Murtaza Hussain talking:
in 2007, this represented one of the most high-profile terrorism investigations in the post-9/11 era. At the time, it was reported that a group of men were planning to attack the Fort Dix military base, Albanian immigrants to the U.S. And it was trumpeted as a major uncovering of a major plot against the U.S. Chris Christie was then U.S. attorney at the time, and he was integrally responsible for prosecuting this case and generating the charges against these men.
after the Duka family went on a family vacation to the Poconos, they dropped off a video of their trip to a local Circuit City. In the video, they had done horseback riding, skiing, and they had gone to a shooting range. And they peppered their phrases with Arabic phrases, as people tend to do who are of Muslim background. The Circuit City people got alarmed by this. They reported to police. The police forwarded the tape to the FBI, and the FBI proceeded to introduce two informants into the lives of the Duka brothers.
These informants befriended them over the course of about 18 months. They recorded them. They tried to goad them into saying things. They tried to get them to commit a criminal act. And they were never successful. There was another man—not one of the Duka brothers—who went along with the informants’ plot separately, but the Dukas themselves never even knew about a Fort Dix plot. And then, in 2007, when they were arrested, they were charged with this plot to attack the base, and they ended up being convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. And they’re all still serving life today.
Mike German talking:
after 9/11, terrorism became the FBI—actually, preventing terrorism became the FBI’s number one mandate, so they transferred a lot of resources and agents to work in counterterrorism. They expanded the Joint Terrorism Task Forces and expanded the informants dedicated to counterterrorism work. And this technique—informants are not new. Law enforcement has—as long as there’s been law enforcement, there have been informants. And I did undercover work often with informants. But what has changed is this methodology.
Number one, typically, you would not use an informant who had a more serious criminal record than the subject of the investigation. That just didn’t make any sense that you would put somebody who’s a really bad person to just ensnare somebody else, when you don’t have significant evidence that that person is engaged in violent crime. So, it’s who’s being used to target who, and then the use of these techniques where the inducement and the coercion is so significant that it would not have survived muster. I mean, before 9/11, if I had asked the FBI to open an undercover terrorism investigation and told them that the person was not associated with any real terrorist group and had no weapons of their own and had no plot of their own, that that was all part of the operation, they would have probably sent me to psych counseling.
Murtaza Hussain talking:
And that was exactly the case in the Fort Dix case. There was no terrorist group. There was no plot to speak of. And there were no weapons, until the informant was introduced in the lives of these men.
Chris Christie was the U.S. attorney at the time of this case, and he was responsible for prosecuting the case. And in that clip you just saw, he gave this very incendiary press conference where he trumpeted these arrests in the immediate aftermath. For Christie, now governor, this case was huge to his career. He still discusses it to this day. He cites it as an example of defeating terrorism on his watch, when, in reality, the facts of the case are very troubling. It was a very dubious investigation and a very aggressive and malicious prosecution, which resulted in sending a number of men who may well have been completely innocent to jail for the rest of their lives.
we don’t know what Chris Christie knew at the beginning of this case, but as the trial started to develop, it became very clear that there was not—there was a very glaring absence of evidence against the Duka brothers in this case. And this was even acknowledged at trial by the judge. During the sentencing hearing, when he delivered the sentences, he noted the lack of direct evidence and said that it did not seem to bother him nor the jury. So this is just indicative of the way, the callous—. The brothers have launched a series of appeals, which have been denied. two of the brothers are in ADX supermax. They’ve been in solitary for a number of years. In Colorado, Florence, Colorado, one of the most harsh and brutal prisons in the country, in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. They have not seen their children, nor touched them, since this happened. And their lives have been destroyed. And for what purpose?
Mike German talking:
And I think one of the things it shows is how the FBI has this concept of terrorist radicalization, that if you have these ideas, you are on a path to terrorism, so therefore it justifies using these extraordinary measures to pull you along the line, even though empirical studies do not support that theory of radicalization that the FBI holds to.
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Murtaza Hussain, reporter at The Intercept.
Mike German, fellow at NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice and former FBI agent specializing in domestic counterterrorism.
— source democracynow.org