Here is more evidence of the false conflation of America and Israel that now permeates our discourse: specifically, a criminal case in NY in which a young Pakistani immigrant was targeted, entrapped in my view, because of his statements about the Palestinian situation. And so Israel’s predicament, which stems from violent resistance to occupation, is cut and pasted on to America’s relationship to the Muslim world.
The excerpt is from “The Problem of the New York Police,” Michael Greenberg’s report in the NY Review of Books on the ten-year-long program of the Police Department’s intelligence division– Intel– to “map” the Muslim community so as to counter terrorism. Go to the link for the complete description of this shocking case. The boldface is mine:
Intel’s single conviction thus far—in a case that did make it to federal court—was that of Shahawar Matin Siraj, a twenty-two-year-old Pakistani immigrant who was arrested in August 2004 for conspiring to bomb the Herald Square subway station. At trial Siraj mounted a defense of entrapment, claiming that he was under the influence of an Intel agent, Osama Eldawoody, who fostered a relationship with Siraj over a period of eleven months, during which he induced him to hatch a plot that, without Eldawoody’s encouragement, would never have come into being.
There is no doubt that Siraj, and his associate James Elshafay, entered into a conspiracy with Eldawoody—that is, a verbal agreement to violate the law. Siraj admitted coming up with the idea of placing a bomb in the 34th Street subway station. But transcripts of the trial reveal a murky, and highly vague, narrative of events and intentions… Siraj has an IQ of 78, just above the threshold of mental retardation, and the impression I got from reading transcripts of the trial was that of an inarticulate young man, shifting and transparent in his attempts to protect himself and easily led around during cross-examination.
…The prosecution’s main challenge was to convince the jury that prior to meeting Eldawoody, in September 2003, Siraj had been ready and willing to become a terrorist. In fact, for almost two years before meeting Eldawoody, Siraj had been under the surveillance of an undercover officer—a Bangladeshi-American who had been recruited from the Police Academy when he was twenty-three and who testified under the pseudonym “Kamil Pasha.” Never during those two years, according to the reports Kamil filed, did Siraj express any interest in becoming a terrorist. To establish Siraj’s predisposition, prosecutors leaned heavily on a statement he made to Kamil that he could sympathize with the impulse driving Palestinian suicide bombers whose family members had been killed. This, argued the government, showed incontrovertibly that Siraj “approves of violent jihad,” asserting that “this statement all by itself demonstrates predisposition.”
I read in a newspaper just a week or two before the second intifada that an Israeli spokesperson said that there had been no suicide bombings in the first intifada. (As they had claimed for many years).
When the second intifada started and most bombings were described as suicide bombings i expected the media to remember that.
But no, the media had that foggy memory.
All bombings MUST be by people that is so evil that they want to kill themselves and a lot of other people .. xtra evil people…. !!!
“… Siraj has an IQ of 78, just above the threshold of mental retardation…”
Life imitates art. This nonsense gets closer to the plot of Conrad’s The Secret Agent with every iteration.
it is bizarre, the government employing criminals and con-men to entrap the destitute and mental defectives in ‘plots’ to attack the US. what is going through the minds of FBI and police as they take part in this theatre of the absurd? and who exactly examined siraj and determined that his IQ just managed to break the ‘threshhold of mental retardation’? presumably an ‘expert’ employed by the government.
errol morris just wrote a brilliant book on the jeffrey macdonald case, ‘a wilderness of errors’. one of his basic criticisms of the government is that once prosecutors have established a ‘narrative’, everything that they do, every shred of evidence analyzed, every witness interviewed, is viewed through that narrative and every interpretation mangled to fit their story. it really has nothing to do with a search for ‘justice’. and now that the government has established the ‘terrorism’ narrative, it needs actors to play the parts.
Dog bites man. Unfortunately, entrapment has become a standard modus operandi for the FBI. This story is almost a verbatim redux of the Oregon Christmas Tree bomber case where a young Somali American student Mohamed Osman Mohamud was sucked into a bomb plot by FBI undercover creeps who were able to work the kid into an anti-American hate-lather and then bust him. They even had a 36 page affidavit about the crime already to go before any crime was committed so they wouldn’t waste anytime getting the arrest warrant as soon as the dummy bomb failed to explode. See: link to something-stinks.com
In 2011 NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston aired a powerful piece showing how the FBI get their own agents into an anti-Muslim hate-lather and then sic them on the Muslim community.
link to vpr.net
Americans, particularly Muslim Americans, have a lot more to fear from the FBI than they do the Taliban or any other terrorists. It’s out of control, and Obama has not done a thing to change that.
Eldawoody and all his superiors, up to the chief of police and mayor of New York, should be arrested immediately by the FBI and indicted for instigating a terrorist act.
Clear problem is that the government has unlimited capability of manufacturing terrorist cases, stigmatize selected groups, justify more spending on manufacturing such cases etc. For example, I guess that a disturbed young man with low intelligence and deep Christian faith could be indoctrinated and manipulated into a plot to attack an abortion clinic. And he could well express some tripe like “abortion is worse than Holocaust” that circulates in some not-so-small circles, hence “predisposition”.
Actual terrorists need actually some mental acuity to conceive and execute an effective plot, and a person with at least average mental level could well be alert to the possibility of a set up and much less prone to follow “an older brother figure”.
Actual terrorists need actually some mental acuity to conceive and execute an effective plot, and a person with at least average mental level could well be alert to the possibility of a set up and much less prone to follow “an older brother figure”.
your comment reminded me of a horrifying article i read this morning
link to afpak.foreignpolicy.com
Pakistan’s almost-suicide-bombers
breaks the mold
One extra point: indoctrinating impressionable people to phony terror plots can horribly backfire. My suspicion is that this is what happened in Toulouse, because the perpetrator was very familiar to police. Perhaps rather then following a phony plot he simply got himself a gun and started to shoot people alone. At the very least, the potential is there. Perhaps the risk is low if the patsy is very, very inept?
The most depressing thing is those involved in these ‘anti-terrorism’ programmes, departments, centers, and so on have every incentive to keep manufacturing these cases.
If they don’t, there go their jobs. Ever hear anyone argue his occupation is unnecessary and he should be put out on the street?
We have created a terrorism industry. Not very surprisingly, it manufactures ‘terrorists.’
Phil. Before saying ‘j’accuse’, consider two things from the book review article.
‘On May 17, Siraj came up with the idea of placing a bomb in the subway. What took place between the two men during the eight months, and thirty-five to forty meetings, leading up to this plot remains largely unknown, even after the trial.’
‘Siraj expresses, in grandiose terms, his desire to avenge America’s mistreatment of Muslims. He also made a scouting trip to the subway station with Eldawoody and Elshafay and created a crude drawing of the target.’
.
Siraj had a trial and was convicted. Maybe someone from Mondoweiss should interview a juror from the Siraj trial and find out why 12 New Yorkers voted for a conviction instead of concocting this ‘false conflation of America and Israel’ phantom.
proudzionist skips the context:
The question: predisposition or indoctrination by the government agent, is not clear, but it is highly possible that the government agent is lying. The life is not neat, many people make idle boasts and entire industries are capitalizing on violent fantasies of (mostly) young people. Also note how far the “plot” was advanced: a crude drawing of a subway station? With the help of two government supplied tutors?
@piotr
Correct. Predisposition or indoctrination by the government agent is not clear, but as Judge Gershon stated in the article, it never is clear.
Correct. Blowing up the Verrazano Narrow Bridge IS ‘crazy’. This is a huge steel suspension bridge with thousands of daily commuters and guarded by police and surveillance equipment. Not so a subway station. Think Madrid and London tubes bombings.
I don’t know if the Siraj jury arrived at the right verdict. I’m a defense attorney and jury verdicts are a mystery to me too. What I do know is that Mondoweiss should make the minimal effort to contact a trial attorney or juror and ask them, ‘What happened?’
Mondoweiss should not make the conclusory statement that a ‘false conflation of Israel of America’ had anything to do with whether there was justice in this case.