Earlier this week a federal judge in Miami declared a second mistrial in the case of the so-called "Liberty City 7," a group of men accused of a terrorist plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Only six men were on trial this time because last December a jury acquitted one of the so-called plotters and was deadlocked on the charges against the others, included the purported leader, one Narseal Batiste, 33, who was supposedly the leader of a self-styled sect called the Moorish Science Temple.
The prosecution had at its disposal hundreds of FBI audio and video recordings documenting supposed plots, including one in which the men took an oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda. Perhaps the jury was less than impressed, however, by the fact that the oath-taking ceremony was led by an FBI informant, known as Brother Mohammed, posing as an al-Qaeda operative.
It quickly became apparent after the arrests of these bozos that they were essentially a bunch of big-talking stumblebums and losers without money, without weapons, without military training, without anything resembling operational knowledge of what it would take to bring down the Sears Tower, and had never even been to Chicago. It turned out that most of the plots were dreamed up at the instigation of FBI informants who sat around with the men in dope-smoking sessions and urged them to dream up ever more fanciful plots. The informants promised to come up with $50,000 to finance the plot and get access to explosives and other nasty stuff. Batiste testified that he was merely trying to con the informant out of $50,000.
By the time of the arrest, the only things resembling evidence that this was anything approaching a serious plot were some cameras and military boots and a warehouse. All this had been supplied by the FBI informants. There were no weapons, ammunition or explosives.
In his closing argument during the December trial, Albert Levin, an attorney for one of the accused, said that "This was all written, produced, directed, choreographed and stage-designed by the United States government." That appears to be the case, and it appears to be what two juries believed.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few home-grown terrorist cells in the United States consisting of fairly serious people who just might have a chance to pull off an attack that caused some serious destruction. There might even be some cells with connections to foreign groups.
But almost all the cases brought forward by the U.S. government so far – each time with portentous self-congratulation about how the intrepid government agents had foiled yet another dangerous plot that could have wreaked untold death and destruction on innocent American citizens – has more closely resembled the Liberty City 7 case. In almost every instance the "plotters" have turned out to be a bunch of pathetic losers who made the mistake of talking nonsense and then getting infiltrated by government agents who goaded them into dreaming of ever-bigger death and destruction, then supplied (at taxpayer expense) the only elements of supposed plot that came even close to resembling something real.
There’s the case of the "Fort Dix Six," arrested last May and charged with a plot to attack the military base in New Jersey. The supposed plotters consisted of a taxi driver, a former pizza delivery boy and three roofers who had no money, no training and pretty much no clue. But the FBI infiltrated the group of slackers, urged them to dream up the plot while collecting incriminating evidence, and promised to give them access to rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s, none of which ever quite materialized.
In most cases there were serious elements of entrapment – undercover government agents urging the supposed plotters to commit crimes they might not have thought of by themselves and had no capacity to commit without government help even if they had thought of them.
Entrapment and "sting" operations, setting up fictional crimes that carry real sentences, are all too common in U.S. law enforcement. As ethically dubious as such operations are, however, they have traditionally been carried out against people whom the police have a reasonably well-grounded suspicion are already involved in some kind of criminal or at least illicit activities, such as burglary, fencing or drug dealing. Thus we hear, from time to time, of a bunch of petty thieves being invited to a warehouse where they can get cash for their stolen goods and being arrested upon arrival.
The difference with the domestic terrorist "plots" is that in almost every single instance there was no activity more criminal than foolish talk before the undercover informants got involved. What seems to be the case with these concoctions is that the government is manufacturing plots at least in part to develop fear in the general populace, most of whom hear little more about these stumblebums beyond the initial press conference announcing that yet another dread terrorist cell has been stymied, but there are others out there, so be very afraid.
There’s also the little matter of justifying the $4 billion a year or so the feds are spending on anti-terrorism boondoggles. As Rolling Stone explained in a valuable recent article, "The Fear Factory," which describes several more episodes of stumblebums prodded by the feds, there are now 102 Joint Terrorism Task Forces spread around the country, consisting of FBI agents, local police and agents from other federal agencies including Immigration, the IRS and the CIA. They’ve got to have some apparent successes to justify all this expenditure of time and money, so they increasingly resort to paid informants, often enough drug dealers or real criminals seeking reduced sentences.
The Rolling Stone story also includes a valuable sidebar describing various efforts to ratchet up fear, whether by describing a supposed plot or raising the threat level to Orange, accompanied by the generally inconsequential or non-existent evidence supporting the fear-mongering, along with the potentially embarrassing political incident that just happened to coincide with the breathless warnings.
All this suggests that while there is probably some real danger, the threat of domestic terrorism in the United States is drastically and purposely overblown by the government to justify ever-greater expenditures of money and liberty-threatening surveillance. And even if the bogus plots the government has chosen to publicize had been real, they would have caused strictly localized damage akin to what hurricanes or tornadoes cause, and much less than has been caused by recent floods or would be caused by the earthquakes the prognosticators have once again warned are imminent in California.
We are encouraged to live in fear and trembling of the terrorist jihadist threat when the potential damage, even if the threats were real, is on the kind of scale that insurance companies and local governments are well equipped to handle.
Add the fact that that Stratfor.com and other private international intelligence sources have sent out several e-mail essays in recent months suggesting that for all the likelihood that al-Qaeda Central has to some extent reconstituted itself along the Afghan-Pakistan border, one of the reasons it hasn’t mounted a major attack on the U.S. since 9/11 is that it simply doesn’t have the operational capacity to do so. Its successes of late have come from adopting local groups – al-Qaeda in Iraq – and to some extent offering advice and training. But there may be less to it than many people suspect.
All this makes the recent advice from the invaluable Bruce Fein, who served in the Reagan Justice Department, timely and relevant. In the series of pieces on Slate.com offering tips to the next president, whoever he or she may be, he includes this:
"End the ‘war on terror’ as a legal paradigm. International terrorists are criminals, not warriors. The next president should see to it that terrorists will be captured, interrogated, prosecuted, and punished according to civilian law. The United States is not at war with international terrorism. The next president should ensure that we do not brandish the weapons of war in lieu of traditional law enforcement against international terrorists."
Haven’t we lived in fear of phantom threats long enough?
