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Posted 10/4/09
DOPES, NOT ROPED
More losers get hurled, or hurl themselves, at America. Should we tremble?
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Since 9/11 the FBI has to all appearances enjoyed a remarkable string of victories against terrorism. From the Fort Dix Six and the Liberty City/Sears Tower Seven, to the Rumble in the Bronx, the Feds have served up case after neatly-wrapped case of would-be bombers whose inner sanctums had been infiltrated by the Government from the very start.
Planting informers in lead roles, then getting targets to say and do enough to satisfy the elements of a crime has become the favorite way to proceed. Agents keep watch so that no one gets hurt, and dangerous stuff like explosives (duds, of course) is only furnished at the last, carefully choreographed moment. That’s when the authorities swoop in, arrest everyone and take back their pretend bombs.
Case closed. Next!
But this time it was different. According to the New York Times, Najibullah Zazi, 24, first came to the attention of FBI analysts in late summer 2009. A native of Pakistan, Zazi emigrated to New York City in the 90’s. By 2005 he had dropped out of high school and was working a coffee cart owned by his father. In 2007 Zazi was regularly visiting Pakistan, where he entered into an arranged marriage and had two children. According to the FBI he would later admit that on his last trip, between August 2008 and January 2009, he took explosives training at an Al Qaida camp.
By then Zazi was in serious financial trouble, having so overspent his credit cards that he was forced into bankruptcy. In January 2009 he moved to Colorado and got a job driving shuttles at the Denver airport. His parents joined him in July. Thanks to store security cameras and after-the-fact interviews it’s known that in August he and possibly as many as three associates ran around Aurora beauty supply stores buying products whose ingredients were in a bomb-making recipe that FBI agents later found in Zazi’s laptop.
When Zazi suddenly packed up a rental car on September 9, 2009 the FBI didn’t know of these purchases, nor that Zazi had unsuccessfully tried to refine his concoctions in an Aurora motel room. Still, agents must have been aware of his overseas trips. And if Zazi’s e-mail and cell phone were already being monitored, as documents filed in the case suggest, they would have also known that he had been in touch with an unidentified person to determine the “correct mixtures of ingredients to make explosives.”
FBI agents tailed Zazi to New York City, where he arrived on September 10. As they still lacked an insider, information was frustratingly sketchy. Fearing the worst, NYPD anti-terror detectives working with the FBI apparently took it on themselves to ask an Imam who knew Zazi to help. Police also stopped and searched Zazi’s car as he entered New York. To help FBI agents execute a “sneak and peek” search warrant they later towed the vehicle under pretext. Inside was a laptop that contained detailed bomb-making instructions and a browsing history suggesting that Zazi was looking to buy more chemicals.
Zazi was decidedly no genius. Still, when the Imam tipped him off that police were asking questions he flew back to Denver and stripped the laptop of its hard drive. Realizing that the jig was up, the FBI emerged from the shadows. Agents interviewed Zazi for two days. Although Zazi insisted that the reason for the trip was to meet with the person who was operating his father’s coffee cart, he supposedly admitted training at an Al Qaida camp. Zazi stopped cooperating on the third day, leading the FBI to arrest him, his father and the Imam for lying to federal agents. Zazi was later indicted for conspiring to set off weapons of mass destruction. As of this writing none of his supposed helpers, an essential part of a conspiracy case, have been named.
In a New York Times analysis entitled “Terror Case is Called the Most Serious in Years,” Karen J. Greenberg, executive director of NYU’s Center on Law and Security trumpeted the Zazi case as being “real scary...the case the government kept claiming it had but never did.” Other skeptics of past FBI counter-terrorism investigations agree. To be sure, this wasn’t the usual FBI rope-a-dope. There was no informer or undercover agent calling the shots. But neither is it comparable to 9/11, the Madrid Bombings or the more recent event in Bombay, which involved cadres of well-trained, highly disciplined terrorists. Poorly educated, bankrupt and holding down a menial job, Zazi was so marginal a figure that even he must have known it.
Of course even hopeless bumblers must be stopped. Zazi likely had associates; according to MSNBC, three New York City men who reportedly helped him buy chemicals in Aurora are under watch. Had the FBI been able to keep the investigation under wraps Zazi and his friends, if any, might have eventually succeeded in mixing a lethal cocktail. They could have also blown themselves up or hurt others while trying.
Still, we should be wary of elevating hopeless bumblers to the top of the threat pyramid simply because the Government didn’t induce them to act. If this ring of incompetents exists, calling it a major threat is a stretch. Even if an Al Qaida connection holds, it’s likely just another attempt to hurl as many losers at America as possible, hoping that one will succeed. In any event, the Zazi episode amply demonstrates the difficulty of building a traditional criminal case against terrorists while maintaining a reasonable assurance that things won’t literally blow up in one’s face. It’s far, far more challenging than roping in dopes. Not incidentally, it also promises to produce far fewer “successes.”
As for major plots, we hope that the FBI’s on them, too. But what happened last week isn’t particularly reassuring. In two unrelated terrorist stings, FBI agents arrested Hosam Smadi, 19 and Michael Finton, 29 when they parked vehicles supposedly containing bombs, Smadi in the underground garage of a Dallas (Tx.) office tower, and Finton across from a Springfield (Ill.) Federal courthouse, and then tried to remotely activate the devices. Smadi was first contacted by an undercover agent trolling extremist chatrooms, while Finton was lured in by an informer. And, yes, the vehicles and bombs had been furnished by the Government.
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They Didn’t Read Police Issues Taking Bombs From Strangers The Men Who Talked Too Much Rope-a-Dope
Damned if They Do, Even if They Could Making Terrorists Making Terrorists II
UPDATES
01/10/12 A Florida man who had been telling an informer since September that he wanted to carry out terror attacks was arrested when he tried to buy explosives and machineguns from an FBI undercover agent. Sami Osmakac, 25, had been banned from local mosques for expressing views that suggested he was “mentally unbalanced.”
11/22/11 Sources say that the FBI declined to become involved in the case against Jose Pimentel, the man arrested by NYPD for conspiring to make bombs, because Federal law lacks a one-party conspiracy charge, and because agents feared that the informer may have played too large a role in getting Pimentel to make bombs.
11/21/11 Manhattan man Jose Pimentel, aka Muhammad Yusuf, was arrested by NYPD as he put the final touches on three bombs at an informer’s residence. He intended to practice on mailboxes and then go on to bomb post offices and police stations. Pimentel, 27, had been under watch for two years. No one else was involved.
11/03/11 FBI agents arrested four retired Georgia men, all in their 60’s and 70’s, for seeking to purchase ingredients to make ricin and bombs so they could wage a campaign of terror against the government. An informer passed them on to an FBI undercover agent. None have a criminal record; one had supposedly been involved with a militia.
10/26/11 FBI agents arrested twelve New York men, including five current and three retired NYPD officers for transporting counterfeit goods, stolen property and firearms including M-16 rifles from New Jersey. All items were furnished by undercover FBI agents. The investigation began when an FBI informant tried to get a traffic ticket fixed.
10/14/11 Three Muslim men were convicted on a 2009 indictment for plotting overseas terrorism and an assault on a U.S. military base in a plot hatched by Daniel Boyd, an American convert. Evidence consisted of statements made to FBI informers and weapons found at Boyd’s home. He and his two sons, who pled guilty, testified against the men.
07/19/11 Mohammed Zazi, father of Najibullah Zazi, is on trial for helping to get rid of evidence and lying to the FBI. Testifying against him is a nephew, Amanullah Zazi, who pled guilty in January 2010 to helping Najibullah. But Amanullah admitted that he himself repeatedly lied to the FBI. He is seeking a reduced sentence on his case.
06/24/11 Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif, 34, and Walli Mujahidh, 32 were arrested for plotting to attack a Seattle military recruiting station with machineguns and grenades. These items, rendered inert, were supplied by an FBI informer whom Abdul-Latif reportedly knew through a local mosque, and whom Abdul-Latif allegedly approached for help.
02/26/11 FBI agents arrested Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, 20, a Saudi community college student in Lubbock, Texas for plotting a bombing campaign. Aldawsari, a former chemical engineering major, had bomb-making supplies and notes indicating his intentions. A chemical supply company alerted police after Aldawsari ordered a quantity of phenol.
05/08/11 In Philadelphia, where as elsewhere the FBI mission has shifted away from public corruption and other traditional casework to terrorism, some agents say they’re happy with the change. Others are critical, accusing the bureau of “chasing ghosts, ” making mountains out of molehills and allowing its core competencies to decay.
12/11/10 In an address to Muslim groups, Attorney General Eric Holder called FBI undercover tactics an “essential law enforcement tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks” and denied they amounted to entrapment. He said those who disagree “simply do not have their facts straight.”
12/08/10 FBI agents arrested a Baltimore man after he planted a fake bomb outside a military recruitment center. Antonio Martinez, 21, aka Muhammad Hussain, got the device from undercover agents. Martinez was obsessed with Jihad and posted threats on his Facebook page. He had tried to recruit friends to join him but they turned him down.
11/27/10 FBI agents arrested Osman Mohamud, 19, a U.S. citizen born in Somalia, after he attempted to detonate an inert bomb at a Portland Christmas-tree lighting ceremony. Mohamud had been watched since 2009, when he tried to contact overseas Jihadists. He was approached by an undercover agent who later supplied the pretend bomb.
11/26/10 Prosecution of terrorist wannabes “fail the smell test” says a writer who lives in the Bronx community where the Newburgh Four planted a “bomb” given them by an FBI informer.
10/18/10 A New York City Federal jury convicted four Muslim men of plotting to bomb Bronx synagogues and bring down planes. Although there was abundant evidence that a Government informer had induced them to act, jurors apparently concluded from listening to extensive surveillance tapes that the accused had been predisposed.
10/04/10 As the trial of the four would-be Bronx bombers comes to an end, defense lawyers are claiming that they were entrapped. But a prosecutor disagreed. “The government is allowed to walk up to a complete stranger and say, ‘Do you want to do this horrible thing?’ — without any information of who that person is or what they are like. And if they say, ‘Yes, I do,’ and that’s it, and they do it, they were not entrapped.” (See 6/17 entry)
09/21/10 FBI agents arrested Chicago resident Sami Hassoun, 22, after watching him deposit an inert bomb in a garbage can near Wrigley Field. Hassoun, who allegedly wanted to commit a terrorist act, got the bomb from an FBI informer who befriended him 18 months ago and gave him $2,700 to quit his job and devote himself to the plot.
09/05/10 Audio recordings reveal that government informer Shahed Hussain implored James Cromitie, the principal defendant in the Bronx plot (see 6/17 entry below) to recruit helpers and go through with the bombing even as Cromitie voiced reluctance to go on.
08/02/10 A Federal jury convicted two Guyanese men of scheming to blow up fuel tanks and lines at Kennedy airport and in New York City. A government informant infiltrated the bizarre, probably unworkable plot three years ago. Two other men have pled guilty in the case and one awaits trial.
07/07/10 Adnan G. el-Shukrijumah, an FBI fugitive and top Al Qaeda figure and three others were indicted in the subway plot. Only one of the men, Abid Naseer, is in custody, by British authorities in connection with a foiled terrorist attack in Birmingham, England.
06/17/10 Trial of the four men who were caught planting informer-provided “bombs” at two Bronx synagogues was delayed by a judge who chided the Feds for withholding information that they reassured an alleged target of the wide-ranging plot that nothing could happen without the informer.
04/23/10 Zarein Ahmedzay pled guilty to plotting to suicide-bomb the NY subways. He said that he, Zazi and a third man met with Al Qaeda in Pakistan where they received bomb-making training.
04/15/10 Imam Ahmad Afzali pled guilty to lying to the FBI about tipping off Zazi, but said he had only been trying to help. He was spared jail time but ordered to leave the U.S. or be deported.
02/26/10 Federal authorities charged Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay with plotting to help would-be terrorist Najibullah Zazi detonate liquid explosives on NYC subways during rush hour. According to the Government the three were trained by Al Qaeda during a 2008 trip to Pakistan.
02/22/10 Najibullah Zazi pled guilty in Federal court to conspiring to set off devices in the subway to mark the 9/11 attack.
01/19/10 FBI criticized for sending informants into mosques to “provoke” terrorist plots
01/12/10 Analyzing ten terror plots against the U.S. in 2009, the New York Times called them either “amateurish” or the handiwork of FBI informants.
01/08/10 FBI arrests Zazi friends Ahmedzay and Medunjanin, the latter after he got into an automobile accident while being surveilled by the terrorist task force. Agents also went to his family’s residence where they served a search warrant and seized his passport.
12/07/09 Homeland Security reports increasing radicalization of U.S. Muslims. Meanwhile plans to combat the threat through education and outreach lag.
10/29/09 FBI guidelines allow agents to “proactively” investigate potential security threats without specific information. Ethnicity and religion can be a factor. Agents are prohibited from leading groups “into criminal activity that otherwise probably would not have occurred.” FBI manual
10/21/09 NYT columnist highlights rift between FBI and NYPD in Zazi case
10/12/09 Smadi, the Texas suspect, came to the U.S. in 2007 on a tourist visa and overstayed. He got a California ID card, secured employment, was briefly married and bought a 9 mm. pistol.
10/12/09 Zazi went to Pakistan with two friends, Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin. Both have been interviewed by the FBI, which is keeping them under surveillance.
10/8/09 FBI is watching Zazi friend Naiz Khan around-the-clock. It seems that the backpacks found in his apartment were part of a wholesaler’s overstock and were given away as gifts.
For prior updates see Rope-a-Dope
Posted 6/14/09
THE FACE OF EVIL
Holocaust Museum shooter part of an extensive, loosely-federated hate movement
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. It was only a matter of time until a new wacko joined Timothy McVeigh, Richard Butler, Matthew Hale and William Pierce in the racist hall of fame. On June 10, 2009 James W. von Brunn, 88, approached the main entrance of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Officer Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, helpfully opened the glass door. Von Brunn stepped inside, pulled a .22 rifle from his coat and fired.  Johns, a six-year veteran, fell mortally wounded. His colleagues instantly reacted, the explosive sounds of their return fire ricocheting inside the cavernous building and sending visitors scurrying for cover. Von Brunn was struck in the head and at this writing remains in critical condition.
Although von Brunn isn’t a household name in extremist circles he is known to Federal law enforcement. In 1981 he burst into the Federal Reserve packing a revolver and sawed-off shotgun inside a trench coat. Intending to “arrest” the Fed’s members for violating the Constitution, America’s self-anointed savior was captured without incident in the room next to where the Board was meeting. He served six and one-half years in Federal prison. (To read his grandiose account of what happened click here.)
Von Brunn’s homepage and biography (links are to archived versions) describe him as a decorated WW-II Navy man. There’s a letter of reference from the late Rear Admiral John G. Crommelin, another far-right zealot, who fawned that von Brunn “deserves the gratitude and assistance of every White Christian citizen of these United States.” While imprisoned von Brunn wrote a plea to the Secretary of the Navy in which he accused the Fed of furthering a Marxist/Jewish conspiracy to subjugate the chosen race. He never got a response.
Von Brunn’s inspiration is a white supremacist ideology that dates back to the founding of the Ku Klux Klan. At its core is the conviction that by natural law European Christians are the master race, but that our government has been co-opted by rich Jews, blacks, immigrants and mongrels to whose whims everyone else must cater. In effect, von Brunn and his ilk aren’t bigots: they’re victims.
Adherents of this hateful philosophy have taken different paths to resistance. Some, including the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations, Waco’s messianic Branch Davidians and the similarly oriented Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord (CSA) built compounds where members and their families lived apart from conventional society. Inevitably, their activities brought them into conflict with authorities. In the early 1980’s members of an Aryan Nations splinter group known as “The Order” staged a series of bank robberies, culminating in a wild shootout with the FBI. In 1998 Aryan Nations security guard Buford Furrow went on a spree, wounding several persons at a Jewish center and killing an Asian letter carrier. A racial harassment lawsuit ultimately led to the organization’s bankruptcy and the sale of their property.
During the 1980’s the Branch Davidians, in Texas, and the CSA, in Arkansas, acquired large quantities of illegal weapons and waited for the apocalypse. Federal agents neutralized the CSA in a 1985 raid that passed without major incident. However, a 1993 attempt to replicate that success with the Branch Davidians led to the shooting death of four ATF agents. Eighty-two members of the sect, including twenty children, later died in a fire that the Feds insist was purposely set by the sect.
After that tragedy authorities took a more measured approach. Three years later, in perhaps the last standoff of any size, twenty members of a tax-resistance group called the “Montana Freemen” holed up in their compound for nearly three months while dodging Federal tax and fraud warrants. Instead of sending in SWAT teams the FBI quietly waited them out, and in the end all peacefully surrendered.
Supremacist groups have remained mostly quiet during the past decade. That’s not to say that everything’s been rosy. Since Timothy McVeigh’s murderous 1995 attack on the Oklahoma City Federal Building, which cost 168 innocent lives, deranged, gun-wielding loners with a victimhood complex have staged a number of mini-massacres at malls, universities and other public places. Most recently, three Pittsburgh (Penn.) police officers were killed and a fourth was wounded by a fanatic who complained about “the Obama gun ban that's on the way.”
With the election of a black liberal as President, observers from the left and, surprisingly, a famous TV news anchor from the right have expressed concern that overheated conservative rhetoric has legitimized hate, energized the radical fringe and set the stage for even more mayhem.
Coming on the heels of the murder of a physician at a Kansas abortion clinic, von Brunn’s murderous act is raising new fears that a resurgence of extremist violence is in the works. We’ll soon know whether that’s true.
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RELATED PUBLICATIONS
Guns and Hate, a Brady Center monograph on domestic hate movements (July 2009)
RELATED POSTS
Is This What the Framers Intended? Don’t Blame the NRA Disturbed Person Looking Beyond the Gun Barrel
UPDATES
07/06/10 U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum establishes Stephen Tyrone Johns Summer Youth Leadership Program in the officer’s honor.
04/20/10 In 1963 a man complained that von Brunn threatened to kill him over an unpaid bill. von Brunn agreed he called the man but denied making a death threat. He wasn’t prosecuted.
01/06/10 von Brunn, who was suffering from chronic illnesses, died in a Federal prison hospital
Posted 5/24/09
ROPE-A-DOPE
Now that five “Liberty City” plotters stand convicted, should we feel safer?
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. “This wasn't so much a case of the FBI interrupting an ongoing terror plot, but of the agency providing a blueprint for it.” So said the editorial board of the Miami Herald.
“We identified and disrupted a terrorist threat, and as a result our community and nation are a much safer place.” So said Jonathan Solomon, special agent in charge of the FBI office in Miami.
Which account is the more accurate? Two weeks after five Liberty City (Miami) residents were convicted of plotting to bomb the Miami FBI office and the Chicago Sears Tower, the truth remains elusive. With trials in November 2007 and April 2008 ending in hung juries (one defendant was acquitted at the end of the first trial, another at the most recent) things seem a lot less certain than three years ago, when Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced the dismantling of a home-grown terrorist cell that intended to wage a “full ground war against the United States.”
It all began when a snitch told the FBI that the head of a tiny Muslim sect in the impoverished “Liberty City” area of Miami was ranting against the Government. During the next few months the original stoolie and a second informer posing as an Al Qaeda representative encouraged Narseal Batiste and his followers to talk trash about the U.S.
As the indictment attests, Batiste, who once lived in Chicago, was recorded saying that he wanted to blow up the city’s famed landmark, the 108-floor Sears Tower. In another taped event an informer led Batiste and his motley crew (the indictment referred to them as “soldiers”) in pledging allegiance to Al Qaeda, a ritual that was offered to jurors as proof positive of the cabal’s dastardly intentions. Prompted for a wish list, Batiste requested radios, guns, boots, weapons, a camera and $50,000 cash (he got boots and the camera.) He and an underling then drove around Miami in a van rented by the FBI and photographed Federal offices they supposedly intended to bomb.
Batiste would later testify that he only cased the buildings to collect the 50 G’s. Whatever his intentions, taking the pictures was the overt act that agents and prosecutors had been waiting for. On June 22, 2006 Batiste and six followers (the indictment ominously called them “soldiers”) were arrested for conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and to destroy buildings with explosives, charges that could bring terms of as much as fifty years.
That’s when a funny thing happened. During a press conference Assistant FBI Director John Pistole let slip that the plot was “more aspirational than operational.” His candid comment, which probably caused much heartburn at the Hoover building, reflected the undeniable fact that the case against the men was awfully thin. No evidence of any kind -- neither weapons, terrorist plans nor bomb manuals -- was recovered from the forlorn warehouse that served as the alleged terrorist lair. What there was lots and lots of chatter, much of it prompted by informers who were reportedly paid more than $100,000 to help bring the motley group within reach of the law.
MSNBC Video Report on Arrests
Considering all that it’s no surprise that juries revolted twice. Jeffrey Agron, a lawyer and foreman at the first trial said that jurors felt the first informant lacked credibility, and that the second led the defendants on. “It's a case where a government informant got a bunch of guys together to swear a loyalty oath to Al Qaeda,” he said. “It's a B movie really, more than a criminal case.”
Yet like everyone in Hollywood knows, given a large enough ad budget even a lousy movie can succeed. After taking “three bites of the apple” and spending millions the Feds finally managed to tailor a case that stuck. Or mostly stuck. A third mistrial was avoided when the judge expelled a juror whom the others accused of refusing to deliberate. Whether she was uncooperative or a victim of bullying will surely come up on appeal.
Domestic Jihad, virtually unknown before 9/11, has become a growth industry. Fortunately, our homegrown terrorists seem to lack the leadership skills, ideas and physical and material means to act on their own. With always an informer to track the shenanigans, remarkably not a single plot has slipped through to completion. In the most recent example, which occurred only days ago in the Bronx, four ex-cons got caught planting what they thought were real bombs at two synagogues. They reportedly got the devices (and one supposes, the notion) from Shahed Hussain, an experienced FBI informer. Until the rumble in the Bronx the smooth-talking ex-con’s claim to fame was the Albany, New York “pizza shop” sting of 2004, where he got two Muslim men targeted by the FBI to help him in a bizarre, wholly made-up money laundering scheme that defense lawyers fruitlessly challenged as an outrageous example of entrapment.
It’s hard to feel sorry for those who harbor radical fantasies. Still, as the writer well knows, there’s a big difference between infiltrating an active criminal organization and trolling for naive opportunists. Many believe that the collapse of the Twin Towers led to a like collapse in the values and precepts that make the American system of justice special. Of course, we should worry when the government acts as a provocateur. And it’s not only a moral concern. As we’ve pointed out in earlier posts manipulating dopes and staging show trials promotes an illusion of safety while distracting agencies from doing the hard work that’s necessary to uncover real threats.
Where the Feds once led the charge for higher standards, it seems that they’re now leading the race to the cellar. It’s not the terrorists’ character that we ought to be worrying about.
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RELATED REPORTS
NYU “Targeted and Entrapped” Report
RELATED POSTS
Dopes, Not Roped They Didn’t Read Police Issues Taking Bombs From Strangers
The Men Who Talked Too Much If You Can’t Find a Terrorist, Make One! Damned if They Do, Even if They Could
UPDATES
For more recent updates see Dopes, Not Roped
09/26/09 In two unrelated terrorist stings, FBI agents arrested a Texas man and an Illinois man for planting vehicles they thought contained bombs in an office tower and near a Federal courthouse.
07/13/09 Feature article claims that Bronx plot was FBI informer’s doing
Posted 5/3/09
TORTURE: WHO DECIDES?
The real dilemma’s not about using torture -- it’s about authorizing it
By Julius (Jay) Wachtel. Where did “enhanced interrogation” techniques come from? No, they’re not an outgrowth of the 3D experiments (“debility-dependence-dread state”) that the C.I.A. commissioned during the Cold War. Neither did they originate with SERE, the program that prepares special ops troops for those nasty “we have ways to make you talk” methods that made North Korean interrogators famous. Nope, for the real scoop we must turn to...Hollywood!
A vicious criminal buried a comely teen alive and abandoned her to suffocate. After the requisite number of chases and shootouts Inspector Callahan caught up with the kidnapper. There was no time to argue. Where is she?
While “Dirty Harry” has its comic-strip moments much of it rings true. Its depiction of the kidnapping seems nearly prophetic. In 2002 real German police arrested the abductor of an 11-year old boy when he tried to pick up the ransom. But the man stubbornly refused to help officers find the child. After hours of fruitless questioning Frankfurt’s deputy police chief bluntly warned him that if he didn’t cooperate a “specialist” would be summoned to inflict unbearable pain. Although the ruse worked, it failed to save the victim: his body was found in a lake, swathed in plastic.
Scorpio’s victim also turned up dead. But unlike the German cop, who was relieved of duty and investigated for merely threatening torture, Inspector Callahan, who really did it (on screen) got off scot-free. Well, there were sequels to be filmed!
Dirty Harry’s actions stirred spirited debate in the halls of academe. In his classic essay “The Dirty Harry Problem,” criminologist Carl Klockars used what the Inspector did to explore the means-end dilemmas that real cops encounter. But long before the movie hit theaters a string of Supreme Court decisions had already made it clear that anything remotely smacking of torture would make whatever the police got inadmissible in court:
- Rochin v. California (1953): Officers choked a suspect who was swallowing pills, and when they couldn’t get him to stop had his stomach pumped out. (In this landmark case the Court ruled that police behavior which “shocks the conscience” violates the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.)
- Leyra v. Denno (1954): During a relentless interrogation a psychiatrist posing as an ordinary physician told the defendant, who was suffering from a severe sinus condition, how much better he would feel if he confessed.
- Spano v. New York (1959): The defendant confessed after a friend (a police cadet) begged him, saying that if he didn’t the cadet would get in trouble and his wife and kids would suffer.
- Rogers v. Richmond (1961): After a prolonged, fruitless interrogation officers threatened to arrest a suspect’s sick wife
- Frazier v. Cupp (1969). Officers subjected a defendant to a grueling 36-hour interrogation.
Next thing we knew there was Abu Ghraib. Shocked by disclosures that “unlawful combatants” were being starved, deprived of sleep, forced to stand in stress positions for hours, and so forth, attorney Alan Dershowitz wrote that it was time to give the whole matter of torture a proper airing. A year later Dershowitz wrote a follow-up article suggesting that requiring interrogators to justify the necessity for “rough interrogation” techniques by securing special warrants could help assure that unsavory methods were used only when really, really necessary.
As Dershowitz is a well-known civil libertarian, his piece set off a ruckus. In “Torture: the Case for Dirty Harry and Against Alan Dershowitz” philosopher Uwe Steinhoff lauded Inspector Callahan’s instincts:
The Dirty Harry case, it seems to me, is a case of morally justified torture. But isn’t
the kidnapper right? Does not even he have rights? Yes, he has, but in these circumstances he does not have the right not to be tortured. Again, the situation is analogous to self-defence. The aggressor does not lose all of his rights, but his right to life weighs less than the innocent defender’s right to life...Harry made the right decision.
Steinhoff nonetheless warned against officially endorsing torture, reasoning that giving it legitimacy would amplify its use and coarsen the system. Agreeing with Klockars, he suggested that the best way to keep repugnant yet potentially lifesaving practices within bounds was to place would-be torturers on notice that they could be prosecuted. His moral calculus brings to mind a 1999 ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court (cited by Dershowitz) that outlawed all forms of torture but left it up to judges to forgive interrogators who thought they had no option.
In a rejoinder Dershowitz pointed out that Bill Clinton had supported using Presidential findings to authorize torture should extreme situations warrant. What neither the lawyer nor the ex-President knew was that Justice Department attorneys crafted secret guidelines so permissive that two Al Qaeda suspects wound up getting waterboarded a total of 266 times. Just as Klockars and Steinhoff feared, trying to regulate “enhanced interrogation techniques” only managed to grease an already slippery moral slope.
History tells us that crusades (think War on Terror) have led otherwise good people to endorse and engage in the most brutal and despicable behavior. Remember the Milgram experiment? It’s not surprising that when our new President realized what was happening under the Stars and Stripes he would adopt the Klockars/Steinhoff approach and ban torture altogether. It may not be a perfect solution. But in this world it’s as close to perfection as we’re likely to get.
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Stanford student grills Condoleezza Rice about torture (April 2009)
UPDATES
09/14/11 “The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda,” a new book by former FBI agent Ali H. Soufan, blames a dysfunctional intelligence community for failing to prevent 9/11. Soufan says the biggest mistake in the War on Terror was letting the CIA torture prisoners and use “brutal” interrogation techniques.
05/02/11 Bin Laden’s fate was supposedly sealed when 9/11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gave up the nickname of Bin Laden’s personal courier to interrogators. Some say that justifies Mohammed’s relentless waterboarding by the CIA. But others point out that Mohammed only passed on the information “many months” after torture ended.
10/10/10 A judge barred the testimony of a man who was to say that he sold TNT to Ahmed Ghailani, the first Gitmo detainee to be tried in Federal court. Knowledge of the witness, the judge said, came from Ghailani while he was tortured by the CIA, making his testimony inadmissible fruit of the poisoned tree. The government won’t appeal.
07/16/10 Jay Bybee, the former DOJ lawyer who co-authored memos authorizing torture with John Yoo, testified that they did not permit repeated waterboarding, a technique the CIA applied 83 times to one suspect alone. A 2004 CIA Inspector General report had also called such conduct illegal.
08/26/09 Supposedly to avoid “torturing” and comply with the law, CIA directives specified detainee treatment down to the hours that they could be kept in a box and exactly how far to go when waterboarding. Now DOJ must decide whether to prosecute agents who stepped over these lines.
08/24/09 DOJ to investigate whether CIA interrogations broke the law. Many had been reported by the CIA but were deemed unprosecutable by the Bush administration. CIA report
05/03/09 Bush officials “battled” about interrogation methods
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