Entrapment: Inventing Terrorists

[Epsilon Tau Alpha]

How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' -
and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook
By Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone
May 15, 2012
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/how-fbi-
entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-
hook-20120515

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland,
Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their
necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were
heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act
violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them,
a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco,"
explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make
plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five
men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco
suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought
they'd have a better chance of not hurting people if
they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for
a big bridge - "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to
make them money" - and won. He then led them to a
connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then,
the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they
allegedly put the plan into motion - and just as the
would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they
hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in
Ohio's Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610
vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The
authorities couldn't have more effectively made the
Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if
they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or
less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big
bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the
team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant
was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And
the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by
federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of
terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have
had to talk into embracing violence in the first place.
One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens,
complained to his sister of feeling "very pressured" by
the guy who turned out to be an informant and was
recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: "We're
in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just
don't cut it," he said. "And it's actually harder to be
non-violent than it is to do stuff like that." Though
when Cleveland's NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage,
they headlined it "Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on
Camera Talking Violence."

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged
terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full
story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a
paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. ("They teach
you how to make all this stuff out of simple household
items," one of the kids says on a recording quoted in
the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered,
The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it
says explosives cost. "I'm not sure," he responds, "I
just downloaded it last night.") It's a perfect example
of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem
acceptable that were previously beyond the pale.
Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now
they're white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue
that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually
acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats
are imminent and which are not. But that's not what
they're doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to
themselves a downright Orwellian power - the power to
deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental
narrative about which ideas Americans must be most
scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at
all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness
of the people who hold those ideas.

To see how, travel with me to rural Florida, and another
arrest that occurred at almost exactly the same time. On
April 28, members of American Front, a white-supremacist
group labeled "a known terrorist organization" in the
affidavit justifying the arrest, took a break from
training with machine guns for a race war in order to
fashion weapons out of fake "Occupy" signs which they
planned to use to assault May Day protesters in
Melbourne, Florida. No script, no choreography for
maximal impact on sensation-hungry news broadcasts, no
melodramatic press conference with a U.S. attorney and
FBI Special Agent in Charge; this arrest only went down
after an informant working with state law enforcement
fled in fear for his or her life after being threatened
by the group's leader Marcus Faella with a 9mm pistol.
And though the media reported the involvement of a
"joint terrorism task force of FBI and local law
enforcement" the arresting affidavit does not even
mention federal law enforcement; the charges filed were
state, not federal. A circuit court judge scrawled a
bail amount of $51,250; that was accidentally knocked
down to $500. The Cleveland anarchists were held without
bond.

The contrasts are extraordinarily instructive. When
federal law enforcement agencies take an affirmative
role in staging the crimes, the U.S. Justice Department
then prosecutes, leaving more clear-and-present dangers
relatively unbothered, the State is singling out
ideological enemies. Violent white supremacists are not
one of these enemies, apparently - because, as David
Neiwert, probably the nation's top journalist on the
subject, told me, the federal government has much less
often sought to entrap them, even though they are
actually the biggest home-grown terrorism threat. That
is unconstitutional, because law enforcement's criterion
for attention has been revealed as the ideas the alleged
plotters hold - not their observed violent potential.

Who else are we supposed to be afraid of? Certainly
animal-rights and environmental radicals. In 2006, when
FBI Director Robert Mueller announced the indictments of
Animal Liberal Front activists who burned down a horse-
rendering plant in 1997, harming no humans, he called
such property destruction one of the agency's "highest
domestic terrorism priorities." We're supposed to be
afraid of Muslims, of course - though not even
necessarily Muslim militants. In a sting stunningly
anatomized on a Pulitzer-worthy This American Life
episode from 2005 the target, British citizen Hemant
Lakhami, known as "Habib," was an Indian-born Willy
Loman, so dumb he referred to night-vision goggles,
which he'd never heard of, as "sunglasses" and so broken
down and desperate for attention he told the federal
informant he had full-sized submarines to sell. He was
egged by the informant into selling him Stinger missiles
(Lakhami had approached him hoping to sell him mangoes).
Upon Lakhami's terrorism conviction then-U.S. Attorney
Chris Christie stepped up to the press conference
microphones to announce, "Today is a triumph for the
Justice Department in the war against terror. I don't
know that anyone can say that the state of New Jersey,
and this country, is not a safer place without Hemant
Lakhani trotting around the globe attempting to broker
arms deals."

But don't worry your pretty little heads over the
epidemic of far-right insurrectionism that followed the
election of Barack Obama: all told, according to a
forthcoming data analysis by Neiwert, there have been 55
cases of right-wing extremists being arrested for
plotting or committing alleged terrorists acts compared
to 26 by Islamic militants during the same period. The
right-wing plots include the bombing of a 2011 Martin
Luther King Day parade in Spokane and the assassination
of abortion doctor George Tiller in 2009. Neither of
their perpetrators, it goes without saying, had been
arrested before they attempted their vile acts; neither
required law enforcement entrapment to conceive and
carry them out. It's just too bad for their victims they
did not fit the story federal law enforcement seeks to
tell.

I use the word "story" advisedly. Entrapment is the most
literary of abuses of power: Investigators and
prosecutors become as unto little Stephen Kings, feeding
into, and feeding, the fear centers of our lizard brains
in order to manipulate their audience. Unsurprisingly,
the tactic crops up whenever the powers that be are
themselves most frightened for their power, such as
during the 1960s, when instigation of criminal acts by
agents provacateurs infiltrating the anti-war movement
became extremely prevalent. When one of the accused
Chicago 7 left the courtroom just as a witness for the
prosecution left the stand, the other six became
horrified when it became clear that the guy who had just
got up (actually to go to the bathroom) was a plant
about to testify against them.

The antiwar movement soon learned whom to be afraid of:
people who don't quite fit in, who always seemed ready
to volunteer for anything (if you're on the FBI payroll,
you don't need a job), people pressing violence when
everyone else in the room preferred peace. In the 1972
"Camden 28" trial of Catholic left conspirators who
tried to steal and destroy registration records from a
local draft board, the star witness got his breaking-
and-entering training from the FBI and swore in court
that the accused never would have raided the building
absent his leadership. Although the people the FBI
preferred to recruit were the sort who had trouble
keeping jobs anyway. They were frequently mentally
unstable: the agent provocateur whose recordings got
twenty-three members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War
indicted for supposedly conspiring to attack the 1972
Republican National Convention with "lead weights,
'fried' marbles, ball bearings, cherry bombs ... wrist
rockets, slingshots, and cross bows" had received a
psychological discharge from the Army. And they were
usually criminals. In the Harrisburg 7 trial of in 1972
(in which the feds fantastically claimed that a pacifist
priest, some nuns, and their confreres intended to blow
up the steam tunnels beneath Washington, D.C.) the
prosecution's star witness had offered himself to the
FBI as an undercover New Lefty from the jail cell where
he was serving time for so many crimes the U.S. Attorney
had classified him as a "menace to society."

The entrapment game still works the same. In the case
documented on This American Life, informant "Habib" was
such a notorious liar, thief, and con man that the feds
deactivated him - until after September 11, when
suddenly "different FBI bureaus were fighting" for his
services. The key informant in the Animal Liberation
Front arrests was a truck thief and heroin addict. The
dude in the Cleveland anarchist case, identified by
thesmokinggun.com as a Donald Trump fan named Shaqil
Azir, had convictions for cocaine possession, robbery,
and passing bad checks - and was also under a current
check-fraud indictment the FBI covered up in its
affidavit. They also neglected to mention his frequent
appearances in bankruptcy court.

Such choices are a feature, not a bug: Criminals with
cases pending are able to act more convincingly as,
well, criminals, and will do anything the government
asks to reduce their sentences; sociopaths are better
able to manipulate the emotions of macho young men. The
play's the thing. Although sometimes the play becomes
too convincing: In the Watergate hearings in 1973, some
of the witnesses testified that hearing about VVAW's
violent plans to disrupt the Republican convention were
what convinced them it was OK to break laws on behalf of
their president.

Not everything is the same since the 1970s, of course.
The media has changed: Newsday editorialized in 1972 of
the Camden case, "We have come to expect such tactics
from totalitarian nations that have no respect for
individual rights permitting dissent. They have no place
in American and those who advocate them have no place in
this government." You don't see that sort of language
much any more. Indeed, Newsday appears not to have
covered the arrest and trial of Hemant Lakhami at all.
"Such tactics" are just not a very big deal any more.

You know what else has changed? You and I - to our
shame. Entraptment is illegal - but the question of
whether law enforcement set up a legal sting or illegal
entrapment is for a jury to decide. Entrapment was why
juries acquitted the defendants in the Camden, VVAW, and
Harrisburg cases. "How stupid did those people in
Washington think we were?" a Harrisburg juror told a
reporter. The feds don't have to worry about folks like
that any more. Not a single "terrorism" indictment has
been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 - not the
Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up
the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them with
offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers
included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in
bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said "the
government made them terrorists.")

The civil liberties of the Florida white supremacist
Marcus Faella, at least, have been honored. He was out
on bail the day he was arrested. There's no police
informant to monitor his activities any more, but not to
fear. His experiments in attempting to produce the
deadly toxin ricin, according to the Florida affidavit,
have not so far been successful. And Connor Stevens,
heard on the menacing video shown on Cleveland news
saying that his favorite part of Occupy protests " is
meeting people walking down the street, average people,
talking to them, hearing about how they're affected by
the economy, by the justice system, things like that"?
He is safely behind bars. So, for the rest of his life,
is Hemant Lakhami, the hapless Stinger missile salesman.
The man who put him there, Chris Christie, is now the
celebrated governor of New Jersey, and was all but
begged by his fellow to run for president. Republicans
think he tells a good story.

--------------------------------------------------------

Looking at FBI Entrapment
By Rehanna Jones-Boutaleb
Foreign Policy In Focus
http://www.fpif.org/articles/looking_at_fbi_entrapment

On August 28, 2008, two childhood friends from Midland,
Texas, Bradley Crowder and David McKay, traveled north
to join thousands of protesters at the 2008 Republican
National Convention (RNC). In the company of six Austin
activists, Crowder and McKay were ready for adventure,
and prepared, in Crowder's words, to protest to "change
the world." What began as a journey of hope, however,
ended in sudden catastrophe. Crowder and McKay's efforts
to mark their opposition to the Republican
administration and the U.S. involvement in Iraq resulted
in multiple charges of domestic terrorism and a high-
stakes entrapment defense in federal court. What the
"Texas Two" hadn't realized in Minnesota was that their
trusted comrade, Brandon Michael Darby - the very
activist to whom they had looked for inspiration and
guidance - was in fact an FBI informant.

Tracing Crowder and McKay's saga from its very origins,
the 2011 documentary Better this Worldcunningly unveils
the intricacies of the two protestors' federal trials,
as well as the media sensation they precipitated. The
film, which is scheduled to air nationally on PBS's
"POV" series, not only provides a nuanced perspective of
two alleged cases of domestic terrorism but also cuts to
the heart of the "war on terror" and its effect upon
civil liberties.

Aiming to go beyond the "nice-kids-turned-domestic-
terrorists" narrative propagated by mainstream media
sources, film-makers Kelly Galloway and Kelly Duane de
la Vega have turned their attention to the viewpoints of
the key players themselves: Crowder, McKay, and Darby.
Although both directors are clearly sympathetic toward
the convicted Texas youths, they take care to interview
multiple FBI agents and prosecutors, providing viewers
with conflicting approaches to the trials. The result is
a documentary thriller that stands as both a compelling
character study and a necessary reminder of the broader
themes behind McKay and Crowder's testimony, namely the
post-9/11 security apparatus and the use, and abuse, of
informants in the government's "war on terror." David v.
Goliath

Playing out against the backdrop of the RNC in St. Paul,
Minnesota, Better this World opens with visceral footage
from the 2008 protests. These recordings, alongside
testimonies detailing McKay and Crowder's involvement
with Austin's progressive scene, reveal that both youths
were not only newcomers to the activist community but
also indisputably shocked by what they encountered in
St. Paul. There was, in Crowder's words, a "pervasive
sense of occupation...it was a war zone...a police
state." Indeed, police searched the group's rented white
van without a warrant on its arrival in St. Paul and
seized their homemade shields constructed for the
protests.

Unnerved by this illegal bust and inspired by Darby's
militant polemics, Crowder and McKay walked into a
Walmart on August 31 and bought provisions to construct
Molotov cocktails. Although they proceeded to make eight
bottled gasoline bombs, the next morning the two
protestors realized, in Mckay's words, that they "didn't
know what they were doing." Leaving the Molotovs behind,
they joined other protestors in St. Paul only to be
arrested soon after for disorderly conduct. Due to lack
of identification on his person, Crowder was held in
jail.

At this point, the narrative takes its tragic turn.
Incensed that Crowder had not been released, McKay
foolishly announced to Darby that he was planning to
throw his homemade bombs on police cars in a nearby
parking lot. His conversation with Darby, held in a
moment of hotheadedness, was in fact being transmitted
to the FBI through electronic surveillance gear.
Although McKay and Darby agreed to meet once more at 2
a.m. to use the Molotovs, McKay decided against this
plan and ceased contact with Darby. Nevertheless,
several hours later, just before McKay was due to leave
for the airport, the FBI arrested him at gunpoint.

When McKay took his case to trial, arguing that he'd
walked into an FBI trap, he was facing up to 30 years in
federal prison. As his father remarked in a phone
conversation prior to his trial, the case was that of
"David against Goliath." An entrapment defense had no
precedent of success in the United States. Crowder, in
contrast, found himself in a more secure position; he
had never conversed with Darby on employing firebombs.
The prosecution offered him a two-year plea deal for
accepting one charge of possession of unregistered
firearms. In the belief that this would exempt him from
testifying against McKay, Crowder agreed to these terms.

The two friends nonetheless found themselves pitted
against each other as their cases played out. As Better
this World critically reveals, when McKay's trial
resulted in a hung jury, the prosecution crawled back to
Crowder, effectively blackmailing him for information on
McKay. Although the latter still had a chance to prove
entrapment, when he was offered a plea-deal of four
years in prison, he accepted, thus allowing Darby and
the FBI to wash their hands of the case. Faced with the
decision to accept four years in prison, or risk 30 in
proceeding with a second trial, McKay backed down.

As Crowder explained in an interview on June 23, he and
McKay were simply "pawns in somebody else's game." A
paid FBI informant -- once respected for his involvement
with Common Ground Relief, the post-Katrina recovery
effort -- directly influenced their progression to more
radical activism. More importantly, the machinery of the
U.S. judicial system constrained and shaped their
decisions following arrest. Broader Implications

Crowder and McKay's experience serves as a crucial
reminder of broader and more disquieting government
trends, such as the tendency to amplify minor offences
as cases of "homegrown" domestic terrorism and employ
pre-emptive counterterrorism strategies on U.S. soil.
"Going on the offense," as former Attorney General John
Ashcroft once dubbed it, has worked to push the
boundaries of civil privacy to their limit. Since 9/11,
Ashcroft and his successor Michael Mukasey have steadily
weakened rights protections and relaxed appropriate
checks put in place for FBI investigations. In recent
years, the Attorney General Guidelines, first
promulgated in 1976 to eradicate the forms of
investigative abuse that marked the COINTELPRO program,
have markedly eroded. As documented in a study by the
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law,
Mukasey's 2008 guidelines continue to permit the FBI to
authorize intrusive surveillance techniques, such as the
dissemination of untrained informants, without any
factual predicates to suspected criminal conduct.

The relaxation of criteria required to engage in
investigative activity has been a recurrent feature of
the post-9/11 world. Mukasey's Guidelines, for instance,
allow the FBI to conduct preliminary "assessments" on
the activities of individuals or organizations without
any prior allegations indicating criminal activity or
threats to national security. In these assessment stages
that occur prior to preliminary investigations - which
themselves can last up to six months! - FBI agents are
also permitted to "assess individuals who may have value
as human sources," effectively enabling the premeditated
recruitment of informants. Crucially, the Guidelines
refrain from imposing "supervisory approval requirements
in assessments."

Taking advantage of this dearth of checks and balances,
the U.S. Department of Justice has heretofore brought
charges against just over 400 individuals in "terrorism-
related investigations," since 9/11. As noted by David
Cole, a professor of law at Georgetown University, this
figure is widely regarded as inflated in that it
incorporates a vast number of cases that relate to minor
offences, such as immigration fraud, rather than actual
terrorism. Entrapment and Surveillance

Brandon Darby's recognized collaboration with the FBI
also hints of a larger reality: government entrapment.
As the FBI's focus, in the counterterrorism context, has
steadily shifted to a preventative model, it has
increasingly emphasized the use of paid and untrained
informants in the "fight against terrorism." In 2009
alone there were the high-profile cases of Maher Husein
Smadi, 19, and Michael Finton, 29, both of whom were
convicted on charges of domestic terrorism when their
crimes were, in no small part, shaped by the work of FBI
informants. FBI agents posing as al-Qaeda members
frequently approached Smadi, who was arrested for
plotting to bomb a downtown Dallas skyscraper.
Undercover U.S. agents also provided inert explosives to
Finton, convicted of attempting to bomb the Paul Findley
Federal Building and the offices of Congressman Aaron
Schock in Illinois.

These cases are only two of hundreds that raise
questions about the dividing line between covert
operations and government entrapment. Have government
informants been given too much leeway? In the eyes of
James Weddick, one of several FBI veterans interviewed
in Galloway's film, the answer is yes: "Before 9/11 it
was eyes and ears only. Now it's eyes, ears, and the
informant's mouth." In recent years, these surveillance
techniques have become ominously extreme.

Indeed, one of the more shocking realities Better this
World brings to light is the fact that the FBI was
preparing for the 2008 RNC at least two years prior to
its opening. In the words of one agent interviewed in
the film, authorities treated the RNC as a 100% security
threat. To that end, the FBI relied on informants in
neighboring jurisdictions to track the activities of
allegedly threatening activist groups, such as the RNC
Welcoming Committee, which coordinated discussions and
preparations for the 2008 protests. McKay and Crowder
themselves had actually been on the FBI's radar for more
than a year when they travelled to St. Paul. Given the
enormous funds spent on RNC security operations, the FBI
was under considerable pressure to produce results, to
effectively press charges against the alleged terrorists
whom they had been tracking.

For those convicted on dubious charges of domestic
terrorism, the probability of mounting a successful
entrapment defense is slim to nil. According to the
Center for Law and Security, from 2001 to 2007, ten
defendants charged with "terrorism-related" crimes have
formally issued an entrapment defense. None, however,
has prevailed. Although Brandon Darby, currently a
right-wing political commentator, now refers to Crowder
and McKay as "American-hating Americans," the reality is
that the two boys' progression to militant activism was
undeniably influenced by his words and actions. In an
effort to "better this world," a phrase taken from Darby
himself, government informants are taking suspects to
the edge of the pool and pushing them in.