White people can't be terrorists, Part II

A Tennessee man was indicted on Tuesday for a plot to burn down a mosque, school and cafeteria in a small, rural New York town with a large Muslim community. 

According to federal charges, 63-year-old former congressional candidate Robert Doggart advertised his plot on Facebook and tried to recruit others to join him in his mission to “cut them to shreds.” 

Despite those allegations, Doggart was released into the custody of two family members last week, which has inflamed some critics who accuse officials of ignoring threats from white supremacists and anti-government extremists...

Doggart allegedly plotted to recruit militia members to attack the small hamlet of Islamberg, N.Y. — a rural community of Muslims founded about 30 years ago.

The town “is vulnerable from many approaches and must be utterly destroyed in order to get the attention of the American People,” Doggart allegedly wrote in one Facebook post.
“We shall be Warriors who will inflict horrible numbers of casualties upon the enemies of our Nation and World Peace,” he added in another post, the Justice Department said in a complaint earlier this year.

In wiretapped conversations with an undercover source, he also allegedly planned to attack the town with an M-4 military-style assault rifle, pistol and a machete.

“And if it gets down to the machete, we will cut them to shreds,” he allegedly said in a wiretapped phone call in March.

During a meeting with the source in Nashville, Tenn., he allegedly passed along maps of the area as well as information about gun laws in New York and literature about the hamlet. 

He was arrested on April 10, though the incident failed to attract the same amount of attention as other potential terrorist plots, such as a plan to behead the organizer of a "Draw Muhammad" event earlier this year. 

As a condition of his release, Doggart was reportedly ordered to seek psychiatric treatment, stay off the Internet and be confined to his home. 

On Tuesday, a federal grand jury in Knoxville, Tenn., handed down a one-count indictment charging Doggart with soliciting another person to burn down a mosque. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.

The report is based on more than 215 interviews with people charged with or convicted of terrorism-related crimes, members of their families and their communities, criminal defense attorneys, judges, current and former federal prosecutors, government officials, academics, and other experts.

In some cases the FBI may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by suggesting the idea of taking terrorist action or encouraging the target to act. Multiple studies have found that nearly 50 percent of the federal counterterrorism convictions since September 11, 2001, resulted from informant-based cases. Almost 30 percent were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.

In the case of the “Newburgh Four,” for example, who were accused of planning to blow up synagogues and attack a US military base, 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.”

The FBI often targeted particularly vulnerable people, including those with intellectual and mental disabilities and the indigent. The government, often acting through informants, then actively developed the plot, persuading and sometimes pressuring the targets to participate, and provided the resources to carry it out.

“The US government should stop treating American Muslims as terrorists-in-waiting,” Prasow said. “The bar on entrapment in US law is so high that it’s almost impossible for a terrorism suspect to prove. Add that to law enforcement preying on the particularly vulnerable, such as those with mental or intellectual disabilities, and the very poor, and you have a recipe for rampant human rights abuses.”

Rezwan Ferdaus, for example, pled guilty to attempting to blow up a federal building and was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Although an FBI agent even told Ferdaus’ father that his son “obviously” had mental health problems, the FBI targeted him for a sting operation, sending an informant into Ferdaus’ mosque. Together, the FBI informant and Ferdaus devised a plan to attack the Pentagon and US Capitol, with the FBI providing fake weaponry and funding Ferdaus’ travel. Yet Ferdaus was mentally and physically deteriorating as the fake plot unfolded, suffering depression and seizures so bad his father quit his job to care for him.

The US has also made overly broad use of material support charges, punishing behavior that did not demonstrate an intent to support terrorism. The courts have accepted prosecutorial tactics that may violate fair trial rights, such as introducing evidence obtained by coercion, classified evidence that cannot be fairly contested, and inflammatory evidence about terrorism in which defendants played no part – and asserting government secrecy claims to limit challenges to surveillance warrants.

Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is a US citizen who alleged that he was whipped and threatened with amputation while detained without charge in Saudi Arabia – after a roundup following the 2003 bombings of Western compounds in the Saudi capital of Riyadh – until he provided a confession to Saudi interrogators that he says was false. Later, when Ali went to trial in Virginia, the judge rejected Ali’s claims of torture and admitted his confession into evidence. He was convicted of conspiracy, providing material support to terrorists, and conspiracy to assassinate the president. He received a life sentence, which he is serving in solitary confinement at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.