10/29/10 – James Gordon Meek – The Scott Horton Show

All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest is James Gordon Meek.
He writes for the New York Daily News, that's nydailynews.com.
Article in question here is accused DC bomb plotter Farooq Ahmed's goal was killing as many metro riders as possible.
By James Gordon Meek with Kerry Wills and Helen Kennedy.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for joining us today.
So tell us everything you know.
Well, there's a lot we don't know about this case, but what we do know is that you had a guy who has been living in the U.S. for a long time, naturalized U.S. citizen from Pakistan named Farooq Ahmed.
And he spent some time up in Staten Island and about a year ago he showed up in Northern Virginia.
He was a network, like a computer techie guy who worked for Erickson.
And he rented a house or townhouse in Northern Virginia near Dulles Airport, which part of the house was rented by somebody else, a woman named Tanya Minor, who I interviewed when she got home from work the other night after discovering that the FBI had used a battering ram to kick in the townhouse door and raid this place because they accused Mr. Ahmed of being a wannabe terrorist.
Now, he apparently didn't talk to any actual terrorists, or established terrorists, I should say, overseas, for example, such as Al-Qaeda.
But somehow the FBI got wind, it's not real clear how this happened, but they got wind of this guy wanting to go to Afghanistan or Pakistan and kill Americans, fight American troops.
And they talked to him and said, well, you know, we need you to do some work for us.
They posed as Al-Qaeda, these operatives, undercover guys, and they said, we want you to do some stuff for us before we arrange for you to go over and fulfill your lifelong dream of becoming a martyr.
And so they together, you know, they sort of sent him on some tasks.
They said they wanted some casings done of Metrorail.
So that was all, you know, you've heard about, you know, the DC subway being targeted.
Well, that was, you know, apparently that was all, for the most part, the idea of the informant, the undercover operative, said, you know, go to the Arlington National Cemetery, for example, which he did right before Memorial Day and right after Independence Day.
And he videotaped, you know, busy times, busiest times, you know, people coming and going, and security in particular on the tracks, allegedly, according to the FBI.
And he did that at several other Metro stops, where, you know, the Pentagon is obviously an enormous building, but there are a lot of defensive military people who work in Arlington, Virginia, near the Pentagon, in places like Crystal City and Pentagon City and Roslyn.
These are areas of Arlington County, near the Pentagon, and there are Metro stops all around those places.
So he went to all those stops where there are a lot of people who are either, you know, military or defense contractors or workers, employees of the Defense Department, and he videotaped those places to his potential targets.
And his idea, his idea was to not do backpack bombs, but rolling suitcase bombs.
So videotaped, excuse me, the FBI videotaped him doing all of this.
They've had meetings in hotels, all of which were apparently videotaped and audiotaped.
And, you know, where he was conspiring with what somebody he thought was an Al Qaeda operative to bomb the subways before he could go and do his big jihad in Afghanistan.
So that's, that's the case.
And I went out and did, you know, some door knocking of some of his neighbors this week after the case broke and heard what they had to say.
That was kind of interesting, too.
Well, what did they have to say?
Well, one woman said, you know, it's almost like I'm the cliche neighbor who says he just seemed like a normal guy.
And that's, she said, but that's, I hate to be a cliche, but that's what the guy seemed like.
He seemed like a normal guy.
She talked about that she saw him looking through a telescope one night last month.
And she walked out and said, hey, are you looking at Jupiter?
Because Jupiter was in the sky.
And he seemed surprised that she would know that.
And he said, yeah, I am.
I'm looking at Jupiter.
Would you like a look?
Just seemed like a nice neighbor.
You know, it wasn't, they didn't socialize with their neighbors, but they were very friendly.
And she said her husband helped him fix his lawnmower.
And, you know, they got him out to shovel during the big snowstorm.
And, you know, they just seemed like nice people.
He was married to a woman.
They had a little baby.
She was a Brit.
And, you know, they kind of kept to themselves, kept their blinds drawn.
So tell me again, how many years this guy lived in the United States?
I believe he's been here since 93, if I recall correctly from court documents.
And he's going to be going to have a detention hearing in about an hour and a half.
So as soon as I get off the phone with you, I have to go to a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia.
And now when you said somewhere in there, I think the word was apparently the FBI got wind that this guy was already on the hunt, looking around for a way to travel overseas to fight.
But is there any indication of that other than some FBI spokesman said so?
I think it's in the court documents that they learned of his desire to go fight in Afghanistan.
I think they would quote him.
But, you know, how they, whether that was an email intercept or a phone intercept, you know, I think, frankly, I believe I've seen it reported somewhere.
Maybe the case, I don't know, that this is often the case where somebody hears somebody talking, could have been a fellow, you know, Muslim at a mosque, or it could have been somebody in a grocery store, could have been a friend, a colleague, a coworker, and they tip off law enforcement.
This guy is, you know, talking about, you know, he wants to exact revenge about something or whatever.
That's very common in these cases.
And there's some indication of that here.
I just, I can't say for certain if that's how they learned about it or how they learned about it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, at least I think we're making progress when it's readily acknowledged by everyone that if a situation like this is, you know, at all what the FBI is saying at this point, that it would be something probably like, say, for example, revenge as a motive rather than a hatred of freedom in primary elections and things like that, like they told us.
And that's what terrorism is always about, is revenge.
It's a tactic in a war that has, you know, earthly and usually pretty realistic goals as opposed to a fanatical poisoned stream of Islam that makes people do terrible things to innocent, wonderful people like us or whatever was the former narrative that I think we're beginning to get over here.
Well, I mean, you know, there certainly are people who interpret that religion for themselves as, you know, jihad means you have to go fight infidels.
And they do.
You know, but I was, it's funny, you know, I was out there knocking on doors in this kind of bucolic little neighborhood what used to be farmland near Dulles Airport, Ashford, Virginia.
Somebody I know from the counterterrorism community drove by because I live in the neighborhood.
Person stopped and came over and talked to me.
We were talking and I said, they said, well, you know, it's, I mean, the last year there's been something like 47 Americans who in the last two years have been caught up in counterterrorism for, you know, trying to attempt terrorism.
And I said, well, yeah, but you know, a lot of those folks are naturalized US citizens, a lot of them.
But really frankly, I'm surprised given the unpopularity of the Iraq war in particular, and, and South Asia and the Middle East, the Afghan war, I'm surprised there haven't been a lot more people who have, you know, haven't been caught by the FBI trying to do something or, or frankly succeeded.
I think the numbers are actually surprisingly low given the unpopularity of our conflicts overseas.
So I'm actually encouraged by that, not troubled by the number.
I'm encouraged by it.
Right.
Yeah.
No, I totally agree with you.
I mean, you think about, you know, I met some pilots driving a taxi cabbies to take the American airlines pilots to the airport really early in the morning sometimes.
And they told me right after September 11th that any five guys could take over a plane and get away with that, you know, and do that.
It wouldn't be hard for any terrorist to hijack a fuel truck and then crash it into a baseball game or, you know, whatever anybody, anybody who's ever seen a Hollywood movie can imagine how soft targets could be hit.
And it is, I'm very thankful that the amount of reaction has been as low as it has been so far.
But you know, like you look at Abdulmutallab and the attempted Christmas day attack, if that had been successful and a plane had been blown up over Detroit and crashed into innocent civilians on the ground, et cetera, like that history would have been a different thing between now and between then and now, that's for sure.
Now, I want to know more about this story.
So we'll be right back, everybody, with James Gordon Meek from the New York Daily News on anti-war radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with James Gordon Meek.
He's a reporter for the New York Daily News.
Wrote this piece about the accused DC subway bomb plotter.
Now, James, as you pointed out, the whole idea for bombing the subway system and whatever came from the FBI informant anyway in the first place.
And when people just look back at the history of the last decade or so, at least you could correct me if I'm wrong, the last actual Al Qaeda I heard of being prosecuted in this country was Moussaoui, who was actually real Al Qaeda.
The rest of these have been either entrapments or just making mountains out of molehills and that kind of thing.
But there's been outright worst case kind of entrapments in Detroit, two different ones in Detroit and Lodi, California, the Miami 7, the New Jersey Pizza, Fort Dix plot, and the tunnels to New York that were supposed to flood Manhattan like New Orleans, even though Manhattan is not below sea level and on and on like that.
The New York airport plot.
It's always the FBI informant who's making $100,000 a year, who's saying, hey, come on, guys, let's film each other saying we want to join Al Qaeda and blow up stuff.
Well, I would quibble with you slightly.
Well, you're welcome to.
But first of all, I just want to say maybe one of the few listeners of your broadcast could actually name the SST recording artist who you ended our last segment with.
Firehose doing Brave Captain.
Nice choice.
Yeah, right on.
But what I was saying during the Natas Kapas part of Streets of Fire, which was the best Santa Cruz skate video when I was a kid.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Good to know that.
Well, this is what I would say.
I mean, you brought up Lodi, California.
You know, I did reporting on Lodi.
Actually, the guy, the informant in that case was paid a half a million dollars by the half a million.
We repeat that by the FBI to say on the witness stand that he had seen Ayman al-Zawahiri, the number two leader of Al Qaeda, with a $25 million bounty on his head, preaching in a California mosque after 9-11.
Yeah, you know, I've read on Newsmax.
See, we told you.
But what I would quibble with is I would say, first of all, sure, there have been people who, you know, have been, the cases were thin.
I guess what I would say is, as in this case, if it proves to be correct, this guy wanted to go to Afghanistan and kill American troops.
I'm not really crazy about that guy getting on a plane to Pakistan to, you know, Peshawar or Karachi and making that trip.
I'm really not crazy about that.
I'm kind of against that.
Furthermore, I would say, although a lot of those cases, you talked about Miami, where the number two, the deputy director of the FBI, John Pistol at the time, made a comment at the Justice Department press conference about the Miami 7, which became, you know, almost a catchphrase, which he said that their plot was more aspirational than operational.
Yeah, and then they tried those guys three times.
I know, but I mean, at least it was at the highest level of the FBI from the get-go.
They were refreshingly not hyping it, which we had seen in the Ashcroft era and the Bush administration, a lot of hyping a plot.
So, to me, it was always more hyping of the importance of a plot to help build a prosecutor's career, particularly a U.S. attorney in whatever district, than it was, you know, necessarily so much entrapment, although I think there was plenty of that.
I don't know what it'll turn out to be, but this guy wanted to kill American troops.
That was the initial, allegedly, that was the initial purpose of his interest, and I think those are people who should not be walking the streets.
Well, here's the thing, though.
I mean, you seem like a pretty fair-minded guy to me.
If you were an FBI agent, and you got wind of a guy like that, wouldn't you monitor him and see whether he was just blowing off steam or whether he actually was looking into getting a plane ticket to Karachi or something before you went and set him up like this?
There's a lot we don't know, and I think there was some talk in the court papers so far about, you know, I think they were looking for, in fact, I believe in the affidavit for a search warrant, they were looking for a plane ticket.
I think they believed he had a flight booked, so I don't have that in front of me, but I believe I read that yesterday when they unsealed that document.
So, you know, that may have been happening.
I guess it's possible.
It's just, to me, the FBI is guilty till proven innocent beyond a shadow of a doubt.
But the other thing I want to say to you, though, is...
After all, 9-11 happened on their watch.
Why should they be our security force at all?
That it did, but you talked about al-Qaeda cases.
I covered the Moussaoui trial, sat in that courtroom for that misery for two months.
Really?
That's interesting.
And I've covered, but I mean, you know, I was at the scene of the Pentagon after the attacks.
I've done Afghanistan twice.
I've been to Gitmo for the 9-11 defendants' arraignment.
I've covered three investigations of 9-11.
So, this has been my career.
So, you've got the 9-11 guy on the phone with you today.
But what I would say is there's one other case that is a major case of an al-Qaeda operative, Najib al-Azzi, who wanted to blow up the subways in New York City.
And he was an al-Qaeda operative, and he...
That was the guy from Colorado, right?
Well, he was from New York, really, but he had moved to Colorado temporarily.
So, yes, that is the case.
And he was going to do it on last year's 9-11 anniversary, or thereabouts, according to prosecutors.
But he pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaeda operative.
He pleaded guilty to meeting with senior al-Qaeda leaders.
There was another guy, also from New York, who was an American-born, Bryant Neal Venus.
He pleaded guilty to also going and meeting with senior al-Qaeda leadership and helping them to case the Long Island Railroad.
That also came about last year.
There's a...
You know, as a sort of an aside, I think there's an interesting thing here.
A lot of people thought, I might even venture to say myself included, that with Obama getting elected, it would kind of take the wind out of al-Qaeda's sails.
You know, we're electing a guy named Hussein, you know.
And instead, what's interesting is he's escalated the war in Afghanistan, and we've had, you know, near attacks by two groups that we never thought capable.
Regional nodes connected to al-Qaeda we never thought were capable of attacking the U.S. homeland, al-Qaeda in Yemen, a QAP, and also the Pakistani Taliban.
That's happened since Obama got elected.
So anybody who thought that Obama getting elected was going to, you know, somehow convince the terrorists not to hit us, turns out that wasn't the case.
And that's kind of interesting, I think.
That's part of why I'm so frustrated about the Miami 7 and Lodi, California, in these cases where the FBI is running around chasing their tail and trapping innocent people, when, you know, I am like you, like we talked about earlier, pleasantly surprised at how few terrorists, real terrorist threats America has faced since September 11.
I'd like to keep it that way.
I'm really worried about what might happen the next time there's a red alert in this country.
Well, we haven't had a red alert yet, but we did have orange alerts.
I don't know if they'll do those again.
I just mean like, you know, worst case scenario, like the plane over Detroit on Christmas had actually gone off the way they had tried to do it.
But what was troubling to me about that was, I mean, look, you have to look at these guys and assume that, you know, they've got their own think tanks for how to come up with new, innovative ways to hit us.
But aviation consistently has been of interest to al-Qaeda.
Secondly, you know, if they miss a target, you can bet they're going to try to hit it again.
That is their history, as well as their MO doing multiple simultaneous attacks.
Now they're doing these lone wolf attacks.
Last week we had Adam Gadon, that guy from California, you know, his grandparents were Jewish activists, grew up on a goat farm in California, joined al-Qaeda, has access to the senior leadership of al-Qaeda, writes speeches for Osama bin Laden, made a speech last week in which he endorsed the vision of al-Qaeda and Yemen's de facto leader, the Yemeni-American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, and al-Awlaki's call for individual or lone wolf, individual jihad, violent jihad against the West.
And basically, so here you had al-Qaeda's spokesman, surprising to me, saying, we're endorsing al-Awlaki, A, and B, do what he says, do the lone wolf jihad, don't come to the tribal areas of Pakistan, don't try to make your way here, we're under threat, do your own thing, be a Major Hassan, be a Umar Farooq Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Undies air bomber, be one of those guys, do your own thing by yourself, that's better.
You know, and they had all kinds of great suggestions recently in a magazine I tried to put out online, but, you know, that's sort of, that's kind of an interesting sea change, that they're now encouraging these lone wolf, you know, jihadi actions.
Yeah, well, we've got to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here.
It's working out great, apparently.
Remember during the millennium, they caught a guy named Ahmed Rassam?
Yeah, at the Canadian border.
Exactly.
By luck, too, by one good Border Patrol customs person up there went, wait a minute, open your trunk, pal.
The guy was sweaty, that's right.
He was sweaty, he was sick, and they thought there was something there.
They found explosives in his trunk.
Ahmed Rassam was an Algerian who had been trained by Al-Qaeda, but he was not an Al-Qaeda operative, technically.
He was, he'd funded his own plot to blow up LAX airport, and he was considered a lone wolf.
So in a way, Al-Qaeda's now sort of going back to old school, you know, really old school, with lone wolf attackers.
And that's worrisome, because they're really hard to track.
Right.
Well, and Al-Qaeda really isn't so much an organization as it is an agreement to attack the U.S. first, and then the local enemies later.
And so we keep making that seem better and better to them, I guess, more than lone wolves headed this way.
And thanks, James, I really appreciate it.
Hey, thank you, buddy.
Have a good day.
Everybody, that's James Gordon Meek from the New York Daily News, wrote about Farouk Ahmed.
Go look it up.