Excellent article in the NYT.
Shahawar Matin Siraj first met the older man late in the summer of 2003. He would see him at the mosque in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, sobbing loudly during prayers and hovering near the imam. But when the man entered the bookstore nearby, where Siraj worked, he was warm and easygoing. He said his name was Osama Eldawoody, and the two men struck up an unlikely friendship.
Siraj, at 21, had a hulking build and a tendency to ramble when he spoke. He usually lingered around the store with friends from the neighborhood, talking about Islam and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had difficulty grasping new ideas and would need them explained multiple times, but in front of his friends, he pretended to know more than he did. Eldawoody was the son of an Egyptian religious scholar and said he studied nuclear engineering. He was knowledgeable about the world and had a flair about him, gesticulating excitedly as he spoke. To Siraj’s delight, Eldawoody took an interest in him, encouraging him to pursue his interest in computers. Never before had someone this sophisticated, an adult more than twice his age, taken him so seriously.
Siraj was quietly pleased when Eldawoody started offering him rides after work. The young man listened as his friend counseled him on personal responsibility and the Prophet’s sayings. Over the months, Siraj found himself pouring his heart out to Eldawoody, about his financial woes and about Mano, the woman in Pakistan he had met online; he hoped to marry her soon. He was distraught when Eldawoody confided that he was suffering from a liver disease and worried that it was potentially fatal. Siraj promised to care for Eldawoody’s daughter if anything happened to him and began telling him, in his broken English, “I am like your son.”
Slowly, their conversations took on a darker edge. Eldawoody complained to Siraj that the F.B.I. was harassing him, maybe because he was a Muslim who knew about nuclear engineering. They discussed the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and online images of Muslims being tortured and killed in the wars overseas. When Siraj saw a picture of a girl who was raped, he broke down and cried. Eldawoody seemed to share his friend’s anger. Something had to be done, something that would get the world to pay attention.
Then, before Siraj knew it, it was no longer idle talk. On Aug. 21, the three men visited Herald Square and made drawings that Eldawoody kept. But Siraj was starting to have doubts: The station was a busy one and never empty. What if a child got hurt? What if someone died because of him? Siraj liked to talk tough, but this was different. Eldawoody appeared to be serious.
...
Four days after the car ride, Siraj got a call from the Police Department, asking him to come to a station in Bay Ridge to discuss his misdemeanor charge. He set off from the bookstore around 3 p.m., when, without warning, he was surrounded by three unmarked cars. A gun was pointed at his head, and his hands were cuffed. An hour later, he was sitting in an office in Lower Manhattan, panicking. He asked to call his mom but was not allowed to. A six-foot table separated him and an N.Y.P.D. officer, an N.Y.P.D. intelligence detective, an F.B.I. agent and two federal prosecutors. Siraj learned that he was under arrest on suspicion of conspiring to blow up the Herald Square subway station. His friend, Eldawoody, was an informant.
That night, the department started carrying out another series of arrests, rounding up hundreds of demonstrators who had been gathering ahead of the Republican National Convention, scheduled to start in three days at Madison Square Garden, to protest the Bush administration’s wars. Officers had been monitoring activist groups for weeks and justified the measures by invoking the specter of terrorism. As the arrests continued, the department focused the media’s attention on the plot they had recently foiled just a block away from the convention, at Herald Square. The police said they were forced to arrest Siraj and Elshafay before they slipped surveillance and took action. “It was clear that they had an intention to cause damage to kill people,” Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said in a news conference broadcast live on CNN. The motive, he stated, was “hatred for America.” When a reporter asked if there was any entrapment involved in the arrest, Kelly rejected the idea flatly. “Entrapment?” he replied. “No, not that I see.”
In the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, government officials pointed to the absence of a major attack as evidence of the success of counterterrorism strategies. But in some respects, the government’s counterterrorism policy may be manufacturing the very threat it was meant to confront. “You’re trying to get people before they commit a crime,” said David Cole, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “And if you’re doing that, you’re going to end up locking up a lot of people who probably would have never ended up committing a real crime. Who knows whether any of these people would have engaged in a terrorist act? I don’t know, you don’t know, the courts don’t know, the government doesn’t know. But as a result, the courts tend to be very deferential, because they buy into the notion ‘Better safe than sorry.’”
As a growing number of Muslims went to prison on terrorism-related charges, the arrests themselves became evidence of a larger threat. Siraj was not affiliated with any terrorist group, but for government agencies and the news media, his case was proof of the need for greater vigilance; experts pointed to Siraj in studies about radicalization. In 2007, two N.Y.P.D. intelligence analysts prepared a report for policymakers and law enforcement, detailing how the Islamic bookstore in Bay Ridge became “an extremist incubator” for Siraj and Elshafay “as they progressed through the stages of radicalization.” Speaking at a congressional hearing in New York in 2008, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the Herald Square bombing plot proved that the N.Y.P.D.’s intelligence and counterterrorism bureaus were “crucial elements in the global fight against terrorism.”
Today there has been little accounting from policymakers of whether these measures have made us any safer; instead, the rise in domestic-terrorism incidents is inciting calls to further broaden the government’s counterterrorism apparatus. In 2017, the Government Accountability Office reported the number of “violent extremist” attacks on American soil that resulted in death. From Sept. 12, 2001, to the end of 2016, 23 such attacks were carried out by “radical Islamist violent extremists”; 62 were carried out by “far-right-wing violent extremist groups.”
For the past several years, the F.B.I. has stated that it is concerned about domestic-extremist movements driven by “perceptions of government or law-enforcement overreach, sociopolitical conditions and reactions to legislative actions.” In 2019, the F.B.I. Agents Association, which represents 14,000 current and former agents, urged Congress to apply the weight of the federal government to meet the threat. The call was revived after Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol in January; the Biden administration directed the intelligence community to conduct a domestic-threat assessment and instructed the National Security Council to prioritize the issue.
But many constitutional and civil rights lawyers worry that this renewed energy to combat extremism will miss the lessons of cases like Siraj’s — that the government’s approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat. “We treat terrorism in an exceptional way,” said Shirin Sinnar, a law professor at Stanford University. “The ordinary rule of law doesn’t apply when it comes to terrorism — no ordinary oversight or democratic accountability.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/magazine/fbi-international-terrorism-informants.html
