Judge Releases Last Of The ‘Newburgh Four,’ Excoriates FBI For The Entrapment It Calls ‘Counterterrorism’
The FBI's counter-terrorism work has always been noted for its willingness to radicalize people just to arrest them. The FBI has a lot of wins in the win column, but many of those wins have been obtained through... well, let's call it what it is: cheating.
People with mental issues or deep wells of insecurity are the government's favorite targets. Anyone who can be persuaded they're making a difference - even if said difference" is an attack on America - becomes fodder for the FBI's manipulators. People who would never have had the ability to carry out a terrorist attack, either due to a lack of intelligence or funds or both, suddenly become Public Enemy No. 1 following interactions with FBI agents and informants.
These tactics would be questionable enough. They border on entrapment the few times they don't actually appear to cross the line. But some of the FBI informants might be even worse.
The case of the Newburgh Four" involves a small group of Newburgh residents who were talked into a grandiose plan that involved shooting down planes at a Air National Guard base and blowing up synagogues in New York City. The FBI and its preferred informant - Shaheed Hussain - put together the plans, gave the men the explosives" they needed to carry this out, and arrested them for trying to please their handlers.
When Judge Colleen McMahon released the other three Newburgh defendants, she wondered why the FBI didn't spend its time and money investigating and prosecuting its lead informant.
As was revealed on cross examination, in the years prior to his becoming an FBI asset, Hussain engaged repeatedly in activity that constituted various crimes, including bankruptcy fraud, tax evasion, immigration fraud, perjury, and mail fraud.He lied repeatedly to a laundry list of government agencies, from the United States Bankruptcy Court... to the sentencing judge in his criminal case, his Probation Officer, the FBI, the INS, the IRS, the New York State Liquor Authority and the New York State Education Department.He even lied on the witness stand at the trial of this case, putting the Government in the uncomfortable position of not being able to rehabilitate certain aspects of his testimony, or adopt certain of his statements when arguing this case.More recently, Hussain was the owner of a car-for-hire business in Upstate New Yorkthat rented a defective limousine- a vehicle that had been ordered out of service following a safety inspection -that hurtled down Route 30 in Schoharie, New York, sending 21 innocent people to their deaths.
The FBI had a guy committing actual crimes but chose to focus on four men Judge McMahon said were hapless, easily manipulated and penurious petty criminals," rather than the terroristic masterminds the government portrayed them as while securing 25 year sentences for the men.
James Cromitie is the last of the Newburgh Four" to be released. The government portrayed him as the ringleader of this (imaginary) four-person terrorist cell. Cromitie is now free, albeit after having lost 15 years of his life to the federal prison system.
Judge Colleen McMahon is no less scathing in her assessment of the FBI and DOJ prosecutors in this order [PDF].
First, she shuts down one of the argument the DOJ made to keep Cromitie behind bars.
The Government opposes Cromitie's motion. It argues-as it argued in opposition to the co-defendants' motions-that the mandatory-minimum sentence the court was required to impose on the defendants was neither the product of Government misconduct nor Government manipulation. That of course is errant nonsense...
Then she details the exploits of this supposed terrorist ringleader:
[FBI informant Shaheed] Hussain's task was to infiltrate upstate mosques (attended largely by members of the Black Muslim movement within Islam) and identify potential terrorists. Cromitie, a small time grifter and petty drug dealer with no history of violence, pretended to be one, feeding Hussain lie after lie about his past and ingratiating himself with the man he believed to be a wealthy Pakistani businessman. Over a period of about eight months, Hussain inveigled Cromitie with promises of both heavenly and earthly rewards, including as much as $250,000, if he would plan and participate in, and find others to participate in, a jihadist mission." Cromitie professed interest in Hussain's plan, often employing the same deeply offensive anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric that Hussain himself used, but he backed those words with absolutely nothing in the way of deeds. Cromitie strung Hussain along for six months at which point he simply disappeared for so long a period that the FBI started to move on to other ventures.
Unfortunately, in April 2008, Cromitie reached out to Hussain, presumably hoping to access some of this promised money. Hussain directed him to put together a crew and pushed the men towards carrying out a synagogue bombing of Hussain's own creation.
There's a reason Hussain pushed Cromitie to recruit other people: to create a terrorism crime that would not have existed without Hussain's input and influence.
The three men were recruited so that Cromitie could conspire with someone; the real lead conspirator was the United States, but Cromitie could not conspire with the Government
The US is the best conspirator, though. It invented the conspiracy, converted a state-level charge to a federal one by driving one of the men to Connecticut to view the bombs," picked the equipment for the attack, set the data, and even armed" the fake bombs because Cromitie (with all his claimed expertise) could not figure out how to do it. As soon as the fake explosives were planted, the FBI swooped in to arrest the men.
It was not enough to basically entrap these four men. The government concocted a separate plan solely for the reason of keeping them locked up for as long as possible.
The purported attack on Stewart AFB using stinger missiles" (never carried out, even in the carefully faked manner of the Bronx operation) was added to the sting solely to subject the four men to the statutory mandatory minimum sentences of 25 years.
Cromitie was not a talented and dangerous criminal capable of terrorist acts, something recognized by the judge who previously reviewed his sentence.
[C]hief Judge Jacobs, who would have overturned Cromitie's (and only Cromitie's) conviction on entrapment grounds, said it best: It is clear that Cromitie in his unmolested state of grievance would (for all the evidence shows, and as the district court found) have continued to stew in his rage and ignorance indefinitely, and had no formed design about what to do. The government agent supplied a design and gave it form, so that the agent rather than the defendant inspired the crime, provoked it, planned it, financed it, equipped it, and furnished the time and targets. He had to, because Cromitie was comically incompetent, possibly the last candidate one would pick as the agent of a conspiracy." Had the Government not contrived its elaborate sting operation, it is highly likely that Cromitie would have lived out his life in Newburgh, quite possibly cycling in and out of jail for a string of petty offenses, but never committing a crime remotely like the ones for which he has been sitting in a federal penitentiary for 15 years.
More benchslapping is handed down as Judge McMahon dispenses of the government's arguments in favor of keeping Cromitie locked up for another decade.
The Government argues... that Cromitie was involved in the scheme far longer" than the others. But it does not admit that Cromitie did nothing that violated the law-not even make plans to violate the law-during the extra months that he was subjected to Hussain's repeated inveigling. Nor does the Government acknowledge that Cromitie spent a considerable portion of that extra time" hiding from the informant in order to escape the pressure he was under. And while Crornitie did technically recruit" the co-defendants, he did so at the behest of Hussain, who urged (badgered) him to involve others, solely that the Government-created conspiracy would be legally possible.
The notion that Cromitie was selected as a leader" by the co-defendants is inconceivable, given his well-documented buffoonery and ineptitude. That ineptitude extended to his manipulation of the Government-made fake bombs, which Cromitie was unable to arm" despite being shown how to do it by the informant. The Government selected Cromitie, pressured Cromitie, and anointed him as its vessel-the leader" of its conspiracy. The Government believes that Cromitie had a more significant role in the offense, but to the rest of the world, and certainly to this Court, it appears that the Government selected the most expendable, most pathetic, least capable and least discerning individual it could find and then used him in the scheme it designed.
Judge McMahon says Cromitie has served his time... and then some, given the underlying circumstances of this case.
A decade and a half in prison, the last few years under conditions harsher than anything imagined by the court at the time of sentencing, is more than sufficient to provide deterrence and promote respect for the law. As far as this court is concerned, the only thing connected to this case that undermined anyone's respect for the law was the Government's questionable decision to send a villain like Hussein to troll among the poorest and weakest of men for terrorists" who might prove susceptible to an offer of much-needed cash in exchange for committing a faux crime.
In less than three months, Cromitie will regain his freedom. How much freedom remains is questionable. A 58-year-old convicted felon doesn't have a whole lot of options. But things could have gone differently for him. Imagine if the government was willing to spend this much time and effort dissuading people from sympathizing with terrorists or ensuring those expressing an interest in these things don't find themselves in echo chambers populated by a mix of extremists and government informants. The FBI doesn't seem all that interested in actually making the country better, much less safer. And it will surely shrug off these judicial admonitions because it has demonstrated a clear preference for easy wins in the War on Terror.