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When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi walked away from a U.S. detention camp in 2009, the future leader of ISIS issued some chilling final words to reservists from Long Island.
The Islamist extremist some are now calling the most dangerous man in the world had a few parting words to his captors as he was released from the biggest U.S. detention camp in Iraq in 2009.
“He said, ‘I’ll see you guys in New York,’” recalls Army Col. Kenneth King, then the commanding officer of Camp Bucca.
King didn’t take these words from Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as a threat. Al-Baghdadi knew that many of his captors were from New York, reservists with the 306 Military Police Battalion, a unit based on Long Island that includes numerous numerous members of the NYPD and the FDNY. The camp itself was named after FDNY Fire Marshal Ronald Bucca, who was killed at the World Trade Center in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
King figured that al-Baghdadi was just saying that he had known all along that it was all essentially a joke, that he had only to wait and he would be freed to go back to what he had been doing.
“Like, ‘This is no big thing, I’ll see you on the block,’” King says.
King had not imagined that in less that five years he would be seeing news reports that al-Baghdadi was the leader of ISIS, the ultra-extremist army that was sweeping through Iraq toward Baghdad.
“I’m not surprised that it was someone who spent time in Bucca but I’m a little surprised it was him,” King says. “He was a bad dude, but he wasn’t the worst of the worst.”
King allows that along with being surprised he was frustrated on a very personal level.
“We spent how many missions and how many soldiers were put at risk when we caught this guy and we just released him,” King says.
During the four years that al-Baghdadi was in custody, there had been no way for the Americans to predict what a danger he would become. Al-Baghdadi hadn’t even been assigned to Compound 14, which was reserved for the most virulently extremist Sunnis.
“A lot of times, the really bad guys tended to operate behind the scenes because they wanted to be invisible,” the other officer says.
“The worst of the worst were kept in one area,” King says. “I don’t recall him being in that group.”
Al-Baghdadi was also apparently not one of the extremists who presided over Sharia courts that sought to enforce fundamentalist Islamic law among their fellow prisoners. One extremist made himself known after the guards put TV sets outside the 16-foot chain-link fence that surrounded each compound. An American officer saw a big crowd form in front of one, but came back a short time later to see not a soul.
“Some guy came up and shooed them all away because TV was Western,” recalls the officer, who asked not to be named. “So we identified who that guy was, put a report in his file, kept him under observation for other behaviors.”
The officer says the guards kept constant watch for clues among the prisoners for coalescing groups and ascending leaders.
“You can tell when somebody is eliciting leadership skills, flag him, watch him further, how much leadership they’re excerpting and with whom,” the other officer says. “You have to constantly stay after it because it constantly changes, sometimes day by day.”
The guards would seek to disrupt the courts along with and any nascent organizations and hierarchies by moving inmates to different compounds, though keeping the Sunnis and the Shiites separate.
“The Bloods with the Bloods and the Crips with the Crips, that kind of thing,” King says.
The guards would then move the prisoners again and again. That would also keep the prisoners from spotting any possible weaknesses in security.
“The detainees have nothing but time,” King says. “They’re looking at patterns, they’re looking at routines, they’re looking for opportunities.”
As al-Baghdadi and the 26,000 other prisoners were learning the need for patience in studying the enemy, the guards would be constantly searching for homemade weapons fashioned from what the prisoners dug up, the camp having been built on a former junkyard.
“People think of a detainee operation, they think it’s a sleepy Hogan’s Heroes-type camp,” the other officer says. “And it’s nothing of the sort.”
Meanwhile, al-Baghdadi’s four years at Camp Bucca would have been a perpetual lesson in the importance of avoiding notice.
“A lot of times, the really bad guys tended to operate behind the scenes because they wanted to be invisible,” the other officer says.
King seemed confident that he and his guards with their New York street sense would have known if al-Baghdadi had in fact been prominent among the super-bad guys when he was at Camp Bucca.
King had every reason to think he had seen the last of al-Baghdadi in the late summer of 2009, when this seemingly unremarkable prisoner departed with a group of others on one of the C-17 cargo-plane flights that ferried them to a smaller facility near Baghdad. Camp Bucca closed not along afterward.
Al-Baghdadi clearly remembered some of the lessons of his time there. He has made no videos, unlike Osama bin Laden and many of the other extremist leaders. The news reports might not have had a photo of him at all were it not for the one taken by the Americans when he was first captured in 2005.
That is the face that King was so surprised to see this week as the man who had become the absolute worst of the worst, so bad that even al Qaeda had disowned him. The whole world was stunned as al-Baghdadi now told his enemies “I’ll see you in Baghdad.”
WORLD NEWS 06.14.14
Michael Daly
Find this story at 14 June 2014
© 2014 The Daily Beast Company LLC

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The U.S. once had Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in custody at a detention facility in Iraq, it was revealed Friday
Al Baghdadi was among the prisoners released in 2009 from the U.S.’s now-closed Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr in Iraq
It is unclear why the U.S. let the merciless al Qaeda leader slip away
Al Baghadadi and his troops took the Iraqi cities of Fallujah and Ramadi earlier this year and conquered Tikrit and Mosul within the last several days
They are now bearing down on Baghdad, burning down everything that stands in their way and carrying out executions on Iraqi civilians, soldiers and police officers
ISIS posted an image today of an officer’s decapitated head tweeted with sickening message: ‘This is our ball. It’s made of skin #WorldCup’
The United States once had Islamic State of Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi in custody at a detention facility in Iraq, but president Barack Obama let him go, it was revealed on Friday.
Al Baghdadi was among the prisoners released in 2009 from the U.S.’s now-closed Camp Bucca near Umm Qasr in Iraq.
But now five years later he is leading the army of ruthless extremists bearing down on Baghdad who want to turn the country into an Islamist state by blazing a bloody trail through towns and cities, executing Iraqi soldiers, beheading police officers and gunning down innocent civilians.
These are the only two known photos of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is seen here on the left as a prisoner half a decade ago and on the right more recently as the shadowy head of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL, also known as ISIS
These are the only two known photos of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He is seen here on the left as a prisoner half a decade ago and on the right more recently as the shadowy head of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL, also known as ISIS
This uundated handout picture of jihadi leader of The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as Abu Du’a, was provided by the Department of State. The U.S. government has a $10 million bounty out for the al Qaeda leader
This uundated handout picture of jihadi leader of The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also known as Abu Du’a, was provided by the Department of State. The U.S. government has a $10 million bounty out for the al Qaeda leader
It is unclear why the U.S. let the merciless al Qaeda leader slip away, however, one theory proposed by The Telegraph is that al Baghadadi was granted amnesty along with thousands of other detainees because the U.S. was preparing to pull out of Iraq.
The United States began withdrawing troops from Iraq in 2010,and Camp Bucca closed in 2011 along with the United States’ other military facilities as President Obama declared that the War in Iraq had come to an end.
Another possible explanation is that al Baghadadi did not become a jihadist until after his release from Camp Bucca.
More…
Iran offers to work WITH the US to stop the ISIS horde from overrunning Baghdad
Ancient hatreds tearing apart the Middle East: How 1,400-year-old feud between Shia and Sunni Muslims flared into life with the fall of dictators like Gaddafi and Saddam… and threatens to swallow Iraq
Planeloads of American diplomats and contractors EVACUATE from northern Iraq as Obama says he ‘won’t rule out anything’ in stopping jihadist violence spreading throughout the country
The story of how Baghadadi ended up in U.S. custody in the first place and later came to be the leader of a violent terrorist group is the stuff of legend.
It is said by some that al Baghadadi was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he was picked up by the U.S. military, a farmer who got caught up in a massive sweep. It was at Camp Bucca that he was radicalized and became a follower of Osama Bin Laden.
Another version of the story is that al Baghadadi, who also goes by the alias of Abu Duaa, was an Islamic fundamentalist before the U.S. invaded Iraq and he became a leader in al Qaeda’s network before he was arrested and detained by American forces in 2005.
‘Abu Duaa was connected to the intimidation, torture and murder of local civilians in Qaim,’ according to a 2005 U.S. intelligence report.
‘He would kidnap individuals or entire families, accuse them, pronounce sentence and then publicly execute them.’
Crazed: Jihadists are carrying out summary executions on civilians, soldiers and police officers including this police major after taking control of large swathes of Iraq
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Crazed: Jihadists are carrying out summary executions on civilians, soldiers and police officers including this police major after taking control of large swathes of Iraq
Shock and awe: An ISIS propaganda video shows militants blindfolding a Sunni police major in his home before cutting off his head
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Shock and awe: An ISIS propaganda video shows militants blindfolding a Sunni police major in his home before cutting off his head
Barbaric: This picture of the police officer’s decapitated head resting on his legs was tweeted with the message: ‘This is our ball. It is made of skin#WorldCup’
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Barbaric: This picture of the police officer’s decapitated head resting on his legs was tweeted with the message: ‘This is our ball. It is made of skin#WorldCup’
The U.S. now has a $10 million warrant out out of the brute, who is accused of bombing a mosque in Baghadad in 2011 and killing former Sunni lawmaker Khalid al-Fahdawl.
Al Baghadadi’s use of aliases has made him a difficult man to pin down. The terrorist organizer rarely shows his face – even to his followers. There are only two known pictures of him in existence, and one is from before he was released from prison.
‘We either arrested or killed a man of that name about half a dozen times, he is like a wraith who keeps reappearing, and I am not sure where fact and fiction meet,’ Lieutenant-General Sir Graeme Lamb, a former British special forces commander, told The Telegraph.
‘There are those who want to promote the idea that this man is invincible, when it may actually be several people using the same nom de guerre.’
Al Baghadadi and his troops had already taken key cities of Fallujah and Ramadi in Iraq earlier this year and have conquered the Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Mosul within the last several days.
They are now on the war path to Iraq’s capitol city Baghadad.
The terrorist group’s sudden rise in Iraq has taken the United States mostly by surprise.
President Obama famously said in October of 2011 that the American soldiers leaving Iraq would come home ‘with their heads held high, proud of their success.
‘That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.’
Obama rules out sending troops back to Iraq
President Obama reiterated on Friday that, ‘We will not be sending us troops back into combat in Iraq’
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President Obama reiterated on Friday that, ‘We will not be sending us troops back into combat in Iraq’
Faced with the real possibility that Iraq’s capitol could fall into the hands of terrorists, President Obama is now rethinking America’s military engagement in Iraq.
The president said on Thursday that he would consider launching air strikes on al Baghadadi and his followers.
‘What we’ve seen over the last couple of days indicates Iraq’s going to need more help’ from the United States and other nations, Obama said yesterday from the Oval Office.
‘I don’t rule out anything,’ he said, ‘because we do have a stake in making sure that these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in Iraq – or Syria, for that matter.’
In his daily briefing with reporters, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney clarified that president Obama was specifically referring to airstrikes.
‘We’re not considering boots on the ground,’ he said.
Thousands of Iraqi soldiers, men and boys captured by ISIS
On the warpath to Baghdad: A graphic showing the town and cities captured by ISIS over the last few days
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On the warpath to Baghdad: A graphic showing the town and cities captured by ISIS over the last few days
Up in arms: Members of Iraqi security forces chant slogans in Baghdad Sunni Islamist militants pressed towards the capital
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Up in arms: Members of Iraqi security forces chant slogans in Baghdad Sunni Islamist militants pressed towards the capital
Sabre-rattling: An Islamic militant issues a call to arms, saying: ‘Declare Allah the Greatest! Allah is the Greatest!’ in a video released by ISIS
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Sabre-rattling: An Islamic militant issues a call to arms, saying: ‘Declare Allah the Greatest! Allah is the Greatest!’ in a video released by ISIS
President Obama reiterated on Friday that, ‘We will not be sending us troops back into combat in Iraq.’
Obama said the U.S. would not get involved at all militarily until Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki and other members of the government demonstrate that they can put aside their secretarian differences and work toward unifying the country.
‘Ultimately it’s up to Iraqis to solve their problems,’ Obama said.
ISIS militants in Mosul stamp on Iraqi military uniforms
Volunteers who have joined the Iraqi Army to fight against the predominantly Sunni militants, who have taken over Mosul and other Northern provinces, gesture from an army truck
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Volunteers who have joined the Iraqi Army to fight against the predominantly Sunni militants, who have taken over Mosul and other Northern provinces, gesture from an army truck
Kurdish Peshmerga forces seize the control of Kirkuk where Iraqi army forces and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant clashed
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Kurdish Peshmerga forces seize the control of Kirkuk where Iraqi army forces and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant clashed
The news that the U.S. may have played a role in the rise of the new Osama bin Laden comes just a week after President Obama released five Taliban commanders in exchange for a U.S. solider being held hostage by the terrorist network.
Lawmakers immediately questioned the logic of the president’s decision, saying that the move could end up backfiring on the U.S. if the five fighters return to the battlefield in Afghanistan once their mandatory one-year stay in Qatar comes to a close.
They are especially concerned given the president’s announcement just days before their release that he plans to withdraw the majority of America’s troops in Afghanistan by the end of this year.
Already one, of the Taliban 5 have vowed to return to Afghanistan to fight American soldiers there once he is able.
‘I wouldn’t be doing it if I thought that it was contrary to American national security,’ the president said at the time.
By FRANCESCA CHAMBERS
PUBLISHED: 15:55 GMT, 13 June 2014 | UPDATED: 19:20 GMT, 13 June 2014
Find this story at 13 June 2014
© Associated Newspapers Ltd

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The biggest threat to Middle East security is as much a mystery as a menace — a 42-year-old Iraqi who went from a U.S. detention camp to the top of the jihadist universe with a whisper of a backstory and a $10 million bounty on his head.
He’s known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, head of the ruthless Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, and he oversees thousands of fighters in his quest to create a Sunni Islamic caliphate straddling the border of Iraq and Syria.
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His biometrics may have been cataloged by the soldiers who kept him locked up at Camp Bucca in Iraq — where he was recalled as “savvy” but not particularly dangerous — but few details about his life and insurgent career have been nailed down.
US to send 275 troops to IraqTODAY
“They know physically who this guy is, but his backstory is just myth,” said Patrick Skinner of the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm.
Jihadist propaganda has painted him as an imam from a religious family descended from noble tribes, and a scholar and a poet with a Ph.D. from Baghdad’s Islamic University, possibly in Arabic.
Skinner said it’s known he was born in Samarra and it’s believed that he was active in Fallujah in the early 2000s, probably as a commander in charge of 50 to 100 men.
He ended up at Camp Bucca in 2005, where the commander in charge of the U.S. detention facility could not have imagined he would one day be capturing city after city in Iraq.
“He didn’t rack up to be one of the worst of the worst,” said Col. Ken King, who oversaw Camp Bucca in 2008 and 2009.
Baghdadi may have tried to manipulate other detainees or instigate reactions from the guards, but he knew the rules well enough not to get in serious trouble.
“The best term I can give him is savvy,” said King, who first spoke to the Daily Beast.
The colonel recalled that when Baghdadi was turned over to the Iraqi authorities in 2009, he remarked, “I’ll see you guys in New York,” an apparent reference to the hometown of many of the guards.
“But it wasn’t menacing. It was like, ‘I’ll be out of custody in no time,'” King said.
“He’s managed this secret persona extremely well and it’s enhanced his group’s prestige.”
If that’s what he meant, he was right. It wasn’t long before Baghdadi was rising through the ranks of the Islamic State of Iraq, the successor to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al Qaeda in Iraq.
And when the organization’s two leaders were killed in 2010, Baghdadi stepped into the void.
He kept a low profile compared to other militants, with their grandiose taped statements — one key to his survival, analysts said.
“When you start making videos and popping off, it increases the chance you’re going to get caught or killed,” Skinner said. “He’s been around five years, and that’s like cat years. It’s a long time.”
Another benefit to his mystique: recruitment of younger fighters.
“He’s managed this secret persona extremely well, and it’s enhanced his group’s prestige,” said Patrick Johnston of the RAND Corporation. “Young people are really attracted to that.”
Image: Purportedly a photo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi IRAQI MINISTRY OF INTERIOR / AFP – GETTY IMAGES
A picture released by the Iraqi Interior Ministry shows a photograph purportedly of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.
Baghdadi — which is not his birth name — uses a host of aliases and is said to wear a bandana around his face to conceal his identity from everyone except a very tight inner circle that is almost certainly comprised only of Iraqis.
There are only two known photos of him, one put out by the Iraqi Interior Ministry and one by the U.S. Rewards for Justice Program, which has offered $10 million for his capture — a bounty second only to the reward for Ayman al-Zawahiri, chief of al Qaeda’s global network.
Skinner calls Baghdadi “hyper-paranoid,” but Johnston notes that despite the shroud of secrecy, he is apparently closely involved in day-to-day operations.
When the fighting in Syria intensified in the summer of 2011, Baghdadi saw an opportunity and opened a branch there and changed the name of his group to ISIS. He took over oil fields, giving him access to “riches beyond his wildest dreams,” Skinner said.
‘People Are Afraid’: Baghdad on Guard as ISIS AdvancesNIGHTLY NEWS
ISIS reportedly controls tens of millions to $2 billion in total assets — built through criminal activities like smuggling and extortion, according to the State Department — but Baghdadi’s ambitions have more to do with borders than bank accounts.
In a June 2013 audio recording, he vowed to erase Iraq’s “Western-imposed border with Syria” and called on his followers to “tear apart” the governments in both countries.
Now, as ISIS consolidates its hold on the areas it has seized in Iraq and has moved within 60 miles of Baghdad, the world is waiting for Baghdadi’s next move.
Whatever happens, Skinner said he’s likely to remain an enigma.
“No one knows anything about him,” he said. “He can be a Robin Hood. He could be Dr. Evil. It’s very hard to fight a myth.”
BY TRACY CONNOR
First published June 16th 2014, 7:04 pm
Find this story at 16 June 2014
Copyright NBC Newsroom

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BEIRUT: The United States has begun reconnaissance flights over Syria and is sharing intelligence about jihadist deployments with Damascus through Iraqi and Russian channels, sources told AFP Tuesday.
“The cooperation has already begun and the United States is giving Damascus information via Baghdad and Moscow,” one source close to the issue said on condition of anonymity.
The comments came a day after Foreign Minister Walid Moallem said Syria was willing to work with the international community against the jihadist Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) group, and U.S. officials said they were poised to carry out surveillance flights over Syria.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said foreign drones had been seen over the eastern province of Deir al-Zor Monday.
“Non-Syrian spy planes carried out surveillance of ISIS positions in Deir al-Zor province Monday,” the Britain-based activist group’s director, Rami Abdel-Rahman, said.
Syrian warplanes bombed ISIS positions in several areas of Deir al-Zor Tuesday, an oil-rich province in the east of Syria, most of which is held by the jihadists.
A regional source told AFP that “a Western country has given the Syrian government lists of ISIS targets on Syrian territory since just before air raids on Raqqa, which started in mid-August.”
ISIS, which emerged from Al-Qaeda’s Iraq branch but has since broken with the worldwide network, controls large parts of Deir al-Zor and seized full control of Raqqa province, further up the Euphrates Valley, Sunday, with the capture of the army’s last position, the Tabqa air base.
It has declared an Islamic “caliphate” in areas under its control in Syria and neighboring Iraq, where U.S. war planes have been targeting its positions since August 8.
U.S. officials said Monday that Washington was ready to send spy planes into Syria to track the group’s fighters but that the moves would not be coordinated with the government in Damascus.
Moallem warned Monday that any unilateral military action on its soil would be considered “aggression.”
Aug. 26, 2014 | 06:14 PM (Last updated: August 26, 2014 | 06:15 PM)
Find this story at 26 August 2014
Copyright Agence France Presse

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Army Gen. Martin Dempsey says US looking for “more insights” into the activities of Islamic State in Syria.
U.S. Starts Syria Surveillance Flights
Aug. 26 (Bloomberg) — Scarlet Fu reports on today’s top news stories on “Bloomberg Surveillance.” (Source: Bloomberg)
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN — The U.S. has begun surveillance flights over Syria after President Barack Obama gave the OK, U.S. officials said, a move that could pave the way for airstrikes against Islamic State militant targets there.
While the White House says Obama has not approved military action inside Syria, additional intelligence on the militants would likely be necessary before he could take that step. Pentagon officials have been drafting potential options for the president, including airstrikes.
One official said the administration has a need for reliable intelligence from Syria and called the surveillance flights an important avenue for obtaining data.
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Two U.S. officials said Monday that Obama had approved the flights, while another U.S. official said early Tuesday that they had begun. The officials were not authorized to discuss the matter by name, and spoke only on condition of anonymity.
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Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Tuesday that the U.S. wants more clarity on the militants in Syria, but declined to comment on the surveillance flights.
“Clearly the picture we have of ISIS on the Iraqi side is a more refined picture,” said Dempsey, using one of the acronyms for the Islamic State group. “The existence and activities of ISIS on the Syrian side, we have … some insights into that but we certainly want to have more insights into that as we craft a way forward.”
The U.S. began launching strikes against the Islamic State inside Iraq earlier this month, with Obama citing the threat to American personnel in the country and a humanitarian crisis in the north as his rationale. Top Pentagon officials have said the only way the threat from the militants can be fully eliminated is to go after the group inside neighboring Syria as well.
Obama has long resisted taking military action in Syria, a step that would plunge the U.S. into a country ravaged by an intractable civil war. However, the president’s calculus appears to have shifted since the Islamic State announced last week that it had murdered American journalist James Foley, who was held hostage in Syria. The group is also threatening to kill other U.S. citizens being held by the extremists in Syria.
Dempsey, who was in Kabul for the U.S. military’s change of command ceremony, has said he would recommend the military move against the Islamic State militants if there is a threat to the homeland. He didn’t rule out strikes for any other critical reasons, but listed the homeland threat as one key trigger.
Dempsey also said the U.S. has been meeting with allies in the region to help develop a better understanding of the Islamic State group’s threat. He said he believes those talks are now beginning to “set the conditions for some kind of coalition to form.”
He said they are “trying to better understand the threat that ISIS poses, not just in Iraq and Syria but regionally.” Dempsey has said he believes key allies in the region — including Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia — will join the U.S. in quashing the Islamic State group.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Monday that Obama has demonstrated his willingness to order military action when necessary to protect American citizens.
“That is true without regard to international boundaries,” he said.
The White House would not comment on Obama’s decision to authorize surveillance flights over Syria.
“We’re not going to comment on intelligence or operational issues, but as we’ve been saying, we’ll use all the tools at our disposal,” said Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council.
The U.S. had already stepped up its air surveillance of the Islamic State inside Iraq earlier this year as Obama began considering the prospect of airstrikes there. And the administration has run some surveillance missions over Syria, including ahead of an attempted mission to rescue Foley and other U.S. hostages earlier this summer.
The U.S. special forces who were sent into Syria to carry out the rescue mission did not find the hostages at the location where the military thought they were being held. Officials who confirmed the failed rescue last week said the U.S. was continuing to seek out intelligence on the other hostages’ whereabouts.
Administration officials have said a concern for Obama in seeking to take out the Islamic State inside Syria is the prospect that such a move could unintentionally help embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad. A top Syrian official said Monday any U.S. airstrikes without consent from Syria would be considered an aggression.
The Islamic State is among the groups seeking Assad’s ouster, along with rebel forces aided by the U.S.
The White House on Monday tried to tamp down the notion that action against the Islamic State could bolster Assad, with Earnest saying, “We’re not interested in trying to help the Assad regime.” However, he acknowledged that “there are a lot of cross pressures here.”
By Lolita C. Baldor and Julie Pace, Associated Press AUGUST 26, 2014
Find this story at 26 August 2014
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press.

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(Washington, DC) –The US Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have targeted American Muslims in abusive counterterrorism “sting operations” based on religious and ethnic identity, Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Institute said in a report released today. Many of the more than 500 terrorism-related cases prosecuted in US federal courts since September 11, 2001, have alienated the very communities that can help prevent terrorist crimes.
The 214-page report, “Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions,” examines 27 federal terrorism cases from initiation of the investigations to sentencing and post-conviction conditions of confinement. It documents the significant human cost of certain counterterrorism practices, such as overly aggressive sting operations and unnecessarily restrictive conditions of confinement.
“Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US,” said Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report. “But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”
Many prosecutions have properly targeted individuals engaged in planning or financing terror attacks, the groups found. But many others have targeted people who do not appear to have been involved in terrorist plotting or financing at the time the government began to investigate them. And many of the cases involve due process violations and abusive conditions of confinement that have resulted in excessively long prison sentences.
The report is based on more than 215 interviews with people charged with or convicted of terrorism-related crimes, members of their families and their communities, criminal defense attorneys, judges, current and former federal prosecutors, government officials, academics, and other experts.
In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act. Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counterterrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases. Almost 30 percent were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.
In the case of the “Newburgh Four,” for example, who were accused of planning to blow up synagogues and attack a US military base, a judge said the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” and had, in the process, made a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”
The FBI often targeted particularly vulnerable people, including those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent. The government, often acting through informants, then actively developed the plot, persuading and sometimes pressuring the targets to participate, and provided the resources to carry it out.
“The US government should stop treating American Muslims as terrorists-in-waiting,” Prasow said. “The bar on entrapment in US law is so high that it’s almost impossible for a terrorism suspect to prove. Add that to law enforcement preying on the particularly vulnerable, such as those with mental or intellectual disabilities, and the very poor, and you have a recipe for rampant human rights abuses.”
Rezwan Ferdaus, for example, pled guilty to attempting to blow up a federal building and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Although an FBI agent even told Ferdaus’ father that his son “obviously” had mental health problems, the FBI targeted him for a sting operation, sending an informant into Ferdaus’ mosque. Together, the FBI informant and Ferdaus devised a plan to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol, with the FBI providing fake weaponry and funding Ferdaus’ travel. Yet Ferdaus was mentally and physically deteriorating as the fake plot unfolded, suffering depression and seizures so bad his father quit his job to care for him.
The US has also made overly broad use of material support charges, punishing behavior that did not demonstrate an intent to support terrorism. The courts have accepted prosecutorial tactics that may violate fair trial rights, such as introducing evidence obtained by coercion, classified evidence that cannot be fairly contested, and inflammatory evidence about terrorism in which defendants played no part – and asserting government secrecy claims to limit challenges to surveillance warrants.
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is a US citizen who alleged that he was whipped and threatened with amputation while detained without charge in Saudi Arabia – after a roundup following the 2003 bombings of Western compounds in the Saudi capital of Riyadh – until he provided a confession to Saudi interrogators that he says was false. Later, when Ali went to trial in Virginia, the judge rejected Ali’s claims of torture and admitted his confession into evidence. He was convicted of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy to assassinate the president. He received a life sentence, which he is serving in solitary confinement at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.
The US has in terrorism cases used harsh and at times abusive conditions of confinement, which often appear excessive in relation to the security risk posed. This includes prolonged solitary confinement and severe restrictions on communicating in pretrial detention, possibly impeding defendants’ ability to assist in their own defense and contributing to their decisions to plead guilty. Judges have imposed excessively lengthy sentences, and some prisoners suffer draconian conditions post-conviction, including prolonged solitary confinement and severe restrictions on contact with families or others, sometimes without explanation or recourse.
Nine months after his arrest on charges of material support for terrorism and while he was refusing a plea deal, Uzair Paracha was moved to a harsh regime of solitary confinement. Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) – national security restrictions on his contact with others – permitted Paracha to speak only to prison guards.
“You could spend days to weeks without uttering anything significant beyond ‘Please cut my lights,’ ‘Can I get a legal call/toilet paper/a razor,’ etc., or just thanking them for shutting our light,” he wrote to the report’s researchers. After he was convicted, the SAMs were modified to permit him to communicate with other inmates. “I faced the harshest part of the SAMs while I was innocent in the eyes of American law,” he wrote.
These abuses have had an adverse impact on American Muslim communities. The government’s tactics to seek out terrorism suspects, at times before the target has demonstrated any intention to use violence, has undercut parallel efforts to build relationships with American Muslim community leaders and groups that may be critical sources of information to prevent terrorist attacks.
In some communities, these practices have deterred interaction with law enforcement. Some Muslim community members said that fears of government surveillance and informant infiltration have meant they must watch what they say, to whom, and how often they attend services.
“Far from protecting Americans, including American Muslims, from the threat of terrorism, the policies documented in this report have diverted law enforcement from pursuing real threats,” Prasow said. “It is possible to protect people’s rights and also prosecute terrorists, which increases the chances of catching genuine criminals.”
Find this report at 21 July 2014
© Copyright 2014, Human Rights Watch

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• Human Rights Watch documents ‘sting’ operations
• Report raises questions about post-9/11 civil rights
Nearly all of the highest-profile domestic terrorism plots in the United States since 9/11 featured the “direct involvement” of government agents or informants, a new report says.
Some of the controversial “sting” operations “were proposed or led by informants”, bordering on entrapment by law enforcement. Yet the courtroom obstacles to proving entrapment are significant, one of the reasons the stings persist.
The lengthy report, released on Monday by Human Rights Watch, raises questions about the US criminal justice system’s ability to respect civil rights and due process in post-9/11 terrorism cases. It portrays a system that features not just the sting operations but secret evidence, anonymous juries, extensive pretrial detentions and convictions significantly removed from actual plots.
“In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act,” the report alleges.
Out of the 494 cases related to terrorism the US has tried since 9/11, the plurality of convictions – 18% overall – are not for thwarted plots but for “material support” charges, a broad category expanded further by the 2001 Patriot Act that permits prosecutors to pursue charges with tenuous connections to a terrorist act or group.
In one such incident, the initial basis for a material-support case alleging a man provided “military gear” to al-Qaida turned out to be waterproof socks in his luggage.
Several cases featured years-long solitary confinement for accused terrorists before their trials. Some defendants displayed signs of mental incapacity. Jurors for the 2007 plot to attack the Fort Dix army base, itself influenced by government informants, were anonymous, limiting defense counsel’s ability to screen out bias.
Human Rights Watch’s findings call into question the post-9/11 shift taken by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies toward stopping terrorist plots before they occur. While the vast majority of counterterrorism tactics involved are legally authorized, particularly after Congress and successive administrations relaxed restrictions on law enforcement and intelligence agencies for counterterrorism, they suggest that the government’s zeal to protect Americans has in some cases morphed into manufacturing threats.
The report focuses primarily on 27 cases and accordingly stops short of drawing systemic conclusions. It also finds several trials and convictions for “deliberate attempts at terrorism or terrorism financing” that it does not challenge.
The four high-profile domestic plots it found free of government involvement were the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Najibullah Zazi’s 2009 plot to bomb the New York subway; the attempted Times Square carbombing of 2010; and the 2002 shooting at Los Angeles International Airport’s El Al counter.
But the report is a rare attempt at a critical overview of a system often touted by the Obama administration and civil libertarian groups as a rigorous, capable and just alternative to the military tribunals and indefinite detention advocated by conservative critics. It comes as new pressure mounts on a variety of counterterrorism practices, from the courtroom use of warrantless surveillance to the no-fly list and law enforcement’s “suspicious activity reports” database.
In particular, Human Rights Watch examines the extent and impact of law enforcement’s use of terrorism informants, who can both steer people into attempted acts of violence and chill religious or civic behaviour in the communities they penetrate.
Linda Sarsour, the executive director of the Arab American Association of New York, a social services agency, told the Guardian she almost has a “radar for informants” sent to infiltrate her Brooklyn community.
While the FBI has long relied on confidential informants to alert them to criminal activity, for terrorism cases informants insert themselves into Muslim mosques, businesses and community gatherings and can cajole people toward a plot “who perhaps would never have participated in a terrorist act on their own initiative”, the study found.
Many trade information for cash. The FBI in 2008 estimated it had 15,000 paid informants. About 30% of post-9/11 terrorism cases are considered sting operations in which informants played an “active role” in incubating plots leading to arrest, according to studies cited in the Human Rights Watch report. Among those roles are making comments “that appeared designed to inflame the targets” on “politically sensitive” subjects, and pushing operations forward if a target’s “opinions were deemed sufficiently troubling”.
Entrapment, the subject of much FBI criticism over the years, is difficult to prove in court. The burden is on a defendant to show he or she was not “predisposed” to commit a violent act, even if induced by a government agent. Human Rights Watch observes that standard focuses attention “not on the crime, but on the nature of the subject”, often against a backdrop where “inflammatory stereotypes and highly charged characterizations of Islam and foreigners often prevail”.
Among the informants themselves there is less ambiguity. “It is all about entrapment,” Craig Monteilh, one such former FBI informant tasked with mosque infiltration, told the Guardian in 2012.
Informants, the study found, sometimes overcome their targets’ stated objections to engage in terrorism. A man convicted in 2006 of attempting to bomb the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan told an informant who concocted the plot he would have to check with his mother and was uncomfortable planting the bombs himself. One member of the “Newburgh Four” plot to attack synagogues and military planes – whose case is the subject of an HBO documentary airing on Monday – told his informant “maybe my mission hasn’t come yet”.
Once in court, terrorism cases receive evidentiary and pre-trial leeway rarely afforded to non-terrorism cases. A federal judge in Virginia permitted into evidence statements made by a defendant while in a Saudi jail in which the defendant, Amed Omar Abu Ali, alleged torture, a longstanding practice in Saudi Arabia. The evidence formed the basis for a conviction, and eventually a life sentence, for conspiracy to assassinate George W Bush. Mohammed Warsame, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization, was held in solitary confinement for five years before his trial.
Another implication of the law-enforcement tactics cited the report is a deepening alienation of American Muslims from a government that publicly insists it needs their support to head off extremism but secretly deploys informants to infiltrate mosques and community centers.
“The best way to prevent violent extremism inspired by violent jihadists is to work with the Muslim American community – which has consistently rejected terrorism – to identify signs of radicalization and partner with law enforcement when an individual is drifting towards violence. And these partnerships can only work when we recognize that Muslims are a fundamental part of the American family,” Obama said in a high-profile 2013 speech.
Yet the Obama administration has needed to purge Islamophobic training materials from FBI counterterrorism, which sparked deep suspicion in US Muslim communities. It is now conducting a review of similar material in the intelligence community after a document leaked by Edward Snowden used the slur “Mohammed Raghead” as a placeholder for Muslims.
Spencer Ackerman in New York
The Guardian, Monday 21 July 2014 14.30 BST
Find this story at 21 July 2014
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Siraj was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2007 for conspiring to plant bombs in New York City. The way he got there is similar to a spate of US ‘stings’ to capture terror suspects since 9/11
Shawahar Matin Siraj was sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2007 after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to plant bombs at a Manhattan subway station near the Republican National Convention in 2004. As is frequent in post-9/11 domestic counter-terrorism investigations, a new Human Rights Watch report documents, Siraj might never have gotten there but for the involvement of someone else: an older man at a mosque in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood who posed as a nuclear engineer and cancer patient with a deep knowledge of Islam.
When they met in September 2003, Siraj was 21, working at his father’s Islamic bookstore. New York magazine would later report that he “regularly engaged in virulent anti-American tirades”, piquing the curiosity of law enforcement. The older man would later testify that he and Siraj developed a father-son relationship, perhaps since he said he had cancer and Siraj’s father was disabled. Siraj, he judged, was “impressionable”.
When word of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke the next year, Siraj received a barrage of images from the older man of US forces abusing Muslims. Then his friend recommended inflammatory websites for Siraj to view. He intimated to Siraj that he lamented “dying without a purpose” as Siraj became “inflamed by emotions”.
The older man worked with Siraj and Siraj’s friend James Elshafay to fashion a “purpose” worth dying for: the bomb plot. He drove Siraj to Herald Square and instructed Siraj to place explosives in the trash cans. Only Siraj exhibited doubts, saying he had to “ask my mom’s permission” and saying he preferred to be a lookout. Soon after, Siraj was arrested.
His older friend, in reality, was a New York police department informant named Osama Eldawoody, who had taped their conversations. Eldawoody had been casing mosques in Brooklyn and Staten Island for behavior he deemed suspicious. It was a lucrative business: CBS reported in 2006 that Eldawoody made $100,000 over three years of informing.
“Thanks to the extraordinary work of law enforcement, the defendants’ plot did not advance beyond the planning stage, and the public was never at risk,” Rosylnn Mauskopf, then the US attorney for eastern New York, said after Siraj’s sentencing.
Spencer Ackerman in New York
theguardian.com, Monday 21 July 2014 17.53 BST
Find this story at 21 July 2014
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The Obama administration has quietly approved a substantial expansion of the terrorist watchlist system, authorizing a secret process that requires neither “concrete facts” nor “irrefutable evidence” to designate an American or foreigner as a terrorist, according to a key government document obtained by The Intercept.
The “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance,” a 166-page document issued last year by the National Counterterrorism Center, spells out the government’s secret rules for putting individuals on its main terrorist database, as well as the no fly list and the selectee list, which triggers enhanced screening at airports and border crossings. The new guidelines allow individuals to be designated as representatives of terror organizations without any evidence they are actually connected to such organizations, and it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to place entire “categories” of people the government is tracking onto the no fly and selectee lists. It broadens the authority of government officials to “nominate” people to the watchlists based on what is vaguely described as “fragmentary information.” It also allows for dead people to be watchlisted.
Over the years, the Obama and Bush Administrations have fiercely resisted disclosing the criteria for placing names on the databases—though the guidelines are officially labeled as unclassified. In May, Attorney General Eric Holder even invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent watchlisting guidelines from being disclosed in litigation launched by an American who was on the no fly list. In an affidavit, Holder called them a “clear roadmap” to the government’s terrorist-tracking apparatus, adding: “The Watchlisting Guidance, although unclassified, contains national security information that, if disclosed … could cause significant harm to national security.”
The rulebook, which The Intercept is publishing in full, was developed behind closed doors by representatives of the nation’s intelligence, military, and law-enforcement establishment, including the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, and FBI. Emblazoned with the crests of 19 agencies, it offers the most complete and revealing look into the secret history of the government’s terror list policies to date. It reveals a confounding and convoluted system filled with exceptions to its own rules, and it relies on the elastic concept of “reasonable suspicion” as a standard for determining whether someone is a possible threat. Because the government tracks “suspected terrorists” as well as “known terrorists,” individuals can be watchlisted if they are suspected of being a suspected terrorist, or if they are suspected of associating with people who are suspected of terrorism activity.
“Instead of a watchlist limited to actual, known terrorists, the government has built a vast system based on the unproven and flawed premise that it can predict if a person will commit a terrorist act in the future,” says Hina Shamsi, the head of the ACLU’s National Security Project. “On that dangerous theory, the government is secretly blacklisting people as suspected terrorists and giving them the impossible task of proving themselves innocent of a threat they haven’t carried out.” Shamsi, who reviewed the document, added, “These criteria should never have been kept secret.”
The document’s definition of “terrorist” activity includes actions that fall far short of bombing or hijacking. In addition to expected crimes, such as assassination or hostage-taking, the guidelines also define destruction of government property and damaging computers used by financial institutions as activities meriting placement on a list. They also define as terrorism any act that is “dangerous” to property and intended to influence government policy through intimidation.
This combination—a broad definition of what constitutes terrorism and a low threshold for designating someone a terrorist—opens the way to ensnaring innocent people in secret government dragnets. It can also be counterproductive. When resources are devoted to tracking people who are not genuine risks to national security, the actual threats get fewer resources—and might go unnoticed.
“If reasonable suspicion is the only standard you need to label somebody, then it’s a slippery slope we’re sliding down here, because then you can label anybody anything,” says David Gomez, a former senior FBI special agent with experience running high-profile terrorism investigations. “Because you appear on a telephone list of somebody doesn’t make you a terrorist. That’s the kind of information that gets put in there.”
The fallout is personal too. There are severe consequences for people unfairly labeled a terrorist by the U.S. government, which shares its watchlist data with local law enforcement, foreign governments, and “private entities.” Once the U.S. government secretly labels you a terrorist or terrorist suspect, other institutions tend to treat you as one. It can become difficult to get a job (or simply to stay out of jail). It can become burdensome—or impossible—to travel. And routine encounters with law enforcement can turn into ordeals.
nomination_chart
A chart from the “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance”
In 2012 Tim Healy, the former director of the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, described to CBS News how watchlists are used by police officers. “So if you are speeding, you get pulled over, they’ll query that name,” he said. “And if they are encountering a known or suspected terrorist, it will pop up and say call the Terrorist Screening Center…. So now the officer on the street knows he may be dealing with a known or suspected terrorist.” Of course, the problem is that the “known or suspected terrorist” might just be an ordinary citizen who should not be treated as a menace to public safety.
Until 2001, the government did not prioritize building a watchlist system. On 9/11, the government’s list of people barred from flying included just 16 names. Today, the no fly list has swelled to tens of thousands of “known or suspected terrorists” (the guidelines refer to them as KSTs). The selectee list subjects people to extra scrutiny and questioning at airports and border crossings. The government has created several other databases, too. The largest is the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), which gathers terrorism information from sensitive military and intelligence sources around the world. Because it contains classified information that cannot be widely distributed, there is yet another list, the Terrorist Screening Database, or TSDB, which has been stripped of TIDE’s classified data so that it can be shared. When government officials refer to “the watchlist,” they are typically referring to the TSDB. (TIDE is the responsibility of the National Counterterrorism Center; the TSDB is managed by the Terrorist Screening Center at the FBI.)
In a statement, a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center told The Intercept that “the watchlisting system is an important part of our layered defense to protect the United States against future terrorist attacks” and that “watchlisting continues to mature to meet an evolving, diffuse threat.” He added that U.S. citizens are afforded extra protections to guard against improper listing, and that no one can be placed on a list solely for activities protected by the First Amendment. A representative of the Terrorist Screening Center did not respond to a request for comment.
The system has been criticized for years. In 2004, Sen. Ted Kennedy complained that he was barred from boarding flights on five separate occasions because his name resembled the alias of a suspected terrorist. Two years later, CBS News obtained a copy of the no fly list and reported that it included Bolivian president Evo Morales and Lebanese parliament head Nabih Berri. One of the watchlists snared Mikey Hicks, a Cub Scout who got his first of many airport pat-downs at age two. In 2007, the Justice Department’s inspector general issued a scathing report identifying “significant weaknesses” in the system. And in 2009, after a Nigerian terrorist was able to board a passenger flight to Detroit and nearly detonated a bomb sewn into his underwear despite his name having been placed on the TIDE list, President Obama admitted that there had been a “systemic failure.”
Obama hoped that his response to the “underwear bomber” would be a turning point. In 2010, he gave increased powers and responsibilities to the agencies that nominate individuals to the lists, placing pressure on them to add names. His administration also issued a set of new guidelines for the watchlists. Problems persisted, however. In 2012, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report that bluntly noted there was no agency responsible for figuring out “whether watchlist-related screening or vetting is achieving intended results.” The guidelines were revised and expanded in 2013—and a source within the intelligence community subsequently provided a copy to The Intercept.
tbu2
“Concrete facts are not necessary”
The five chapters and 11 appendices of the “Watchlisting Guidance” are filled with acronyms, legal citations, and numbered paragraphs; it reads like an arcane textbook with a vocabulary all its own. Different types of data on suspected terrorists are referred to as “derogatory information,” “substantive derogatory information,” “extreme derogatory information” and “particularized derogatory information.” The names of suspected terrorists are passed along a bureaucratic ecosystem of “originators,” “nominators,” “aggregators,” “screeners,” and “encountering agencies.” And “upgrade,” usually a happy word for travellers, is repurposed to mean that an individual has been placed on a more restrictive list.
The heart of the document revolves around the rules for placing individuals on a watchlist. “All executive departments and agencies,” the document says, are responsible for collecting and sharing information on terrorist suspects with the National Counterterrorism Center. It sets a low standard—”reasonable suspicion“—for placing names on the watchlists, and offers a multitude of vague, confusing, or contradictory instructions for gauging it. In the chapter on “Minimum Substantive Derogatory Criteria”—even the title is hard to digest—the key sentence on reasonable suspicion offers little clarity:
“To meet the REASONABLE SUSPICION standard, the NOMINATOR, based on the totality of the circumstances, must rely upon articulable intelligence or information which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrants a determination that an individual is known or suspected to be or has been knowingly engaged in conduct constituting, in preparation for, in aid of, or related to TERRORISM and/or TERRORIST ACTIVITIES.”
The rulebook makes no effort to define an essential phrase in the passage—”articulable intelligence or information.” After stressing that hunches are not reasonable suspicion and that “there must be an objective factual basis” for labeling someone a terrorist, it goes on to state that no actual facts are required:
“In determining whether a REASONABLE SUSPICION exists, due weight should be given to the specific reasonable inferences that a NOMINATOR is entitled to draw from the facts in light of his/her experience and not on unfounded suspicions or hunches. Although irrefutable evidence or concrete facts are not necessary, to be reasonable, suspicion should be as clear and as fully developed as circumstances permit.”
While the guidelines nominally prohibit nominations based on unreliable information, they explicitly regard “uncorroborated” Facebook or Twitter posts as sufficient grounds for putting an individual on one of the watchlists. “Single source information,” the guidelines state, “including but not limited to ‘walk-in,’ ‘write-in,’ or postings on social media sites, however, should not automatically be discounted … the NOMINATING AGENCY should evaluate the credibility of the source, as well as the nature and specificity of the information, and nominate even if that source is uncorroborated.”
There are a number of loopholes for putting people onto the watchlists even if reasonable suspicion cannot be met.
One is clearly defined: The immediate family of suspected terrorists—their spouses, children, parents, or siblings—may be watchlisted without any suspicion that they themselves are engaged in terrorist activity. But another loophole is quite broad—”associates” who have a defined relationship with a suspected terrorist, but whose involvement in terrorist activity is not known. A third loophole is broader still—individuals with “a possible nexus” to terrorism, but for whom there is not enough “derogatory information” to meet the reasonable suspicion standard.
Americans and foreigners can be nominated for the watchlists if they are associated with a terrorist group, even if that group has not been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. They can also be treated as “representatives” of a terrorist group even if they have “neither membership in nor association with the organization.” The guidelines do helpfully note that certain associations, such as providing janitorial services or delivering packages, are not grounds for being watchlisted.
The nomination system appears to lack meaningful checks and balances. Although government officials have repeatedly said there is a rigorous process for making sure no one is unfairly placed in the databases, the guidelines acknowledge that all nominations of “known terrorists” are considered justified unless the National Counterterrorism Center has evidence to the contrary. In a recent court filing, the government disclosed that there were 468,749 KST nominations in 2013, of which only 4,915 were rejected–a rate of about one percent. The rulebook appears to invert the legal principle of due process, defining nominations as “presumptively valid.”
Profiling categories of people
While the nomination process appears methodical on paper, in practice there is a shortcut around the entire system. Known as a “threat-based expedited upgrade,” it gives a single White House official the unilateral authority to elevate entire “categories of people” whose names appear in the larger databases onto the no fly or selectee lists. This can occur, the guidelines state, when there is a “particular threat stream” indicating that a certain type of individual may commit a terrorist act.
This extraordinary power for “categorical watchlisting”—otherwise known as profiling—is vested in the assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, a position formerly held by CIA Director John Brennan that does not require Senate confirmation.
The rulebook does not indicate what “categories of people” have been subjected to threat-based upgrades. It is not clear, for example, whether a category might be as broad as military-age males from Yemen. The guidelines do make clear that American citizens and green card holders are subject to such upgrades, though government officials are required to review their status in an “expedited” procedure. Upgrades can remain in effect for 72 hours before being reviewed by a small committee of senior officials. If approved, they can remain in place for 30 days before a renewal is required, and can continue “until the threat no longer exists.”
“In a set of watchlisting criteria riddled with exceptions that swallow rules, this exception is perhaps the most expansive and certainly one of the most troubling,” Shamsi, the ACLU attorney, says. “It’s reminiscent of the Bush administration’s heavily criticized color-coded threat alerts, except that here, bureaucrats can exercise virtually standard-less authority in secret with specific negative consequences for entire categories of people.”
The National Counterterrorism Center declined to provide any details on the upgrade authority, including how often it has been exercised and for what categories of people.
Pocket litter and scuba gear
The guidelines provide the clearest explanation yet of what is happening when Americans and foreigners are pulled aside at airports and border crossings by government agents. The fifth chapter, titled “Encounter Management and Analysis,” details the type of information that is targeted for collection during “encounters” with people on the watchlists, as well as the different organizations that should collect the data. The Department of Homeland Security is described as having the largest number of encounters, but other authorities, ranging from the State Department and Coast Guard to foreign governments and “certain private entities,” are also involved in assembling “encounter packages” when watchlisted individuals cross their paths. The encounters can be face-to-face meetings or electronic interactions—for instance, when a watchlisted individual applies for a visa.
In addition to data like fingerprints, travel itineraries, identification documents and gun licenses, the rules encourage screeners to acquire health insurance information, drug prescriptions, “any cards with an electronic strip on it (hotel cards, grocery cards, gift cards, frequent flyer cards),” cellphones, email addresses, binoculars, peroxide, bank account numbers, pay stubs, academic transcripts, parking and speeding tickets, and want ads. The digital information singled out for collection includes social media accounts, cell phone lists, speed dial numbers, laptop images, thumb drives, iPods, Kindles, and cameras. All of the information is then uploaded to the TIDE database.
Screeners are also instructed to collect data on any “pocket litter,” scuba gear, EZ Passes, library cards, and the titles of any books, along with information about their condition—”e.g., new, dog-eared, annotated, unopened.” Business cards and conference materials are also targeted, as well as “anything with an account number” and information about any gold or jewelry worn by the watchlisted individual. Even “animal information”—details about pets from veterinarians or tracking chips—is requested. The rulebook also encourages the collection of biometric or biographical data about the travel partners of watchlisted individuals.
The list of government entities that collect this data includes the U.S. Agency for International Development, which is neither an intelligence nor law-enforcement agency. As the rulebook notes, USAID funds foreign aid programs that promote environmentalism, health care, and education. USAID, which presents itself as committed to fighting global poverty, nonetheless appears to serve as a conduit for sensitive intelligence about foreigners. According to the guidelines, “When USAID receives an application seeking financial assistance, prior to granting, these applications are subject to vetting by USAID intelligence analysts at the TSC.” The guidelines do not disclose the volume of names provided by USAID, the type of information it provides, or the number and duties of the “USAID intelligence analysts.”
A USAID spokesman told The Intercept that “in certain high risk countries, such as Afghanistan, USAID has determined that vetting potential partner organizations with the terrorist watchlist is warranted to protect U.S. taxpayer dollars and to minimize the risk of inadvertent funding of terrorism.” He stated that since 2007, the agency has checked “the names and other personal identifying information of key individuals of contractors and grantees, and sub-recipients.”
Death and the watchlist
The government has been widely criticized for making it impossible for people to know why they have been placed on a watchlist, and for making it nearly impossible to get off. The guidelines bluntly state that “the general policy of the U.S. Government is to neither confirm nor deny an individual’s watchlist status.” But the courts have taken exception to the official silence and footdragging: In June, a federal judge described the government’s secretive removal process as unconstitutional and “wholly ineffective.”
The difficulty of getting off the list is highlighted by a passage in the guidelines stating that an individual can be kept on the watchlist, or even placed onto the watchlist, despite being acquitted of a terrorism-related crime. The rulebook justifies this by noting that conviction in U.S. courts requires evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, whereas watchlisting requires only a reasonable suspicion. Once suspicion is raised, even a jury’s verdict cannot erase it.
Not even death provides a guarantee of getting off the list. The guidelines say the names of dead people will stay on the list if there is reason to believe the deceased’s identity may be used by a suspected terrorist–which the National Counterterrorism Center calls a “demonstrated terrorist tactic.” In fact, for the same reason, the rules permit the deceased spouses of suspected terrorists to be placed onto the list after they have died.
For the living, the process of getting off the watchlist is simple yet opaque. A complaint can be filed through the Department of Homeland Security Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, which launches an internal review that is not subject to oversight by any court or entity outside the counterterrorism community. The review can result in removal from a watchlist or an adjustment of watchlist status, but the individual will not be told if he or she prevails. The guidelines highlight one of the reasons why it has been difficult to get off the list—if multiple agencies have contributed information on a watchlisted individual, all of them must agree to removing him or her.
If a U.S. citizen is placed on the no fly list while abroad and is turned away from a flight bound for the U.S., the guidelines say they should be referred to the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate, which is prohibited from informing them why they were blocked from flying. According to the rules, these individuals can be granted a “One-Time Waiver” to fly, though they will not be told that they are traveling on a waiver. Back in the United States, they will be unable to board another flight.
The document states that nominating agencies are “under a continuing obligation” to provide exculpatory information when it emerges. It adds that the agencies are expected to conduct annual reviews of watchlisted American citizens and green card holders. It is unclear whether foreigners—or the dead—are reviewed at the same pace. As the rulebook notes, “watchlisting is not an exact science.”
By Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux 23 Jul 2014, 2:45 PM EDT 378
Josh Begley, Lynn Dombek, and Peter Maass contributed to this story.
Find this story at 23 July 2014
© 2014 First Look Productions, Inc.

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“The Intercept” hat die vertraulichen Leitlinien für die Terrordatenbank der US-Regierung veröffentlicht. Demnach sind konkrete Fakten nicht nötig, um jemanden als suspekt einzustufen. Die Folgen können gravierend sein.
“The Intercept”, die Enthüllungswebsite, für die auch Glenn Greenwald arbeitet, hat am Mittwoch ein internes Dokument der US-Regierung im Volltext veröffentlicht. In den Leitlinien mit dem Titel “March 2013 Watchlisting Guidance” wird auf 166 Seiten dargelegt, wie verdächtige Personen auf der nationalen Terrorliste landen und wieder entfernt werden können.
Die US-Regierung hatte vor der Veröffentlichung gewarnt. Die Anleitung sei ein “Fahrplan” in Sachen Terrorbekämpfung, heißt es von US-Justizminister Eric Holder. Eine Veröffentlichung könne der nationalen Sicherheit erheblichen Schaden zufügen.
Greenwalds Redaktion hält dagegen, das Dokument sei nicht als geheim eingestuft. An der Erstellung der Leitlinien hätten 19 Dienste und Regierungsbehörden mitgearbeitet, vom FBI über die CIA bis zur NSA. Das Papier richtet sich “The Intercept” zufolge an zahlreiche US-Behörden. Wer auf Grundlage des Dokuments einmal auf der allgemeinen Überwachungsliste landet, läuft demnach etwa Gefahr, mit einem Flugverbot belegt oder an Flughäfen und Grenzübergängen strenger kontrolliert zu werden.
Die Kriterien, die darüber entscheiden, ob jemand auf der Beobachtungsliste der US-Regierung landet, scheinen recht unscharf. So soll im Zweifel ein nicht näher zu begründender “angemessener Verdacht” reichen, “konkrete Fakten” oder “unumstößliche Beweise” seien nicht erforderlich. Zudem sei es selbst einzelnen Regierungsbeamten jederzeit möglich, “komplette Kategorien” von Verdächtigen der Terrorliste hinzuzufügen. Was man sich darunter konkret vorstellen darf, wird jedoch nicht ausgeführt.
Selbst Tote könnten in der Liste auftauchen. Die US-Regierung verweist hier auf die Gefahr, dass die Identität eines Verstorbenen von einem anderen Terrorverdächtigen angenommen werden könnte. Auch Familienangehörige von Verdächtigen können ohne eigenes Fehlverhalten auf der Liste landen.
1,5 Millionen Namen auf der Liste
Die großzügige Einschätzung von tatsächlicher oder nur angenommener Bedrohung hat dazu geführt, dass die Terror-Liste inzwischen 1,5 Millionen Namen enthält. Noch im August 2013 soll die Anzahl der erfassten Verdächtigen bei 700.000 gelegen haben, meldete die Nachrichtenagentur AP. Als Aktivität eines Terroristen definieren die Leitlinien übrigens nicht nur Bombenattentate, Flugzeugentführungen oder Geiselnahmen. Eine Aufnahme in die Liste hält die US-Regierung auch dann für gerechtfertigt, wenn jemand im Verdacht steht, Regierungseigentum zerstören zu wollen oder Computer zu beschädigen, die Finanzbehörden verwenden.
Amerikanische Bürgerrechtsgruppen kritisierten die schwammigen Kriterien der Regierung. “Anstatt die Watchlist auf aktuell bekannte Terroristen zu beschränken, hat die Regierung ein riesiges System geschaffen, das auf der unbewiesenen und fehlerhaften Annahme beruht, es sei möglich, künftige Terrorakte vorherzusagen”, sagte Hina Shamsi von der Bürgerrechtsorganisation American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Die Bürgerrechtler werfen der Regierung auch vor, dass es keine Möglichkeit gebe, sich gegen eine Nennung auf der Liste zu wehren. Ebenso sei es kaum möglich, die Gründe für eine Listen-Aufnahme herauszufinden. In den Leitlinien heißt es, ein Grundsatz der Regierung sei es, den Beobachtungslisten-Status einzelner Personen weder zu bestätigen noch zu dementieren.
Die Liste war nach den Terroranschlägen vom 11. September 2001 eingeführt worden. Ihr Umfang nahm rasant zu, nachdem im Dezember 2009 der Nigerianer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab versucht hatte, einen in seine Unterhose eingenähten Sprengsatz an Bord einer US-Passagiermaschine von Amsterdam nach Detroit zu zünden.
24. Juli 2014, 11:30 Uhr
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Rezwan Ferdaus is a 26-year-old US citizen of Bangladeshi descent. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to blow up the Pentagon and the US Capitol. This plot was devised with the direct guidance of a federal agent who infiltrated Ferdaus’ mosque and even provided the fake explosives. An FBI agent said of Ferdaus to the convict’s father that he “obviously” is mentally ill. Ferdaus, who also suffered from severe depression, seizures, and had to wear adult diapers for bladder control problems, was the victim of the sort of FBI sting that crosses the fine line into entrapment. And these operations are no rarity.
In everyday parlance, the difference between a sting and an act of entrapment seems minimal. They carry the same gist: influencing an individual to carry out an act, in which they are then caught.
By the letter of the law, however, the difference between a sting and entrapment is significant. Sting operations are legal. A cursory glance at popular culture’s imagining of FBI work would suggest that stings are in fact the bread and butter of federal policing. It makes for entertainment — the unfolding of elaborate investigative schemes; an agent with a hunch and a five o’clock shadow catches dastardly criminals doing what they invariably would do anyway. Entrapment, meanwhile, is when law enforcement induces a person or group to commit a crime that they would otherwise have been unlikely to commit.
In the fanciful world of television policing, cops are the goodies, criminals are the baddies, stings are stings and stings are legal. In reality, sting operations regularly cross the line into entrapment. The line in US law is purportedly clear: entrapment is illegal, stings are legal. How this line is actually walked by law enforcement is, however, fuzzy at best.
A report released this week from Human Rights Watch highlights how, consistently, FBI sting operations are over aggressive and premised on the racist profiling of Muslim communities — that old building block of our contemporary national security state. Based on 215 interviews and focusing on 27 post-9/11 cases of alleged terror plot thwarting, HRW’s findings call into question the very legitimacy of the FBI’s counterterror work. The authors go as far as to call a number of stings “government-created” terror plots.
Introducing the report, HRW’s Andrea Prasow noted that “Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US… But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.”
It is no secret that US counterterrorism is regularly prefigurative. Under the pretext of stopping terror attacks before they happen, federal agencies like the FBI, NSA, and CIA target networks based often on nothing more valid than religious affiliation. “Sting” operations perform a pernicious part of this equation by drawing otherwise harmless individuals into situations wherein they are framed, and then punished, as terrorists.
As HRW noted, “Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counterterrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases. Almost 30 percent were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.” This means that FBI involvement has been the sine qua non of nearly a third of federal terror convictions (and therefore plots). The government is creating the very terror it claims to fight.
The premise of a sting is that the operation catches criminals or terrorists doing what they would have done anyway. There is a dangerous counterfactual here that seemingly gives the state insurmountable leverage. Who can prove what anyone would have done anyway? How can it be shown that a group would have carried out a terror attack, when the feds provide the very conditions for a terror attack to be carried out?
US justice has set the burden of proof the feds must show for the “would-have-done-it-anyway” condition troublingly low. Consider the case of the “Newburgh Four.” Using incentives including money and food, the FBI convinced four Muslim men to agree to a plot to shoot down military planes and blow up two synagogues in the Bronx. The FBI took the lead at every stage of the so-called plot. One of the so-called terrorists was a schizophrenic who kept his own urine in a bottle. While a Second Circuit judge said that the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” and had, in the process, made a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope,” all of the Four were convicted and sentenced to 25 years. They maintain that the sting crossed the line into entrapment.
Since 9/11, Muslims in the US have been the focus of major counterterror stings. But other groups have been caught in the net where sting meets entrapment. A small group of self-identified anarchists in Cleveland were all convicted to around 10 years in prison for allegedly plotting to blow up a bridge in Ohio. But an FBI infiltrator provided the target and the fake C-4 explosives. Rick Perlstein wrote of the case in Rolling Stone, “the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.”
In the same 2012 article, Perlstein stresses an important point about FBI schemes in the still-rippling wake of 9/11. In previous decades, when defendants would claim entrapment, juries would sometimes listen. The 1972 indictment against Vietnam Vets Against the War was thrown out when a jury ruled that activists were entrapped by feds in a conspiracy to attack the RNC. However, not one terrorism indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since September 2001.
It is a sign of paranoid times, peppered with anti-Islamic sentiment. Federal agents can pick their terrorists and bring them into being. The government can provide every element of a terrorist plot, from target, to objective, to explosives. It appears to pass muster that suspects be Muslim to assert that they would have done it anyway.
By Natasha Lennard
July 22, 2014 | 11:50 pm
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The use of informants to target communities is one of the most alarming trends to have developed since 9/11.
The FBI has used informants in its counterterrorism tactics [AP]
On the surface, the scene unfolds without any hint of intrigue. A young Muslim convert named Darren Griffin meets fellow congregants at a local mosque in northwest Ohio. In addition to sharing the same faith as his new friends, they enjoy similar interests: watching sports, playing video games, working out at the local gym, and discussing international affairs. Except the scene ends tragically with a string of arrests, a national media frenzy, and self-congratulation among federal officials claiming to have foiled yet another terrorist plot.
The only problem is that Griffin was an FBI plant and the terror plot he supposedly helped thwart was entirely manufactured by the United States government. Purely on the strength of Griffin’s aggressive recruitment tactics, three young American Muslims received prison sentences ranging from eight to 20 years.
Similar scenarios have played out in many cities across the US during the past decade. “Informants”, the new documentary film from Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, explores a phenomenon that has been far more pervasive than the media, government officials, or community leaders have acknowledged. In addition to sharing the heart-wrenching stories of the victims of these entrapment tactics, the film is unique because it shines a light on the informants themselves, highlighting the crucial role that they played in actively enlisting young men who never demonstrated any inclinations toward engaging in violence.
The informants
In order to understand how the use of paid informants became such a crucial cog in the FBI’s counterterrorism policy, one need only trace the major shift in the US national security paradigm after 9/11. Prior to the September 11 attacks, the FBI employed 10,500 agents, about 2,500 of whom were dedicated to national security investigations.
After 9/11, however, the overall number of agents expanded to 13,600, half of whom became devoted to national security. The annual budget of the FBI has risen dramatically from $3.1bn in 2001 to $8.4bn in the current fiscal year. Together, expanded budgets, the availability of advanced technological capabilities, and a permissive political climate combined to create an environment where federal law enforcement agencies enjoyed vastly expanded powers but were also expected to demonstrate immediate results.
In the course of investigating American Muslims for possible terrorist threats, the government cast a wide net. It placed tens of thousands of Muslims under constant surveillance, infiltrated community spaces, including mosques, dug through private records, interrogated many Muslims because of their political views and probed for any links to violent activities. These investigations largely turned up nothing, and that was a problem.
In order to continue to justify the robust expenditure of resources and the expansive investigative powers, officials needed results in the form of thwarted terrorist plots that demonstrated to American citizens that unless the FBI acted, the next attack was right around the corner. That climate of fear helped rationalise many of the country’s worst civil liberties violations committed under the Bush Administration and consolidated as standard practice during Obama’s presidency. To sustain the perception of the threat, one had to be created where it did not exist.
Meet the shady characters spying on American Muslims for the FBI.
Enter the informants. As Al Jazeera’s investigative film lays out, many of the most high-profile terrorism cases of the last decade were not a product of insidious Muslim sleeper cells uncovered by skillful investigators. Rather, in the absence of actual plots, the FBI actively targeted communities, identifying particularly vulnerable individuals, and sending them informants with the expressed purpose of ensnaring them in a conspiracy.
The informants are not government agents. Rather, they are almost always criminal offenders attempting to avoid prison time through their cooperation with the government. From drug dealing to fraud, their criminal history ostensibly provides them the tools they need to maintain their deception, though a crash course on basic Islamic beliefs and rituals is a must. With codenames like “The Trainer”, “The Closer”, and “The Bodybuilder”, they play to their particular strengths while identifying the weaknesses of those they are sent to entrap.
In the case of the latter, Craig Monteilh hung out in mosques where he hoped to meet Muslim youth and invite them to work out at a local gym. There, he could ostensibly engage them in conversation about volatile political subjects and broach the topic of terrorism over an intense workout regimen. When his aggressive posture provoked suspicion on the part of community members in southern California, local leaders reported Monteilh to the FBI, apparently not realising that it was the FBI which had sent him into their community in the first place.
The community’s experience with the “Bodybuilder” is particularly egregious, given the seeming vindictive nature of the FBI’s conduct in that case. The local imam, Sheikh Yassir Fazaga, dared to question publicly the veracity of claims made by a local FBI official at a town hall meeting. “The FBI does not take that lightly,” Monteilh recalled to Al Jazeera. “So they had me get close to Mr Fazaga, to get into his inner circle.” When Monteilh failed to ensnare Fazaga or any other local Muslims into a terrorist plot the FBI attempted to pursue immigration charges against Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, an Afghan immigrant who was one of those who reported Monteilh to the FBI for his suspicious behaviour. But the Department of Justice eventually dropped those charges and so Operation Flex, it seems, ended in failure.
This case, however, was the exception. The overwhelming majority of so-called “pre-emptive prosecutions” end in convictions on terrorism charges of individuals who the government is unable to prove would have ever entered into a violent plot on their own accord. More often than not, the FBI targets young Muslims with strong political opinions, usually concerning the role of the US in the plight of Muslims in places like Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Kashmir. As a former FBI special agent told Al Jazeera about the Ohio case, “The whole purpose was to verify whether it was more than just talk.”
By treating the political opinions of American Muslims as cause for suspicion, government investigators operate on the assumption that free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment of the US Constitution do not extend to a particular segment of the American people. Over the years, the FBI’s actions have had a dramatic chilling effect on the ability of Muslims to express their political views. Motivated by such pressures from the government, many community leaders around the country have since attempted to suppress political expression in mosques and community centres.
But absent such healthy community spaces through which to channel passions for humanitarian concerns around the globe, it actually becomes more likely that young Muslims could channel their frustrations through alternative modes of oppositional politics. This type of quietist, disaffected atmosphere sanitised of all political expression is precisely the environment in which agent provocateurs thrive.
Exploiting poverty
In some cases, there is not even any “talk” to motivate the FBI into infiltrating communities. The Liberty City case with which Al Jazeera’s investigative film begins concerns a group of impoverished black men in Florida with no history of political activism or inflammatory speech. Nevertheless, the FBI sent in “The Closer” a fast-talking informant named Elie Assaad who operated as the ringleader for an alleged plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Swaying the impressionable and impoverished young men with promises of everything from shoes to wear to large sums of cash, Assaad enlists Rothschild Augustine and six others in his conspiracy.
The use of informants to target communities is one of the most alarming trends to have developed since 9/11, as it threatens to undo the fabric of a free society.
In relaying this story to Al Jazeera’s investigators, Assaad and Augustine reveal a number of disturbing practices in the concocted plot. The FBI specifically selected its own south Florida offices as a surveillance target, attempting to position itself as the victim of the conspiracy rather than the originator of it, despite the fact that there is no indication that the men even knew where or what it was. The ceremonial oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda that Assaad administered to the seven men displayed what can only be described as a symbol of the cartoonish imagery with which many in the US government associate Islam and Muslims.
Perhaps most worrisome in the case of the Liberty City 7, and an eerily similar case in New York, is the ways in which the FBI has exploited the endemic poverty and social problems from drug use to lack of education that are prevalent within some black communities across the US in order to construct the perception of a terrorist threat. In the latter case, the Newburgh Four were promised a payment of $250,000 by a government informant who they hoped to manipulate in turn. The Newburgh Sting is an HBO documentary, also premiering soon, which chronicles the government’s excesses in carrying out this plot and the devastation it has caused to an impoverished community.
A startling report utilising the Department of Justice’s internal statistics recently stated that in the decade after 9/11, 94.2 percent of federal terrorism convictions were obtained, at least in part, on the basis of preemptive prosecutions. Given how pervasive this practice has been, it is noteworthy that American Muslim civil rights groups have not developed a coordinated response to what has plainly become a widespread use of informants nationwide. In some instances, they have even attempted to downplay the problem of preemptive prosecutions, as in one report by a prominent American Muslim organisation that states that “while the numbers clearly show informants are frequently used by federal law enforcement, a majority of these cases do not involve them at all.”
The use of informants to target communities is one of the most alarming trends to have developed since 9/11, as it threatens to undo the fabric of a free society. That these recent investigative films have laid bare this troubling phenomenon and displayed its consequences for all to see, is a critical first step in confronting its damaging effect not only on the vulnerable American Muslim community but on American society as a whole.
Last updated: 21 Jul 2014 15:35
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Previously classified documents show federal agents continued to monitor Mandela and ANC even after his release from prison
The FBI monitored the interactions between Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress and leftwing groups in the US through the 1980s and 1990s as part of its ongoing investigations into what the bureau deemed to be the communist threat to US national security, new documents reveal.
The batch of 36 pages of previously classified documents, extracted from the FBI under freedom of information laws, show that federal agents continued to monitor Mandela’s and the ANC’s connections within the US even after the legendary South African leader was released from prison in February 1990. The bureau monitored meetings between Mandela and other world leaders, tracked the movements of senior ANC officials as they travelled across the US, and kept a close eye on the anti-apartheid activities of the Communist Party USA (CP-USA).
The declassified documents are marked “secret” under recognised codes for domestic and foreign counter-intelligence investigations. They include a record kept by federal agents of a meeting in Namibia just a month after Mandela’s release from jail between him and the then president of Yugoslavia, Janez Drnovsek. The record notes that a transcript of the proceedings was sent in Serbo-Croat to the FBI’s Cleveland office.
Another document records the FBI’s decision in June 1990, four months after Mandela was set free, to send an informant from Philadelphia to New York to snoop on a meeting that the bureau thought was about to take place between Mandela and Puerto Rican independence activists. “Information contained in this communication is extremely singular in nature and must not be disseminated outside the FBI or existing terrorism task forces,” it stated.
The newly declassified records are the second batch relating to FBI monitoring of Mandela to be obtained by Ryan Shapiro, a freedom of information expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the first set of documents, made public in May, it was disclosed that the bureau had used a confidential informant to gain an inside track on Mandela’s first visit to America in June 1990.
The new batch suggests that the FBI continued to see Mandela and the ANC through a paranoid cold war lens even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and after Mandela had emerged as one of the great democratic figureheads. The bureau’s obsession with categorising Mandela as a threat to domestic national security reached such a pitch that even elements within the FBI were driven to question the bureau’s prevailing analysis.
In August 1990, the FBI’s Chicago field office wrote a secret memo that highlighted the historical ignorance of its sister branch in New York which had classed the ANC as a “known Soviet front group”. The memo complained that “our description of the ANC as a Soviet front is an over-simplification which fails to recognize the complex and paradoxical nature of that particular organization (which was, of course, founded before the Russian revolution).”
Despite such enlightened interventions, the FBI carried on investigating links between the ANC and anti-apartheid and anti-racist groups in the US over many years. In 1984, federal agents kept watch over a senior ANC official, Makhenkesi Stofile, as he made a tour of the US meeting anti-apartheid groups. It also kept records of the involvement of Democratic Congress representatives in the Free Nelson Mandela campaign.
“The documents reveal that, just as it did in the 1950s and 60s with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, the FBI aggressively investigated the US and South African anti-apartheid movements as communist plots imperiling American security,” Shapiro said.
Many of the documents are heavily redacted, and Shapiro said he is now pressing for release of the complete uncensored records. He is also continuing to sue the CIA, National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency for all their paperwork on Mandela and the anti-apartheid movement.
Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Thursday 10 July 2014 18.10 BST
Find this story at 10 July 2014
© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Court to conduct preliminary examination of around 60 alleged cases of unlawful killing and claims of mistreatment

The ICC will examine separate allegations, mostly from former detainees held in British miltiary custody in Iraq. Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty Images
Allegations that British troops were responsible for a series of war crimes after the invasion of Iraq are to be examined by the international criminal court (ICC) at The Hague, the specialist tribunal has announced.

The court is to conduct a preliminary examination of what have been estimated to be 60 alleged cases of unlawful killing and claims that more than 170 Iraqis were mistreated while in British military custody during the conflict.

British defence officials are confident that the ICC will not move to the next stage and announce a formal investigation, largely because the UK has the capacity to investigate the allegations itself.

However, the announcement is a blow to the prestige of the armed forces as the UK is the only western state that has faced a preliminary investigation at the ICC. The court’s decision places the UK in the company of countries such as the Central African Republic, Colombia and Afghanistan.

In a statement released on Tuesday, the ICC said: “The new information received by the office alleges the responsibility of officials of the United Kingdom for war crimes involving systematic detainee abuse in Iraq from 2003 until 2008.

“The reopened preliminary examination will analyse, in particular, alleged crimes attributed to the armed forces of the United Kingdom deployed in Iraq between 2003 and 2008.”

But Dominic Grieve, the attorney general, said the government rejected any allegation that there was systematic abuse carried out by the British armed forces in Iraq.

“British troops are some of the best in the world and we expect them to operate to the highest standards, in line with both domestic and international law,” he said. “In my experience, the vast majority of our armed forces meet those expectations.”

Grieve added that, although the allegations were already being “comprehensively investigated” in Britain, “the UK government has been, and remains, a strong supporter of the ICC and I will provide the office of the prosecutor with whatever is necessary to demonstrate that British justice is following its proper course”.

The investigation means there will be a degree of scrutiny from The Hague of the British police team responsible for investigating the allegations, as well as the Service Prosecuting Authority (SPA), which is responsible for bringing courts martial cases, and Grieve, who must make the final decision on war crimes prosecutions in the UK.

The decision by the ICC chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, was made after a complaint was lodged in January by the Berlin-based human rights NGO the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights and a Birmingham law firm, Public Interest Lawyers (PIL) – which represented the family of Baha Mousa, the Iraqi hotel receptionist tortured to death by British troops in 2003 – and has since represented scores of other men and women who were detained and allegedly mistreated.

The process of a preliminary examination can take several years.

The newly appointed head of the SPA, Andrew Cayley QC, who has 20 years’ experience of prosecuting at war crimes tribunals in Cambodia and at The Hague, said he was confident that the ICC would eventually conclude that the UK should continue to investigate the allegations. Cayley said the SPA “will not flinch” from bringing prosecutions if the evidence justified it.

He added that he did not expect any civilians – officials or government ministers – would end up facing prosecution.

Any war crime committed by British servicemen or servicewomen is an offence under English law by virtue of the International Criminal Court Act 2001.

The ICC has already seen evidence suggesting that British troops did commit war crimes in Iraq, concluding after receiving a previous complaint in 2006: “There was a reasonable basis to believe that crimes within the jurisdiction of the court had been committed, namely wilful killing and inhuman treatment.”

At that point, the court concluded that it should take no action, as there were fewer than 20 allegations.

Many more cases have emerged in recent years. Currently, the Iraq Historic Allegations Team, the body set up by the Ministry of Defence to investigate complaints arising from the five-year British military occupation of the south-east of the country, is examining 52 complaints of unlawful killing involving 63 deaths and 93 allegations of mistreatment involving 179 people.

The alleged unlawful killings include a number of deaths in custody and the complaints of mistreatment range from relatively minor abuse to torture.

PIL withdrew allegations of unlawful killings arising out of one incident, a firefight in May 2004 known as the battle of Danny Boy, although an inquiry continues to examine allegations that a number of insurgents taken prisoner at that time were mistreated.

The ICC will examine separate allegations, mostly from former detainees held in Iraq. Following the death of Baha Mousa, one soldier, Corporal Donald Payne, admitted being guilty of inhumane treatment of detainees and was jailed for one year. He became the first and only British soldier to admit a war crime.

Six other soldiers were acquitted. The judge found that Mousa and several other men had been subjected to a series of assaults over 36 hours, but a number of charges had been dropped because of “a more or less obvious closing of ranks”.

The MoD admitted to the Guardian four years ago that at least seven further Iraqi civilians had died in UK military custody. Since then, no one has been charged or prosecuted.

• This article was amended on Tuesday 13 May 2014 to reflect the fact that the ICC is not an EU institution, and to remove a reference to the forthcoming European elections.

Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Tuesday 13 May 2014 18.34 BST

Find this story at 13 May 2014

© 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

WASHINGTON — Two weeks ago, a pair of F.B.I. agents appeared unannounced at the door of a member of the defense team for one of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 terrorist attacks. As a contractor working with the defense team at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the man was bound by the same confidentiality rules as a lawyer. But the agents wanted to talk.

They asked questions, lawyers say, about the legal teams for Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other accused terrorists who will eventually stand trial before a military tribunal at Guantánamo. Before they left, the agents asked the contractor to sign an agreement promising not to tell anyone about the conversation.

With that signature, Mr. bin al-Shibh’s lawyers say, the government turned a member of their team into an F.B.I. informant.

The F.B.I.’s inquiry became the focus of the pretrial hearings at Guantánamo this week, after the contractor disclosed it to the defense team. It was a reminder that, no matter how much the proceedings at the island military prison resemble a familiar American trial, the invisible hand of the United States government is at work there in ways unlike anything seen in typical courtrooms.

“It’s a courtroom with three benches,” said Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School. “There’s one person pretending to be the judge, and two other agencies behind the scenes exerting at least as much influence.”

Thirteen years after 9/11, nobody has been convicted in connection with the attacks and, because of the F.B.I. visit, a trial could be delayed even longer. But it was only the latest in a string of strange events at Guantánamo Bay that, coupled with the decade-long delay, have undermined a process that was supposed to move swiftly, without the encumbrances of the civilian legal system and its traditional rules of evidence.

Last year, as a lawyer for Mr. Mohammed was speaking during another hearing, a red light began flashing. Then the videofeed from the courtroom abruptly cut out. The emergency censorship system had been activated. But why? And by whom? The defense lawyer had said nothing classified. And the court officer responsible for protecting state secrets had not triggered the system. Days later, the military judge, Col. James L. Pohl, announced that he had been told that an “original classification authority” — meaning the C.I.A. — was secretly monitoring the proceedings. Unknown to everyone else, the agency had its own button, which the judge swiftly and angrily disconnected.

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Last year, the government acknowledged that microphones were hidden inside what looked like smoke detectors in the rooms where detainees met with their lawyers. Those microphones gave officials the ability to eavesdrop on confidential conversations, but the military said it never did so.

“At some point, it just becomes silly,” said Glenn Sulmasy, a military law professor at the Coast Guard Academy who supports military trials for terrorism but said problems at Guantánamo Bay have undermined confidence in the system. “I don’t think we’re at that point yet, but at some point it just becomes surreal. It’s like there’s a shadow trial going on and we’re only finding out about it in bits and pieces.”

The court has also been troubled by computer problems. A botched computer update gave prosecutors and defense lawyers access to the other side’s confidential work. And the Pentagon acknowledged inadvertently searching and copying defense lawyers’ emails but said nobody read them.

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“These things keep happening,” a defense lawyer, James Harrington, said this week as he asked for an investigation into the F.B.I.’s activities. The other instances seemed like government intrusion, Mr. Harrington said, but lawyers could not prove it. “Here it really happened.”

The F.B.I. would not comment and military prosecutors said they knew nothing about the investigation. But the F.B.I. appears to be investigating how The Huffington Post got ahold of a 36-page manifesto that Mr. Mohammed had written in prison.

The government hopes to start the trial early next year, but it is not clear whether this issue will result in another delay. Mr. Harrington said he wanted Colonel Pohl to question F.B.I. officials and determine whether anyone else on the defense team had been approached by or gave information to the government.

“It’s just a horrible atmosphere to operate in,” Mr. Harrington said Friday. “It’s built on a shaky foundation, and one thing after another happens. I don’t see how anyone can have confidence in this process.”

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gmcnulty 24 days ago
The 9/11 terrorist murdered my son that day in September but I am sickened by the actions of some within our government.No matter what there…
GC 25 days ago
I have zero faith in the bureaucrats that run (leach off) our country. I am an eye for an eye purist, but we have laws for a reason. The…
RS 25 days ago
This is what our country has become, our so-called Democracy land of the free and the CIA.
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Christopher Jenks, a Southern Methodist University law professor and a former military prosecutor, said he sympathized with the Guantánamo prosecutors, who appeared to have been just as surprised as defense lawyers by the appearance of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. in their cases.

“You have these military prosecutors who are normally empowered to own their cases. And they don’t here,” Mr. Jenks said. If this were any other country’s system, Mr. Jenks said, “The reaction would be, ‘Oh my gosh. What a kangaroo process.’ ”

President George W. Bush created the military tribunal system for suspected terrorists in 2001. Years of court challenges followed and after the Supreme Court struck down the tribunal’s rules in 2006, Congress hurriedly wrote new rules giving prisoners more rights. More changes followed in 2009 and the government says the process is far better and fairer now.

The 9/11 trial, if it occurs, will be the biggest test of that system. Six detainees in other cases have pleaded guilty before military commissions. Two others have gone to trial and been found guilty, only to have their convictions thrown out by an appeals court.

Greg McNeal, a former adviser to the top Guantánamo prosecutor, said the military tribunal system was ripe for episodes like the one with the F.B.I. because it is so new. The civilian system and the traditional military judicial system have well-established rules and precedents for handling issues that arise. “Because it’s new and different, they may have a sense that they can get away with things,” Mr. McNeal said. He added, “There are interagency fights happening behind the scenes that have been going on for the past decade.”

The Obama administration had hoped to prosecute the 9/11 case in a New York criminal court. But it reversed course in the face of security fears and criticism that the government would grant constitutional rights to terrorists.

While the military tribunals have been plagued by delays, the department has successfully prosecuted several terrorism cases in civilian courts. Most recently, prosecutors in Manhattan won a conviction against Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the most senior adviser to Osama bin Laden to be tried in civilian court in the United States since 9/11.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. noted that the New York case had proceeded from capture to conviction in about a year. “It is hard to imagine this case being presented with greater efficiency or greater speed,” he said.

Correction: April 22, 2014
An article on Saturday about the F.B.I.’s involvement in terrorism-related trials misspelled the surname of a Southern Methodist University law professor and former military prosecutor. He is Christopher Jenks, not Jencks.

By MATT APUZZO APRIL 18, 2014

Find this story at 18 April 2014

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