terrorist attacks.
And then once these people go along with the idea or come up with the ideas themselves and actually take action to implement the plans, uh, the FBI provides them with the weapons.
They're not real weapons.
They're phonies.
I mean, in one case, uh, uh, the idea came up of, of using stinger missiles to attack military aircraft in Newburgh, New York, and the FBI provided a missile, it was a dummy.
Uh, then another case in Washington, uh, a guy talked about doing a suicide bombing in the Capitol and the FBI provided him with a suicide vest, but the explosives were inert and car bombs have contained inert explosives and so forth.
So once they go to that point of actually being prepared to take the action and, and detonate the explosive, the FBI then arrests them and it charges them and there've been convictions or guilty pleas in, in all these cases.
Well, and see, that's the thing about it too, is that, well, and I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, I guess I'm just thinking of back to when I was a little kid and I ever first heard the term entrapment.
I thought that if a court case was an entrapment case, then that doesn't count and the judge will let you off.
No.
Well, uh, me too, but the popular view of entrapment is different from the legal view in the legal view, uh, to show that you've been entrapped, you have to show that you had no predisposition to commit the crime, even if it was induced by a government agent.
And no predisposition means no predisposition.
That is, if you say, yeah, I'd like to do this and they've recorded the conversation, if you then take a step to further the plot, that shows predisposition.
Uh, now the justice department and the FBI say that they are aware that the entrapment defense will be used by the defense attorneys and therefore what they do is they try to, in most cases, give the suspect an exit.
They'll, the informant or the agent undercover will say, you know, you're going to kill a lot of people.
You sure you want to do this and, and that sort of thing.
But when I looked at, when I looked at the transcripts of, of recorded conversations, I saw that, well, often what happens is that that exit is a little fuzzy and, and the informant or the agent might say at the same time, well, you know, I've, you know, the brothers are depending on you to do this and therefore, uh, are you backing out now?
You know, so there's a little bit of pressure put on the person to continue and to go ahead with the mission.
It's a, it's a, it's a muddy, you know, it's a very muddy situation actually.
And then I think that, well, and in the article, you actually talk at length about one set of transcripts anyway, of this one entrapped guy, I guess from the synagogue plot in New York, correct?
Right.
Yes.
James Cromartie.
Yeah.
Uh-huh.
And then, and you kind of showed how it really took a lot of talking and a lot of, well, they promised him a quarter of a million dollars to get this guy to do it.
Yeah.
It took 11 months of meandering conversation, a $250,000 promise that was made by the informant without authorization by the FBI, supposedly after this suspect had lost his job in the stockroom at Walmart, by the way.
So he was unemployed and pretty desperate.
Uh, he was, uh, an anti-Semitic guy who had been ranting about Jews and wanted to bomb synagogues and, and, but he was a kind of a lost drifting soul, it seemed, and the informant, uh, kept talking about, well, what, what are you going to do for Allah?
What are you going to do for Islam?
He was trying to get him to formulate his religious beliefs in terms of jihad, which his defense attorney, who's appealing the conviction, uh, believes is a, was a really unethical thing to do and has charged the government with misconduct.
I don't know if that's going to hold up on the appeal, but that's one of the basis of the appeal.
In that case, the entrapment defense in his case didn't work.
The judge denied his claim of entrapment, even though the judge herself said that sentencing as she gave him 25 years, uh, that this guy was a buffoon and he would not have been a terrorist without the government involvement.
So you have a very muddy, complicated situation.
And what happens, I think, is that when, once the FBI targets some, some person, usually because of pure speech, you know, something that he said on the internet or something he said to people at a mosque or something like that, once they target him and they kind of set the trap and he begins to play along, uh, law enforcement's view is they can't just walk away from him because what if somebody else comes along who's real, who could actually provide the means for him to conduct an attack, then, you know, the FBI would have egg on his face.
So it's a little bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy that they get themselves into.
All right.
Now, um, the other thing is about, uh, when you talk about, uh, chromity here, that even these decisions he's making, as you said, you know, you give him a chance to back out, but maybe it's couched in a way where it's still adding pressure, not to that kind of thing.
It's also, as you said, took 11 months of, you know, infiltrating this guy's life and creating basically this whole movie for him to be the star of, uh, for him to, you know, the entire circumstances that he's making these choices.
And, um, and I don't know, it's funny to read that you quote the judge saying, uh, that this guy's a buffoon, that this is a fantasy terror operation, the whole thing's a giant joke.
And then 25 years bang.
Yeah.
Well, he was convicted.
So, uh, if the judge had decided that it was entrapment, then the conviction would not have held up.
But the judge couldn't do that given the rigors of the law, because he did show predisposition.
And so is it a mandatory minimum sentence or what?
Uh, I believe it was, yes, for that particular crime.
And I think that, uh, uh, you have a, a situation in many of these cases where, uh, the question is, is raised quite legitimately, would these folks have done this if it hadn't been for their contact with these FBI people who were posing as terrorists, providing the, basically the wherewithal to conduct these attacks?
And I think the question probably needs to be answered differently in each case, but in a lot of the cases, it seemed to me that they were kind of hapless wannabes, you know, who really didn't know what end of the fuse to light and probably wouldn't have been able to do anything on their own.
I mean, you get, well, I mean, hey, if they were more sophisticated than that, wouldn't they be able to, you know, catch a couple of clues that their new best friend is the undercover FBI informant, you know, they have to find the slowest kid at the local Islamic bookstore to pick on because anybody else would smell a rat in the first place.
I think you're, you're onto something there.
I mean, what, what police officers will tell you in their investigating ordinary crime is the crooks we catch are the dumb one.
Uh, now Cromity, for example, had been arrested numerous times for drug dealing and other nonviolent crimes at one time for selling drugs to an undercover cop.
Yeah.
So you'd think he particularly would have been alert to the possibility.
There was a case involved.
I'm sorry.
We got to hold it right there, but we'll be right back.
Everybody with David K.
Schipler, author of rights at risk, the limits of liberty in modern America, uh, writing about terrorist plots helped along by the FBI at the New York times.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Talking with David K.
Schipler formerly of the New York times and now writing in the New York times, uh, the Sunday magazine here.
Terrorist plots helped along by the FBI.
And, uh, there certainly are quite a few of them.
And you list quite a few, you say of the 22 most frightening plans for attacks since nine 11 on American soil, 14 were developed in sting operations.
And I think that's the thing that gets me the most about all this is that, you know, you think back about all the hype, you know, that hit the press at the time of, uh, for example, the plot against the Sears tower supposedly.
Um, and, uh, some of these other ones, this really amounts to a psychological warfare operation against the moms of America who are scared to death by this stuff, who believe their government, when their government says the heroic police came and stopped a terrorist attack threat on your life today, they believe that and they're afraid.
And then of course, that means that they tend to support opera, uh, you know, uh, bigger budgets and, uh, more homeland security, uh, maybe more wars overseas cause they're terrified and that's not fair.
That's not right.
Well, there's no question that, uh, the sense of a country at risk is heightened by the blurring of the lines between the sting operations and the real threats.
I mean, there have been some real plots that have not involved government.
For example, the, uh, subway attacks, uh, that was planned for the New York city subway system, which recently went to trial, um, didn't have any sting operation in it.
Uh, the, uh, time square bombing that fizzled, uh, you know, was not a, not something that the FBI cooked up, but most of the, I don't know, most, but yeah, most of the really dramatic, uh, attacks since nine 11, uh, have involved government involvement.
And I think one of the, one of the problems is that, uh, when the press reports them, uh, they don't make it very clear that they were sting operations.
For example, the, the story today, which I was just reading about the five men who were arrested for planning to bomb a bridge in Cleveland.
Uh, I heard that reported on NPR earlier and the report did not say that in fact the FBI provided the so-called bomb, the explosives, which were inert, which means we don't know all the details now yet, but we will, uh, that the FBI agents or informants were involved in, uh, talking to these guys and perhaps helping them plan the attack and setting them up with actual fake explosives.
So they thought they were going to detonate something.
So I think that that distinction really has to be made by the press clearly.
And it, it is not made very often and not clearly enough.
And I think in, in most minds, they get these whole plots get all mixed up together.
I mean, if you ask most people about the car bomb attempt at the Christmas tree lighting it in Portland, Oregon, for example, a few years ago, they probably think that was a real case where in fact the, the kid who was doing it, that didn't even drive the van himself.
The van was provided by the FBI.
It was full of 55 gallon drums of inert material, detonator call cords, uh, fake detonator caps, uh, some diesel fuel to make it smell flammable.
And the kid was in the passenger seat while the FBI agent posing as a terrorist drove the van to a place that the Portland police had considerably made sure was open and strategic to, to be parked in, you know, and then the FBI gave the kid, uh, a cell phone and gave him the number to punch in to detonate the bomb.
So it was all kind of a piece of theater.
And it doesn't mean that this guy was not interested in doing it.
I mean, he obviously was, he played along for quite a while and, and helped in the planning and, and obtained some of the equipment and all of that.
So illegally he was guilty.
But, uh, the question is, is this the best use of limited resources that are designed to find real terrorists?
Because, uh, you know, basically what's happening in these thing operations is something different from what happened, uh, in the past, you know, usually in the past, the FBI has, uh, done sting operations in the category of crime that people have been involved in before.
So somebody who's believed to be a drug dealer would be induced to sell drugs to an undercover cop or somebody who's been known or believed to be in the mortgage fraud business would be set up to conduct a fraudulent activity with, uh, somebody, an undercover agent, that sort of thing.
This is different because what's being done here is people who have never been involved in terrorism are being induced to get involved in terrorism.
They may make radical statements.
They may have had other criminal backgrounds, but terrorism was not really part of their métier, so to speak.
And that is concerning and it concerns law enforcement people as well as other experts, that the FBI is actually manufacturing a phenomenon that does not necessarily exist as widespread away as it may appear.
Right.
It's funny that in the New York Times, uh, let's see, I forgot what day it was, on the 29th, uh, they have this piece, testimony of four admitted terrorists gives a rare view of Al-Qaeda and this is about some actual terrorists.
So you mentioned the Zazi plot, right?
The Afghan.
Yeah, that's a real plot.
Right, right.
And these just show the others by such contrast, the difference.
And in fact, as best I could tell, and maybe I'm wrong about this, the best I can tell, the Zazi plot was the only one that was legit and that they stopped, right?
The Times Square bomber got away with it.
Only his bomb was a piece of garbage.
And so thankfully nobody was killed, right?
The, uh, the, uh, Abdulmutallab, the under bomber was able to attempt to set off his, uh, you know, uh, bomb, although, well, that one's more complicated, maybe.
But anyway, certainly wasn't stopped by the FBI on the way here, but you know, with this endless parade of, uh, entrapment case after entrapment case, like I'm saying, it, it makes the mom scared and glad that the Patriot Act gets reauthorized and that kind of thing.
But it also confuses the issue as to who's a terrorist and why would they be a terrorist?
Is it just some kid from the Islamic bookstore that becomes a terrorist because his Islam gets so extreme or something like that, that kind of narrative comes through in these things.
But if we focus on the actual terrorists, like, uh, Zazi or Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square bomber, and look at who these guys are and why they do what they do, uh, they are in it.
The real ones are in it for very earthly political reasons, not Islamic extremism, but like in the case of Faisal Shahzad, he went on vacation home to Pakistan and he was a happy American living the American dream here in the United States.
And then went to Pakistan and saw what the drone strikes were doing.
And he joined up a war on the other side.
It wasn't about magic and virgins in heaven and all these things.
It was a war.
And so all of that is confused when we're talking about the synagogue plot and the Miami seven and all this other stuff.
Why would some local nation of Islam want to be, uh, do the kinds of things that the FBI is entrapping them into doing?
And then they pretend it's all the same.
Sorry for going on so much, but I think you make a good point.
And one of the things that I discovered when I was researching this was that some of the Americans who've been radicalized, uh, have gotten that way because of the American actions overseas, uh, Abu Ghraib comes up very often in these conversations where people saw these pictures of the abusive prisoners at Abu Ghraib, where they saw pictures or read on websites about civilians being killed in drone strikes and in the Iraq war and so forth.
Come up in the conversations.
You mean the police bring them up to induce these guys?
Yeah, well, the, the suspects bring them up as part of their motivations.
You know, you read the transcripts of the recorded conversations between the suspects and the informants or the suspects and the FBI agents who are operating undercover.
These are secretly recorded conversations that are then introduced into evidence.
And you see that some of the motivations of these guys, or the, you know, if you want to ask why have they become radicalized?
Uh, some of it, not all of it, but some of it is a result of what they've seen happening overseas, uh, by the United States.
And they, they're, you know, because they're all, they're marginalized in the U S sometimes they're misfits, they're adrift.
They, they may have problems with authority.
They may have difficult family relationships.
I mean, there are a lot of personal issues that go on here too.
They are looking for a cause larger than themselves.
I think in many cases, and some reason to do something on behalf of some legitimate cause or cause they consider legitimate and, and trying to find a way to support Islam through violent Jihad is the way that some of them gravitate to.
And, and unfortunately, you know, you could imagine a different scenario where government agent might try to induce them to a peaceful path, but these are law enforcement agents.
They want to get people to do something that will give evidence that they can use in court.
And therefore they're not going to necessarily preach peace to them.
And that's certainly what happens.
They, they, they, they get into a relationship where they, you know, talk about, uh, you know, for example, in the Cromartie case with the stinger missiles, the first person to bring up the idea of using missiles was not the suspect, but the confidential informant working for the FBI.
I mean, he was the one who raised the missile issue.
He said, I can get missiles through containers from China, you know, and Cromartie was kind of startled.
It seemed, I mean, by reading the transcript, you know, sort of, he laughed and, and they kept coming around to the idea of missiles.
Cromartie never really bought into the idea of using missiles in an attack.
Uh, but the informant kept on pushing it.
You know, one of the, one of the questions that's been raised is whether the FBI inflates these plots to either scare the public or to overwhelm the jury.
Uh, one former FBI agent suggested to me that that was to overwhelm the jury to make the jurors so frightened that they would not give any, you know, kind of grace to the particular defendants who were sitting before them, that these plots were so dastardly that they had to be dealt with.
And that may be, I mean, it may be just a case specific thing where law enforcement just tries to get the hardest, the most, uh, inflated evidence they possibly can to take to court, but you know, there are cases where they could have arrested people on weapons charges long before they got to the point of, uh, formulating these, these terrorist plots.
And they didn't do that.
They, they spun the whole scenario out into a kind of pageant of, of devastation.
And that's basically the technique that they've used now, this, this case with the bridge in Cleveland, you know, you sort of had to have to read between the lines, but I just read something that's worth pursuing.
You know, when you get the criminal complaint, we can look more clearly, but they apparently the anarchists who were involved in this, according to the justice department, uh, press release today, originally their idea was to, to topple, uh, do you smoke grenades at the tops of some buildings to distract law enforcement or bar security guards so they could topple signs or financial institutions.
And then later the idea developed into using explosives against the bridge.
Now, the question is who came up with that idea?
Were they led by the informants or the FBI agents into thinking about a more extravagant plot than just toppling signs?
And I think that's worth looking at closely because, you know, if it's the latter, then it means that the FBI really was involved in exaggerating the plans that these people were ready to, to execute.
And I think that's a, you know, that's a, it may be legal, but it certainly has ethical questions.
Yeah.
Well, I guess we'll see whether Obama has them turned over to the military, you know, like they did with Jose Padilla, which was a crime then, but it's legal now.
Yeah.
Well, Obama has said in his signing statement that he issued when he signed the national offense authorization act, that he would not turn us citizens over to military detention.
So that's his position, even though the law authorizes him to do so.
Now, these guys were not associated with any foreign terrorist organization, according to the justice department.
So they wouldn't fit into that category anyway, but I mean, you raise an important and worrisome point, of course.
I mean, this is why in my book, Rights at Risk, I've written a good deal about some of the dangers that we face in undermining our constitutional liberties in this post 9-11 period.
Well, and you know, my problem is too, especially that you look at the last time Al-Qaeda succeeded in pulling off a real attack here and they failed a couple of times.
But last time they pulled it off, they killed almost 3000 people and changed the entire history of the world and and, you know, caused all sorts of terrible things happen or allowed for all kinds of terrible things to happen and that kind of thing.
And it seems to me, I mean, and to their credit, Headline News is saying sting operation in their on their script on the bottom of the page here.
But on this case, but it seems to me like there's only so many, as you said, there's limited resources, a limited number of FBI, you know, gumshoe agents who can be working counterterrorism cases at any time.
And it seems like as long as they're, you know, for intensive purposes, run around chasing their tail, making up plots to bust, they're not looking.
And we could have real, actual dangerous terrorists in this country planning to get away with something and have the FBI agents, you know, on the same block, but looking into someone who really is entirely innocent, you know?
Yeah, one problem is that the FBI is under instructions to check out every single tip that comes in, no matter how frivolous it seems, which is something that was issued after 9-11 to try to prevent terrorism.
It's hard enough to solve crimes after they've occurred, much less prevent them before they occur.
So the FBI doesn't really have the discretion anymore to go through and prioritize.
And I think that's one of the difficulties.
The other problem is that the surveillance methods the government has employed since 9-11, authorized by amendments contained in the Patriot Act and other laws that have been passed, have amassed so much information that the analysts can't sort through it.
I was talking to a former intelligence guy recently who said that they don't even read most of the stuff that comes in because too much is coming in.
They can't hear the ominous melodies against the background noise.
Right.
So it's a very, it's not even practical.
And not only does it violate people's rights, it doesn't really enhance our safety.
You know, the American Civil Liberties Union has a great metaphor for this.
They say you're not going to increase the chances of finding a needle in a haystack by increasing the size of the haystack.
And that's what's happened.
I mean, you look at the underwear bomber, Abdulmutallab, who tried to set off a bomb at an airliner over Detroit in his underwear.
I mean, this guy, his father had gone to a U.S. embassy and reported his radicalization.
And yet the guy retained a multiple entry visa to the United States.
He was not given secondary screening in Amsterdam before he got on the plane.
And, you know, so you have to wonder who's connecting the dots and whether there's just too much information coming in for the dots to be connected.
And I think that that is really the case.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, since you bring up that one specifically, and I guess I kind of already did, too, it's hard for me to let this go without saying that it's pretty suspicious the way there's, you know, a credible witness to someone intervening on behalf of that kid to help him change planes in the Netherlands, whether it was just, you know, airport security local there or whether it was somebody's intelligence agency was never made clear because they never really fessed up about it.
There was a Brian Ross piece that confirmed that the FBI was looking into this, but we never heard again about the well-dressed man who helped him change planes.
And then, you know, Richard Wolff, the Newsweek reporter who is very close to the Obama White House, he went on MSNBC and said that the White House itself, you know, speaking for Obama, I guess, and the NSC, somebody, that they were concerned that the intelligence agencies were allowed, allowed Abdulmutallab to get through deliberately.
And they sent Richard Wolff to go say that on TV.
I mean, I read that there was a passenger on the plane who said that the that Abdulmutallab didn't have a passport and the gate agent wouldn't let him board.
And then some well-dressed guy with an American accent, you know, took him on or something like that.
And that's never, you know, as you say, nobody's been able to nail that one down.
I you know, I just don't know.
I mean, it's you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
You know what?
I'm sorry, because I'm not either.
But I just remember, too, it's this is the better footnote is there was I think I forget his first name, but his name was Kennedy and he was a State Department guy.
And he testified before the Congress that the State Department was there was a request from an American intelligence agency to the State Department to go ahead and let him through.
And they didn't say why and they didn't name the agency.
But it's interesting.
I'll even I'll even send you the link, because it does sound like I'm I'm turning your interview into this off the wall thing.
But that did happen in sworn testimony before the Congress.
And I'm not claiming to know anything more about it or why or anything else.
I'm just saying, you know, I could imagine theoretically, if they had information on a somebody who was suspicious.
Allowing him into the country to follow him, monitor him and see who he contacted.
Well, that's a good reason to cover it up, too, if they pull up a larger group and they may not have.
Obviously, if they'd screened him properly, they would have detected the explosives.
But the you know, I don't know whether that's the case here, but it's theoretically imaginable that that could happen.
Yeah.
Well, I'm making a note to myself to get that footnote in the email to you later so you don't think I'm a lunatic.
I don't think you're a lunatic.
All right.
Well, great.
Thanks.
All right.
Hey, listen, we're already way over time.
I appreciate you staying over with us and your time on the show today, David.
OK, thanks for having me, everybody.
That's David K. Schipler.
He's the author of Rights at Risk, The Limits of Liberty in Modern America.
And he's got this piece that was in the weekend magazine for The New York Times, Terrorist Plots Hatched by the FBI.
