The Terror Factory (27 page)

If the FBI could miss—or ignore—something like the sovereign citizen movement, what else has it missed or ignored in the years since 9/11, being so hyper-focused on terrorism in Muslim communities? While cataloging missed opportunities is something of an exercise in speculation, there were enough major crimes over the decade that went unnoticed by federal law enforcement until it was too late
to give credibility to that question. Main Street mortgage fraud and Wall Street financial fraud—which together created an economic toxin that pushed the United States into the worst recession since the Great Depression—were among the Bureau's areas of focus prior to 9/11.
¹⁰
So were financial Ponzi schemes, and in the decade that the FBI has kept one eye trained on terrorism, con men such as Bernie Madoff and R. Allen Stanford flourished, scamming away a total of more than $10 billion from investors.
¹¹
If the FBI had not been so obsessed with stopping a terrorist attack that never came, and creating “terrorists,” could they have stopped mortgage and Wall Street fraud before it spread globally like an uncontrollable contagion? Could FBI agents have taken down Ponzi artists before unsuspecting investors lost billions? Could agents have uncovered any number of crimes we have yet to hear of?

These are unanswerable questions. But as I researched terrorism sting operations and talked with current and former FBI agents who complained that in terrorism stings the government was creating bogeymen from buffoons, I've thought a lot about these questions, which remind me of a line that Peter Ahearn, the retired FBI agent who directed the Western New York Joint Terrorism Task Force and oversaw the investigation of the Lackawanna Six, offered when we sat in a coffee shop in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. “If you concentrate more people on a problem,” Ahearn told me, “you'll find more problems.” The corollary to that, of course, is that if you concentrate fewer people on a problem, you'll find fewer problems. It's conceivable that had the FBI not been chasing terrorists of its own creation, federal agents might have had the resources to prevent the financial crimes that ultimately brought the world economy to the brink of collapse—or stopped the sovereign citizen movement before men like Brandon Paudert
were killed. However, since the U.S. Congress continues to mandate that the FBI focus on terrorism, and the FBI in turn churns out Islamic terrorism cases to prove that it is responsive to that mandate, it's conceivable that the Bureau will not notice or arrive too late to address the real crimes and threats of tomorrow.

The FBI currently spends $3 billion annually to hunt an enemy that is largely of its own creation. Evidence in dozens of terrorism cases—involving plots to blow up synagogues, skyscrapers, military recruiting stations, and bars and nightclubs—suggests that today's terrorists in the United States are nothing more than FBI creations, impressionable men living on the edges of society who become bomb-triggering would-be killers only because of the actions of FBI informants. The FBI and the Justice Department then cite these sting cases as proof that the government is stopping terrorists before they strike. But the evidence available for review in these cases shows that these “terrorists” never had the capability to launch an attack themselves. Most of the targets in these stings were poor, uneducated, and easily manipulated. In many cases, it's likely they wouldn't have come up with the idea at all without prodding by one of the FBI's 15,000 registered informants. In sting after sting, from Miami to Seattle, the FBI and its informants have provided the means for America's would-be terrorists to carry out an attack, creating what a federal judge has called a “fantasy terror operation.”
¹²

According to government and federal court records, the Justice Department has prosecuted more than 500 terrorism defendants since 9/11. Of these cases, only a few posed actual threats to people or property such as: Hesham Mohamed
Hadayet, who opened fire on the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport on July 4, 2002; Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the New York City subway system in September 2009; and Faisal Shahzad, who failed to detonate a car bomb in Times Square on May 1, 2010.
¹³
Of the rest of the approximately 500 defendants, more than 150 were caught conspiring not with terrorists but with FBI informants in sting operations. The remainder of the Justice Department's post-9/11 terrorism prosecutions involved crimes such as money laundering or immigration violations in which the link to terrorism was tangential or on another continent, and no evidence in these cases suggested credible safety threats to the United States.

The men the FBI and the Justice Department describe today as terrorists—among them Narseal Batiste, James Cromitie, Dritan Duka, Michael Finton, Hamid Hayat, Mohammed Hossain, Imran Mandhai, Antonio Martinez, Mohamad Osman Mohamud, Walli Mujahidh, Tarik Shah, and Derrick Shareef—may technically be terrorists under the law, as they have been convicted on terrorism-related charges in federal courts. But if they are indeed terrorists, the government has stretched the definition of a terrorist well beyond its limits. These men, some broke, others with mental problems, couldn't have committed even small-time offenses on their own, and yet the FBI and Justice Department have convinced courts and the public that they
are
terrorists, even though it was government informants and agents who provided the plans and weapons that allowed them to become terrorists in the first place.

The definition of who is and who isn't a terrorist has been a source of debate for more than 150 years. John Brown, an abolitionist who turned to violence in an attempt to free slaves
in the South, raided Harpers Ferry Armory in West Virginia in 1859 for his cause. Southerners viewed Brown as a terrorist when he was executed, while many in the North saw Brown as a man forced to militancy in order to fight the violent enslavement of blacks in the agricultural South. To this day, historians and criminologists disagree over whether Brown was America's first terrorist.
¹⁴
Indeed, the definition of a terrorist depends largely on the person or institution defining it. Menachem Begin led the resistance against the British occupation of what became Israel, while Nelson Mandela was a militant who fought the apartheid government in South Africa. Both men, winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, are remembered today as statesmen—but they were once considered terrorists. Whether the Irish Republican Army or the Tamil Tigers were terrorists or revolutionaries depends on whose definition of terrorist you choose to adopt.

There's a famous saying—first used in Gerald Seymour's 1975 novel about the IRA,
Harry's Game
—that alludes to how the definition of a terrorist can be so loose and imprecise as to be form-fitting for the user of the word: “One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.” The saying is so often used, it's become a cliché. But I don't think this well-worn maxim can be used any longer, once you take a close look at the terrorism cases that have moved through federal courts in the years after 9/11. No one could think former crack cocaine addict James Cromitie, lured into a terrorist plot by the prospect of money, was a freedom fighter, or the young and disgruntled Antonio Martinez, who had trouble driving a car, a revolutionary. Like all FBI terrorism sting targets Cromitie and Martinez were dupes. Today, we need a new saying. One man's terrorist is another man's fool.

During the course of researching FBI informants and terrorism sting operations, I received financial support from the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California Berkeley, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the Carnegie Legal Reporting Fellowship at Syracuse University. Without the generous support of these institutions, I could not have written this book.

The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism
is an outgrowth of my work as a fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California Berkeley, and for that reason, I owe thanks to Lowell Bergman, who runs the Investigative Reporting Program, for investing in my research, for his editorial guidance, and for helping me build sources within the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I'm grateful as well to
Mother Jones
and editor Monika Bauerlein for devoting a magazine cover and substantial resources to publish “The Informants,” the magazine story that this book expands on, and help me build a database of terrorism prosecution since 9/11 that earned industry praise and won the prestigious Data Journalism Award. I also want to acknowledge
Miami New Times
editor, Chuck Strouse, who published a 2009 story I wrote about the FBI's coercion of a South Florida imam—a story that
forms the basis of
Chapter 4
and ultimately inspired me to spend more than a year analyzing how the Bureau recruits informants through coercion and then uses those informants in terrorism sting operations.

I don't suspect the transition from newspapers and magazines to books is ever comfortable and seamless one for journalists; it wasn't for me. But having Robert Lasner of Ig Publishing on the other side of every draft gave me confidence where I otherwise would have had anxiety. He and Elizabeth Clementson of Ig Publishing have my gratitude for seeing the book that was to be written from my reporting and then helping me shape that reporting into the work you've read today.

The backbone of my research for this book was a close and careful analysis of the prosecutions of more than 500 terrorism defendants since September 11, 2001. This required spending months pouring through court records from federal courthouses across the country. I could not have done this laborious research were it not for Lauren Ellis, a researcher at the Investigative Reporting Program who shared my intense curiosity about the people our Justice Department describes as terrorists today. Lauren developed a familiarity with more than 500 terrorism defendants and an expertise of many of them, and I am grateful for the hundreds of hours she spent helping me gather documents and analyze Justice Department terrorism cases in a systematic way.

Other researchers helped me along the way as well. Hamed Aleaziz, a former editorial fellow at
Mother Jones
, was a tenacious fact-checker who skillfully challenged some of my reporting and conclusions. Alexandra Kish and Brandie Middlekauff contributed research memoranda about specific cases and helped me understand how those cases fit into the
specific themes I explored in this book.

I wrote
The Terror Factory
while working full-time at the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, a Miami-based nonprofit that produces investigative journalism about Florida and Latin America in partnership with traditional print and broadcast media. For that reason, I owe my colleagues at FCIR, including Sharon Rosenhause and Mc Nelly Torres, thanks for their support of my outside interests, including this book. Sharon deserves additional thanks for the valuable feedback she offered on drafts of
The Terror Factory
.

Finally, none of my research would have been possible without help and cooperation from dozens of current and former FBI agents around the country. Some talked to me on a regular basis to help me determine what was happening in the Bureau as the Justice Department brought more than 500 alleged terrorists into U.S. District Courts in the decade after 9/11. Others alerted me to specific cases or provided documents that I otherwise would have been unable to obtain. Most of these FBI officials cannot be named here. But you know who you are, and truly, you have my sincerest gratitude.

1
. “Feds: Al Qaeda Suspect May Not Be Threat at All,”
Associated Press
, February 16, 2006.

2
. Alfred Lubrano and John Shiffman, “Federal authorities Say W-B Man Is a Terrorist,”
Philadelphia Inquirer
, February 12, 2006.

3
. Indictment, United States v. Michael Curtis Reynolds, Oct. 3, 2006,
http://theterrorfactory.com/documents/reynolds_indictment.pdf
.

1
. Don Markus and Andrea F. Siegel, “Man Accused in Bomb Plot Had Prior Criminal Charges,”
Baltimore Sun
, December 10, 2010.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Tricia Bishop, “Would-be Catonsville Bomber Sentenced to 25 Years in Prison,”
Baltimore Sun
, April 6, 2012.

4
. Criminal complaint, United States v. Antonio Martinez, December 8, 2010,
http://theterrorfactory.com/documents/martinez_complaint.pdf
.

5
. Ibid.

6
. Ben Nuckols, “Lawyer: FBI entrapped Baltimore bomb plot suspect,”
Associated Press
, December 13, 2010.

7
. Ibid.

8
. “Maryland Man Pleads Guilty to Attempted Use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction in Plot to Attack Armed Forces Recruiting Center,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2012,
http://theterrorfactory.com/documents/FBI-Martinez.pdf
.

9
.
Inspire
, no.2,
http://theterrorfactory.com/documents/inspire-magazine-2.pdf
.

10
.
Inspire
, no.5,
http://theterrorfactory.com/documents/inspire-magazine-5.pdf
.

11
. “Awlaki Video Urges U.S. Muslims to Join Al Qaeda,”
Reuters
, December 20, 2011.

12
. Patrik Jonsson and Tracey D. Samuelson, “Fort Hood Suspect: Portrait of a Terrorist?”
Christian Science Monitor
, November 9, 2009.

13
. “Stats and Facts,” Drug Enforcement Administration, 2011,
http://www.justice.gov/dea/statistics.html#seizures
.

14
. Review the data cited here:
http://theterrorfactory.com/database.html
.

15
. Rick Lyman and Nick Madigan, “Officials Puzzled About Motive of Airport Gunman Who Killed 2,”
New York Times
, July 6, 2002.