http://www.amny.com/ny-usinform105250715jun10,0,1568027.story
Controversy over informants' roles BY CAROL EISENBERG <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]&subject=Controversy%20over%20informants' %20roles> June 10, 2007 WASHINGTON - He is a twice-convicted drug dealer trying to avoid jail time, according to court papers. At the behest of his police handlers, who tantalized him with the prospect of a commuted sentence, the dealer befriended Russell Defreitas to investigate a tip that Defreitas might be involved in a terror plot against the United States. The dealer, identified in court papers only as the Source, was so convincing that Defreitas exclaimed that he must have been "sent by Allah" to help blow up the fuel lines at Kennedy Airport, according to the criminal complaint. By all accounts, the informant gave a masterful performance that appeared to shape the plot's development: After winning the confidence of the 63-year-old Guyanese-born U.S. citizen, the Source repeatedly drove Defreitas, who had no car or money, to conduct airport "surveillance," bought plane tickets for the two of them, as well as a third man, to fly to Trinidad last month, and trumpeted his jihadist sympathies, declaring that the greatest way for a Muslim to die was as a martyr, say court papers. All the time, he was wearing a wire and was being paid by the government. Those bold acts by a man identified in the Guyanese media as a Dominican-born U.S. citizen posing as a merchant are not unique in the shadowy world of counterterror. In many homegrown terror plots prosecuted in the United States in recent years, from Lodi, Calif., to Miami to New York City, informants posing as Islamist radicals have been key to government conspiracy cases. "You can't investigate terror cells in real time from satellites 10,000 feet in the air and ... wiretaps," said Andrew McCarthy, a former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and another foiled plot in the 1990s to blow up city landmarks. "When we have human intelligence, we can stop things before they happen." Two views The practice of enlisting unsavory players to implicate others is hardly new or unique to terror cases. It dates at least as far back as Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. More recently, informants have been a staple of organized crime and drug prosecutions. And when dealing with an insular terror cell, "sometimes, you need bad guys to catch bad guys," said Robert Bloom, a Boston College law professor and author of "Ratting: The Use and Abuse of Informants in the American Justice System." The type of individual who can penetrate a cell "isn't usually an upstanding member of society," Bloom said But critics, including civil rights and Muslim advocacy groups, say informants often act as agent provocateurs inciting their quarry, not simply investigating them. And critics fear informants have a self-interest in building cases because their compensation or reduced sentences may depend on that. That argument has even been used in defense of terror suspects - albeit with little success thus far. Martin Stoler, who represented Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 24-year-old Pakistani immigrant accused of plotting to bomb the Herald Square subway station, contended that the paid informant "created the plot." Stoler argued at last year's trial that the informant, Osama Eldawoody, had been paid by police to report on hundreds of prayer services in Brooklyn and Staten Island mosques. After Eldawoody connected with Siraj, Stoler argued that the informant stoked the young man's rage with images of Muslims abused at the hands of Americans and offered to provide him with a bomb. The jury, however, rejected the entrapment defense and Siraj was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Stoler's view: "If you're a Muslim accused of terrorism, you're cooked with a jury." But McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. attorney, argues that juries' tolerance of informants depends on the heinousness of the crime. "The jurors may come away saying, 'Look, I'm not crazy about the fact that the government was so aggressive here, but what these guys wanted to do was so atrocious that thank God, they got involved with a government informant.'" Balancing act Most prosecutors acknowledge "human intelligence," as it is called in the trade, is a tricky business. But they say they take steps to avoid being used or misled - and to counter the entrapment defense. In the alleged JFK plot, for instance, investigators corroborated information from the informant through tape recordings, surveillance, e-mails, financial documents and other records, according to the complaint. "The tapes will sing by themselves at trial," predicted McCarthy, who built his successful prosecution of the city landmark plot on such recordings. Pat D'Amuro, former FBI assistant director in New York, said the best counter to an entrapment defense is "to have the guy wired up so you can see how the conversations are taking place, and then determine what else you can do to corroborate what you're hearing." But pushing the informant to aggressively scope out the plot and potential players without acting as an instigator is a balancing act. Some Guyanese Muslims became concerned, for instance, when the informant demanded to be taken to al-Qaida operative Adnan El Shukrijumah, who holds a Guyanese passport and is on the FBI's most-wanted list. "I don't know how to take you to him, I don't even know the man, and why would I want to get involved with a terrorist?" one man told the informant, according to a source. Experts note it is legal for the government to provide money to build a case, as the FBI did when it sent agents dressed as Arab sheiks to offer bribes to officials in the ABSCAM sting of the late 1970s and early 1980s. All of which is profoundly discomfiting to government critics who fear big talkers are being miscast as jihadists. "Do you think that any of these hapless people would have gotten close to acquiring the materials they needed to execute these plots without the help of a self-interested informant?" asked Arshad Majid of Hauppauge, a defense attorney who is active in Muslim civil rights. "Just because someone is angry about government policies," he said, "doesn't mean their natural destiny is to grab an AK-47 and kill people." 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