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Trolling For Terrorists: The FBI, Undercover Instigators, Informants, and the Newburgh Four [1]

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Date: 2023-08-01  

In the case of the "Newburgh Four," for example, 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."'— from the Summary, Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions

The Associated Press recently reported that Onta Williams, David Williams and Laguerre Payen — three of the men known as the “Newburgh Four” — were “hapless, easily manipulated and penurious petty criminals” caught up more than a decade ago in a scheme driven by overzealous FBI agents and a dodgy informant, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon said in her recent ruling.

The three men who were “convicted in a post-9/11 terrorism sting have been ordered freed from prison by a judge who deemed their lengthy sentences ‘unduly harsh and unjust’ and decried the FBI’s role in radicalizing them in a plot to blow up New York synagogues and shoot down National Guard planes,” AP reported.

“The real lead conspirator was the United States,” McMahon wrote in granting the men’s request for compassionate release, effective in three months.

The fourth man, James Cromitie, wasn’t part of the compassionate release request and is expected to complete his sentence in 2030.

According to the Associated Press “Defense lawyers said a federal informant, Shaheed Hussain, tried to stir up the men with rhetoric and chose targets, offered hefty payment, bought the defendants groceries, and provided the fake bombs and missile. The defense portrayed Hussain as a self-serving manipulator trying to please the government after his own fraud conviction.”

AP reported that “Hussain worked with the FBI on other stings, including one that targeted an Albany pizza shop owner and an imam and involved a loan using money from a fictitious missile sale. Both men, who said they were tricked, were convicted of money laundering and conspiring to aid a terrorist group.”

In the HBO documentary The Newburgh Sting, filmmakers looked at the Newburgh 4 case and prolific FBI informant Shahed Hussain.

The FBI, Informants and Undercover Operatives

FBI informants and undercover operatives have been in existence since the early days of the FBI. In 1908, in light of the spread of the country westward, the US victory in the Spanish-American War, and increasing industrialization, violent crime was on the rise. “But violence was just the tip of the criminal iceberg. Corruption was rampant nationwide—especially in local politics, with crooked political machines like Tammany Hall in full flower,” according to “A Brief History: The Nation Calls 1908-1923” (https://www.fbi.gov/history/brief-history). “Big business had its share of sleaze, too, from the shoddy, even criminal, conditions in meat packaging plants and factories (as muckrakers like Upton Sinclair had so artfully exposed) to the illegal monopolies threatening to control entire industries.”

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Charles Bonaparte as his second Attorney General. By 1908, tired of obstacles put in his way from operatives of the Secret Service, Bonaparte, the grandnephew of the infamous French emperor, “ordered Department of Justice attorneys to refer most investigative matters to his Chief Examiner, Stanley W. Finch, for handling by one of these 34 agents. The new force had its mission—to conduct investigations for the Department of Justice—so that date is celebrated as the official birth of the FBI.” However, the Justice Department’s Bureau of investigation wasn’t officially named the Federal Bureau of Investigation until 1935, with J. Edgar Hoover at its helm.

In June 1940, responding to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s call for investigating domestic threats, the FBI set up a Special Intelligence Service that “deployed scores of undercover agents to ferret out Axis spy networks” (https://www.fbi.gov/history/history-of-legal-attaches).

As David H. Price writes in his book The American Surveillance State: How the U.S. Spies on Dissent, “Hoover fed on secrecy. He fetishized this hunger with the endless creation of lists and secret files filled with private details to be scurrilously used as needed at some later date. Hoover created the world’d most comprehensive pre-computer eta cross-listed filing system profiling millions of Americans. The FBI pooled information from information ranging from driminals-in-a-pinch, to ideologue members of the American Legion and other reactionary citizen groups who mailed-in informer reports based on their suspicions of coworkers, neighbors, or fellow citizens, clipped letters to the editors of local newspapers ir reported free-floating suspicions of local citizens…”

FBI’s Terror Factory

Several years ago I reviewed Trevor Aaronson's book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism (Ig Publishing, 2013). I wrote that "Aaronson found that FBI informants and undercover agents were at the center of many of the cases touted by the FBI as successes in thwarting terrorist plots. In fact, were it not for the FBI, most of those plots would likely have fallen apart under the weight of their own senselessness and ineptitude."

".... After his extensive and exhausting investigation, Aaronson found that 'the FBI has built the largest network of spies ever to exist in the United States – with ten times as many informants on the streets today [as] ... during the infamous Cointelpro operations under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover – with the majority of these spies focused on ferreting out terrorism in Muslim communities.'"

“Citing concerns for the men’s health and her own qualms about the [Newburgh Four] case, [Judge] McMahon cut the 25-year mandatory minimum sentences she imposed on them in 2011 to time served plus 90 days,” AP reported (https://apnews.com/article/newburgh-four-terrorism-sting-fbi-compassionate-release-62065491755cf80766aaab46410cdeff). “She said that would allow time for probation officials to prepare and for Payen’s lawyer to line up supportive housing for the man, who has a severe mental illness.”

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