On Nov. 4, 2010, a small cell of al-Qaeda operatives convened at a Starbucks in Corvallis, Oregon, to review the details of their plot to kill 25,000 people in downtown Portland. The cell had three members: Hussein, an explosives expert; Youssef, a businessman turned jihadi recruiter; and Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-American college student.
The would-be terrorists had met earlier that year, after one of Mohamud’s friends from the mosque recommended him to the Council, a secret jihadi organization that scoured the globe for potential operators. Hussein and Youssef flew to Oregon to meet the teen, whom they called “a jewel in the rough.” Together, the three conceived a plot to detonate an 1,800-pound bomb during Portland’s Christmas tree lighting ceremony, a yearly Black Friday tradition in Pioneer Square, the city’s main plaza. Mohamud chose the target. Hussein and Youssef designed and built the bomb.
It was time for a test run. After meeting at the coffee shop, the group drove to a remote spot in the countryside. There, Hussein showed Mohamud a smaller version of the device: a backpack filled with three pounds of explosives. They placed the bomb in a tree and walked away. Hussein handed Mohamud a cell phone and asked him to dial a number. The teenager obeyed — and a small explosion rattled the last yellow leaves on the trees.
Later that day, the cell returned to Mohamud’s apartment in Corvallis to record his farewell video. The teenager put on a white robe, a white-and-red headdress, and a camouflage jacket. He began to read his manifesto to the camera. “For as long as you threaten our security, your people will not remain safe,” Mohamud said. “As your soldiers target our civilians, we will not fail to do so. Did you think that you could invade a Muslim land and we would not invade you?”
Two weeks later, on Nov. 26, 2010, Youssef picked up Mohamud from a friend’s house in Portland. They met with Hussein and headed to a parking spot near the Comcast building, where the operators showed Mohamud a large white van. Hussein opened the side door, revealing six 55-gallon drums filled with fertilizer. On the front seat was the detonation mechanism: a cell phone, a 9-volt battery, and a switch. The whole van smelled of diesel.
“It’s beautiful,” Mohamud said.
The three headed to a hotel in downtown Portland, where they prayed and ordered a pizza. They turned on the TV and watched the crowds march into Pioneer Square under light rain.
Around sunset, Hussein and Mohamud drove the bomb to the chosen corner. Mohamud flipped the toggle switch attached to the detonator, arming the bomb. Youssef picked up Mohamud and Hussein in a different car and drove them to Union Station. As the three left the scene, Mohamud said he thought he saw his mother heading toward the ceremony.
After dropping off Youssef at the train station, Hussein and Mohamud parked in a nearby garage. The explosives expert handed the teen a cell phone. The teenager dialed the detonator number. Nothing happened.
“Why don’t you get out of the car and try again?” Hussein said.
Mohamud did as he was told. As he pressed the last button, he heard a group of people running at him.
“Don’t move!” someone yelled.
Suddenly, Mohamud was on the ground. He could hear Hussein screaming “Allahu akbar!” — God is great — over and over again. After the third or fourth time, the 17 arresting officers started to laugh.
The bomb Mohamud had tried to detonate was fake. The test explosion was staged. There was no secret council of militant leaders seeking a gifted Somali-American teenager to wage jihad. Youssef and Hussein were undercover FBI agents.
The Black Friday non-bombing of Portland was a federal government sting, the result of a yearlong operation involving dozens of people, a secret court order, and a massive surveillance apparatus.
Mohamud's mugshot.
Multnomah County Sheriff Office via Getty Images
Mohamud went to trial three years after his arrest. (Unless otherwise stated, the facts in this article come from the voluminous public record for his criminal case, including the 2,700-page trial transcript, as well as firsthand interviews with 11 people with knowledge of the case. The FBI, the Department of Justice, and Mohamud’s attorneys declined to answer detailed questions. Mohamud did not respond to letters sent to him in prison.)
In court, Mohamud’s lawyers attempted an entrapment defense, arguing that their client never indicated he wanted to attack Portland before the FBI contacted him. The prosecution said Mohamud’s prior correspondence with two individuals suspected of working for al-Qaeda was evidence he was looking for “the right people” — and that, had the FBI not intervened, he might have found them.
The jury convicted Mohamud. A judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison.
The story could have ended there. But, months after the trial, Mohamud’s lawyers received an unexpected message from the government: At some point in the investigation, the FBI had used the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, a law known as the FAA, to access Mohamud’s communications without a particular warrant.
Mohamud is the very first defendant to potentially challenge the NSA's mass surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden before the U.S. Supreme Court.
The notification was bewildering. The government is supposed to inform defendants they have been targeted by FAA spying before they go to trial, not after. More broadly, the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution — at least as many legal experts understand it — protects citizens and those living in the U.S. from warrantless surveillance.
Today, Mohamud’s lawyers are asking the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals to overturn their client’s conviction. Their central argument is that the FBI’s use of the FAA against Mohamud violated the Constitution.
Mohamud is the very first criminal defendant to challenge the FAA before a court of appeals, which opens the door for a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court. The appeal has widespread implications: The controversial law provides the legal framework for the mass surveillance programs that Edward Snowden revealed in 2013.
“It’s not an exaggeration,” Patrick Toomey, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, told BuzzFeed News, “to say that the privacy rights of millions of Americans potentially hang in the balance of his case.”
Marc Aspinall for BuzzFeed News
The chain of events that led to Mohamud’s appeal began in 1978, when Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act, or FISA. In its original version, the law forbade the government from spying within U.S. territory, unless it could convince a special court that the investigation's targets were "agents of a foreign power.”
The law was far from perfect: The special court met in secret and approved nearly all of the government’s requests. (Of the 35,333 applications for FISA warrants filed between 1979 and 2013, only 12 were rejected outright.) Still, the act required the government to name the individuals it was targeting, specify the kind of communications it wanted to intercept, and give a timeline for the investigation — provisions that generally kept it in line with the Fourth Amendment.
Instead of targeting individuals already engaged in criminal conduct, the FBI after Sept. 11, 2001, began focusing on people who it believed could potentially become terrorists.
All of that changed after Sept. 11, 2001. Instead of treating terrorism as a crime to be solved after it happened, the government began to treat it as a disaster to be prevented. In 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order authorizing the National Security Agency to monitor every email, telephone call, and text message in which at least one party was believed to be outside the U.S. — even if everyone else in the conversation was located within the country. The administration said the NSA didn’t need any kind of warrant, from the FISA court or otherwise, because such communications counted as “foreign” rather than “domestic,” and were therefore not protected by the Fourth Amendment.
The FBI, however, faced a problem: All that monitoring of communications was turning up a lot of terrorist sympathizers, but not a lot of actual criminal activity. The bureau responded by refining one of its most controversial techniques: the sting operation. Instead of targeting individuals already engaged in criminal conduct, the FBI began focusing on people who it believed could potentially become terrorists.
Underlying many of these sting operations was a psychological doctrine — strongly challenged by several studies — known as “radicalization theory,” which held that individuals with extreme political opinions tended to look for like-minded people and eventually take violent action.
Many American Muslims believe the government uses sting operations to unfairly target their communities and that radicalization theory contributes to Islamophobia. “When people assume that one of their community members could be an informant for the government, that creates a ripple effect,” Kayse Jama, a Somali-American organizer who works in Portland, told BuzzFeed News. “They can’t trust the people at their mosque. They can’t trust anyone. They feel they can't speak freely.” Studies suggest that at least some of Jama’s fears are well-founded.
Federal courts convict nearly 90% of those of accused of terrorism, most of them through guilty pleas. This means the facts of most homegrown terrorism cases are rarely entered into the public record, which in turn means the FBI is almost never forced to argue the legality of its techniques. Mohamud’s case is one of few exceptions.
Mohamed Osman Mohamud was born on Aug. 11, 1991, in Mogadishu, Somalia. Months earlier, rebels had ousted the country’s long-standing dictator, unleashing a civil war that rages to this day. On the way to the hospital, Mohamud’s parents had to confront armed thugs. They were lucky to find a doctor who helped with the baby’s breech birth.
The family fled to America. Mohamud's father, Osman Mohamud Barre, went first, quitting his engineering professorship at Somali National University. Mohamud stayed behind, spending a year in a Kenyan refugee camp with his mother, Mariam Hassan.
The U.S. granted Barre refugee status. He settled in Hillsboro, Oregon, where he worked 13 hours a day at an Intel assembly line. By 1993, he had saved enough money to bring his family to the U.S. “They were malnourished and suffering, but they were happy,” Barre later testified at his son’s trial. “We were grateful to America.”
Barre climbed the ranks at Intel. He and Mariam had two more children. They moved to Beaverton, a prosperous suburb in southwest Portland. Mohamud devoured the Harry Potter series and became an NBA fan. He did well in school and made friends easily. “You would never see him alone,” Joshua Alinger, who befriended Mohamud in elementary school, told BuzzFeed News.
Early in high school, Mohamud became interested in religion, even as his parents became less observant. Several of his friends said many Muslim families in Beaverton felt that Mohamud exerted a positive influence. “Whenever we tried to do something that went against our religion, like date a girl, [Mohamud] was like a stopping point,” Mohamud’s best friend, who is not identified in the public record and who spoke on condition of anonymity, told BuzzFeed News. “He would just give us that look.”
Mohamud also joined in the hijinks of American adolescence. By junior year, he began skipping school. His best friend said the two of them would sneak out to a nearby community college to play pool. They made friends with an older student, who bought them alcohol and let them hang at his house. “I think he wanted to be a normal suburban teenager,” said James Duncan, an English teacher at Westville High School who oversaw Mohamud’s study hall.
Like many refugee children, Mohamud had to deal with cultural barriers that separated him from his parents, his American friends, and his mostly white classmates. There is little question he felt different. For an issue of the class magazine, for example, Duncan asked his students to draw cartoons of themselves and caption them. Under his portrait, Mohamud wrote, “I’m the black one.”
Around the same time, Mariam and Barre began to go through a breakup, Mohamud’s best friend said. “Home was kind of a hostile environment for him,” the friend said. “He tried to spend as much time as possible out of the house.”
(Reached at her home in suburban Portland, Mohamud’s mother declined to comment, saying her son’s attorneys had instructed her not to speak to reporters. “But one day,” she said, “I’ll be able to speak out about his case, inshallah” — God willing. Mohamud’s father did not respond to requests for comment.)
Mariam Barre at her son's trial.
Rick Bowmer / AP Photo
from BuzzFeed - USNews http://ift.tt/1QFGVOC
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