FBI BUSTS 'HOMEGROWN NY TERROR CELL'

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Postby mentalgongfu2 » Mon May 25, 2009 3:14 pm

What kind of trial can these four men expect? A jury trial? In open court?


I don't expect it will ever go to trial. Prosecutors will use scare tactics to force the defendants into plea agreements, which they will accept as a better option than the severe sentences that would be likely upon conviction at trial.

And regardless of what happens with the actual criminal case, the defendants will be declared guilty in the MSM and most people will stop paying attention by the time a trial occurs and they will remember only that Homeland Security saved us from a bunch of sub-human, would-be terrorists.

On the basis of what I've seen so far in the media, the whole case against them looks scandalously thin and unjust and easy to debunk. If a handful of good NYC lawyers were to take up their case, it looks as though it could easily become a cause celebre, and a good way of exposing the grotesqueness of the entire War on Terror.


But I wish I had your optimism.
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Postby Hilda Martinez » Mon May 25, 2009 3:24 pm

I think the FBI (or whoever) picked the wrong people. These guys have families and friends, they are not disaffected loners. Their family members and friends are going to make a lot of noise.

I agree with the poster who said that this was an "off the shelf" event. It happened too coincidentally in conjunction with the whole Guantánamo Bay/"prolonged detention" debate. It kind of reminds me of the beheadings that happened right after the prisoner abuse photos surfaced. And just like those videos, this was done with haste and not very carefully.

I can't wait to see this unravel day by day.
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Postby MacCruiskeen » Mon May 25, 2009 4:00 pm

Hilda Martinez wrote:I think the FBI (or whoever) picked the wrong people. These guys have families and friends, they are not disaffected loners. Their family members and friends are going to make a lot of noise.

I agree with the poster who said that this was an "off the shelf" event. It happened too coincidentally in conjunction with the whole Guantánamo Bay/"prolonged detention" debate. It kind of reminds me of the beheadings that happened right after the prisoner abuse photos surfaced. And just like those videos, this was done with haste and not very carefully.

I can't wait to see this unravel day by day.


Well said.

And it would be particularly great if some good Jewish NYC lawyers were to take up their case, because recent mentions of MLK remind me of a time (pre-"War on Terror") when many prosperous Jews found it natural to ally themselves with poor people of colour in the pursuit of social justice.

And because the obvious first question to ask about those allegedly planned "synagogue bombings" is: Who first came up with the idea?

The four accused themselves, and independently?

Or the Pakistani-fraudster "informant", who (we're now told) had been blackmailed, through threats of deportation, into doing what he did?

Or the FBI?

The answer should be easy enough to establish.
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Postby Hilda Martinez » Mon May 25, 2009 9:31 pm

I don't normally do this but I just spent an hour watching national and local news and not a word about this "home-grown terror cell" (lots of drug commercials, though). I guess I will have to work hard to watch this story "unravel day by day."

And I thought this was important.
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Hugh and Machiavelli were right!

Postby Iamwhomiam » Tue May 26, 2009 2:12 am

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who would gain by the new ones." Machiavelli
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Postby Hilda Martinez » Thu May 28, 2009 12:17 am

What the hell happened to this story?????
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Postby AlicetheKurious » Thu May 28, 2009 5:01 am

From The Sunday Times
May 24, 2009

FBI ‘lured dimwits’ into terror plot

The arrest of petty crooks over a plan to target Jews has put the use of sting operations under fire

David Williams


ON the steps of New York city hall on Friday, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor, praised the police officers and federal agents who helped disrupt an apparent terrorist plot to blow up a synagogue and shoot down military aircraft.

The mayor was flanked by more than 100 homeland security and counter-terrorist specialists, all of whom had a hand in an elaborate sting that netted four alleged Muslim extremists. Their plan, according to FBI agents, was to detonate a “fireball that would make the country gasp”.

The operation was acclaimed by New York officials for its success in averting what David Paterson, the state governor, described as “a heinous crime”.

Yet not every New Yorker was impressed by the latest in a long line of purported anti-terrorist triumphs that have supposedly averted tragedy in New York, Chicago, Toronto and several other North American cities since September 11, 2001.

“This whole operation was a foolish waste of time and money,” claimed Terence Kindlon, a defence lawyer who represented the last terror suspect to be tried in New York state. “It is almost as if the FBI cooked up the plot and found four idiots to install as defendants.”

Kindlon’s complaints were echoed by other legal experts who have repeatedly questioned the FBI’s reliance on undercover informants – known as confidential witnesses (CWs) – who lure gullible radicals into far-fetched plots that are then foiled by the agents monitoring them.

The last such plot purportedly involved an alleged attempt to blow up a fuel pipeline at John F Kennedy airport in New York in 2007; the defendants are awaiting trial in a case that depends heavily on evidence from an undercover CW.

“One question [about the synagogue case] that has to be answered is: did the informant go in and enlist people who were otherwise not considering trouble ?” said Kevin Luibrand, who represented a Muslim businessman caught up in another FBI sting three years ago. “Did the government induce someone to commit a crime?”

The other question that US security experts were debating was how much had been achieved by assigning more than 100 agents to a year-long investigation of three petty criminals and a mentally ill Haitian immigrant, none of whom had any connection with any known terrorist group. “They were all unsophisticated dimwits,” said Kindlon.

Prosecutors alleged that James Cromitie, a 44-year-old ex-convict who converted to Islam in prison, was the ringleader of a plot to bomb synagogues because, in his tape-recorded words, “I hate those f****** Jewish bastards”.

Cromitie, from Newburgh, 60 miles north of Manhattan, was said to have recruited three other Muslim converts – David Williams, 28, and Onta Williams (no relation), 32, both former Baptist American ex-convicts; and Laguerre Payen, 27, a Haitian former Catholic and paranoid schizophrenic.

This unlikely crew was said to have planned to use remotely detonated C4 explosives to bomb synagogues in the New York suburb of Riverdale; they then intended to drive north to a National Guard base near Newburgh to shoot down military aircraft with a Stinger missile supplied by a man they believed was working with Jaish-e-Mohammed, a Pakistan-based terrorist group.

That man is now understood to have been Shahed Hussain, a former New York state motel owner who became an FBI informant in 2002 to avoid deportation to Pakistan after being arrested on fraud charges. Hussain appears to have met Cromitie at a Newburgh mosque where the plot to bomb Jewish targets was hatched.

With Hussain’s help, the FBI was able to monitor every move made by Cromitie and the others. Hussain also provided the group with bogus C4 explosive and a fake Stinger missile and launcher supplied by the FBI. When the conspirators planted their dud bombs outside two Jewish targets on Wednesday night, the FBI was watching. The area was smothered with heavily armed Swat teams, the would-be bombers’ exit was blocked and agents hauled them away in handcuffs.

“Did they really need all those men in ninja suits with M16 rifles to arrest four idiots?” wondered Kindlon, a former marine sergeant whose main concern is that real terrorists may be plotting undisturbed while domestic US agencies focus on fantasists. “Somewhere, someone in Al-Qaeda must be laughing.”

Concern about the FBI’s tactics heightened after Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, imam at the Masjid al-Ikhlas mosque in Newburgh, revealed that when Hussain first came to the mosque and started talking about jihad (holy war) – apparently to identify radical elements for his FBI handlers – several members immediately concluded that he must be a government agent.

The FBI is known to have infiltrated mosques, and many anti-terrorist experts believe a mosque is the last place a serious Islamic terrorist would plot an attack. “Anyone with any smarts knew to stay away from [Hussain],” said Muhammad. Yet nobody will accuse Cromitie and his cohorts of being smart.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 350389.ece
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Re: FBI BUSTS 'HOMEGROWN NY TERROR CELL'

Postby American Dream » Wed Mar 31, 2010 9:18 am

‘NY Synagogue Bomb Plot was Feds’ Idea’

30th March 2010

Dawn.Com | 20 Mar, 2010



WHITE PLAINS, New York: Four men accused of trying to bomb synagogues and shoot down planes in New York last spring did little more than go along with a fake plot proposed, directed and funded by the federal government, defence lawyers claim in asking the court to dismiss the case.

A federal informant chose the targets, offered payment, provided maps and bought the only real weapon involved, a handgun, the attorneys said in a dismissal motion filed this week in federal court. They alleged the defendants were not inclined toward any crime until the informant began recruiting them.

”The government well knew that their case had been a government-inspired creation from day one and that the defendants had not been independently seeking weapons or targets,” the motion said.

Federal court spokesman Herb Hadad said the government would file its response next month.

The defence has suggested from the start that an entrapment claim was likely.

Defendants James Cromitie, 55, Onta Williams, 32, David Williams, 28, and Laguerre Payen, 27, all of Newburgh, are charged with placing what they thought were bombs outside two synagogues in the Bronx last May. They also are accused of planning to use what they thought was a Stinger missile against planes at an Air National Guard base 50 miles north of New York City.

They have pleaded not guilty and face up to life in prison if convicted.

The FBI was in on the plot, and the bombs and missiles involved were dummies, prosecutors said.

The defence lawyers said they based their account of the case on evidence shared by the government, including recordings and agents’ affidavits. Those materials have not been made public.

In a separate motion, they demanded more information on inducements that the informant may have offered the defendants. The dismissal motion identified the government’s agent as Shaheed Hussain, a ”professional informant” for the FBI. The defence claimed he was directed to visit suburban mosques, find members with anti-American leanings and recruit them to join a fake terror plot supposedly funded by a Pakistan-based group.

He suggested there could be as much as $250,000 available and the government provided him with a BMW, a Hummer and other cars to make him appear well-funded, the defence filings said.

The defence alleged that Hussain tried to incite the defendants by blaming Jews for the world’s evil and telling them that attacks against non-Muslims were endorsed by Islam.

Nevertheless, they said, he failed to motivate the defendants to any action on their own. Months went by between meetings, and the filings quote Cromitie as saying, ”I’m not gonna hurt anybody” and ”The plane thing … is out of the question.”

Hussain suggested the targets, paid for the defendants’ groceries, bought a gun, provided the fake bombs and missile, assembled the explosive devices and acted as chauffeur, the defence said.

”The alleged crimes were almost entirely the product of Hussain’s labours and the enterprise would have immediately collapsed if Hussain’s guiding hand had been removed,” the defence motion said.


http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/daw ... plot-qs-12
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Re: FBI BUSTS 'HOMEGROWN NY TERROR CELL'

Postby American Dream » Tue Oct 09, 2018 5:05 pm

Shahed Hussain, the FBI sting artist whose unsafe limousine cost the lives of 20 people

Image


In today’s NY Times, there is a report on a limousine company that was responsible for the death of 20 people in upstate NY–the driver, 17 passengers and two pedestrians. The first paragraph: “A driver with an improper license. A limousine company with a trail of failed inspections and ties to a scheme to illegally obtain driver’s licenses. And a limousine that had also been deemed unsafe.”

We learn that owner of the limousine company was an FBI informant named Shahed Hussain who participated in stings and who was known to his victims as “Malik”.

Mr. Hussain, the man whose name seems to be associated with the limousine company, posed as a wealthy Muslim radical and was the central prosecution witness in a 2004 federal sting focusing on a pizzeria owner and an imam at an Albany mosque. Six years later, Mr. Hussain, who posed as a terrorist, played a key role in the government’s case in a plot to blow up two synagogues in the Bronx.

He became an F.B.I. informant after being charged in 2002 with a scheme that involved taking money to illegally help people in the Albany area get driver’s licenses.


Shahed Hussain first came to my attention in 2009 when I was compiling a dossier on FBI entrapment.

His first sting occurred in 2004 as mentioned above. I referred to a NY Times article from 2006 that identified Shahed Hussain’s role in Albany:

The New York Times, October 11, 2006
2 Albany Men Are Convicted In Missile Sting
By MICHAEL WILSON; Dennis Gaffney contributed reporting.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted two Muslim immigrants of participating in a plot with a man who said he was helping plan a missile attack on a Pakistani diplomat in New York City in 2004.

The man to whom the immigrants were linked was actually an informant working with the F.B.I. in a sting operation against the two defendants, Yassin M. Aref, 36, an Iraqi refugee and the imam at an Albany mosque, and Mohammed M. Hossain, 51, a Bangladeshi immigrant and the owner of a pizzeria here. The gestation of the case, with the government’s informant ingratiating himself with the men and initiating all the conversations about a shoulder-fired rocket launcher, led to claims of entrapment from Mr. Hossain’s lawyers during the three-week trial in Federal District Court.

The case began when the undercover informant, Shahed Hussain, who used the name ”Malik,” introduced himself to Mr. Hossain at the Little Italy Pizzeria on Central Avenue in July 2003, bringing gifts for the restaurateur’s children, according to testimony. The two became friends, and the informant offered to lend Mr. Hossain $50,000 for improvements to the pizzeria. At later meetings, Mr. Hussain testified that he told Mr. Hossain that the money he was going to lend to him came from the sale of a missile launcher that would be used to kill a Pakistani diplomat in New York.

In reality, there never was a plot. In one meeting, captured on a video that was played at the trial, the informant showed Mr. Hossain a launcher. The restaurateur said he had only seen such a weapon on television, and he asked if it was legal, and the informant replied, ”What is legal in this world?”


This was not the last of Hussain’s dirty tricks. Three years later he conned four very marginal men into staging attacks on Jews that would help bolster the “war on terror” hysteria of those days. The NY Times reported on May 23, 2009:

The members of the mosque now believe that Maqsood was the government informant at the center of the case involving four men from Newburgh arrested and charged this week with having plotted to explode bombs at Jewish centers in New York City. The government has said that the four men, several of whom visited the mosque in Newburgh and all of whom spent time in prison, were eager to kill Jews, and prosecutors charged that they had actually gone so far as to plant what they believed to be bombs on the streets of New York, an act the F.B.I. captured on videotape.


It turns out that Maqsood was none other than the owner of the limousine company that now has the blood of 20 people on his hands:

The informant was not identified in court papers unsealed on Wednesday in Manhattan. But according to a person briefed on the case, the informant is Shahed Hussain, the central prosecution witness in a 2004 federal sting focusing on a pizzeria owner and an imam at an Albany mosque.

Lawyers for those men argued that Mr. Hussain, who had posed as a wealthy Muslim radical, had entrapped their clients in an ultimately fictional plot to kill a Pakistani diplomat with a missile. But a federal jury convicted the two men, and they were sentenced to 15 years in prison.


Continues: https://louisproyect.org/2018/10/09/sha ... his-hands/
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Re: FBI BUSTS 'HOMEGROWN NY TERROR CELL'

Postby Jerky » Thu Oct 11, 2018 2:06 am

Astonishing how the roots always seem to curl back incestuously in on themselves in these particular types of schemes, isn't it?

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Re: FBI BUSTS 'HOMEGROWN NY TERROR CELL'

Postby Sounder » Thu Oct 11, 2018 8:01 am

Good catch AD, thanks.
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