The Terror Factory (25 page)

“Okay. So not so heavy on the technology,” Priest said.

“That's correct,” McFeeley said.

The point being made was that all this intrusive surveillance technology wasn't helpful in finding terrorists. But
Frontline
never questioned if someone such as Martinez, who was lured into an FBI sting by an aggressive informant, could legitimately even be considered a terrorist if he lacked the capacity to commit acts of terror on his own. Since the media have largely abdicated the role of defining who is and is not a terrorist to the FBI and Justice Department, the government has been able to push forward cases with no links to real terrorists and use the resulting publicity to demonstrate a terrorism-thwarting job seemingly well done.

In addition, without critical questioning from the media, or any kind of independent verifying organization, law enforcement is able to use its own data to create the narrative that dangerous terrorists are targeting us. For example, in March 2012, the New York City Police Department published a list of fourteen terrorism cases since 9/11 that the NYPD had seemingly prevented. A flattering June 2012
Newsweek
profile of New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly cited those fourteen cases, as did U.S. Representative Peter King, a New York Republican who held controversial congressional hearings on homegrown Islamic terrorists.
¹⁵
The problem with the NYPD's list was that only two of the cases involved real terrorists in New York—planned subway bomber Najibullah Zazi and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad—while another was a plot in the United Kingdom only tangentially linked to New York. The other eleven plots either never had credibility in the first place or involved FBI informants, such as the Newburgh Four and the Herald Square bombing plots. To justify its own success, the NYPD cited its own data, which is something the FBI has been doing with terrorism since 9/11—using data of its own creation to prove the point that terrorists are a growing threat that the Bureau is addressing.

Because the FBI has the luxury of determining alone who is and who is not a terrorist, simply by labeling them as such to the public, the government is able to create the very data by which its success can be measured. When the Justice Department asked Congress to allow prosecutors to put 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on trial in Manhattan—a plan DOJ officials later scuttled for security reasons in favor of Guantanamo Bay as the venue—Attorney General Eric Holder provided congressional representatives with a list of more than 400 international terrorism-related defendants
the Justice Department had prosecuted since 9/11. Holder provided this list as a way of showing that the DOJ had a near-flawless record in prosecuting terrorism defendants inside the United States, and thus was more than capable of putting Mohammed on trial. While the list did include one dangerous terrorist, Najibullah Zazi, as well as people who were raising money for or sending money to terrorist groups such as Hamas, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, others who made the list were terrorists only because the Justice Department had labeled them as such. The list included several sting targets whose terrorist acts were only made possible by the FBI, such as the five convicted members of the Liberty City Seven, Mohammed Hossain, and the Fort Dix Five. Other inclusions seemed arbitrary, if not deceitful. Amr I. Elgindy, an Egyptian-born stock trader who received confidential information from an FBI agent that he used to manipulate stock prices, was on the list, even though he had no connections to terrorism whatsoever and evidence showed that his motivation was greed, not religion or ideology. Also on the list were New Jersey men Hussein and Nasser Abuali and Rabi Ahmed, who were busted in a storeroom full of Kellogg's cereal worth nearly $90,000. No evidence linked them to terrorism, and they were never charged with a terrorism-related offense. “This case had no connection to terrorism unless you consider cornflakes weapons of mass destruction,” Michael Pedicini, a lawyer for one of the men, said.
¹⁶
Yet the Justice Department was able to include the cereal bandits on a list of dangerous terrorists because no one independently audits the terrorist data by which the government is measuring itself.

Congress allocates billions to the FBI to find terrorists and prevent the next attack. The FBI in turn focuses thousands of agents and informants on Muslim communities in sting operations that pull easily influenced fringe members of these communities into terrorist plots conceived and financed by the FBI. The Justice Department then labels these targets, who have no capacity on their own to commit terrorist acts and no connections to actual terrorists, as terrorists and includes them in data intended not only to justify how previous dollars were spent, but also to justify the need for future counterterrorism funding. In the end, the tail wags the dog in a continual cycle.

He sent the email in the middle of the night on March 9, 2012, and it went to dozens of people—journalists, lawyers, activists. The subject line read “Shahed Hussain.” Khalifah Al-Akili, a thirty-four-year-old living near Pittsburgh, had found the article I'd written for
Mother Jones
about FBI informants, which detailed, among many things, Hussain's life and work with federal law enforcement. Al-Akili discovered while reading the article that his new friend “Mohammed,” pictured alongside the text in my story, was one of the FBI's most prolific terrorism informants. What Al-Akili didn't know, however, was that the man who had introduced to him to Hussain was another one of the FBI's favorite informants, Theodore Shelby, the former Black Panther and tollbooth robber who had led the sting against Tarik Shah, the jazz-bassist-turned-terrorist from New York City.

In the email, Al-Akili said that he first met Shelby outside Jamil's Global Village, a store in Pittsburgh, in October 2011. As he had during the Shah investigation in New York, Shelby went by the name Saeed Torres. Al-Akili saw Shelby again at his mosque, An-Nur Islamic Center, in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania, where the informant told him that he lived just down the road from him, on Kelly Street. “He offered to ride
me home when we was leaving, and I left with him,” Al-Akili wrote. “Over time we continued to meet at the musjid for the prayer, and then he began to pick me up and take me to the musjid.” Shelby told Al-Akili that he was interested in fighting and that he knew some people who had the means and desire to fund an attack. He also asked Al-Akili several times his opinions on jihad, which made Al-Akili wonder if Shelby was working for the FBI.

Later that month, Al-Akili told Shelby that he was going to Philadelphia for a few days. “I want you to see if you can get me a roscoe,” Al-Akili remembered Shelby telling him, using an antiquated term for a gun. “I have some young boys selling drugs in front of my house, and I need some protection in case one of them gets out of hand.” Al-Akili returned from Philadelphia three days later, and Shelby asked if he had the gun. No, Al-Akili told him, as he didn't “deal with brothers on that.” Shelby continued to press. Did he know anyone in Pittsburgh who could get him a gun?

The agitation from Shelby never stopped. For example, when Al-Akili mentioned that he was interested in opening a Halal restaurant in Pittsburgh, Shelby told him he knew someone who could put up money for the eatery—but he'd need to do something in return. Al-Akili knew that “something” meant violence. “When he would talk like this, I would just remain silent for the most part and not really comment back,” Al-Akili wrote in his email. He began trying to avoid Shelby, but he'd still end up running into him since the two lived so close to one another.

On January 15, 2012, Shelby told Al-Akili that he had a brother coming to town and that he wanted the two of them to meet. His brother was a man of the “struggle,” to use Shelby's word, which he intended to mean jihad. When and
where could they meet? The next day at one o'clock, Al-Akili told him. But after thinking about it, Al-Akili changed his mind. He sent a text message to Shelby, telling him that he had to cancel because he was going to see his ill mother.

A week passed, and on January 19, Al-Akili was walking to his apartment when he saw Shelby's truck and waved. Because of the truck's darkly tinted windows, Al-Akili couldn't see inside. The truck pulled up next to him, the passenger-side door opened, and a slender man of South Asian descent got out and approached. “
As-Salamu Alaykum
,” the man said, kissing both of Al-Akili's cheeks. The man told Al-Akili his name was Mohammed, and that he'd been looking forward to meeting him. He'd heard so much about him, he said. Mohammed, as Al-Akili would later discover, was FBI serial snitch Shahed Hussain.

Hussain asked if they could have coffee together. Al-Akili declined, saying he had to go see his mother, who was ill. Shelby could drive him there, Hussain offered. Again Al-Akili declined, saying he'd take the bus. “So as they left, and as I was walking home, I had a feeling that I had just played out a part in some Hollywood movie where I had just been introduced to the leader of a terrorist sleeper cell,” Al-Akili wrote.

Al-Akili told a friend, Dawud, about what had happened. As they were discussing the encounter in Al-Akili's apartment, the phone rang. Shelby and Hussain were on the line, and they were downstairs. Al-Akili told them he wasn't at home, a lie. “I just thought maybe you and Dawud might be upstairs just sitting around,” Shelby said.

He wasn't home, Al-Akili told Shelby again.

“I really want to meet you, brother, and I have a card for your mother because she is not feeling good,” Hussain said. Al-Akili knew then that he was being watched. The next
morning, as he was walking down the street, Hussain turned the corner right in front of him. “As-Salamu Alaykum,” he said, and asked again if they could have coffee together. There was a McDonald's nearby, so Al-Akili agreed.

Over coffee, Hussain told Al-Akili that he had an import business, the same story he had told Mohammed Hossain in Albany and James Cromitie in Newburgh. But with Al-Akili, Hussain didn't waste time with pleasantries. He said he was from Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan, and that his people were in the business of jihad. “I hear you want to go to Pakistan,” Hussain said.

“No, I don't want to go to Pakistan,” Al-Akili replied. He then told Hussain he had to go, and asked the informant to write down his phone number, email address, and the name of his business. Hussain scribbled the information on a McDonald's receipt. “He kept attempting to talk about the fighting going on in Afghanistan, which I clearly felt was an attempt to get me to talk about my views or understanding of that matter,” Al-Akili remembered.

When he got home that evening, Al-Akili pulled out the receipt and sat down at his computer. First, he Googled the business name Hussain had given him—Seagull Enterprises—but couldn't find anything relevant. He then Googled the phone number—518-522-2965—thinking that might bring up information about the business. But it didn't. Instead, the first search result was an FBI transcript of a recorded phone conversation between Hussain and James Cromitie on April 5, 2009, which had been entered into evidence in the Newburgh trial and posted online. Since the Newburgh investigation, the FBI had never bothered to change Hussain's phone number. Al-Akili then Googled “James Cromitie” and found a Wikipedia entry mentioning
Hussain as the informant in the case. Finally, Al-Akili Googled “Shahed Hussain,” stumbled onto my
Mother Jones
article and the picture of Hussain, and realized that the man who said his name was Mohammed was in fact one of the FBI's most effective and productive terrorism agent sprovocateurs. “I would like to pursue a legal action against the FBI due to their continuous harassment and attempts to set me up,” Al-Akili wrote in his email. “This is just the latest attempt of the FBI to entrap me in their game of cat-and-mouse.”

I wrote back to Al-Akili, and we arranged a time to talk by phone. But our conversation never happened, as less than a week after Al-Akili sent his email message, federal agents arrested him, charging him with being a felon in possession of a firearm. (Al-Akili, whose former name is James Marvin Thomas Jr., had pleaded guilty to two felony drug charges in 2001.) Included in the government's evidence against Al-Akili, which the FBI disclosed in its affidavit to commence prosecution, was an email from July 4, 2010, with an attached photo and links to two short YouTube videos, which have since been taken offline. In the photo and in the videos, Al-Akili is seen holding a .22-caliber rifle—a gun that wasn't his in 2010 and wasn't in his possession when he was arrested nearly two years later. A federal judge ordered Al-Akili to be held without bond pending trial after FBI Special Agent Joseph Bieshelt testified that Al-Akili had told an FBI informant he planned to travel to Pakistan and fight with the Taliban.
¹
He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

The charges against Khalifah Al-Akili were the culmination of the FBI's latest sting operation involving Shahed Hussain, an accused murderer and con artist who in less than ten years has become one of the Bureau's most valuable terrorism informants.
The Al-Akili sting offers a window into how far the FBI is willing to go to create the very terrorists it's charged with hunting. Given his previous drug charges, Al-Akili isn't the nation's best, most productive citizen, to be sure. But is he a potentially dangerous terrorist? An informant offered him money, and Al-Akili wouldn't buy a gun. In addition, Al-Akili was never in touch with terrorists in the United States or abroad. The only evidence linking him to terrorism is an unsubstantiated claim by the FBI that Al-Akili told an informant he wanted to fight with the Taliban—an imagined crime at best, if it's even true. Yet the FBI deemed this ex-con and convert to Islam so dangerous that agents assigned two of their most prolific and aggressive terrorism informants—men with histories of violence and fraud—to target him. When Al-Akili realized he was at the center of a setup, he sent an email nationwide sounding the alarm—not exactly the type of stealth behavior one would expect from a hardened lone wolf intent on wreaking havoc and carnage in America. After the sting operation was blown, the FBI arrested Al-Akili, labeled him a terrorist based on a comment he allegedly made to an informant with a record of lying, and prosecuted him using evidence from a two-year-old YouTube video clip in which he is seen holding a firearm.