FBI Set Up Teen in Fake Car Bomb Plot
A Somali-born, American teenager was apparently set up by federal law enforcement officials who posed as radical Islamic fighters and lured the young man into a plot he believed would lead him to detonate a car bomb at an Oregon Christmas tree lighting ceremony.
The bomb, provided by FBI agents, was “inert” and did not pose a threat to public safety, according to the US Attorney’s Office in Oregon.
Oddly enough, Arthur Balizan, an FBI agent in Oregon, contradicted the US Attorney’s Office, suggesting that the threat posed by 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud “was very real.”
Except: “[At] every turn,” he explained, “we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack.”
The story rings devastatingly familiar when stacked next to the tale of Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a Jordanian man arrested in 2009, at age 19, for allegedly planning to detonate a car bomb in a Dallas skyscraper.
Each boy was led down the path to imagined violence by federal agents, with authorities ultimately providing fake bombs in both cases. Smadi and Mohamud, officials claim, expressed a desire to engage in terrorist attacks before agents began luring them in.
Federal agents noticed Mohamud in December 2009, after he allegedly communicated with a suspected terrorist in Pakistan. Months later, an undercover agent contacted Mohamud claiming to be the individual’s associate, and Mohamud agreed to meet in Portland.
Agents claimed that Mohamud revealed himself to be the author of a bizarre 2009 article for the English-language “Jihad Recollections” magazine. The story made headlines for it’s comical images of masked fighters helping each other exercise.
Other articles in the 70+ page magazine published in North Carolina included a preview of “emp technology,” poetry, speeches from Osama bin Laden and a how-to guide to global jihad.
One key thing, however, was oddly lacking from the magazine’s first edition: as even Fox News noted, it did not explicitly call for violence against anyone.
The magazine also featured quotes from Tennessee Republican Congressman Zach Wamp, who made headlines again last July for suggesting that his state secede from the US.
Agents also reveal in court documents that Mohamud had told them he might be able to get a gun, because he was a “rapper.”
“We were unable to determine Mohamud’s Jihadi emcee name, or the potency of his flow,” Gawker quipped.
Court documents claim the first meeting between Mohamud and the FBI took place in July, 2010. In the months following, agents ostensibly worked him up to the point where he was willing to flip the switch on a car bomb. Agents even took Mohamud to a secluded location to blow up a bomb they placed in a backpack, allegedly as a test run.
Mohamud was arrested by FBI agents and Portland police around 5:40 pm Friday, after he attempted to remotely detonate what he believed to be an explosives-laden van. Officials claimed that early on Friday, Mohamud had recorded a video explaining why he wanted to carry out the attack.
“I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured,” he said, according to law enforcement.
Mohamud is scheduled to appear in federal court on Monday.
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An excellent analysis of this story was just done by Glenn Greenwald —
. . . .Second, in order not to be found to have entrapped someone into committing a crime, law enforcement agents want to be able to prove that, in the 1992 words of the Supreme Court, the accused “was independently predisposed to commit the crime for which he was arrested.” To prove that, undercover agents are often careful to stress that the accused has multiple choices, and they then induce him into choosing with his own volition to commit the crime. In this case, that was achieved by the undercover FBI agent’s allegedly advising Mohamud that there were at least five ways he could serve the cause of Islam (including by praying, studying engineering, raising funds to send overseas, or becoming “operational”), and Mohamud replied he wanted to “be operational” by using exploding a bomb (para. 35-37).
But strangely, while all other conversations with Mohamud which the FBI summarizes were (according to the affidavit) recorded by numerous recording devices, this conversation — the crucial one for negating Mohamud’s entrapment defense — was not. That’s because, according to the FBI, the undercover agent “was equipped with audio equipment to record the meeting. However, due to technical problems, the meeting was not recorded” (para. 37).
Thus, we have only the FBI’s word, and only its version, for what was said during this crucial — potentially dispositive — conversation. Also strangely: the original New York Times article on this story described this conversation at some length and reported the fact that “that meeting was not recorded due to a technical difficulty,” but the final version omitted that, instead simply repeating the FBI’s story as though it were fact: “undercover agents in Mr. Mohamud’s case offered him several nonfatal ways to serve his cause, including mere prayer. But he told the agents he wanted to be ‘operational,’ and perhaps execute a car bombing.”
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/11/28/fbi/index.html