generalspeaking

Unconscionable Zeal?

Mohamed Warsame had travelled to Afghanistan in 1999-2000, driven there in the thought that he might become part of history in homage to his religion and co-religionists there who were suffering, in the common enough belief of Muslims that an alien military presence in a Muslim country equated with dominating persecution of Muslims. But the Russians had been defeated and Islam resurrected. There, he thought, he would find the perfect Islamic state under the Taliban; they were scholars of Islam, after all weren't they?

The violence he found there appalled him and he felt completely disenchanted, and decided to return to North America. Years later he drove his wife and child to a daycare centre and returned home. Where three FBI agents came along to question him about that trip. They took him to a National guard base about 160 kilometres distant from his Minneapolis home and spent two days grilling him about his trip years earlier. Two days later he was formally arrested and charged with giving support to al-Qaeda.

He had been born in Mogadishu, Somalia, moved to Canada where he was a naturalized citizen. Then he left Toronto in 2002 to join his wife in the United States. He had been under surveillance for a full six months before his arrest, though no proof that he was connected to terrorism was ever given in evidence. Despite which he was considered a dangerous threat, placed in pre-trial solitary confinement and for the following five and a half years remained in a cell 23 hours a day.

By 2009, when his lawyer described him as having become "less and less connected to reality", he pleaded guilty to all charges. He was released and sent back to Canada. He lives now in the greater Toronto area. He represents one of the over five hundred people convicted on terrorism charges in the United States since 9/11. Civil liberties groups and legal experts question the judicial practices and human rights abuses they are certain cases like Mr. Warsame's represents.

There are other case studies, where pre-trial solitary confinement often lasting years targeting racial and religious groups occur, with secret evidence never disclosed to the accused or their lawyers. Of those cases about 150 include undercover police officers and confidential informants whose purpose it is to entrap those who had demonstrated no previous involvement in terrorist activities. Human Rights Watch claim to have discovered seven instances where police targeted people who had mental or intellectual issues.


They were, in the descriptive phrase of one forensic psychologists, "susceptible to the manipulations and demands of others". At a time when the United States had suffered its most traumatic violent attack of hitherto unimaginable horror and magnitude, Americans thought of themselves as being under siege by malign foreign forces, which they had been in fact. Counterterrorism became the focus of American intelligence and security services.

"We forget how paranoid things were back then. 9/11 proved that the Constitution of the United States only exists when it is convenient for it to exist", stated Dan Scott, the lawyer who took Mohamed Warsame's case. Which is not to say that arrests and prosecutions haven't targeted those who have genuinely been involved in planning and carrying out terrorist acts.  However, according to a report by Human Rights Watch: "many others have targeted individuals who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting".

The FBI and other law enforcement organizations, like the New York City Police Department make use of undercover officers along with paid confidential informants who have their own criminal and prison records and histories of drug addiction. They're used to infiltrate mosques and to target Muslims whom it is known have criticized U.S. policy on the Middle East.

The report points to the case of Shahawar Matin Siraj, 21 when the NYPD targeted him. With an IQ of around 78, equating to the mental age of a 12-year-old, he lived with his parents and busied himself watching cartoons and playing video games. In 2003, an informant, 50-year-old Osama Eldwoody was paid to befriend Siraj at his mosque, posing as a man with a deep knowledge of the Koran. A report he gave to the police noted that his target was "impressionable".

He spent a year guiding Siraj in acquiring a hatred of Americans, exposing him to dreadful websites featuring the bodies of Muslims whom he claimed had been tortured or slaughtered by Americans. He impressed upon the young man that "Killing the killers" was permitted by the Koran, persuading him to seek revenge by bombing a subway station in downtown New York. Siraj enlisted a friend, a drug addict suffering from paranoid schizophrenia to join the "conspiracy".

Siraj had informed his mentor at one point that he really didn't want to kill anyone. Furthermore he would have to "ask my mom's permission".  The informer was paid $100,000 for his troubles. And Siraj paid with a 30-year sentence after a year of solitary confinement pre-trial, after which he was convicted of a terrorist plot; while his friend became a government witness, getting away with five years of prison time.

Irony of ironies, as the FBI busied itself constructing elaborate "sting" operations, then moving in on the unfortunate who had succumbed to the recruitment blandishments of an undercover agent or informant whom they paid handsomely for his services to enable law enforcement to scoop up the suspects who had trustingly agreed to recommendations and suggestions by those engaged in infusing them with enthusiasm for jihad, the warning the FBI had received from Russian intelligence relating to Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev was shunted aside.

Labels: 9/11, Defence, Intelligence, Security, Terrorism, United States

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, April 01, 2015