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Newburgh Four: poor, black, and jailed under FBI 'entrapment' tactics
In June, four men were jailed for 25 years over a US terror plot. The FBI painted them as dedicated fanatics, but were they lured by the promise of cash from a fake informant?...Shahed Hussain...was flash, drove expensive cars and treated people to gifts of cash and food. He also had radical opinions that stood out in a mosque that welcomed Shia and Sunni followers and had good relations with local Jewish and Christian communities...
...Hussain would make Newburgh's Muslim community famous when earlier this year four other black Newburgh Muslims were jailed for 25 years...
Prosecutors painted them as America-hating terrorists bent on slaughter. All four followed the instructions of Hussain, who meticulously organised the scheme: from getting the missile and bombs, to reconnaissance missions, to
teaching the tenets of radical Islam.
The "Newburgh Four" now languish in jail. Hussain does not. For Hussain was a fake. In fact, Hussain worked for the FBI as an informant trawling mosques...
...far from being active militants, the four men he attracted were impoverished individuals struggling with Newburgh's grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty. One had mental issues...[and] believed Florida was a foreign country.
Hussain offered the men huge financial inducements to carry out the plot – including $250,000...
As defence lawyers poured through the evidence, the Newburgh Four came to represent the most extreme form of a controversial FBI policy to use invented terrorist plots to lure targets. "There has been no case as egregious as this.
It is unique in the incentive the government provided. A quarter million dollars?" said Professor Karen Greenberg, a terrorism expert at Fordham University...
...Hussain coaxed Cromitie along, eventually developing the plot to attack Riverdale and a US airbase on behalf of a Pakistani terrorist group...
From then, the FBI prosecution seemed straightforward...even though the plot was fake...But it is not that simple.
None of the four men fit the usual profile of a terrorist-in-waiting, let alone an active militant. But they did fit the profile of desperate men who would do anything for money – and Hussain promised massive earthly awards.
For Cromitie, he proffered $250,000: a staggering sum. Hussain also offered to buy him a new BMW, a holiday in Puerto Rico, and a barber shop to set him up in his own business. The other three were also offered thousands of dollars in what must have seemed a miraculous windfall...
...Payen, of Haitian origin, was possibly schizophrenic. He urinated in bottles in his bedroom and, when told of a trip to Florida as reward, said he could not go because he had no passport.
In meetings discussing the plot, Payen said little; he just devoured the copious free food Hussain bought. It is not a portrait of radical Islamists. It is a sad picture of life in an urban ghetto...
....Yet the FBI treated the gang, especially Cromitie, as dedicated fanatics...
...Cromitie seemed less a terrorist and more a blustering fantasist. Indeed, away from the company of Hussain, there is little sign Cromitie did anything for the plot. When Hussain gave him a camera and told Cromitie to reconnoitre targets, he promptly sold it.
He knew little about Islam; it was Hussain who tried to educate him about jihad. Hussain complained bitterly his pupil was doing nothing. "You've not started the first step, brother. Come on," Hussain griped on tape.
In fact, Cromitie tried to ditch Hussain. For weeks on end Cromitie pretended to leave Newburgh to avoid him. Cromitie ignored Hussain's phone calls, deleted voice mails and pretended not to be in when Hussain came around his house. He stopped going to the mosque.
Only when Cromitie lost his job, and became desperate for money, did he contact Hussain again. "I told you, I can make you $250,000, but you don't want it, brother," Hussain told him.
Now Cromitie agreed and set about finding lookouts. "Ok, bugger it. I don't care. Ah, man. Maqsood, you got me," he said, using Hussain's fake name.
ven further into the plot – when Cromitie again told Hussain he did not think he could do it – Hussain said his overseas terrorist "brothers" might cut his head off. Cromitie came back on side.
The sheer scale and proactive nature of Hussain's actions has shocked legal experts, Muslim groups and civil rights organisations. They say it went far beyond a fair use of resources in neutralising a real threat. Not only was the entire plot fake, but it seemed only Hussain's Islamic coaching, talk of cash rewards and constant attention was keeping it alive.
Hussain was the sole personal witness for the FBI. His reports of what Cromitie had talked about were taken as truth, even though Hussain did not record the first four months of their meetings. And, once he began recording, the FBI unusually allowed him to switch the tape on and off...
...there are large, unexplained gaps in the tapes, including the final minutes of the plot itself as the bombs were put in position...
www.theguardian.com/world/2011/dec/12/newburgh-four-fbi-entrapment-terror
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