I haven’t seen this news splashed across the front and home pages of America’s media as much as I would say, if the bad guys were Muslims, but I was happy to see it here. Seems America’s real terrorists are at it again out to wreck mayhem and sew dissension and chaos as far and wide as they can. In the case of the terrorists mentioned below, targeted Muslims and anyone who was against Israel (?) and I’ve got to wonder were they able to make contact with members of the Jewish community as the article below implies and what was the result of that contact?
2 accused of plot to kill Muslims with X-ray weapon
A Ku Klux Klansman working for General Electric and an accomplice are facing terrorism charges in Upstate New York for allegedly planning to build a mobile X-ray weapon to kill Muslims and other “enemies of Israel,” federal authorities announced Wednesday.
Eric J. Feight
Glendon Scott Crawford, 49, of Galway, N.Y., and Eric J. Feight, 54, of Hudson, N.Y., were charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, which carries a maximum prison term of 15 years, U.S. Attorney Richard Hartunian said. They were due in federal court in Albany on Wednesday.
Crawford, an industrial mechanic with GE, claimed the “Hiroshima on a light switch” device could fit in a van, be triggered remotely and deliver lethal doses of ionizing radiation that would kill its targets as they slept, the complaint stated. Feight allegedly agreed to build the electronic controls.
Glendon Scott Crawford
Their target was the Muslim community, the complaint stated, and they had successfully tested the remote trigger from about a half-mile away.
Crawford, a married father of three, is a member of the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the criminal complaint said. In disrupting the alleged plot, undercover agents posed as Klansmen in North Carolina who offered to finance and buy the device, which the FBI said was constructed but never operable or a public danger.
Feight works for a GE contractor in Columbia County, authorities said. He formerly was employed as a computer software expert and project engineer for Smith Control Systems, in Hudson, the Albany Times-Union reported in its detailed account.
Up to six unidentified people, including another GE employee, were assisting Crawford, and some may have known his intentions, according to an FBI affidavit.
GE said in a statement that the company has “no reason to believe the act took place on GE property nor is there any information indicating that our employees’ safety was ever compromised. Since this incident, Mr. Crawford has been suspended. We are cooperating fully with the authorities on their investigation.”
In April 2012, authorities were notified that Crawford had gone to an Albany-area synagogue and and(sic) contacted a local Jewish organizations(sic)”seeking out individuals who might offer assistance in helping him with a type of technology that could be used against people he perceived as enemies of Israel” and the United States. He called these perceived enemies and Muslims “medical waste” and “scumbags.”
Crawford told an informant he planned to buy or build a battery-powered, industrial-strength X-ray device and hoped to land a part-time job in a metal shop with X-ray tubes, according to the complaint.
A year later — April 15, the day of the Boston Marathon bombings — Crawford said in an e-mail exchange monitored by the FBI that he had found a power supply. He railed against President Obama, whom he derided as “your treasoness bedwetting maggot in chief,” for “bringing the muzzies here without background checks.”
Crawford was aware that authorities might monitor his cellphone, e-mail and text messages — which they did with search warrants — so he used pseudonyms and code words.
Hartunian, the U.S. attorney, said the case “demonstrates how we must remain vigilant to detect and stop potential terrorists, who so often harbor hatred toward people they deem undesirable.”
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 beenrefuted, 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.
Remember this guy? He was denied entry into his own country for several long, excruciating months due to the appearance of his name on the mysterious, unfathomable no fly list or whatever it’s designation really is. Finally he was allowed to fly to his home state of Oklahoma and his return was uneventful, if you don’t count this rather intimidating run in he had with the FBI back in November. Well he’s back in the news again and here’s why
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.
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.
Another terrorist plot has been thwarted by the FBI who arrested a NYC man because of his plans to kill a Pennsylvania bank’s employees. First off, this bit of news goes to show you the federal government can monitor threats just fine, without the need of the New York city police department which has, when it comes to Muslims, decided to expand its jurisdiction to everywhere along the east coast of America. This bit of news also underscores the terrorist threat that lies within the shores of this great Nation that has nothing to do with or is not based on Islam and Muslims.
Michael Chung, 52, allegedly faxed a letter to a Pottsville, Pennsylvania branch of Sovereign Bank on Monday in which he cited the second amendment of the Constitution and threatened to kill workers at the bank.
“The 2nd Amendment to the National Constitution authorizes the use of deadly force to protect my interests as a national citizen,” said the fax, according to the criminal complaint. “I believe I have a basis to act in that manner.”
According to a law enforcement official, Chung told investigators he is a “sovereign citizen,” one of a group of people who reject government authority and resist paying taxes. The FBI monitors the “sovereign citizen” movement as a potential domestic terror threat.
Lest anyone forget this is the definition of terrorism from which Miscellany101 works
The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property in order to coerce or intimidate a government or the civilian population in furtherance of political or social objectives.
After the last two examples of domestic terrorism America continues her denial about the contributions she makes towards terrorism which began back in 2009 after the report that shook the world, entitled Right Wing Terrorism. If there is any doubt about the backlash one faces when talking about America’s terrorism and especially terrorism fueled by conservative thought unrelated to Islam look no further than to this brilliant piece in Wired
in April 2009, (Daryl) Johnson warned that the election of the first African-American president, combined with recession-era economic anxieties, could fuel a rise in far-right violence. “DHS/I&A is concerned that rightwing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities,” he wrote. And so began a brief media firestorm. Conservative writers feared that the DHS was demonizing — even, potentially, criminalizing — mainstream right-wing speech.
According to Johnson, his former team now consists of a single analyst tasked with tracking all domestic non-Islamic extremism. His database has been shuttered.
It’s obvious any act of violence that aims to influence public opinion, government policy or otherwise terrorize people is considered terror only if committed by Muslims even though that is NOT the definition crafted by policy makers and law enforcement. In an effort to get people on board with the idea of terrorism, a very broad definition was made, but in practice, even by the federal government headed by the first black president, terrorism is recognized exclusively on the ethnic, racial, and religious characteristics of the one(s) committing the act. That is typical of America’s politicians reaping scorn on one group of Americans or another for political gain, which is why we here at Miscellany101will continue to remind America of what she has committed to in writing and call a terrorist a terrorist even if he’s not Muslim.
Beware this man. If you ever see him in your community, no matter what faith you are or are not, don’t call the authorities, don’t take any action, simply ignore him. Don’t talk to him, don’t give him your phone number, don’t let him into your home.
I tweeted once earlier that black teens and Muslims cannot run away from trouble…it always seems to follow them. This latest story is an excellent case in point. A Muslim American is approached by someone (because we don’t the identity of the man pictured left we can only provide this photo of him) who he correctly identifies as an agent provocateur and verifies that after finding his picture on the net and reading about his history that includes a murder charge. In fear of his life Khalifah al-Akili calls the FBI to report this person’s presence in the community only to find himself arrested and his reputation maligned and his name associated with the Taliban.
Khalifah Al-Akili, 34, who lives near Pittsburgh, told the Times Union in an interview Sunday that the FBI recently used Shahed Hussain — an informant who was integral in two terrorism-related cases in the upstate New York cities — in an apparent attempt to test Al-Akili’s interest in jihad and anti-American views.
Al-Akili said he was approached by Hussain, who went by the name “Mohammed,” and another man, who used the name “Shareef,” in January when they turned up in his neighborhood and repeatedly made attempts to get close to Al-Akili. But Al-Akili said he quickly figured out Hussain’s identity as an FBI informant. He said the men were “too obvious” and requested receipts even for small items they purchased like coffee and donuts.
Al-Akili said Shareef also asked Al-Akili repeatedly if he could help him purchase a gun. Al-Akili said he told the man he could not help him.
Al-Akili said his suspicions the men were informants were confirmed when he saw a photograph of Hussain on the Internet. In addition, he said, a cell phone number Hussain had given him was the same number used by Hussain during a 2009 counterterrorism investigation against four Newburgh men in the small Orange County city. Al-Akili said he found the number and its connection to that case through a simple Internet search using Google.
Al-Akili was arrested during an FBI raid of his home in Wilkinsburg, a Pittsburgh borough. He was charged in a federal complaint with being a convicted felon in possession of a firearm. The complaint filed in U.S. District Court said federal agents obtained an email with a 7-second video showing Al-Akili firing a .22-caliber rifle at a shooting range in 2010.Federal agents said Al-Akili was prohibited from possessing a gun because of a 2001 drug conviction.
No terrorism-related charges were filed against him. But at a detention hearing Friday, an FBI agent, Joseph M. Bieshelt, testified the search of Al-Akili’s home uncovered “jihadist literature and books on U.S. military tactics,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said. The newspaper also reported Bieshelt testified at the hearing that Al-Akili told an informant he had plans to go to Pakistan to join the Taliban, and that Al-Akili was recorded in December saying “that he was developing somebody to possibly strap a bomb on himself.” A federal magistrate judge ordered Al-Akili held without bail pending trial.
The FBI’s classic entrapment strategy failed when their operative was exposed, due in large part to the Bureau’s own incompetence, leaving them no other alternative but to charge al-Akili with a weapons charge ( they couldn’t do better than a .22 caliber rifle at a firing range) which they linked to incendiary language that got a judge to keep him in jail without bond until his court date. And while it might be too much to hope for, the recent ruling by a federal judge that language alone is not sufficient to prove sedition or violence against the government in the absence of any concrete action to convict someone might be extended to al-Akili’s case does offer some hope for an American Muslim who says he would never do anything to hurt/harm his country.
The FBI got caught with their pants down; their methods were sloppy but in today’s America sufficient enough to convict others which is why they were resorted to again. Al-Akili’s citizenship is to be applauded….in essence he was a whistle blower pointing to the inefficient and costly workings of bureaucracy, and like most whistle blowers before, he was made to bear the brunt of a humiliated agency out for revenge. That anyone can be locked up for shooting a.22 caliber rifle at a firing range…….there is no proof he owned the weapon, nor were any weapons found in his home, nor was he accused of buying and selling weapons( in fact he rebuffed the FBI informant’s attempt to even find him one) and the only basis for his incarceration besides such flimsy accusations is his religious identity is not only criminal, appalling but certainly unconstitutional. It is a sign of today’s America and it must be changed and abandoned forever. Wake up America…if today it’s al-Akili, who will it be tomorrow?
But untangling the Islamophobic thread woven into the FBI’s counterterrorism training culture won’t be easy. In addition to inflammatory seminars which likened Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader,” Danger Room has obtained more material showing just how wide the anti-Islam meme has spread throughout the Bureau.
The FBI library at Quantico currently stacks books from authors who claim that “Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.” The Bureau’s private intranet recently featured presentations that claimed to demonstrate the “inherently violent nature of Islam,” according to multiple sources. Earlier this year, the Bureau’s Washington Field Office welcomed a speaker who claimed Islamic law prevents Muslims from being truly loyal Americans. And as recently as last week, the online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces included claims that Sunni Islam seeks “domination of the world,” according to a law enforcement source.
“I don’t think anyone with half a brain would paint 1.2 billion people of any ethnic or religious persuasion with a single brushstroke,” Mike Rolince, an FBI counterterrorism veteran who started Boston’s JTTF, tells Danger Room. “Who did they run that curriculum by — either an internal or outside expert — to get some balance?”
The FBI declined to respond directly to such questions from Danger Room. But what’s clear is that the anti-Islam sentiment in the FBI’s training and orientation isn’t the marginal problem that the Bureau portrayed in its previous public statements and press releases. It’s not a historical problem, it’s ongoing. And it will require substantial effort to root out. Not even a July warning from the office of a powerful senator was able to spur the Bureau to purge itself of its anti-Islam material.
One example is found in the mandatory orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, or JTTFs. Those task forces are a nationwide partnership between the FBI, intelligence analysts and state and local police. As of late last week, according to a law enforcement source familiar with the program, new members or those needing a belated orientation saw this description of Sunnism — the largest branch of Islam — as part of their online training course:
Sunni Muslims have been prolific in spawning numerous and varied fundamentalist extremist terrorist organizations. Sunni core doctrine and end state have remained the same and they continue to strive for Sunni Islamic domination of the world to prove a key Quranic assertion that no system of government or religion on earth can match the Quran’s purity and effectiveness for paving the road to God.
That paragraph is contained in orientation material, known as the Joint Terrorism Task Force Orientation v2 course, distributed online through a secure intranet for every member of the JTTFs. That’s approximately 4,400 officials, according to FBI figures, all charged with stopping terrorism. The orientation course is mandatory for every member of the task force.
The passage is especially odd because most of the orientation consists of practical, mundane information, such as the proper forms to fill out during an inquiry or FBI standards for investigations, according to the source. It consists of five sections, one of which is about Islam, Muslims and Arab culture. The supervisor of each JTTF has to certify that all his or her personnel have completed the online orientation course, and then must pass that certification up to FBI Headquarters’ Counterterrorism Division.
The FBI would neither confirm nor deny the existence of the JTTF orientation material.
The excerpt from the JTTF orientation material was provided to Danger Room by a concerned law enforcement official, who says the material contains 20 paragraphs about Islam in a similar vein. Several Bureau and law enforcement officials who spoke to Danger Room on condition of anonymity believe that such instructions are detrimental to uncovering and thwarting terrorist plots, and that the FBI continues to be less than forthright with the press and the public about the extent of its teaching that Islam is at the root of the menace of terrorism. Evidence for this continuing belief can be found in Quantico, Virginia, at the FBI’s elite training academy.
Michael Migliore an American citizen who was put on the no-fly list by US authorities possibly because he refused to talk to the FBI without a lawyer had to end his way to Italy by train from the West Coast and then by boat to England. The story doesn’t end there however, he was detained by authorities before the boat he was in even made it to port in Suffolk, England.
Migliore was responsible enough to make his way to Europe by 19th century means because of how the US government categorized him, but it seems that “brand” followed him to England as well which underscores the pernicious nature of the no-fly lists. Migliore’s crime seems to be being Muslim, knowing someone who was charged with terrorism and not talking to the FBI about that relationship without a lawyer (something any seasoned lawyer would advise and which he has the right to do). What this says is the federal government wants to rescind the right to have someone present when authorities talk to you AND the government wants to punish you for exercising your right to freedom of religion. That a 21 year old university graduate has to fight this fight against the two greatest powers in the world, the US and the UK, is shameful and disgusting. That no one or very few people in America is up in arms about this violation of Migliore’s inalienable rights is further indication of how close this country is to abandoning the principles of its Founding Fathers.
You’ve gotta wonder how many of the ‘terror threats’ are just as baseless as the two highlighted below are. Indeed, just a week before the 10th anniversary of 911, we the public were regaled with news about an unsubstantiated terror threat that could possibly interrupt the 10th anniversary celebrations. Nothing happened to get in the way of our post 911 angst except our own fears.
Local and federal law enforcement officials had told ABC News Sunday initial reports of “suspicious behavior” by multiple passengers that prompted the emergency call for F-16s was suspected of being a couple “making out” in the plane’s lavatory mid-flight. When the flight landed, the plane was taken to a remote area for security screening and three passengers were briefly taken into custody.
In the course of their investigation, the FBI found that one of the passengers, who felt sick, happened to get up and head to the bathroom at approximately the same time as another passenger. None of the three people taken into custody knew each other, the FBI said.
Of course we’ve been all conditioned to say the response of authorities was appropriate and not comical, which was really the case. We’ve also been conditioned to look the other way when people who disrupt the transportation industry are not our typical view of what a terrorist should look like.
A Long Island woman worried about her mom and brother flying to New York on the eve of 9/11 was busted for trying to ground their flight — by twice phoning in false bomb threats against the Southwest Airlines plane they were taking from Arizona, the feds said today.
The loony Saturday morning stunt by ex-con Mary Purcell, 37, of Lake Ronkonkoma, sparked a massive security response at Tucson Airport — where a horde of police, bomb-experts and explosive-sniffing dogs quickly swarmed around Flight 2475 to re-screen luggage and passengers as a security alert for the entire airport was elevated.
“We felt that it was a credible threat,” said John Ivanoff, chief of the Tuscon Airport Authority Police. “We were already at a heightened state of alert [because of the 9-11 anniversary Al Qaeda threats], but more manpower was needed.”
Purcell, a convicted felon, doesn’t fit our image of a terrorist, but America doesn’t seem to be upset that a lot of resources were wasted on her ‘threat’ or that Americans somewhere in the transportation system of our country were inconvenienced or maybe had their rights as citizens of this Republic abridged because of the actions of a loony and an over responsive federal government.
Finally, there’s the story of the American teenager who was found driving around in his city alone without a drivers license BUT with an AT4 rocket launcher in the back seat of the SUV. It’s clear this boy’s name is not Arabic or his religion Islam, for had it been, he, his father and brother, who are connected to the US military, would be linked to al-Qaida, conspiracies hatched and foiled and headlines proclaim how Islam is trying to take over the country and establish sharia. The young man was not named because he’s underage, but driving around during school hours with blaring music is a sure way to draw attention to ones self. As far as the press is concerned, however, it’s just another teenage prank.
So, while we were informed of security alerts surrounding the 10th anniversary of 911 based on unsubstantiated information that cannot be verified, the two news items above barely scratched the attention of the Nation and were strictly a local event……as they should have been. However, we should not have been frightened with alerts that really had no basis in fact but which served a political purpose for the party(ies) in power. Don’t we deserve better than that?
American based terrorism doesn’t get much mention in mainstream media, maybe because those who are responsible for it in many cases reflect the ethnicity of those who write about terrorism. I mean it’s much easier to call someone who looks different from you and has a funny name a terrorist than it is to call your next door neighbor or the person who attends your church or synagogue one. Janet Napolitano knows a thing or two about what happens to people who take an even handed approach to this issue of homegrown terrorism because she was excoriated in the media by pundits for a 2009 report released by Homeland Security entitled, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment. Because there’s no mention of Islam in the title, the report was denounced by many across the political spectrum. Media Matters does a pretty nice job of detailing the arguments of some of the people opposed to labelling American terrorism just that, and their analysis can be found here. Needless to say, the 2009 report doesn’t follow the meme so often repeated in public discourse that ‘all terrorists are Muslim’ because such a statement is false on its face, racially charged and bigoted.
Do you know who the people pictured above are? They are members of Hutaree who see law enforcement as the enemy and they planned to kill a police officer, possibly at a traffic stop, and then attack the funeral procession to kill more officers. Sounds much like terrorism to me, but instead these folks were charged with seditious conspiracy against the government, attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and possessing a firearm during a crime of violence. Ever hear of the group The Sovereign Citizen? You can see for yourself the width and breadth of this group across the country here. The FBI has a full page on them which says in essence they do not feel bound to obey the laws of America, do everything to circumvent the law up to and including murder of public officials and the destruction of government institutions. The ubiquitous federal government isn’t the only entity to see the danger Sovereign Citizen members present to the general public. A local Texas sheriff, Chief Smith has issued his own terrorism warning saying in part
Chief Smith wants the Citizens to be aware that these people could be practicing their beliefgs in this area. Chief Smith warns that these persons have the potential to act out in very violent manners with both citizens and law enforcement if the contact with them is negative.
The Chief has every reason to be concerned. Just last week a ‘sovereign citizen’ in Florida, claiming he “did not have to follow the law or obey law enforcement officers” fired an AK-47 weapon at a store after calling them repeatedly to demand a product they did not have. Larry Kelly then led law enforcement officials on a chase through the city of Ensley, Florida before being captured. Again, last week another ‘sovereign citizen’ Matthew O’Neill was arrested after sending a white powder substance to the Colorado Department of Revenue which was dealing with his tax issues. It doesn’t take a genius to understand the significance of that in post 911 America does it? Then it was an act of terrorism, now it’s a disgruntled tax case. But ‘sovereign citizen’ encounters with the law have also been deadly. What’s significant is if one were to replace each of the above linked news stories with someone’s Arabic name or reference to their religious belief it would be a sure indicator of their terrorist inclinations, BUT absent such identifying tags, while still abhorrent and deadly, the acts are crimes which we have all too often been accustomed, absent the accompanying terrorism hysteria. Conservatives have for some time bemoaned the increase in laws on the books to handle what they consider situations already adequately addressed in law, yet many on the right are the first to claim the need for increased laws to save America from ‘sharia law’, for instance to the presence of municipally approved places of worship to articles of clothing to any number of other things associated with Islam and Muslims in America. This is the dilemma America faces today; how to deal with the hypocrisy and demagoguery of politicians and political parties, such as the Republican and Tea Party, while still legitimately addressing the role of the rule of law. What’s good for the goose IS good for the gander as well. It’s either all terrorism or it’s not, but most likely chances are it will not be classified terrorism, especially by the main stream media, as long as people who write about it look like the people above who perpetuate it.
These are not the words of a potential terrorist or enemy of the US, but rather the proclamation of a whistleblower with the Air Marshal Service, talking about the rampant discrimination faced by females, veterans, blacks, minority groups of all types in the Orlando, Florida office of the Air Marshals. The managers of that office were far more preoccupied making crude jokes and pranks about and against co-workers than they were with protecting passengers; one local Florida TV news crew even recorded marshals sleeping while on duty, drunk or vandalizing personal property. Yet, these are the people who are charged with insuring the safety of America’s air waves post 911 at an enormous cost of money to the public’s treasury and even by the admission of one of them they are ineffective because of…..dare I say it…….their inability to deal with a multi ethnic workplace, discrimination.
After 911, when government agencies were either created or expanded to deal with perceived threats against America, bureaucracies grew so quickly and to such an extent that they became inefficient, off message and unfocused, and possibly ineffective in their mission and at a cost of trillions of dollars. We were told such expansion would produce good results, a consolidation of efforts, more efficiency to fight to preserve our way of life. Rhetoric flew fast and furious in much the same way as government expanded, but after 9 years it seems we are no better off with no appreciable gains in the war on terror than we were on September 10,2001. There’s this
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work….
Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.
At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.
We are plagued by a bloated bureaucracy which harbors uninspired servants whose lapses endanger the security of the homeland. Not much has changed since 911 except the deficit, the size of government and the burden tax payers are paying for the perception of security, which begs the question is all this worth the price?
Chris Gaubatz, pictured on the right next to Representative Andre Carson, along with his father have produced what they think is an explosive book about the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, a Muslim civil rights organization’s attempts to infiltrate Congress with spies as interns. Yes, this is another in a long line of attempts to discredit, denigrate, pollute Islam’s presence in America, and you the reader should ask yourself the question why is so much effort being made to destroy a religion in the land of the free and the home of brave. The book in question is called Muslim Mafia, and the writer, Chris’ dad, Dave Gaubatz is literally on the fringe when it comes to sanity in today’s America; you can read about his dubious past here. Among some of his more enlightened pronouncements is the one where he says when talking about the Obama campaign, ‘We are now on the verge of allowing a self admitted ‘crack-head’ to have his finger on every nuclear weapon in America.’ His tendency to make things up out of thin air is continued in the aforementioned book. What’s disturbing about it, apart from the fact he prostituted his son to lie and deceive the people who work in the offices of CAIR where he stole memos from them, no doubt that the FBI already possessed, to prove his theory of spying, is the fact this book was announced by four members of Congress, one of whom wrote the forward for the book…….a bit of self-promotion never hurt anybody I guess. This is the same Congress, an institution where one of their own esteemed members has already been outed as a spy!
Jane Harman, democrat from California has been recorded discussing making a deal with some Israeli intelligence officer who was being monitored by the feds through a court approved wiretap. Harman was to throw the full weight of her office behind getting the Justice Department to drop the charges against two AIPAC officials….the DOJ inevitably did just that, who were accused for spying for Israel in exchange for being appointed chairman of the House Intelligence Committee with the help of said Israeli officer. It doesn’t help Harman’s supporters to know that Harman had been under investigation since 2006 and that DOJ attorneys had decided she indeed committed a crime in her discussions with the Israelis. That doesn’t seem to matter to the likes ofReps. Sue Myrick (NC), John Shadegg (AZ), Paul Broun (GA), and Trent Franks (AZ), who claim the Muslim menace is imminent and deadly and by extension trumps anything Harman ever did. Yet, the CAIR’s literature used by Gaubatz to expose their dastardly plot reveals them to be no more than a public advocacy group for the rights of Muslim Americans and a lobbying organization with far less effectiveness than AIPAC.
The second part of the misdirection involves diverting attention away from the efforts Muslims have made to report, bring to the attention of authorities or police, members of their community only to have their efforts denied, like the community in California that reported an obviously errant Muslim who it later turned out was a FBI informant only to have one of their own arrested and the subject of a government investigation. Or how about the Muslim community leader, known as an Imam, who was arrested by federal authorities because while he agreed to help law enforcement round up radical leaning Muslims he refused to do so surreptitiously. Left with examples like this Muslim communities throughout America feel helpless to stop what are many times government inspired plots of violence against American citizens because such disclosure to or cooperation with federal authorities often leads to negative consequences to otherwise law abiding citizens. Perhaps this high publicity appearance of the four horsemen congressional representatives was meant to get the members of CAIR and other Muslim civil rights groups to come running back to federal officials begging to be accepted by them and agreeing to any terms dictated by law enforcement to counter any negative publicity generated by this “book”. I hope that doesn’t happen, and it shouldn’t. The Muslim community has done more than their share to show good faith in working with law enforcement to eliminate any threat to the security of American citizens….many of them Muslims. This spurious book, Muslim Mafia, is the thanks they get for that.
The wife of Daniel Boyd, accused of being a terrorist ringleader, said Tuesday that her husband and two sons are “completely innocent” of charges that they plotted to kill themselves and others in the name of Islam.
Meeting at a restaurant in Garner on Tuesday afternoon, Sabrina Boyd sat covered head to toe in traditional Muslim garb, only her brown almond eyes visible. She and her husband, who years ago had military training in Afghanistan and fought with Muslim rebels against the Soviets, were committed to living pure and honest lives, she said. They believed in helping their neighbors and they attempted, on occasion, to help the children of immigrant Muslims hold their faith while growing up amid the pressures of American culture.
“My husband was not plotting,” Boyd said. “It’s premature for everyone to jump on the guilty bandwagon.”
Leaders of the Muslim American Society’s Raleigh branch made a similar point earlier in the day at a news conference held to urge the media not to convict the men before they’ve had a trial.
But Boyd, a 41-year-old mother of five and U.S.-born convert to Islam, reserved her sharpest comments for what she called a cruel trap that law enforcement authorities set up to get her out of her house Monday while agents scoured it for documents after the arrest of her husband, two sons and four other men.
Boyd, whose family lives in the Johnston County community of Willow Spring, described a harrowing experience Monday afternoon when she answered the door to find a man she thought was a family friend wearing a shirt that appeared to be bloodied. He told her that Daniel and their three sons, Dylan, Noah and Zakariya, were in a serious car crash. He asked her to get into a Highway Patrol cruiser that would take her to Duke Hospital, where they were being treated.
Boyd summoned her daughter and pregnant daughter-in-law. They wrapped their heads in scarves, grabbed their Qurans and flew out the door. For Boyd, it was a particularly painful experience. Her 16-year-old son, Luqman, died in a car crash near their home in 2007.
When they arrived at Duke Hospital, the cruiser took them to a construction site at the rear of the facility. A man dressed as a doctor came out and asked whether she was the wife. When she said yes, he extended his hand. She told him she does not shake men’s hands. He then grabbed her wrist and handcuffed her.
“I’m not a doctor. I’m an agent and your family is not in the hospital,” he told her. “You’re being detained, and you need to cooperate with us.”
Boyd estimates she was then surrounded by 30 agents who frisked her and asked whether she had weapons or weapons of mass destruction.
They drove her in a car, separate from her daughter and daughter-in-law, to the Johnston County’s Sheriff’s Department, where she picked up Noah, 15, who was not arrested.
“That was an awful dirty trick,” Boyd said she told the agents. “You guys pulled a horrific lie on me and on my daughters. You know we’ve been through this before.”
U.S. District Attorney George E. B. Holding declined to respond to Boyd’s version. “I am sticking to the four corners of the indictment. We try our cases in court and won’t go back and forth before then,” he said Tuesday.
Trips called pilgrimages
Boyd said the many trips the family made abroad, especially to Jerusalem, were pilgrimages to give her sons an exposure to the Arabic language and a chance to experience the daily rhythms of life in predominantly Muslim communities.
“The point of a pilgrimage is to see the Al-Aksa mosque, the Dome of the Rock, to hear the call to prayer and to make a prayer,” she said.
Boyd said her husband and sons attempted to make two trips to Israel. Daniel and Noah were admitted in 2006. One year later, when her husband wanted to take Zakariya to Jerusalem to help him cope with his brother’s death, the two were denied entry at the airport in Tel Aviv. After being detained for two days, they were flown to France.
As to charges her family stockpiled military-style weapons, Boyd said her family enjoyed hunting and shooting. “They exercise their constitutional right to bear arms,” she said.
The FBI was so busy carrying out the phony war on terror, WOT, the ignored the pleas of one person who tried to tell them about a man who was trafficking in humans…a modern 21st century slave trader. I’m astonished really. How could this be? I found it ironic that next to the story of Levy Rosenbaum in the New York Daily News was a poll for its readers which asked, Do you think people should be allowed to sell their kidneys, as if Rosenbaum was merely paying people for their kidneys. In fact, he was extorting them:
Rosenbaum “a thug” who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, “You’re here. A deal is a deal. Now, you’ll give us a kidney or you’ll never go home.’ “
The Brooklyn man arrested Thursday for dealing in black-market kidneys was identified to the FBI seven years ago as a major figure in a global human organ ring.
Levy-Izhak Rosenbaum‘s name, address and even phone number were passed to an FBI agent in a meeting at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan by a prominent anthropologist who has been studying and documenting organ trafficking for more than a decade.
“He is the main U.S. broker for an international trafficking network,” she said.
Her sources include a man who started working with Rosenbaum imagining he was helping people in desperate need. The man then began to see the donors, or to be more accurate, sellers, who were flown in from impoverished countries such as Moldova.
“He said it was awful. These people would be brought in and they didn’t even know what they were supposed to be doing and they would want to go home and they would cry,” Scheper-Hughes said.
The man called Rosenbaum “a thug” who would pull out a pistol he was apparently licensed to carry and tell the sellers, “You’re here. A deal is a deal. Now, you’ll give us a kidney or you’ll never go home.’ ”
Scheper-Hughes felt she had to stop Rosenbaum. She met with the FBI.
“I always thought of it as my Dick Tracy moment,” she said Thursday.
She waited and waited for something to be done. The FBI may have been following the lead of the State Department, which dismissed organ trafficking as “urban legend.”
“It would be impossible to conceal a clandestine organ trafficking ring,” a 2004 State Department report stated.
Scheper-Hughes had better luck in Brazil and in South Africa, where law enforcement corroborated her findings and acted decisively.
But the ring kept operating elsewhere. Scheper-Hughes visited villages in Moldova where, “20% of the men were siphoned off to be kidney sellers in this same scheme.”
Back in Brooklyn, Rosenbaum stayed busy. He was contacted by an FBI informant who introduced Rosenbaum to an undercover agent who supposedly wanted to buy a kidney for her uncle.
“I’m doing this a long time,” Rosenbaum was recorded saying.
The undercover asked how many organs he had sold.
“Quite a lot,” he answered.
On Wednesday, the FBI called Scheper-Hughes, who is putting her findings into the upcoming, “A World Cut in Two, The Global Traffic in Humans for Organs.”
“Why are you calling me now?” she asked.
Thursday, seven years after her Dick Tracy moment with the FBI at the Roosevelt Hotel, Rosenbaum was finally arrested.
For the last eight years we have been led to believe the greatest threat to us as a society has been Islam and Muslims, and of course now, Barack Obama, and during that same time people have been robbing the national treasury, Bernie Maddof, and human resources, Rosenbaum and no one lifted a finger until all the money was gone and scores of bodies were piled up and all this was done while we were diverted with the bogey man ruse. Are you not convinced the war on terror is a fraud?
Law enforcement in this country is getting increasingly bizarre. First we had the FBI deciding they wanted to invade the religious houses of worship of Muslims with informants who offered drugs and money to desperate, illiterate, down on their luck marginal followers of Islam all in order to make sensational busts with outrageous claims of terror, murder and mayhem.
Now we have a branch of the federal government in the call girl business.
One “hobbyist” described “Michelle” as having a “really great body, beautiful face and (being) dressed to kill.”
Another said “Monique” was into “water fun (and) slip sliding bodies” and charged about $160 for a one-hour session.
Both statements, posted on a Web site that rates escorts, describe in more explicit terms the experiences of customers — or “hobbyists” — with women of Executive Playmates, an escort service suspected by the San Antonio Police Department of generating about $150,000 a month from prostitution between 2005 and 2007.
The department raided the escort service’s central location and one of its hubs in October 2007 and found Executive Playmates employed more than 300 women who serviced about 2,000 customers, law enforcement sources said.
The list of customers includes doctors, lawyers and others of important social standing, but the names are being withheld because of the ongoing investigation.
Many found the service online or in newspaper ads. Its operations extended into Austin and briefly into the Rio Grande Valley.
The department has described the prostitution case as the largest in San Antonio since the 1980s.
The raid drew headlines and was the leading story on local television newscasts when it happened. But authorities have since been silent.
Because the case involves money laundering and organized crime, police turned over their findings months ago to federal prosecutors. But the information has sat at the U.S. attorney’s office with little movement.
A San Antonio Express-News investigation found fewer than 10 people — including the suspected operator, Samuel “Sammy” Flores Jr. — may end up being charged later this year.
Federal law enforcement sources said the case could be complicated because Flores, 38, was working as an informant for the FBI at the time of the bust. The sources said they suspect that has delayed charges in the escort-service case.
Can we get the government to defend and protect the Constitution for a change? Hat tip to Xymphora.
I believe the Department of Homeland Security, born of the fraudulent premise of 911 and the need for expanded government, should not exist, but it certainly shouldn’t be staffed by those people who are responsible for the lies and myths of the war on terror. That said, I was happy the DHS got off to an interesting start when they declared the biggest threat to the security of the “homeland” was our own violent rightwing extremist groups fuelled by recession, the return of disgruntled army veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan, and hostility over the election of the first black president. The shooting death of Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who performed abortions in the state of Kansas was an endorsement of that warning issued earlier this year. I don’t like the idea that President Obama is staffing this very department with Bush political appointees who are responsible for the illegal activity the US has participated in over the last 8 years in our name.
President Barack Obama has nominated Philip Mudd, who was deputy director of the Office of Terrorism Analysis at the CIA during the Bush administration to be under secretary of intelligence and analysis at Homeland Security. Mudd is into ethnic cleansing/targetting.
Philip Mudd, who had just joined the bureau from the rival Central Intelligence Agency, was pitching a program called Domain Management, designed to get agents to move beyond chasing criminal cases and start gathering intelligence.
Drawing on things like commercial marketing software and the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping without warrants, the program is supposed to identify threats. Mr. Mudd displayed a map of the San Francisco area, pocked with data showing where Iranian immigrants were clustered — and where, he said, an F.B.I. squad was “hunting.”
Some F.B.I. officials found Mr. Mudd’s concept vague and the implied ethnic targeting troubling. How were they supposed to go “hunting” without colliding with the Constitution? Would the C.I.A. man, whom some mocked privately as Rasputin, take the bureau back to the domestic spying scandals of the 1960’s? And why neglect promising cases to, in Mr. Mudd’s words, “search for the unknown”?
I am troubled by Mr. Obama’s appointments who use methods against American citizens and others we have already come to associate as illegal. Where is the change we were promised and the return to the rule of law? Moreover, what signal does this nomination send to a country Obama has pledged to work with to resolve differences with it when Mudd has been known to go after and try to prove terrorism on the part of Iranian expatriates in America? Unfortunately, the Mudd nomination hasn’t raised the ire that Charles Freeman’s did, who subsequently had to withdraw from consideration to a top intelligence post because of AIPAC pressure, and most likely the Mudd nomination will go through after an appearance of resistance from the Republican party to their own one time appointee. It’s all very macabre, the delicate dance that goes on between the two political parties. Were it not so serious with ramifications for the entire country it would be entertaining to watch. As it is, it’s nothing more than the shuffling of the same players on a game board.
Once again we are told our conduct during the war on terror was criminal in nature, and this time it comes from almost the top! General David Petraeus went on live television, thank God it was live and not something that could be later edited out of an interview, and said the United States of America violated the Geneva Conventions, read that broke the law. Petraeus was appointed by the Bush administration to lead the war effort in Iraq and I think it’s significant he would come out so publicly and disavow the direction his boss took in carrying out the war on terror. However, most of us knew that long before Petraeus joined in this fracas, and indeed many have been saying so since the inception of the war on terror; it was a diversionary one meant to mask or cover up the real agenda of the people in power during the Bush years.
The whole issue of torture is also an indication of where America is as a Nation. Sixty years ago, post World War II, there would be no discussion of whether waterboarding was torture, and what the consequences are for those who participate in such illegal activity, let alone whether such tactics are effective. Now however, a lot of time and effort has been put into describing this technique as ‘enhanced interrogation’ to make it as benign as possible and allow some a chance to escape from the penalty of law. I’m glad to see someone on the front line of war and terror, Petraeus, saying that it is a violation of international law, as opposed to the arm chair quarterbacks and political pundits who seem to make their punditry akin to the life and death of fighting in real wars proclaiming the opposite.
Now comes word that sugar free cookies went further to produce actionable intelligence than waterboarding.
The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or “walling” and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.
Abu Jandal had been in a Yemeni prison for nearly a year when Ali Soufan of the FBI and Robert McFadden of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service arrived to interrogate him in the week after 9/11…..
While Abu Jandal was venting his spleen, Soufan noticed that he didn’t touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: “He was a diabetic and couldn’t eat anything with sugar in it.” At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal’s angry demeanor. “We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him,” Soufan recalls. “So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures.”It took more questioning, and some interrogators’ sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda — including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers — but the cookies were the turning point. “After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans,” Soufan says. “Now he was thinking of us as human beings.”
What does that say about a country far more interested in torture and sadism to get information than cookies and respect? This isn’t the first time we’ve heard that interrogation methods that stressed identifying with the prisoner, affording him his rights and treating him with respect got more information out of him than banging his head against a wall or waterboarding him. Post 911 we were an angry country and some people in government took advantage of that rage to settle age old scores of tribes and jealousy which have had a devastating impact on the psyche of the country. We have worsened this problem by refusing to admit it exists and/or addressing it and the ultimate abuse of the country is to allow the perpetrators of this criminal activity to go free. Forgetting about the criminality and who did it does not spare the collective from our mental anguish. American military personnel felt perfectly justified posing and smiling next to dead bodies, or smearing human feces on people to take their pictures and laugh or as has been more recently asserted, raping and sodomizing women and children all under the guise of authorities of the United States. We should not give any one that kind of power to abuse what the country has fought for and sustained for so many years until now. Nothing will do more to drive that point home than for the citizenry to rise up and demand all people who participated in illegal activity in our name be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I hope you will join me in making that proclamation!
There’s really not that much to these “sting operations” anymore. They are so predictable that even mainstream media is beginning to catch on, while cheering from the sidelines for the success of such dubious methods of law enforcement. The latest catch of four social misfits tangentially related to Islam if that much is another example. Spurred on by a fellow coreligionist who flashed a lot of money and recruited them earnestly, because of a nefarious and compromising past that made it easy for him to be recruited by the FBI, four former convicts, one of them mentally disturbed, and two others heavy drug users, pot and crack, are the latest to constitute a threat of world wide proportions to the United States of America. It didn’t help that an unscrupulous FBI special agent played a high profile role in the arrest of these men. Special Agent Robert Fuller was responsible for the secret rendition of Canadian citizen Maher Arar to Syria and his subsequent torture at the hands of Syrians based on false information Fuller got from a wounded and some might say tortured Omar Khadr. Arar has gone on to sue successfully the Canadian government and is in the process of suing the American government because of Fuller’s role in his torture.
Here’s the deal however. The pseudo Muslim ringleader who was egging on the four charged defendants was clearly spotted by the members of the different masajid as an agent provocateur but because of their mistrust of the government, a mistrust clearly justified based on what happened to a group of Muslims in California, they were left with a brewing scandal and no one to tell. The MO of this “informant” and indeed others who infiltrate places where Muslims gather is they appear out of the blue, invite other worshippers to meals, flash money, and speak of violence and jihad, and offer substantial amounts of money to others to join their “team.” The inertia or hesitation communities feels is really what the government wants in order to obscure its role in such operations. Government does not want to be pressed by a diligent citizenry to do its job. Here then is my suggestion for people with an informant in their midst; use the internet. Plaster the suspect’s picture on the masjid’s web page, blog about him or her, especially if they are advocating violence and contact your local media to inform them you may be a victim of a government sting operation. Informants do not like to be exposed and if they are steeped in a past full of illicit behavior with many victims someone will certainly notice them and do the government’s job of getting rid of them.
For the meantime, it’s sad to say the four men in New York most likely will be convicted amidst a lot of publicity about their case that’ll highlight the potential for terrorism on the home front, but such miscarriages of justice, where people are entrapped by government will be avoided in the future as more and more communities become sophisticated enough to spot the likes of the informant in this case and educate their worshippers of the threat such false messiahs bring to their stability. `
America needs to get rid of the group of people least inclined towards peace and friendly relations with their neighbors. The FBI is being led by the nose by the likes of con artists like Craig Monteilh who has left such a trial of deceipt and lies he should be the one in prison, not Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, on the left. Craig is the guy the FBI placed their bets on to disrupt California masajid, or places of worship for Muslims, with his slow but steadily increasing incendiary terrorist rhetoric. Of course it was all a show to get people to sign on to the game so that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies could disrupt a so called terrorist cell brewing on the homeland. What the feds didn’t count on was that the masajid targetted by them would be so upset with Monteilh’s terrorist rhetoric they would actually turn him into the FBI instead of joining him. That didn’t go over to well so retribution was taken against the law abiding Muslim citizens for not going along with the program and poor Ahmadullah Sais Niazi was arrested and charged with a variety of “immigration charges” the likes of which are used whenever the government needs an arrest to justify the enormous amounts of money spent going nowhere; and nowhere is what they got with Monteilh, a con artist who has people, not just Muslims, writing about how bad a con artist and lover he really is. What’s troubling about this case is the people the FBI wanted to entrap were perfectly willing to work with law enforcement and provided the feds with a terrorist…..the feds’ own terrorist, but that simply wasn’t good enough and someone ELSE had to pay for Monteilh’s deception. Why the FBI didn’t do a better job of seeing what kind of history their informant had, who he had abused in the past that might blow this guy’s cover, (hell hath no fury like a woman scorned), and what a liability he could potentially be to their case, they could have saved themselves this set back with a group of citizens who wanted to do the right thing and in fact did. As a result of such a lousy informant, the Muslim community has decided for now to withdraw their offer to help the government and the FBI too has retreated from its community outreach. That is not good for either group, but there are some within government who are probably quite happy about that. Craig Monteilh no doubt is one of them.
Dignity means not begging for inclusion. CAIR and other Muslim organizations had done a somewhat decent job of not begging when it came to the federal government and it’s law enforcement arm, the FBI; that was until the FBI decided to end the love fest with CAIR and stop doing community outreach programs with them. The FBI has been infested with Islamophobes the likes of Steve Emerson and Daniel Pipes whose hatred of anything Islamic is as rabid, demented and misguided as anyone from your local insane asylum. As long as the federal government is under the sway of folks like the two above there’s very little CAIR can do to get the feds to change their mind. I was a little upset therefore to read this “plea” from CAIR for the FBI to justify their breaking of relations. I think it’s more dignified for CAIR to continue with its program of uncovering abuse directed towards Muslim Americans and working with those institutions that are willing to work with them to stop such abuse, but if anyone wants to give in to the rhetoric and racism of Islamophobes there’s nothing you can do to change that, and begging them to like you certainly won’t work.
And speaking of CAIR did you read where they have changed leadership and gone more “local” as it were. The former head of the organization, a Palestinian-American was just the lightening rod the likes of Pipes and Emerson needed to make and then make stick the accusation that CAIR was somehow affiliated with home grown Islamic terrorism. Yes, we all know no such thing exists, but that didn’t stop Pipes, et.al from slinging the mud. Larry Shaw a North Carolina state representative is now taking over the reigns of CAIR and showing another dimension to Islam in America.
Shaw, who has served in the senate for seven terms, has a reputation for honesty and fair dealing. A champion of interfaith understanding, he has gained support in the Jewish community, too.
“I’m very much impressed with his fine personality,” says Rabbi Yosef Levanon of Congregation Beth Israel in Fayetteville. “I think he has good intentions, and I’m praying he will avoid the pitfalls that have plagued this organization.”
Indeed, some have suggested that Shaw was chosen to lead CAIR precisely because he can soften its sometimes combative image.
Khalilah Sabra, a Raleigh activist who directs the local chapter of the Muslim American Society’s Freedom Foundation and consults with Shaw on a weekly basis, says Shaw brings a uniquely American political vision to CAIR.
I don’t know what all happened to make Mr. Shaw’s leadership at CAIR possible but I think it has something to do with the group’s tarnished image, a la Mr. Pipe and Emerson. Perhaps Shaw can transform that image and focus the vision of the group to pursuits that will make it more necessary to the American fabric.
American based terrorism doesn’t get much mention in mainstream media, maybe because those who are responsible for it in many cases reflect the ethnicity of those who write about terrorism. I mean it’s much easier to call someone who looks different from you and has a funny name a terrorist than it is to call your next door neighbor or the person who attends your church or synagogue one. Janet Napolitano knows a thing or two about what happens to people who take an even handed approach to this issue of homegrown terrorism because she was excoriated in the media by pundits for a 2009 report released by Homeland Security entitled, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment. Because there’s no mention of Islam in the title, the report was denounced by many across the political spectrum. Media Matters does a pretty nice job of detailing the arguments of some of the people opposed to labelling American terrorism just that, and their analysis can be found 
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