Business as (un)Usual

More than two years ago — two years and two months, actually — I wrote on this blog about the breaking news story of a 19-year-old “Islamic terrorist” who had tried to detonate what he thought was a bomb in downtown Portland a few blocks from my apartment.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud attempted to explode a bomb in Pioneer Square during a Christmas tree lighting ceremony for which thousands of people from the Portland metro area had gathered. But the bomb was a harmless fake, supplied to Mohamud by the FBI, which had been assisting him for the preceding four months in the person of an undercover agent posing as an Islamic terrorist.

In custody ever since, Mohamud finally went on trial this week in federal court for the alleged attempt at a terrorist bombing. The court is also just a few blocks from the site of the alleged bombing attempt, and maybe ten blocks from my apartment. (In fact it overlooks the two parks where Occupy Portland made its encampment a little over a year ago, between Oct. 6 and Nov. 12, 2011.) As I write, the undercover FBI agent who made contact with the teenager in July 2010 is testifying about their activities between that July and his November 26 arrest.

Born in Mogadishu, Somalia, Mohamud had come to the U.S. with his family, been naturalized as a citizen, and graduated from high school in Beaverton, Oregon. His father was reported to be an engineer at Intel. The teenager started college at Oregon State University. By then a fervent Muslim, Mohamud attended services at Salman al-Farisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, but other congregants reportedly steered clear of him because the boy espoused an extreme Sunni form of Islam called Salafism, the version favored by Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders. As a frisky college teenager, however, he also is reported to have drunk alcohol, smoked marijuana, and had premarital sex with coeds; certainly, the first and third are generally understood to be strictly forbidden by the Koran and his faith.

In fact, Mohamud was the focus of a date rape complaint in the fall of 2009. Oregon State Police investigated, did not charge the boy, but called him back for a polygraph test with the FBI watching. After Mohamud gave permission for the police to search his laptop and cell phone, the police handed the contents over to the FBI. You can read about where the feds took it from there in this morning’s story in the Oregonian.

In my 2010 commentary, I offered the opinion that Mohamud had not appeared to pose any real threat, and I thought it doubtful he could have acquired the wherewithal or the know-how to concoct a bomb without the advice and support of the FBI. As reported from yesterday’s testimony by the undercover FBI agent, Mohamud initially said he dreamed of flying to Yemen and leading an army against unbelievers there. As near as I can tell, the idea of becoming an Islamic martyr back here in the U.S. was first raised by the FBI agent, as one of a range of options open to the boy.

Perhaps, given enough time, Mohamud might have connected with some real terrorists overseas and been persuaded by them into going to war against the U.S. Security officials should have followed him through that process, not led him. Had the bureau given Mohamud a looser lead (instead of placing him on a federal no-fly list in June 2010 and commencing the sting operation that ended in his arrest for the Pioneer Square fiasco), they might have tracked down more substantive anti-American Islamic forces overseas.

But that’s mere speculation. Mohamud would have had to get to Yemen or Pakistan first, and one wonders how he would have done that, given that he couldn’t even keep up the rental payments for his apartment in Corvallis (which the FBI also covered for a while, to the tune of $2,700). In my November 2010 commentary, I wondered why the FBI hadn’t simply contacted Mohamud’s U.S.-loving parents. They might have jerked him into line at much less fuss and cost.

Willamette Week has excerpted an upcoming book by Trevor Aaronson, The Terror Factory, which discusses the Mohamud case and other FBI terrorism stings that follow a disturbing pattern. Crucial taped interviews with subjects of FBI terrorism stings regularly turn up missing, so that court testimony depends solely on the word of the undercover agent and FBI informants. We know they never lie. Despite these gaping holes, federal courts and juries almost never side with defendants in terrorism prosecutions, probably on the theory of “better safe than sorry.”

Federal prosecutors in the Mohamud case spent a good portion of last November trying to get the court to okay their use of the term “terrorist” during trial proceedings. In the eyes of this lay person, they wanted to act as if their case against the defendant had already been made while they were trying to make it. Does the desire to commit a terrorist act make you a terrorist? If so, then the desire to have sex with a woman you don’t know makes you a rapist. I had to regard the prosecution’s efforts in this respect as a sign of the weakness of their case.

An underlying theme of my November 27, 2010 piece, which seems to be supported by the excerpt from Aaronson’s book in Willamette Week, is that the FBI went overboard in trying to justify its massive expenditures of U.S. taxpayer dollars by making terrorist threats seem more widespread and dangerous than they possibly really are. In other words, the FBI is in business to keep itself in business. That’s why they didn’t opt for the cheap and simple solution of contacting Mohamud’s parents.

Going for expensive solutions in order to justify one’s continued existence is not unusual for any organization, private sector or public. Before I met her, my wife worked for a government agency; she saw a lot of duplication and waste in her department’s activities, so she bid many of them out to the private sector, refused to fill positions that became vacant, and all but did away with her own position before leaving government. I think anyone would agree that that’s the performance of a true public servant. But of course it all came creeping back after she left, because many government managers don’t think that way.

 

This tendency may be even worse with national security agencies like the FBI, the CIA, and, well, the National Security Agency. Since a portion or all of their activities and budgets are kept secret from the public and even from many of the elected officials who vote on these agencies’ budgets, they’re apt to get away with a lot more. If they’re lying about some of the things they do — how large or small the threats to national security may be, and how they establish this — who’s to know?

I wonder about the state of mind of young Mohamed Osman Mohamud today. Have the two years he’s spent in prison, during a formative period when nearly all of us believe and do stupid things we eventually learn to regret, made him rethink who his friends and enemies are? Or has he only hardened in his Islamic beliefs?

From all reports, the odds are not very good that Mohamud will live to see his freedom and perhaps even the error of his ways. I have a feeling that will turn out to have been a shame and a waste.