The Terror Factory (10 page)

After Stewart's arrest, the FBI raided Batiste's warehouse in Liberty City and federal prosecutors charged him and his followers with conspiracy to support terrorism, destroy buildings, and levy war against the U.S. government.

James J. Wedick, a former FBI supervisory agent who spent more than three decades at the Bureau, was hired to review the Liberty City Seven case as a consultant for the defense. I met with him at his home outside Sacramento, California, in late 2010 and asked him about the case. His first reaction was a smirk. “These guys couldn't find their way down the end of the street,” Wedick said of Batiste and his followers. “They were homeless types. And, yes, we did show a picture where somebody was taking the oath to Al Qaeda. So what? They didn't care. They only cared about the money. When we put forth a case like that to suggest to the American public that we're protecting them, we're not protecting them. The agents back in the bullpen, they know it's not true.”

Indeed, the Justice Department had a difficult time winning convictions in the Liberty City Seven case. It was clear from trial testimony that Batiste, the alleged ringleader, was merely bullshitting with the FBI informants, free-flowing with absurd ideas he'd picked up from popular culture in the hopes that he might see some cash at the end of the hustle. For example, when his lawyer asked him on the stand how he came up with the idea to bomb the Sears Tower, Batiste answered: “Just from watching the movies.”
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In three separate trials, juries deadlocked on most of the charges, eventually acquitting two of the defendants—Lyglenson Lemorin and
Naudimar Herrera—and convicting the other five of crimes that landed them in prison for between seven and thirteen years.
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(To date, Lemorin's and Herrera's acquittals are the exceptions to what is otherwise a perfect conviction record for FBI terrorism sting cases that go to trial.) Despite the eventual convictions, the U.S. government was never able to show in any of the three trials that the Liberty City Seven had the ability to commit an act of terrorism were it not for the FBI informants providing them with the means.

For the Justice Department, the case was an early test of what has become known as preemptive prosecution—when the government uses terrorism conspiracy charges to make the case for what defendants would have done if not busted by federal law enforcement. Liberty City Seven prosecutor Jacqueline Arango emphasized this in her closing arguments. “The government need not wait until buildings come down or people get shot to prove people are terrorists,” she said. But if the government doesn't need to show that defendants committed the crime, Batiste's lawyer asked the jury in her closing argument, how can we be sure that they would have committed the crime without the prodding of government informants? “This is not a terrorism case,” Ana Jhones told the jury. “This is a manufactured crime.”
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The Liberty City Seven case, however, proved to be quite
lucrative for the informants involved in it. Elie Assaad earned $85,000 for his work on the case, while Abbas al-Saidi received $21,000.
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Several years later, Elie Assaad resurfaced in El Paso, Texas, where he was running a low-rent modeling agency on the Mexico border. In March 2011, El Paso police attempted to pull over Assaad's black SUV on the interstate. Instead of stopping, Assaad led the police on a high-speed chase through the city and onto the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso, where he drove into a dead end, reversed, and backed into a police officer whose gun was drawn. The officer fired several times. Assaad later rolled his SUV on a nearby street as he tried to get away.
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I called Assaad shortly after his arrest and asked if I could meet with him in El Paso. He told me his incredulous story about how he came to serve as an FBI informant and bragged on the phone about how his work as an informant saved the United States from another terrorist attack—but he wouldn't agree to meet with me. He's saving his story, he said, for his own book. He's still looking for a publisher.

Since the 9/11 hijackers spent the days before their attack in hot and balmy Florida, it's fitting that terrorism sting operations were born in the Sunshine State. Starting as an idea from a security guard named Howard Gilbert with big dreams, these stings would have their greatest test in court with the Liberty City Seven case, which proved to the government that it could win terrorism prosecutions even when no evidence linked the defendants to actual terrorists.

J. Stephen Tidwell, the FBI's executive assistant director who supports the use of terrorism sting operations, and James
J. Wedick, the former FBI supervisory agent who is opposed to them, both told me that the FBI and the Justice Department viewed the Liberty City Seven case as a test of what the law and juries would allow in terrorism cases in a post-9/11 United States. Winning the case, even if it did take three trials, strengthened the government's position in using terrorism sting operations. It also sent a message to defense lawyers that the Justice Department can win these cases at trial, and this likely has played a role in the high rate of guilty pleas we see today following terrorism stings.

But that doesn't mean that the government treated the members of the Liberty City Seven like dangerous terrorists after their trial and conviction. One of the convicted men, Burson Augustin, has already been released from prison, and he's back in Florida. While the government portrayed him as a dangerous killer who wanted to bomb buildings in June 2006, when authorities released him in September 2012, they never even bothered to warn the community that a convicted terrorist was living among them, suggesting either that the U.S. government believes terrorists can be fully rehabilitated after short prison sentences, or that those convicted as terrorists weren't really dangerous in the first place.

Augustin is the first man convicted in a post-9/11 terrorism sting operation to be released from prison. During the six years he was incarcerated, the FBI has dramatically stepped up its use of terrorism sting operations. To do that, the Bureau has had to recruit thousands of informants to perform the job of agent provocateur that Howard Gilbert and Elie Assaad helped pioneer. But not every informant has hooked up with the FBI in the hopes of becoming a secret agent man, as Howard Gilbert did, or of becoming a federal snitch for the money, as Elie Assaad did. Many spy for the
government because FBI agents have coerced them into doing so. Just as agents have targeted Muslim communities to find terrorists, they have also targeted those same communities to recruit informants, using any means necessary.

 

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Lemorin, who had left the group before it engaged in an alleged terrorist plot with an FBI informant, was acquitted in the first trial due to lack of evidence and later deported to Haiti. Herrera was unexplainably acquitted in the third trial when the evidence against him was similar to the evidence against the five men in the plot who were convicted. Herrera's not guilty verdict was an anomaly—something none of the jurors has come forward to explain—since his actions weren't significantly different from those of the other defendants.

Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards campaign signs littered the lawns in his North Miami Beach neighborhood as Imam Foad Farahi walked from his mosque to his apartment a few blocks away. It was five o'clock in the afternoon on November 1, 2004, the day before George W. Bush would win a second term in office, but Farahi, an influential South Florida Islamic religious leader, had been too busy fasting and praying Ramadan to pay much attention to the presidential election.

As he neared his apartment, he saw two men standing outside. “We're from the FBI,” one of the men said. They wanted to know about José Padilla and Adnan El Shukrijumah, two men linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Padilla, the so-called Dirty Bomber, had been arrested in May 2002 and given enemy combatant status. He stood trial in Miami and was convicted in 2008 on terrorism charges and sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Currently on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list, Shukrijumah is a senior Al Qaeda member who came to the Bureau's attention in the Imran Mandhai case.

“I know José Padilla, but I don't know Adnan,” Farahi told the agents.
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As imam of the Shamsuddin Islamic Center in North Miami Beach, Farahi was in a unique position to know about local Muslims. While he had met Shukrijumah, the son
of a local Islamic religious leader, on one occasion in 2000, he had had no contact with him since then. “I don't know anything about his activities,” Farahi said. Padilla had prayed at Farahi's mosque and had once been among his Arabic students. However, Farahi told the agents that he had had “no contact with Padilla since 1998, when he left the country.”

“We want you to work with us,” one of the agents then said to Farahi.

“I have no problem working with you guys or helping you out,” Farahi told the agents. He could keep them informed about the local Muslim community, or translate Arabic. But the relationship, he insisted, would need to be made public; others would have to know he was working with the government. But that wasn't what the FBI had in mind: the agents wanted him to become a secret informant. And they knew Farahi was in a vulnerable position as his student visa had expired and he had asked the government for a renewal. He had also applied for political asylum, hoping one of those legal tracks would offer a way for him to stay in the United States indefinitely.

“We'll give you residency,” the agents promised. “We'll give you money to go to school.”

Farahi considered the offer for a moment, then shook his head. “I can't,” he told them.

The slender, bearded Farahi frowned as he recounted this to me while sitting on a white folding chair in the Shamsuddin Islamic Center in May 2009. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you're trying to kind of deceive them,” he said, remembering the choice he faced. “That's where the problem is.”

Farahi soon discovered that the FBI's offer wasn't optional, as the federal government began using strong-arm
tactics—including trying to have him deported and falsely claiming it had information linking him to terrorism—in an effort to force him to become an informant. The imam resisted the government at every step of the way and took his political asylum case to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta. “As long as you're not a citizen, there are lots of things [the government] can do,” Ira Kurzban, Farahi's lawyer, told me.
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“They can allege you're a terrorist and try to bring terrorist charges against you, or they can get you deported.”

Farahi's was among the first cases to become public of the FBI using leverage to recruit informants from within U.S. Muslim communities, an aggressive program that has netted thousands of informants since 9/11. And the only reason his case became public was because Farahi chose to fight, risking deportation. “People have two choices,” Farahi told me. “Either they end up working with the FBI or they leave the country on their own. It's just sometimes when you're in that situation, not many people are strong enough to stand up and resist and fight—to reject their offers.”

Two days after Farahi told the FBI he couldn't spy on members of his mosque in good conscience, the two agents phoned him and requested he come to their office to take a polygraph. “I had nothing to hide,” Farahi said of the test. “They asked the same questions over and over, to see if my answer would change, and it didn't.” The agents were focused primarily on Adnan El Shukrijumah, Farahi recalled. “What is your relationship with him?” they asked. “When was the last time you were in contact with him? Where is he now?”

Following the polygraph, Farahi didn't hear from the FBI for two and a half years. Then, in the summer of 2007, he received a call from an agent who asked to meet with him. In Cooper City, a suburb northwest of Miami, two FBI agents—
a man and a woman—again asked Farahi if he would work with the government. He again declined, and the meeting ended amicably.

Farahi didn't know the push back would come later on.

Though he has never set foot in the country, Foad Farahi is technically an Iranian. He was born in Kuwait, but under Middle Eastern law, he is considered an Iranian citizen because his father was from there. Farahi grew up in Kuwait City, where his father operated a currency exchange business. His mother, a Syrian, raised him and his younger sister to speak Arabic and worship as Sunnis, an Islamic sect that is persecuted in Iran. But he knew his future would never be secure in Kuwait. “Even if I married a Kuwaiti woman, I wouldn't become a citizen,” Farahi said. “Kuwait could deport me to Iran at any time for any reason.”

At the age of nineteen, Farahi applied for and received a student visa to study in the United States. He chose to go to South Florida, where his family had once vacationed when he was a teenager. He enrolled at Miami Dade College and received an associate's degree before transferring to Barry University, a private Catholic school in Miami Shores, where he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry. While at Barry, he served on the university's interfaith committee as well as participating as a teacher in a university peace forum attended by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children. “He has had a positive influence at this university,” said Edward R. Sunshine, a theology professor at Barry.
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No one who knows Farahi, Sunshine told me, would suspect he is radical or militant.

Farahi went on to obtain a master's degree in public health from Florida International University. At the same
time, he began an intensive, three-year imam training course at a mosque in Miramar, Florida. In 2000, the Shamsuddin Islamic Center opened near his home in North Miami Beach. Six months later, its imam returned to Egypt, and Farahi became his successor. It was through this position that he came into contact with several South Floridians who have been linked to terrorism, including Padilla, Shukrijumah, and Imran Mandhai, the nineteen-year-old Pakistani American man who conspired with FBI informants Howard Gilbert and Elie Assaad. “Imran came here once years ago during Ramadan,” Farahi said. “It was a big event for him at the time. He memorized and recited the Koran.”