Terrorist plots are suddenly everywhere. In Baltimore last week, a 21-year-old construction worker tried to blow up a military recruitment center. In late November, federal law enforcement officials arrested a Somalia-born teenager for plotting to bomb a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. In October, a jury found the Newburgh Four guilty of planning to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx.
In all three cases, the major accomplice was not al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was the FBI. The Bureau has been going undercover to lure terrorists out of their lairs. This should be reassuring. But U.S. counter-terrorism policy, both at home and abroad, suffers from a carrot-and-stick problem. The carrots that the FBI offers through its undercover operations suggest entrapment. The sticks that the Pentagon has wielded against Muslim lands have done much to encourage the proliferation of plotting on the home front, and yet Washington pretends otherwise.
Law enforcement officials, as you might guess, are not thrilled at the accusation of entrapment. After the arrest of 19-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the would-be Portland bomber, Attorney General Eric Holder said that there were “a number of opportunities that the subject in this matter, the defendant in this matter, was given to retreat, to take a different path. He chose at every step to continue.” Juries have basically agreed with the government position. To date, the entrapment defense has not led to any acquittals.
According to the Supreme Court, entrapment takes place if “the criminal design originates with the officials of the government, and they implant in the mind of an innocent person the disposition to commit the alleged offense and induce its commission in order that they may prosecute.” In the Portland case, there was no plot and no accomplices before the FBI decided to intervene. The Bureau had been tracking Mohamud since 2009 when it intercepted his email exchange with a suspected terrorist recruiter. From all evidence, Mohamud was unhappy with America and possibly attracted to terrorism. Was the best option as this point for the U.S. government to play the enabler, like providing a budding alcoholic with liquor? As Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) contributor Francis Njubi Nesbitt points out in Homegrown Fear Mongering, “These so-called counter-radicalization policies focus on individuals rather than structures, symptoms rather than root causes. A more proactive domestic approach would include policies that prevent radicalization instead of focusing on arresting and prosecuting perpetrators.”
Likewise, the Newburgh Four didn’t come up with their plan to bomb synagogues and shoot down military planes. That was the suggestion of FBI informant Shahed Hussain, who traveled around to mosques in search of potential terrorists and then dangled large sums of money in front of them to join him in “jihad.” When one of the four African-American converts to Islam – all marginal down-and-out figures – tried to back out of the scheme because it would kill women and children, court records indicate that Hussain pressed him to continue or else put the informant’s own reputation at risk. Hussain even sought to stir up the anti-Semitism of his four putative colleagues by telling them “that Jews were responsible for the U.S. wars in the Middle East and for other acts of violence against Muslims.”
Shahed Hussain is not the only questionable FBI informant. Convicted forger Craig Monteilh similarly went around to mosques to drum up terrorism. At the Islamic Center of Irvine, California, “Muslims were so alarmed by his talk of violent jihad that they obtained a restraining order against him,” reports The Washington Post. Monteilh is now suing his former employers, saying that the Bureau trained him to entrap.
Both Hussain and Monteilh made a lot of money at their job of reeling in terrorists. Their work sounds eerily similar to the bounty hunters in Afghanistan who, after the invasion in 2001, delivered to occupation authorities anyone suspected of links to al-Qaeda or the Taliban. That tactic produced hundreds of suspects that had nothing to do with either organization.
Whether it ultimately qualifies as entrapment or not, this FBI tactic is poisoning relations with the Muslim community. “The FBI wants to treat the Muslim community as a partner while investigating us behind our backs,” says a member of the Islamic Center of Irvine.”They can’t have it both ways.” Indeed, the FBI’s approach veers dangerously close to profiling the entire Muslim community as terrorism-prone.
Another danger is the application of this profiling to other communities. The Justice Department has begun to crack down on anti-war activists because of their alleged connections to terrorist organizations abroad. In September, FBI agents raided homes and offices of activists and issued subpoenas to 14 people, including those connected to the Minneapolis-based Women Against Military Madness, the Chicago-based Arab American Action Network, and Students for a Democratic Society.
Over the summer, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a law that criminalizes any provision of “material support” to a foreign terrorist group. Legal scholar David Cole points out the absurdity of this law: “It means that when The New York Times and The Washington Post published op-eds by a Hamas leader, they were engaged in the crime of providing ‘material support’ to a designated terrorist group, because to publish the op-ed they had to coordinate with a spokesperson from Hamas.” But the FBI isn’t going after the mainstream media. It’s targeting peace activists and the Muslim community.
And the entity providing the most “material support” to terrorist organizations is Washington itself. U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen help generate funds, recruits, and sympathy for those who oppose occupation policies and use terrorism as a tactic to advance their goals. The “collateral damage” associated with these wars is principally Muslim. And Muslims, not surprisingly, are upset, some of them very upset. It’s not a religious thing. It’s all about occupation and war. If, as political scientist Robert Pape has convincingly argued, these factors produce suicide bombings – in the Middle East and, most recently, in Sweden – surely they must also play a role in encouraging terrorist activities here in the United States.
In the movie Minority Report, Tom Cruise plays a cop who has to stop crimes before they happen by relying on psychics who can see into the future. The FBI doesn’t yet have access to reliable psychics. So they’re doing the next best thing: forcing these future crimes to take place in the present in order to arrest the suspect. In some cases, perhaps the crime would indeed have taken place. But in other cases, the FBI is moving dangerously into the realm of science fiction.
Can’t-Do Spirit in Cancun
When in doubt, marketize. That seems to be the default position of the international community when confronted with seemingly insuperable problems. There are no international authorities with enough power to implement a solution to climate change. The major industrialized powers aren’t willing to compromise with rising economies. The business community, on the other hand, is more than eager to get in on the action.
These market-based schemes include “the UN Reduction of Emissions for Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) proposal and the Clean Development Mechanisms (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol,” reports Foreign Policy In Focus columnist Laura Carlsen from the climate negotiations in Cancun in her essay Cloistered Climate Talks. “Both allow developed-country polluters to use peasant and indigenous lands and projects in developing countries to offset continued pollution. In the bargain, not only do polluters avoid having to reduce emissions, but the land-management contracts that verify offsets typically strip traditional communities of their rights over the carbon-absorbing lands they have preserved for millennia.”
Even as the Cancun talks concluded on Saturday with a tepid consensus, we have to remember that multilateral dialogue remains a key to any solution.”Despite the coming low-carbon energy revolution, we can’t expect to make that escape without systems — of global cooperation, burden sharing and accountability — that can only be rooted in a fair multilateral accord,” writes FPIF contributor Tom Athanasiou in The Cancun Set-Up. “Which is to say that the climate talks may not be fun, and may not even be the main event, but there’s no real hope without them.”
Dictators on Top
The December issue of Foreign Policy magazine has a 15-page full-color spread devoted to Equatorial Guinea’s commitment to sustainable growth. On the second page is a picture of the U.S. president and First Lady standing next to Equatoguinean President Teodoro Obiang and his wife. From the supplement, which features smiling children, busy ports, and cheery statistics, you’d think that Obiang was the best thing to happen to Africa since Nelson Mandela.
Think again. As FPIF contributor Abena Ampofoa Asare writes in Obiang: The Sham Humanitarian, “For the past three decades, Obiang has proudly presided over one of Africa’s most devastating humanitarian and political disasters. With a per capita GDP comparable to Portugal or Korea, Equatorial Guinea’s national income is the highest in sub-Saharan Africa; and yet over 60 percent of the population struggle to live on less than a dollar a day. Since oil was discovered in 1995, President Teodoro Obiang’s family and close associates have grown fabulously wealthy, while the majority of Equatoguineans remain mired in poverty.”
Meanwhile, over in Egypt, the regime of Hosni Mubarak recently presided over its own sham elections. Here, too, the United States has largely looked the other way. “Although the State Department acknowledges that the regime suppresses freedom of the press, association, and religion, the U.S. government – under both Republican and Democratic administrations –annually rewards Mubarak with billions of dollars worth of military and economic assistance,” writes FPIF senior analyst Stephen Zunes in Fraudulent Egyptian Election. “Early into his presidency, Obama dispatched Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to Cairo to affirm continued unconditional aid. Similarly, Secretary of State Clinton declared that there would be no human rights ‘conditionality’ in the close relationship between the United States and Egypt, regarding foreign aid or anything else.”
Two Kashmirs, Two Postcards, Two Reviews
The divided land of Kashmir, sandwiched between India and Pakistan, has already sparked three wars between these two nuclear powers. Yet the United States has largely ignored the region, argues FPIF columnist Conn Hallinan, because Washington wants to cement relations with New Delhi to counterbalance Beijing. “An autonomous or even independent Kashmir is not only in the interests of the 10 million or so people that inhabit one of the most beautiful—and tragic—areas of the world, it would help defuse terrorism in Pakistan and India,” Hallinan writes in Kashmir: Obama and the Vale of Tears. “For the United States to forgo this option for what can only be a temporary alliance against an emerging China is profoundly short-sighted.”
From China, meanwhile, we have a Postcard from…Shanghai that explores China’s ambivalent relationship with information. “On the one hand, China wants to facilitate the free flow of ideas,” writes FPIF contributor Josh Leon. “On the other hand, the state is desperate to control that flow. Rather than censorship alone, however, the authorities rely on obfuscation, omission, and gross simplification as more efficient means of information management.”
Twenty years ago this week, students in Albania toppled the last communist regime in Europe. In his Postcard from…Albania, FPIF contributor Fred Abrahams provides an update: “Enver Hoxha University is now Tirana University. Albanian students study Milton Friedman instead of Karl Marx, cubism instead of Socialist Realism, and U.S. foreign policy instead of Russia’s or China’s. But the revolutionary spirit of 1990 has faded in the democratic dash.”
Finally, we have two reviews: Samer Araabi reviews a new book on public diplomacy with the Muslim world by FPIF contributor R.S. Zaharna and Conn Hallinan looks at Benjamin Dangl’s new book on Latin America and the left. Both would make excellent stocking stuffers.
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