B005OWFTDW EBOK (33 page)

Siraj’s mother, Shaina Berbeen, who was a physician with her own clinic in Karachi, told me her family had left Pakistan for the US in 1999, the same year as Shahzad. They had fled persecution for being Ismailis, a branch of Shias sometimes referred to as Agakhanis. Berbeen and her daughter Saniya Siraj, now twenty-four, told me about severe physical punishment of Ismaili students, including Siraj, at the hands of Sunni teachers. Berbeen also shared with me a forensic psychological evaluation of her son, which placed his IQ at seventy-eight, ‘the borderline of intellectual functioning … [a level] surpassed by 93 per cent of the population’.

In 2002, Berbeen’s husband became severely ill and Siraj was the family’s sole support. He worked first at fast-food chain Blimpie, and then as a clerk in his uncle’s store, Islamic Books and Tapes, next door to the Brooklyn mosque known as Masjid Musab Bin Omayer.

‘Cohen,’ Stolar tells me, ‘instituted a programme directed at the Muslim community to develop confidential informants and undercover agents. By the time we get to Siraj in 2004, I don’t think there’s a mosque in New York City that doesn’t have a CI or an undercover.’

Police sources tell me that foreign-born nationals are easy to turn into CIs – confidential informants. If a taxi driver gets into a tussle over a fare, gets reported and turns out to have immigration issues, the police can threaten him with deportation. ‘You become a CI and you won’t be deported.’ It’s a method the police have used for decades. Siraj had a CI assigned to him, an Egyptian nuclear engineer named Osama Eldawoody who had been drawn in because he had run a number of failed businesses out of his Queens apartment, prompting neighbours to call the police. The government paid Eldawoody’s expenses, as well as $94,000 for his work as an informant on the case.

The undercover officer in Siraj’s case was a native of Bangladesh who used the pseudonym Kamil Pasha. ‘He’s recruited in the classic NYPD way,’ Stolar says. ‘They troll the police academy to find someone who fits the targeted group. They started doing this with the Black Panther Party back in the sixties. So they get someone who’s, number one, young, and number two, not known on the street. And they say, we promise you a gold shield, a detective’s shield, if you do this.’

The cop and the CI had no knowledge of each other. July 2003 they began visiting the bookstore where Siraj was working. Eldawoody, fifty at the time, was old enough to be Siraj’s father; Pasha, at twenty-three, was more of a buddy. In seventy-two visits with Siraj, he was able to cull what the jury considered ‘radical statements’, such as Siraj praising Osama bin Laden as ‘a talented brother and a great planner’.

None of Pasha and Siraj’s conversations were tape-recorded, and Eldawoody only began recording their encounters after he’d been meeting with Siraj for nine months. It’s hard, therefore, to gauge what role the two men played in the conversation about the planned bomb attack.

In April 2004, the images of torture and abuse from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad surfaced in the media. When Siraj saw the image of the hooded Iraqi prisoner, attached to wires, standing on a box, he became hysterical. ‘Turn it off, Mommy! Turn it off!’ Siraj shrieked. Trial testimony showed that Eldawoody gave him photographs of a Muslim girl being raped by a dog. He is soon discussing the placement of the bomb with Siraj and his co-defendant, a
twenty-
one-year-old
schizophrenic Egyptian who turned state’s evidence in the case. Siraj, in this recording, says, ‘No killing. Only economic problems.’ He explains, ‘If somebody dies, then the blame will come on me. Allah doesn’t see those situations as accidents.’ In earlier audio recordings, however, he has said, ‘I want at least a thousand to two thousand to die in one day.’

At one point, under pressure from Eldawoody, the mildly retarded Siraj puts him off by saying, ‘I’ll have to check with my mother.’ He never did. Berbeen said she never met either of the men who spent so much time with her son. But her daughter did. ‘He was suspicious,’ Siraj’s sister said. ‘First of all, nobody helps anyone in America. He’s giving my brother rides all the time. It costs a lot of money to drive from Bay Ridge to Queens.

‘One time Eldawoody told my dad, “Your son is a diamond. A hero.” I think no one ever saw Matin that way. You know, it’s like Batman. He wanted to be a superhero. Honestly, all my brother did in his spare time was video games. I think, on some level, he wanted to be in one of them.’

‘This guy was a nebbish,’ Stolar tells me. ‘Look, I’m a defence attorney. I know how to make shit up and bend the facts, but this wasn’t bending the facts. This was classic entrapment.’

O
n Monday, 21 June 2010, I was among the reporters filing into the courtroom of federal judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum in lower Manhattan. We’d come for Faisal Shahzad’s arraignment after a federal grand jury had returned a ten-count terrorism indictment. We expected a five-minute perfunctory exchange; Shahzad would probably enter the typical ‘not-guilty’ plea.

Shahzad was cuffed and shackled, and Cedarbaum removed her reading glasses each time he answered a question so she could study his face. After the preliminaries, Cedarbaum began, ‘I have to discuss some other things with you …’

‘Sure.’

‘… because I want to be sure that this plea is entirely voluntary and that you are entering it with full understanding of the consequences of entering a plea of guilty.’

He was going to plead guilty. The reporter next to me turned, his eyes opened wide. Meanwhile, Shahzad was interrupting.

‘Before you do that …’

‘Yes.’

‘… can I say to you my plea of guilty? I just want to say a small statement.’

‘I think you should wait.’

‘OK.’

After several questions, Cedarbaum asked, ‘Why do you want to plead guilty?’

‘I want to plead guilty and I’m going to plead guilty a hundred times forward because until the hour the US pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking the US, and I plead guilty to that.

‘OK,’ he went on, fumbling with some paper. ‘With the assistance …’

‘Oh, please,’ the judge said. ‘Don’t read it. I want to know what happened. Tell me what you did.’

Shahzad tried again to read something because, he said, ‘It covers all the elements.’ But then he gave up and just started talking.

‘Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan,’ he said uncertainly. ‘I … with them, I did the training to wage an attack inside United States of America.’

‘I see. How to make a bomb or how to detonate a bomb? What were you taught?’

‘The whole thing; how to make a bomb, how to detonate a bomb, how to put a fuse, how many different types of bombs you can make.’

Shahzad went through the previous year’s timeline with her. He became a US citizen in May 2009, and then left on 2 June for Pakistan (‘for good’) with the intention of ‘trying to figure out a way to get to the Taliban’. He stayed with his parents in their Peshawar house. Finally, on 9 December, he and two friends made contact with the Taliban in Waziristan where he stayed until 25 January 2010. His actual bomb-making training lasted only five days.

At times their conversation lapsed into a seminar, with Shahzad the tutor on Taliban politics.

‘Is there a particular Taliban?’ Cedarbaum asked at one point.

‘Well, there are two Talibans; one is Taliban Afghanistan, the other is Taliban Pakistan. And I went to join the Taliban Pakistan.’

‘I see. Has that always been there?’

‘It recently … they … the organization was made … was made like six years ago when the first time Pakistan took a U-turn on the Taliban Afghanistan, and obviously the tribal area in Pakistan is the … was the harbouring for the mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan. So the Pakistan took a U-turn and they became allied with the US and they went against the Taliban and start fighting and killing them. So during that time, the Afghan Taliban made a group to counter the Pakistan government forces, and that’s when Taliban Pakistan came into being. Six years ago, maybe.’

‘Do the people you dealt with in the Taliban all speak English?’ she asked him.

‘No, they speak Pashto. Pashto is my mother language. I am Pashtun ethnically.’

‘I see. And all the Taliban are Pashtun, all the Afghans are Pashtun?’

‘Or most of them; not all of them. Majority. So I did speak with them in Pashto when I was communicating with them.’

‘I see. Pashto is spoken in Pakistan?’

‘Yes. Peshawar, the whole North West Frontier Province is all Pashto speaking, which was part of Afghanistan before the British broke it.’

T
he operation’s financing was under $10,000. Shahzad supplied $4,500 of his own money, the Taliban added $4,900. ‘When I came back on February 2nd, I started … started planning on the plan,’ he explained. ‘So I started looking for a place first to rent and slowly got together what I think could make a bomb … It took me from February up to end of April to do all that.

‘The bomb was – it was in three sections that I made the bomb. The major was the fertilizer bomb. That was in the trunk. It was in a cabinet, a gun cabinet. The second was … if that plan of the actual, that didn’t work, then the second would be the cylinder, the gas cylinders I had. And the third I had was a petrol, a gas to make fire in the car. But seems like none of those went off, and I don’t know the reason why they didn’t go off. And then …’

‘When did you expect them to go off? How long did you think it would take?’

‘Two and a half to five minutes. I was waiting to hear a sound but I couldn’t hear any sound, so I thought it probably didn’t go off, so I just … walked to the Grand Central and I went home.’

‘You took the train to Bridgeport.’

‘Yes.’

Cedarbaum, perhaps confused by the prosaic act of catching a suburban train after planting a lethal bomb, asked whether he did intend for the bombs to go off. Oh yes, Shahzad told her. And he chose Times Square on a Saturday night so he could maximize the mayhem? ‘Yes. Damage to the building and to injure or kill people. But again, I would point out one thing in connection to the attack, that one has to understand where I’m coming from, because this is … I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier. The US and the Nato forces, along with forty, fifty countries has attacked the Muslim lands. We –’

Cedarbaum interrupted. ‘But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night,’ she said slowly. ‘Did you look around to see who
they
were?’

‘Well, the people select the government. We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit –’

‘Including the children?’ the judge interrupted him once again.

There was a long pause.

‘Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq,’ he finally said, ‘they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.’

‘Now we’re not talking about them; we’re talking about you.’

‘Well, I am part of that. I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks because only … like and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks because only … like living in US, the Americans only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die. Similarly, in Gaza Strip, somebody has to go and live with the family whose house is bulldozed by the Israeli bulldozer. There’s a lot of aggression …’

‘In Afghanistan?’

‘In Gaza Strip.’

‘I see.’

‘We Muslims are one community. We’re not divided.’

‘Well, I don’t want to get drawn into a discussion of the Quran.’

S
hahzad’s reasoning – shared by suicide bombers in Gaza, Sri Lanka and elsewhere – was that his act was a war tactic. Aerial bombing by states cannot avoid killing children. Hence, terror bombings by militants that kill children are a logical response.

The anti-terror police have a programme – so far successful – to prevent another 9/11, but it cannot address root causes – American foreign policy – and the chances that the mediocre son of a self-made military man will try to show his father what’s what. Some attacks don’t need the authorities to prevent them, however. Shahzad was as sub par a soldier as he was a financial analyst. In court, he told Judge Cedarbaum that he still didn’t know why his triple redundant bomb failed to ignite sometime after six thirty on a Saturday night. ‘The timer on the detonator, it was on military time,’ a police source later told me. ‘He set it for seven. That was 7 a.m. on this thing. For 7 p.m., what he wanted, it should have been 19.00.’

The New York Police Department declined to comment on the case of Shahawar Matin Siraj or the Times Square bomber and its counterterrorism programme.