|
||||||||||
|
|
Domestic war on terrorism tactics are likely unconstitutional. National Association of Muslim American Women (NAMAW) Press Release National Association of Muslim American Women (NAMAW) calls for US Department of Justice investigation into alleged terrorism case targeting synagogues and airplanes. The National Association of Muslim American Women (NAMAW) in response to FBI and NYPD allegations, and the arrests of six Muslim men who are charged with plotting to bomb synagogues and airplanes in New York, will ask the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division to initiate an investigation to determine whether or not these men were entrapped in a year long scheme that was carried out to criminalize these men in a plot that was in fact conceived, guided and facilitated by an FBI informant. This suggests to us that this was in fact an FBI plot, rather than a plot that was created and advanced by these men. According to the information released today there was neither any willful intent, nor were these men capable of carrying out such a plot without help from the FBI. We believe that this supposed conspiracy was dreamed up by
the FBI informant who coerced these men who reportedly have very limited
intellectual abilities, one who is reportedly a diagnosed paranoid
schizophrenic, to participate with him in a fake plot to blow up synagogues and
an airplane in We feel that the case, and the questions raised by this case have created a need for further investigation and we hope that the Department of Justice will agree with us. We are in the process of retaining an attorney to guide us in our pursuit of the truth and justice for these young men, who may not be guilty of anything more than mental illness, retardation, and sympathy for other Muslims. Our worse suspicion is that these men have been entrapped in
an ongoing political campaign being carried out by the FBI that is aimed at
creating the illusion that all Muslims are either terrorists or potential
terrorists, thereby substantiating the use of racial and religious profiling on
Muslims and Arabs, and the use of controversial and possibly unconstitutional "preventive"
crime techniques exclusively on Muslims and Arabs. Just as we have recently
learned that waterboarding was used against detainees at Guantanamo Bay to
coerce false confessions linking Iraq to Al Qadea, hoping to create a false
cause for war against Iraq, these types of domestic plots, arrests, and
publicity might be intended to create fear in our society of Arabs, Muslims.and
the religion of Islam. The intent might also be to create fear that might
result in a willingness on the part of citizens to surrender rights in exchange
for a false sense of safety, and to substantiate more funding for the wars in For more information contact NAMAW at: namaw01@gmail. com The National Association of Muslim American Women (NAMAW) is
the === A look at one By Doyle Murphy May 21, 2009 http://www.recordon line.com/ apps/pbcs. dll/article?
AID=/20090521/ NEWS/90521007 Hamin Rashada came down out of the building just before 4 a.m., nearly an hour after all the police and federal agents had left and just about an hour before he would have to go out again for morning prayers. A 21-year-old parolee named Laguerre Payen had lived upstairs in the rooming house on the corner of Broadway and notorious by now, his name sent round the world as one of
four Newburgh men charged in a plot to shoot down planes at Since serving a 15-month prison term for attempted assault,
Payen had bounced back and forth between So much for aggression replacement training while in prison Terror suspects liked beer, hanging out "He's a strange kid," Rashada said. "He had a lot of psychological problems." Rashada is a senior life coach with the program and was
working with Payen. He also encouraged him to attend Friday prayers at Masjid
al-Ikhlas in When Payen did come, he would try to impress other members of the mosque by spouting supposed knowledge of Islam, Rashada said. Often, he was so far off in his statements Rashada would have to correct him in front of people. Payen would go quiet then and wander off. He seemed passive to Rashada. Strange, yes, but never violent. Police and federal agents surrounded Payen's home Wednesdy night, barreled into the room and searched his possessions. For nearly five hours, they stood by the building wearing everything from green fatigues and helmets to "Joint Terrorism Task Force" jackets to FBI sweatshirts. Another group of police and agents staged a similar operation at a house just more than a mile to the west on Broadway. Rashada came to He quoted a teaching for the Koran that says a person who saves on person saves all of humanity. And a person who kills another person kills all of humanity. He said they teach that at the mosque. Payen, he said, rarely attended. - The Associated Press contributed to this report === In By MICHAEL WILSON The New York Times May 22, 2009 They were four ex-convicts — one a crack addict, another whose most recent arrest involved snatching purses — and they gathered their terror tools as they went. They bought cellphones, the authorities said; they bought a
camera in a Wal-Mart to take photographs of the synagogues in gang leader in After months of planning, the authorities allege, the men
had their first real scare this month, driving to They brought them back to These details as told by the authorities describe a
homegrown terror plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down a
military aircraft in Remarkably, vast passages of the conspiracy the federal
authorities described — the talk of killing Jews, the testing of the men's
would-be weaponry — played out on a veritable soundstage of hidden cameras and
secret microphones, and involved material provided by the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. A house in "It's hard to envision a more chilling plot," Eric
Snyder, an assistant On Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly appeared at the Riverdale Jewish Center, which the F.B.I. identified as one of the targets of the plot. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly praised the work of the agencies behind the arrests and sought to tamp down any fears of a larger terrorist organization at work. "Sadly, this is just a reminder that peace is fragile and democracy is fragile and we have to be vigilant all the time," said Mr. Bloomberg, who along with Mr. Kelly stressed that the four men had no connection to any international terror groups. "The good news is that the N.Y.P.D. and F.B.I. prevented what could have been a terrible event in our city." The case is the latest in a series in The full nature and extent of the informant's role in facilitating the plot is unknown. In other cases, defense lawyers have sought to portray these informants as engaging in entrapment, suggesting they had, in effect, provoked and fueled the actions of their clients. But where past terror prosecutions have been based mostly on conversations about a planned or imagined attack, this one went further, the authorities alleged: the men went through critical acts in what they believed to be a deadly assault. As for the defendants — James Cromitie, 44; David Williams, 28; Onta Williams, 32, and no apparent relation to David; and Laguerre Payen, 27 — most of the details that emerged on Thursday stemmed from their criminal pasts. David Williams, who lately had grown a beard and taken to
reading the Koran on slow nights at a steakhouse job, was described as
particularly violent by prosecutors on Thursday. When the plan to buy guns from
a woman in Mr. Payen, described as a nervous, quiet sort who took
medication for schizophrenia or a bi-polar disorder, was unemployed and living
in squalor in Onta Williams had been addicted to cocaine since he was a teenager, according to testimony at a 2003 court hearing. Mr. Cromitie has spent 12 years in prison, most recently for selling drugs to undercover officers behind a school. Law enforcement officials initially said the four men were Muslims, but their religious backgrounds remained uncertain Thursday. Mr. Payen reported himself to be Catholic during his 15-month prison sentence that ended in 2005, according to a state corrections official. Mr. Cromitie and Onta Williams both identified themselves as Baptists in prison records, although Mr. Cromitie changed his listed religion to Muslim upon his last two incarcerations; David Williams reported no religious affiliation. The men never served in the same prison together. Three of
them regularly lunched together at Danny's Restaurant in Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, the imam at the mosque where the authorities say the confidential informant first encountered the men, said none of the men were active in the mosque. An assistant imam, Hamin Rashada, said Mr. Cromitie and Mr. Payen occasionally attended services. Mr. Cromitie was there last June, and he met a stranger. He had no way of knowing that the stranger's path to the
mosque began in 2002, when he was arrested on federal charges of identity
theft. He was sentenced to five years' probation, and became a confidential
informant for the F.B.I. He began showing up at the mosque in The stranger's behavior aroused the imam's suspicions. He invited other worshipers to meals, and spoke of violence and jihad, so the imam said he steered clear of him. "There was just something fishy about him," Mr. Muhammad said. Members "believed he was a government agent." Mr. Muhammad said members of his congregation told him the man he believed was the informant offered at least one of them a substantial amount of money to join his "team." The informant met Mr. Cromitie, and it quickly appeared that
Mr. Cromitie was of a like mind with the apparent radical before him, according
to the complaint. Mr. Cromitie said his parents had lived in The next month, on July 3, the two men met and discussed the
terror organization Jaish-e-Mohammed, based in All of this came as a shock to Mr. Cromitie's mother after
his arrest on Wednesday. Adele Cromitie, 65, said her son was raised a
Christian, and that neither she nor his father, who left the family when Mr.
Cromitie was a young child, had lived in "When he told me that, I said, `Get out of here,' " Ms. Cromitie recalled. About six months ago, Mr. DeLeon, the restaurant owner, noticed that a new man was showing up for lunch. He was about 50 and appeared to be South Asian, and he usually paid for the group. Mr. DeLeon thought he was the boss. Beginning in October, the informant began meeting Mr.
Cromitie at a home in In December, the plan began to take shape in the On April 10, Mr. Cromitie, David Williams and the informant drove to a Wal-Mart in where Mr. Cromitie took pictures of synagogues. He said blowing up the Riverdale Jewish Center would be "a piece of cake." Several days later, the three men met again and discussed
picking up a Stinger heat-seeking missile in On the night of April 28, after figuring out where they could get a gun, the men reinforced their commitment to the plan to one another, according to the authorities. They each said they were willing to perform jihad, and Onta Williams spoke, saying the military is "killing Muslim brothers and sisters in Muslim countries, so if we kill them here with I.E.D.'s and Stingers, it is equal," according to the complaint. On May 6, the five men drove to The The men, after the brief scare about being followed,
eventually made it to The four men tested one of the detonators for the bombs,
which was to be set off with a cellphone, the compliant said. They drove the
weapons to celebrated. The five men met at the storage unit to inspect the weapons
on May 8. Twelve days later, they drove to the From: World View <ummyakoub@yahoo.com> |
|||||||||
