A report by the Human Rights Watch (HRW) that closely examined 27 cases of high-profile domestic terrorism plots in the U.S. since 9/11 has found “direct involvement” of government agents or informants, via sting operations, and this borders on “entrapment,” according to the organisation.
In its 214-page study titled >‘Illusion of Justice,’ the HRW said the U.S. government had failed to meet its international legal obligations with respect to its investigations and prosecutions of terrorism suspects, as well as its treatment of terrorism suspects in custody, and this applied specifically to American Muslim defendants investigated, tried, and convicted of terrorism or terrorism-related offences.
Underscoring in particular the aggressive investigation methods of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the HRW said that the agency “may have created terrorists out of law-abiding individuals by conducting sting operations that facilitated or invented the target’s willingness to act.”
The report cited multiple studies that showed that nearly 50 per cent of the more than 500 federal counter-terrorism convictions resulted from informant-based cases and nearly 30 per cent of those cases were sting operations, in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.
Overall, of the 494 terrorism-related since 9/11, approximately 18 per cent of convictions were thwarted not for actual terror plots but on “material support,” charges, a category “expanded further by the 2001 Patriot Act that permits prosecutors to pursue charges with tenuous connections to a terrorist act or group.”
In the case of the “Newburgh Four,” for example, where authorities arrested four Muslim men in connection with a plot to shoot down military airplanes flying out of an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, New York, and blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale community of the Bronx, 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.”
At the heart of the legal framework permitting the widespread use of sting operations is the fact that defendants in many of these cases are unable to avoid criminal liability by making a claim of entrapment because under U.S. law entrapment can only be proved if a defendant shows “both that the government induced him to commit the act in question and that he was not ‘predisposed’ to commit it.”
Yet, such a predisposition inquiry focuses attention on the defendant’s background, opinions, beliefs, and reputation, rather than on the alleged crime.
In this context, the HRW report said, “inflammatory stereotypes and highly charged characterisations of Islam and foreigners often prevail,” to the point where to date no claim of entrapment has been successful in a federal terrorism case in the country.
