FBI searching for Mosque vandals in possible hate crime

OKLAHOMA CITY – The FBI said it is hoping surveillance video will help lead them to a pair of vandals who targeted an Oklahoma City mosque last weekend.

The American Muslim Association on the 3200 block of N.W. 48th St. was damaged when the suspects spray painted racial slurs and other graffiti on the walls.

FBI agents tell us they are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.

Authorities admit the surveillance video is not the best quality but they’re hoping someone will recognize the suspects.

The video appears to show two males involved in the crime.

If you have any information on the vandalism, you can call the FBI hotline at (405) 290-7770.

The FBI’s anticipatory prosecution of Muslims to criminalize speech

by Glenn Greenwald (Guardian)

One of the major governmental abuses denounced by the 1976 final report of the Church Committee was the FBI’s domestic counter intelligence programs (COINTELPRO). Under that program, the FBI targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous – including civil rights activists (such as the NAACP and Martin Luther King), black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters, and various right-wing groups – and infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them. This program was exposed only because a left-wing group, the so-called “Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI”, broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania, stole the files relating to the program, and sent them to various newspapers.

What made the program so controversial was that the FBI was attempting to create and encourage crimes rather than find actual criminals – all in order to punish those whose constitutionally protected political activism the US government found threatening. As Noam Chomsky wrote in a comprehensive 1999 article on the program: “During these years, FBI provocateurs repeatedly urged and initiated violent acts, including forceful disruption of meetings and demonstrations on and off university campuses, attacks on police, bombings, and so on.” Once the program was exposed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover insisted that there was no centralized authority for it and that it had ended, while the Church Committee’s final report made clear just how illegal and threatening it was:

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Please re-read those last two highlighted sentences, as this is exactly what is happening again now: systematically and without much notice. Over the past decade, US Muslims have been routinely targeted with precisely this same tactic of preemptive or anticipatory prosecution. It’s all designed to take people engaged in political and religious advocacy which the US government dislikes – usually very young and impressionable Muslims with zero criminal history, though increasingly non-Muslims engaged in other forms of dissent – and use paid informants to trick them into saying just enough to turn them into criminals who are then prosecuted and imprisoned for decades.

The same pattern repeats itself over and over. The FBI ensnares some random Muslim in a garden-variety criminal investigation involving financial fraud or drugs. Rather than prosecute him, the FBI puts the Muslim criminal suspect on its payroll, sending him into Muslim communities and mosques in order not only to spy on American Muslims, but to befriend them and then actively manipulate them into saying just enough to make their prosecution possible. At times, the FBI’s informants have been so unstable and aggressive in trying to recruit members to join Terrorist plots that the targeted mosque members themselves have reported the informant to the FBI. Time and again, at the direction of these paid provocateurs who know that their ongoing payments depend upon enabling prosecutions, young Muslims in their late teens or early twenties end up saying something hostile about the US and/or statements that are otherwise politically offensive.

The DOJ takes those inflammatory political statements and combines them with evidence of commitment to Islam to depict the target as a dangerous jihadist. They use the same small set of government-loyal “terrorism experts” who earn an ample living testifying for the government and telling juries that unremarkable indicia of Islam are “typical” of Terrorists. Federal judges, notorious for subservience to the government in cases involving Muslims and Terrorism, go out of their way to allow even the most dubious government evidence while excluding the huge bulk of the defendant’s.

Federal prosecutors use this combination to convince a jury of Americans – inculcated with more than a decade of intense Islamophobic propaganda – to convict the defendants under “material support for terrorism” statutes even though they have harmed nobody and have taken no real steps toward doing so. The case is based overwhelmingly on the political and religious beliefs of the defendants, which are enough to convince Americans jurors that they are Bad People. These convictions not only result in decades of prison, but incarceration in special facilities reserved mostly for Muslims that, in most respects, are as restrictive and oppressive as those found at Guantanamo.

There have been several excellent articles reporting on how pervasive this FBI tactic has become, including this Mother Jones article by Trevor Aaronson and this Nation story by Petra Bartosiewicz. Both the Guardian and the Washington Post have reported on some of the worst abuses. I’ve written about various cases on several occasions. And one truly great organization, the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, has devoted itself to chronicling and battling against this assault. As Bartosiewicz reported:

“Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.”

Like most abusive post-9/11 trends, this tactic is now stronger than ever: “there have been 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001, and more than a third of those have occurred in the past three years.”

As common as this tactic has become, it’s vital to look at particularly egregious cases to see what is really at play. This week, a panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a 2-1 decision, affirmed the 2005 “material support” conviction of US-born Hamid Hayat, and it’s one of the worst yet most illustrative cases yet (that’s US justice: he was convicted 8 years ago, and his appeal is only now decided). Hayat was convicted for allegedly having attended “a terrorist training camp” when he was 19 years old. In the Sacramento Bee this week, Stanford Law Professor Shirin Sinnar wrote: “Even among anticipatory prosecutions, this case stands out for the fragility of the government’s case and the rank taint of prejudice, raising the haunting prospect that a man who had done nothing was convicted for a violent state of mind.”

Notably, the dissenting judge was A. Wallace Tashima, the first Japanese-American appointed to the federal bench; he was imprisoned during World War II in an internment camp in Arizona. As Professor Sinnar observed: “Perhaps as a Japanese American who was interned as a child, he remembered well the danger of preventative security measures founded on group-based judgments.” In dissent, Judge Tashima wrote: “This case is a stark demonstration of the unsettling and untoward consequences of the government’s use of anticipatory prosecution as a weapon in the ‘war on terrorism.’” He then described anticipatory prosecutions and explained why they are so dangerous:

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The evidence that Hayat attended a “terrorist training camp” came from a government informant, Nassem Kahn, who was originally arrested by the FBI as part of money laundering scheme. But rather then prosecute Kahn, he was paid between $3,000 and $4,000 per month – as the dissent said, “more than $200,000 by the FBI” total – to infiltrate a local mosque in Lodi, California. That is how he befriended the then-19-year-old Hayat and began trying to induce him into criminal conduct. Desperate to maintain his payments, Kahn outright fabricated stories in order to show his value, including claims – which even the FBI acknowledged were false – that he had on several occasions seen al-Qaida’s then-second-highest official, Ayman al Zawahiri, at the Lodi mosque.

Over the course of hundreds of hours of recorded conversations, Kahn actively encouraged Hayat to attend a terrorist camp in Pakistan. At one point, he even mocked the youth for failing to do so, and on another, told Hayat that he had spoken to Hayat’s father who wanted him to go to the camp:

“Hayat traveled with his family to Pakistan in April 2003. Two of the recorded conversations took place when he was there. Like the earlier conversations, they covered a wide range of topics. On one occasion, Khan scolded Hayat for being lazy and not going to a training camp. In response, Hayat protested that the camp was closed during hot weather and that had the camp been open, he ‘would have been there.’ On another occasion, Khan relayed to Hayat a conversation in which Hayat’s father explained that ‘[Hayat wi]ll enter the Madrassah, and, God Willing, he [will] go for training!’ Hayat responded to Khan: ‘Um-hmm. . . . No problem, absolutely.’ (Underlined portion spoken in English).”

Remarkably, the judge allowed Kahn to testify that Hayat told him that he attended a camp, but then refused to allow Hayat’s lawyers to ask Kahn about the fact that Hayat eventually told him that he never intended to go to a camp and was simply lying out of bravado. That is one major factor that caused Judge Tashima to insist that the conviction must be reversed:

“The prosecution was allowed to introduce inculpatory out-of-court statements Hayat made to Khan, but the defense was prevented from eliciting testimony regarding Hayat’s exculpatory out-of-court statements made in the same conversation. . . . . The district court’s exclusion of a crucial exculpatory statement made under identical conditions and contemporaneously with the inculpatory statement was grossly unfair. . . . This seriously calls into question the fairness and integrity of the proceedings.”

Worse, the prosecution was allowed to introduce “expert testimony” telling the jury that “a particular kind of person would carry” a “supplication” prayer written in Arabic that was found in Hayat’s wallet: namely, “a person who perceives him or herself as being engaged in war for God against an enemy”. As bad as it was to allow such blanket “expert testimony” about his likely state of mind based on a prayer in his wallet, the judge then excluded Hayat’s own expert witness who would have testified that such a prayer is common among perfectly peaceful Muslims and has all sorts of possible meanings. As Judge Tashima pointed out, Hayat was merely carrying “a written prayer, whose meaning to any particular faithful likely is obscure. This is particularly so in this case because Hayat did not speak or read Arabic, the language in which the prayer was written.” To decide that someone is a Terrorist deserving of decades in prison because of that is a travesty beyond belief.

The only other evidence presented was a videotape in which Hayat, after many hours of being badgered in FBI custody, finally said that he had been present a camp at which terrorists were “possibly” or “probably” present. But even an FBI agent, citing how vague and coerced the statement was, himself deemed it the “sorriest confession [he had] ever seen.” Judge Tashima derided it as “a meandering and almost nonsensical confession to the FBI”. He added that the “confession” was extracted only “after hours of questioning, beginning around 11:00 a.m., and lasting into the early morning hours of the following day, [when] he finally agreed with FBI interrogators, who repeatedly insisted, despite his continuing denials, that Hayat had in fact attended such a
training camp.” The trial judge refused to allow expert testimony about how and why it was clear that this statement had been coerced.

But worst of all – and most revealing – the jury foreperson, Joseph Cote, made all sorts of post-trial statements demonstrating clear Islamophobic bias. Cote excused the FBI informant’s fabrications that he had seen al-Zawhiri at the Lodi moseque by saying: “they all look the same when wearing a costume”. Other jurors swore in affidavits that “[t]hroughout the deliberation process, Mr. Cote made other inappropriate racial comments.” In an interview with the Atlantic, Cote, noting the 2005 London subway bombings, said that he could not let Hayat go free “on the basis of what we know of how people of his background have acted in the past.”

That is as bigoted a statement as it gets: that Hayat should be subjected to heightened suspicion because he is Muslim. That’s exactly the mindset that has led the US to create what New York Times editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal has called “essentially a separate justice system for Muslims.” Indeed, Cote specifically endorsed the government’s post-9/11 tactic of preemptively prosecuting Muslims. As the Atlantic article by Amy Waldman explained, the US government’s treatment of Muslims is a direct repudiation of what had long been the core precept of US justice:

“Testifying before Congress in 2004, Paul Rosenzweig of the Heritage Foundation paraphrased a well-known maxim, saying, ‘It is better that ten guilty go free than that one innocent be mistakenly punished.’ September 11 changed the paradigm, he argued, and now, ‘we simply cannot afford a rule that ‘Better ten terrorists go undetected than that the conduct of one innocent be mistakenly examined.’”

The Atlantic article then quoted Cote, again citing the danger from Muslims, as wholeheartedly concurring with this mindset:

“This preventive approach, Cote said, means that ‘just as there are people in prison who never committed the crime, this may also happen . . . .He argued that it was ‘absolutely’ better to run the risk of convicting an innocent man than to let a guilty one go. ‘Too many lives are changed’ by terrorism, he said. ‘So shall one man pay to save fifty? It’s not a debatable question.”

Despite all these comments, the two judges voting to affirm Hayat’s conviction contorted themselves into pretzels to find non-bigoted interpretations of these comments and to conclude, ultimately, that even if ugly, these sentiments are not enough to compel a new trial.

After the jury found him guilty, Hayat was sentenced to 288 months – 24 years – in federal prison. That included the maximum 15-year sentence for “materially supporting” terrorism. Convicted at the age of 23 and now 30 years old, Hayat will not be free until he’s 47 years old – even though there was zero evidence that he had taken any steps to harm anyone.

That’s why I say that this case, though extreme, is incredibly illustrative. It’s how these cases against young Muslims – and, increasingly, non-Muslim activists in the US – typically function. The FBI, using a paid informant, spent years trying to turn him into a criminal. Even with all those efforts, they obtained virtually nothing, but were able to play on the anti-Muslim prejudices of American jurors who equate Muslim religiosity with evidence of Terrorism.

But what makes the case so pernicious, what makes the tactic so dangerous, is exactly what the Church Committee cited when denouncing COINTELPRO: namely, it is the US government targeting citizens for their political beliefs, and then turning them into criminals by exploiting their unpopular political views. Here is the summary of the “evidence” against Hayat from the Atlantic’s Waldman:

“To prove intent, then, the government had to turn to the rubble of Hayat’s life—an accretion of circumstantial but ugly evidence that prosecutors said proved ‘a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind.’ There were Hayat’s words, taped by an informant, in which he praised the murder and mutilation of the journalist Daniel Pearl: ‘They killed him—I’m so pleased about that. They cut him into pieces and sent him back … That was a good job they did—now they can’t send one Jewish person to Pakistan.’ There was what the prosecution called Hayat’s ‘frequently expressed hatred toward the United States’; his comment that his heart ‘belongs to Pakistan’; his description of President Bush as ‘the worm.’ There was, at his house, literature by a virulent Pakistani militant and a scrapbook of clippings celebrating both the Taliban and sectarian violence.”

It’s incredibly common for young people of that age to dabble in extremist thought. But whatever one thinks of those opinions, they are clearly constitutionally protected as free speech. Yet throwing these opinions in the face of the jury, combined with evidence of one’s belief in Islam, is more than enough to persuade all too many Americans that the person is guilty of Terrorism, that he has “a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind”. And that’s what makes these “preemptive” and “anticipatory” prosecutions so menacing: by criminalizing free speech and turning dissidents into felons, they achieve exactly that which the First Amendment, above all else, was designed to prohibit. That these practices created such an intense backlash when exposed 40 years ago by the Church Committee, yet are accepted with such indifference now, speaks volumes about the state of US political culture.

An important report from the ACLU that underscores, once again, the very troubling methodology of the FBI when it comes to “counterterrorism” and the very exaggerated nature of the so-called “American Muslim terrorism problem.”

Radically Wrong: Misstated Threats – Terrorism isn’t an American-Muslim Problem

By Dena Sher, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:50pm

None. Zero. That’s the number of fatalities or injuries from terrorist acts by American Muslims over the last two years, according to a recent report from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security. Here are some other numbers from the report worth noting: In the United States in 2012, there were nine “terrorist plots” by American Muslims—only one of which led to violence. Of those nine plots, only 14 suspects were indicted. Separately, six suspects were indicted for support of terrorism.

Terrorism is not a “Muslim” phenomenon. Indeed, last year, the author of the report called terrorism by American Muslims “a minuscule threat to public safety.” Yet far too many policymakers assume the opposite is true, and too many policies are predicated on the false and bigoted assumption that Muslims are more likely to engage in terrorism than other Americans. The numbers above show how false the premise is. So why are we willing to undermine civil liberties, target an entire religious community, and devote countless resources to this “minuscule threat?”

The answer: a widely debunked “theory” on describing the “process” that drives people to become terrorists. This “theory” is based on the mistaken notion that adopting “radical” ideas (which, under the theory, includes religious beliefs) is a dangerous first step toward committing terrorist acts. Countering terrorism, the thinking goes, begins with countering “radicalization.”

Although it’s been refuted, the “theory” continues to drive policy. Recent Congressional Research Service reports cite it, and the White House issued a plan to counter violent extremism based on it. While the White House deserves some credit for using more careful language and for emphasizing the need for community engagement, it still perpetuates the notion that “how individuals are radicalized to violence” is something we can and should study and understand. And the number of agencies, task forces, working groups, and committees across government that are engaged in the White House’s plan is, well, staggeringly high.

Not surprisingly, when flawed theory drives policy, implementation of the policy is flawed too. If counterterrorism officials believe that adopting radical beliefs is a necessary first stage to terrorism, they will obviously target religious communities and political activists with their enforcement measures.

Take for example, the practice of “preventive policing” by which law enforcement doesn’t focus on crime, but rather tracks legal activities. It has a real and negative impact on individuals: the FBI conducts “assessments” or uses informants, conducts interviews, and surveils people based on their ideas or religious beliefs, or whether they are a certain religion, race, or ethnicity rather than information suggesting they might be involved in criminal activity. Preventive policing also affects entire communities. Through “domain management,” the FBI monitors and tracks entire religious, ethnic, and racial communities based on false stereotypes that ascribe certain types of crimes to entire minority communities. Targeted groups include Muslim- and Arab-Americans in Michigan, and also African-Americans in Georgia, Chinese- and Russian-Americans in California, and broad swaths of Latino-American communities in multiple states.

The FBI has increasingly relied on another tactic based on this flawed theory: the agent provocateur. Remarkably, most of the nine terrorist plots carried out by American Muslims uncovered in 2012 involved informants and undercover agents. According to a recent investigation, undercover agents and informants have targeted “Muslims who espouse radical beliefs, are vocal about their disapproval of American foreign policy, or have expressed sympathy for international terrorist groups”—otherwise known as First Amendment-protected activity. The investigation shows that these targets are fairly unsophisticated and “clearly pose little real threat” on their own. With all essential materials (like money and weapons) coming from government agents and informants, these plots are more manufactured by the government than interdicted.

It’s also clear that preventive policing won’t be tied to an empirical analysis of where significant violence occurs. According to West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, violent acts by far-right extremists significantly outnumber those by American Muslims, but have been virtually ignored by policy makers (though the report has its own problems). While there have been multiple congressional hearings on so-called radicalization of Muslims, there have been none on political violence emanating from the Far Right.

When we implement law enforcement practices that say those who hold “radical” political ideas or religious beliefs, for instance, are dangerous, we could all be in danger. What’s a “radical” idea or belief? It’s one that “reject[s] the status quo.” It’s not hard to imagine that almost all of us hold some “radical” beliefs, which is why it’s not surprising that so many groups come under government suspicion. Anti-government militiamen, misfit anarchists, PETA, Greenpeace, and the Catholic Worker have already been targeted. Who’s to say the group you belong to won’t be next.

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Look, the FBI found somebody that they didn’t have to give weapons to but was actually amassing weapons by himself, in order to kill Blacks, Jews and others.

What if they were Muslim? Wouldn’t there be a mention of terrorism? The article below conspicuously leaves out the word “terrorism” and “terrorist” completely. (h/t: MuslimIQ)

FBI: Neo-Nazi amassed 40,000 rounds, 18 weapons in plot to kill black and Jewish leaders

By Arturo Garcia (Raw Story)

A convicted felon and alleged neo-Nazi amassed 40,000 rounds of ammunition and planned to kill black and Jewish community leaders in Detroit as part of a “hit list,” WXYZ-TV reported on Thursday.

Federal authorities said this week that a search of 47-year-old federal suspect Richard Schmidt’s home revealed the list and apparent plans to kill Scott Kaufman, executive director of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, and Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the Detroit chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

“You have to realize it is the world we live in,” said Kaufman after being notified of the list. “There are people who don’t like us and would just as soon have us not exist, but you can’t dwell on it.”

According to NBC News, Schmidt was indicted in January 2013 on federal charges of possessing firearms, ammunition and body armor, all of which violated his parole. Schmidt was released from prison in 2003, after 13 years of incarceration in Ohio following a homicide conviction for shooting and killing a man during a traffic stop. Schmidt also wounded two others during that attack.

Investigators then found 18 weapons inside Schmidt’s home in Ohio in December 2012, including various types of shotguns and high-caliber rifles, including two different AR-15 assault weapons.

U.S. Attorney Steven M. Dettelbach, who represents Ohio’s northern district, said investigators have concluded that Schmidt acquired his arsenal at gun shows or via private firearms sales, which currently do not require a background check.

“It’s scary,” Dettelback said about the amount of weaponry found at the suspect’s home, adding that while he would say where Schmidt bought the guns if he knew, “It’s that sitting here today as a senior federal law enforcement official in northern Ohio, I can’t say.”

Schmidt, who owns a sporting good store, is also accused of selling knock-offs of popular brands like Nike, Reebok and Louis Vuitton.

Watch WXYZ’s report on Schmidt’s alleged “kill list,” aired Thursday night, below.

The FBI has manufactured the most terrorist plots in the USA.

Most Terrorist Plots in the US Aren’t Invented by Al Qaeda — They’re Manufactured by the FBI

Trevor Aaronson (AlterNet)

Antonio Martinez was a punk. The twenty-two-year-old from Baltimore was chunky, with a wide nose and jet-black hair pulled back close to his scalp and tied into long braids that hung past his shoulders. He preferred to be called Muhammad Hussain, the name he gave himself following his conversion to Islam. But his mother still called him Tony, and she couldn’t understand her son’s burning desire to be the Maryland Mujahideen.

As a young man, Martinez had been angry and lost. He’d dropped out of Laurel High School, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and spent his teens as a small-time thief in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. By the age of sixteen, he’d been charged with armed robbery. In February 2008, at the age of eighteen, he tried to steal a car. Catholic University doctoral student Daniel Tobin was looking out of the window of his apartment one day when he saw a man driving off in his car. Tobin gave chase, running between apartment buildings and finally catching up to the stolen vehicle. He opened the passenger-side door and got in. Martinez, in the driver’s seat, dashed out and ran away on foot. Jumping behind the wheel, Tobin followed the would-be car thief. “You may as well give up running,” he yelled at Martinez. Martinez was apprehended and charged with grand theft of a motor vehicle—he had stolen the vehicle using an extra set of car keys which had gone missing when someone had broken into Tobin’s apartment earlier. However, prosecutors dropped the charges against Martinez after Tobin failed to appear in court.

Despite the close call, Martinez’s petty crimes continued. One month after the car theft, he and a friend approached a cashier at a Safeway grocery store, acting as if they wanted to buy potato chips. When the cashier opened the register, Martinez and his friend grabbed as much money as they could and ran out of the store. The cashier and store manager chased after them, and later identified the pair to police. Martinez pleaded guilty to theft of one hundred dollars and received a ninety-day suspended sentence, plus six months of probation.

Searching for greater meaning in his life, Martinez was baptized and became a Christian when he was twenty-one years old, but he didn’t stick with the religion. “He said he tried the Christian thing. He just really didn’t understand it,” said Alisha Legrand, a former girlfriend. Martinez chose Islam instead. On his Facebook page, Martinez wrote that he was “just a yung brotha from the wrong side of the tracks who embraced Islam.” But for reasons that have never been clear to his family and friends, Martinez drifted toward a violent, extremist brand of Islam. When the FBI discovered him, Martinez was an angry extremist mouthing off on Facebook about violence, with misspelled posts such as, “The sword is cummin the reign of oppression is about 2 cease inshallah.” Based on the Facebook postings alone, an FBI agent gave an informant the “green light” to get to know Martinez and determine if he had a propensity for violence. In other words, to see if he was dangerous.

The government was setting the trap.

On the evening of December 2, 2010, Martinez was in another Muslim’s car as they drove through Baltimore. A hidden device recorded their conversation. His mother had called, and Martinez had just finished talking to her on his cell phone. He was aggravated. “She wants me to be like everybody else, being in school, working,” he told his friend. “For me, it’s different. I have this zeal for deen and she doesn’t understand that.” Martinez’s mother didn’t know that her son had just left a meeting with a purported Afghan-born terrorist who had agreed to provide him with a car bomb. But she wasn’t the only one in the dark that night. Martinez himself didn’t know his new terrorist friend was an undercover agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and that the man driving the car—a man he’d met only a few weeks earlier—was a paid informant for federal law enforcement.

Five days later, Martinez met again with the man he believed to be a terrorist. The informant was there, too. They were all, Martinez believed, brothers in arms and in Islam. In a parking lot near the Armed Forces Career Center on Baltimore National Pike, Martinez, the informant, and the undercover FBI agent piled into an SUV, where the undercover agent showed Martinez the device that would detonate the car bomb and how to use it. He then unveiled to the twenty-two-year-old the bomb in the back of the SUV and demonstrated what he’d need to do to activate it. “I’m ready, man,” Martinez said. “It ain’t like you seein’  it on the news. You gonna be there. You gonna hear the bomb go off. You gonna be, uh, shooting, gettin’ shot at. It’s gonna be real. … I’m excited, man.”

That night, Martinez, who had little experience behind the wheel of a car, needed to practice driving the SUV around the empty parking lot. Once he felt comfortable doing what most teenagers can do easily, Martinez and his associates devised a plan: Martinez would park the bomb-on-wheels in the parking lot outside the military recruiting center. One of his associates would then pick him up, and they’d drive together to a vantage point where Martinez could detonate the bomb and delight in the resulting chaos and carnage.

The next morning, the three men put their plan into action. Martinez hopped into the SUV and activated the bomb, as he’d been instructed, and then drove to the military recruiting station. He parked right in front. The informant, trailing in another car, picked up Martinez and drove him to the vantage point, just as planned. Everything was falling into place, and Martinez was about to launch his first attack in what he hoped would be for him a lifetime of jihad against the only nation he had ever known.

Looking out at the military recruiting station, Martinez lifted the detonation device and triggered the bomb. Smiling, he watched expectantly. Nothing happened. Suddenly, FBI agents rushed in and arrested the man they’d later identify in court records as “Antonio Martinez a/k/a Muhammad Hussain.” Federal prosecutors in Maryland charged Martinez with attempted murder of federal officers and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He faced at least thirty-five years in prison if convicted at trial.

“This is not Tony,” a woman identifying herself as Martinez’s mother told a reporter after the arrest. “I think he was brainwashed with that Islam crap.” Joseph Balter, a federal public defender, told the court during a detention hearing that FBI agents had entrapped Martinez, whom he referred to by his chosen name. The terrorist plot was, Balter said, “the creation of the government—a creation which was implanted into Mr. Hussain’s mind.” He added: “There was nothing provided which showed that Mr. Hussain had any ability whatsoever to carry out any kind of plan.”

Despite Balter’s claims, a little more than a year after his indictment, Martinez chose not to challenge the government’s charges in court. On January 26, 2012, Martinez dropped his entrapment defense and pleaded guilty to attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction under a deal that will require him to serve twenty-five years in prison—more years than he’s been alive. Neither Martinez nor Balter would comment on the reasons they chose a plea agreement, though in a sentencing hearing, Balter told the judge he believed the entire case could have been avoided had the FBI counseled, rather than encouraged, Martinez.

The U.S. Department of Justice touted the conviction as another example of the government keeping citizens safe from terrorists. “We are catching dangerous suspects before they strike, and we are investigating them in a way that maximizes the liberty and security of law-abiding citizens,” U.S. attorney for the District of Maryland Rod J. Rosenstein said in a statement announcing Martinez’s plea agreement. “That is what the American people expect of the Justice Department, and that is what we aim to deliver.”

Indeed, that is exactly what the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been delivering throughout the decade since the attacks of September 11, 2001. But whether it’s what the American people expect is questionable, because most Americans today have no idea that since 9/11, one single organization has been responsible for hatching and financing more terrorist plots in the United States than any other. That organization isn’t Al Qaeda, the terrorist network founded by Osama bin Laden and responsible for the spectacular 2001 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. And it isn’t Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Al-Shabaab, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any of the other more than forty U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations. No, the organization responsible for more terrorist plots over the last decade than any other is the FBI. Through elaborate and expensive sting operations involving informants and undercover agents posing as terrorists, the FBI has arrested and the Justice Department has prosecuted dozens of men government officials say posed direct—but by no means immediate or credible—threats to the United States.

Read the rest…

US Air Force veteran, finally allowed to fly into US, is now banned from flying back home

by Glenn Greenwald (Guardian)

In early November, I wrote about the infuriating story of Saadiq Long, the 43-year-old African-American Muslim who – despite having never been charged with any crime – was secretly placed on a no-fly list and thus barred from flying to the US to visit his seriously ill mother. When I met with Long in early November in Doha, Qatar, where he has lived for several years with his wife and her two children while teaching English, he was in the middle of his futile months-long battle just to find out why he was placed on this list, let alone how he could be removed.

Two weeks after that article was published, Long – without explanation – was finally removed from the no-fly list and he flew from Doha to Oklahoma City to visit his mother and other family members. He took several flights to make the 20-hour journey, all without incident. He has remained in Oklahoma for the last ten weeks, visiting his family in the US for the first time in over a decade.

But now Long – unbeknownst to him – has once again apparently been secretly placed by some unknown National Security State bureaucrat on the no-fly list. On Wednesday night, as Associated Press first reported, he went to the Will Rogers Airport in Oklahoma City to fly back home to Qatar. In order to ensure there were no problems, his lawyer sent the FBI a letter ahead of time notifying them that Long would be flying home on that date (see the embedded letter below).

But without explanation, Long was denied a boarding pass at the airport by a Delta Airlines agent. Three local police officers then arrived on the scene, followed by a US Transportation Security Administration agent who “told Long he couldn’t board a plane but did not give him a specific reason”.

Long’s lawyer, Adam Soltani of the Oklahoma chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), was with him at the airport and repeatedly asked agents why this was happening and who they should contact. He got no answers, except was told to contact the FBI. But both the FBI and Delta refused to comment to AP, while TSA spokesman David Castelveter would only say this:

“It’s my understanding this individual was denied a boarding pass by the airline because he was on a no-fly list. The TSA does not confirm whether someone is or is not on the no-fly list, as that list is maintained by the FBI.”

Long and his CAIR lawyers have thus far been told nothing about why he is barred once again from flying.

The personal cost to this injustice is obvious and substantial. Long has a job he needs to return to in Doha from which he has been away for more than two months, and his family needs that income for its sustenance. “I was extremely disappointed when I was unable to board the flight this past Wednesday,” Long told me through his lawyer. “My family in Qatar feels crushed that I will not be returning home as expected.”

The sense of humiliation and outrage should not be hard to fathom. Just imagine being a US citizen, denied the right to travel home – first to your own country, then back to your family – by a government that has never charged you with any crime or indicated you have engaged in wrongdoing of any sort. Imagine going to the airport and having local and federal agents arrive to prevent you from boarding a plane, treating you like a criminal – a Terrorist – without any tangible accusations. “I don’t understand how the government can take away my right to travel without even telling me,” he told me back in November. “If the US government wanted me to question or arrest or prosecute me, they could have had me in a minute. But there are no charges, no accusations, nothing.”

But what’s particularly infuriating here is that, if they had evidence that Long has done anything wrong, they easily could have arrested him at any point over the last ten weeks when he was in the US. The reality is that they could have arrested him at any time over the last decade because he has lived in three countries with highly US-loyal autocracies: Egypt, the UAE and Qatar. But he was never arrested, never charged with anything – just denied the basic right to travel.

Here is what CAIR’s Gadeir Abbas told me about all of this on Thursday:

“It is not as if the FBI actually thinks Saadiq is a threat. If it did – and it had actual evidence – the FBI would simply arrest him. As they surely recall, they let him fly just a few months ago. It turns out, though, the only reason for doing so is because it is, in the FBI’s view, slightly more indefensible to prevent an American citizen from flying home than it is to prevent him from flying abroad.

“And because we told the FBI ahead of time when Saadiq would be flying, hardly the behavior of a criminal, they could have stuck an air marshal right next to him. They could have subjected his person and luggage to extra scrutiny. But the FBI does not do these things because the No Fly List is not used to protect aircraft. This watchlist – and the many others like it – is a means by which the FBI metes out extra-judicial punishment.”

How can anyone argue with that? Even leaving aside that he just flew into and around the US less than three months ago without incident, the very idea that he poses a threat to this flight is patently ludicrous given their advance knowledge that he was flying and the multiple precautions they could take if they really were concerned.

Plainly, air travel safety is not what any of this is about. It is about inventing ways to punish US Muslims and deprive them of the most basic rights without so much as providing any notice, let alone any due process that would enable the secret, unknown accusations to be discovered and rebutted. And it is a very common weapon.

Use of this repressive tactic has worsened significantly under the Obama administration. Last February, Associated Press learned that “the Obama administration has more than doubled, to about 21,000 names, its secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the United States, including about 500 Americans.” Moreover, as I detailed last November based on that AP report:

“Worse, the Obama administration ‘lowered the bar for being added to the list’. As a result, reported AP, ‘now a person doesn’t have to be considered only a threat to aviation to be placed on the no-fly list’ but can be included if they ‘are considered a broader threat to domestic or international security’, a vague status determined in the sole and unchecked discretion of unseen DHS bureaucrats.”

There should be no doubt of the FBI’s desire to harass Long. Although they never charged him with any crime or arrested him while he was in Oklahoma, he was, along with his sister, Ava Anderson, handcuffed and put on the ground the day after Thanksgiving after they drove to their local police department in fear when they noticed they were being followed. It turns out that the FBI had falsely told local police that Long and his sister were “fleeing felons”, but when the local police learned that was false, they never arrested Long or his sister. They were simply told to leave without explanation. Here’s a video report on those incidents from a local Oklahoma television station back in December:

As Abbas told me after that incident occurred: “Our sense is that a particular FBI agent, or perhaps a small group of them, in Oklahoma City are looking to inflict some pain on Saadiq and his family – maybe in retaliation for the embarrassment he caused them or the thousands of emails that ended up getting sent to their field office there.”

The worst part of all of this is the complete lack of remedy available to Long. Abbas told me: “unfortunately, because of arcane jurisdictional complications, we don’t think seeking a preliminary injunction is necessarily an expeditious option for getting Saadiq on a plane.” Even worse:

“We’ll likely try again in a couple of weeks, but if there isn’t some change by then, this puts Saadiq in the position of rolling the dice and trying to get to a country by land or sea that will actually let him fly. Even in these situations, however, we’ve seen detentions and interrogations by foreign authorities, such as here and here.”

So now he’s just in a no-man’s land. He can’t contest the accusations against him because there are none. After being blocked for months from visiting his own country and his terminally ill mother, he’s now barred from returning to his home, his job, and his own family. All of this is done by his own government without a shred of due process, transparency or accountability.

When I wrote on Tuesday about the Obama DOJ’s “white paper” justifying due-process-free presidential assassinations, I wrote that “the core distortion of the War on Terror under both Bush and Obama is the Orwellian practice of equating government accusations of terrorism with proof of guilt” and that “if the US government simply asserts without evidence or trial that someone is a terrorist, then they are assumed to be, and they can then be punished as such.” This is exactly what I was talking about: I’m sure there will be no shortage of people justifying this by insisting that he must have done something wrong: even though the government has never said what that is, offered evidence for it, or provided any opportunity for the accusations to be independently examined.

This is also a perfect example of what New York Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal meant when he wrote last March that the US now has “what’s essentially a separate justice system for Muslims”. State punishment without charges and trials is now perfectly normal – for Muslims.

The numbers are in fact higher as the SPLC reports that hate crime stats compiled by the FBI are “notoriously understated.”

FBI: Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes Remain Relatively High

by Mark Potok on December 10, 2012, Southern Poverty Law Center

Hate crimes against perceived Muslims, which jumped up 50% in 2010 largely as a result of anti-Muslim propagandizing, remained at relatively high levels last year, according to 2011 hate crime statistics released today by the FBI.

The bureau reported that there were 157 reported anti-Muslim hate crimes in 2011, down slightly from the 160 recorded in 2010. The 2011 crimes occurred during a period when Islam-bashing propaganda, which initially took off in 2010, continued apace.

The FBI statistics, which are compilations of state numbers, are notoriously understated. Two Department of Justice studies have indicated that the real level of hate crimes in America is some 20-30 times the number reported in the FBI statistics, in part because some 56% of hate crimes are never reported to police and more than half of those that are are mischaracterized as non-hate crimes. Nevertheless, the FBI statistics can be used to get a sense of general trends.

Last year saw continued high levels of anti-Muslim propaganda such as the crusade by some against the alleged Muslim plan to impose religious Shariah law on the United States. There were a number of local battles over the construction of new mosques, and several were attacked by apparent Islamophobes.

At the same time, the FBI statistics suggested that there was a 31% drop in anti-Latino hate crimes, from 534 in 2010 to 405 last year. It’s not clear what might be behind that drop, other than an apparent diminution in anti-Latino and anti-immigrant propaganda as negative attention focused on Muslims.

Other hate crime categories remained relatively steady. Anti-Jewish hate crimes fell from 887 in 2010 to 771 last year, while anti-LGBT hate crimes rose slightly, from 1,256 to 1,277. Anti-black hate crimes also fell slightly, continuing a trend of dropping from a high of 2,876 in 2008 (when Barack Obama appeared on the national political scene, fueling anti-black hatred in some quarters) to 2,076 last year.

What if they were Muslim? (h/t: Critical dragon)

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Linked to Nuclear Technology Smuggling Ring – FBI Files

The remains of the Islamic Society of Joplin mosque (Credit: Islamic Society of Joplin/Facebook)

If events continue like this we are sure to see more such attacks in the future, as the anti-Muslim ideology shows no sign of abating in the USA or Europe.:

Eight attacks, 11 days

BY UZMA KOLSY

There’s a crime wave targeting houses of worship, most of them Muslim. Is something sinister at work?

David Conrad, a resident of Morton Grove, Ill., was likely peeved by the noise from the Muslim Education Center. Conrad’s home is adjacent to the center’s parking lot, and during the holy month of Ramadan, men, women and children pack the mosque on a nightly basis. On Friday, Aug. 10, Conrad allegedly shot a pellet rifle at the mosque wall, while some 500 people were praying inside. The building structure sustained minor damage, but no one was hurt. Was this just the rumbling of a disgruntled neighbor? Maybe.

But given a chain of incidents at mosques across the country over the past two weeks, the Morton Grove shooting doesn’t appear to be an isolated event. In the past 10 days, there have been eight cases of vandalism and attacks on houses of worship across the nation, including the deadly shooting spree in a Sikh gurdwara in Wisconsin on Aug. 5. The other seven incidents were mosque defacements, which have sent a tremor of fear through America’s Muslim community.

While Morton Grove Police have not charged Conrad with a hate crime, the FBI is currently investigating the attack as a hate crime and CAIR has also called on the FBI to investigate the Lombard incident as such. Just 25 miles from Morton Grove, an Islamic school in Lombard was targeted with an even more chilling assault on Sunday night. An assailant flung a homemade “MacGyver bomb” at the building, while worshippers prayed inside. The soda bottle — filled with household chemicals, including acid — did not break the window, and again, the worshipers were rattled but unharmed. According to local reports, no one has yet been charged, and the FBI is investigating the matter.

Craig Monteilh says he was an FBI informant who infiltrated mosques in Orange County with IDs issued to him while serving time in state prison.

“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” ~ Benjamin Franklin

Federal judge throws out lawsuit over spying on O.C. Muslims

by Victoria Kim, Los Angeles Times

A federal judge Tuesday threw out a lawsuit filed against the U.S. government and the FBI over the agency’s spying on Orange County Muslims, ruling that allowing the suit to go forward would risk divulging sensitive state secrets.

Comparing himself to Odysseus navigating between a six-headed monster and a deadly whirlpool, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney wrote that”

“…the state secrets privilege may unfortunately mean the sacrifice of individual liberties for the sake of national security.”

The judge wrote that he reached the decision reluctantly after reviewing confidential declarations filed by top FBI officials, and that he was convinced that the operation in question involved “intelligence that, if disclosed, would significantly compromise national security.”

Carney allowed the suit to stand against individual FBI agents under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows those who were improperly subjected to electronic surveillance to sue.

The lawsuit was centered around the actions of Craig Monteilh, who alleges that he posed as a Muslim convert at the behest of the FBI to collect information at Orange County mosques. The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the Council on American-Islamic Relations sued on behalf of community members who alleged that the FBI engaged in a “dragnet” investigation that indiscriminately targeted Muslims based on their religion, planted bugs in offices and homes, and listened in on private religious conversations.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs said late Tuesday that they would appeal the judge’s decision.

“That’s terribly unfortunate that there’s a doctrine in the law that allows courts to throw out cases that allege serious constitutional violations based on secret evidence the judge reviews behind closed doors that never sees the light of day,” ACLU attorney Peter Bibring said after Carney’s ruling. “That shouldn’t be in a democratic society.”

In his decision, Carney called some of the allegations about the FBI investigation involving Monteilh “disturbing.”

Monteilh, a convict who the FBI has acknowledged worked as an informant on a case dubbed Operation Flex, has since taken his story public and filed lengthy court papers for the ACLU outlining his FBI work. In a declaration, Monteilh wrote that he was not given specific targets by the FBI but rather tasked with “immersing myself in the Muslim community and gathering as much information on as many people and institutions as possible.”

He claimed to have conducted surveillance in about 10 Southern California mosques using sophisticated audio and video equipment. Monteilh has separately sued the government, alleging that his rights were violated and that his life was endangered while working as an informant.

The Obama administration asserted the state secrets privilege in the case last August. U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a declaration that he determined that national security was at stake after “careful and actual personal consideration of the matter.” FBI Assistant Director Mark Giuliano wrote in a declaration that Operation Flex was “focused on fewer than 25 individuals and was directed at detecting and preventing possible terrorist attacks.”

Giuliano also filed additional declarations shielded from public view that Carney said he “heavily relied upon” in reaching his decision.

Department of Justice attorney Anthony Coppolino told Carney in court Tuesday that to parse through the truths, half-truths and falsehoods in Monteilh’s statements was not possible without wading into sensitive, privileged information.

“You’d have to throw open the books,” he said. “What you have is a he-said, he-said … Mr. Monteilh versus the FBI.”

While acknowledging that asserting the state secrets privilege could be seen as “unfair or harsh,” Coppolino said it was necessary for the greater public good. He said divulging information about how the U.S. conducts counterterrorism investigations “could cause harm for years to come.”

Attorneys representing two agents who allegedly acted as Monteilh’s “handlers” and their supervisors argued that their clients were prevented from fighting the claims because the information about why and how they conducted their investigation was classified.

“Our clients literally are defenseless to defend themselves,” attorney David Scheper contended. “It’s just not a fair fight.”

Read the rest…