MB Civic

Date: Monday, June 26, 2006

Commentary: Entrapment — or 9/11 redux?
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, UPI Editor at Large
WASHINGTON, June 26 (UPI) — Miami, dubbed the “capital” city of Latin America, with a population two-thirds Hispanic, is also known as the terminal for its Caribbean “Love Boats,” for sin and fun under the sun and dusk-to-dawn disco partying where salsa meets funk in one long tintamarre on the South Beach strip. Seldom mentioned in the hubbub is nearby Liberty City where the FBI believes it has uncovered the biggest plot to harm America since Sept. 11, 2001.
This reporter spent a month living in Liberty City while researching a book on urban terrorism following the infamous race riots that killed 18 and caused $100 million in damage in 1980. Three days and nights of mayhem followed an unpopular verdict in a case of white-on-black police brutality. 1980 was also the year of Castro’s infamous Mariel boatlift that emptied his prisons and brought 125,000 unskilled workers to Miami.
Bounded to the north by Northwest 79th Street, to the west by Northwest 27th Avenue, the south by Northwest 46th Street, and to the east by Interstate 95, the rundown, poverty-plagued Liberty City is home to half a million blacks. It produced a plethora of rap stars ranging from Luke of 2 Live Crew to Trick Daddy, Jacki-O and Fred from Da Band. Within the area is a yet more deprived zone known as Little Haiti. Many of its unemployed youth have served time for possession.
Five of the seven blacks accused of conspiring to unleash a full ground war against targets in America had previous arrest records for assault, drug and weapons charges. The motley gang of losers now found themselves accused of an al-Qaida-type conspiracy in “support of a foreign terrorist organization… to destroy buildings by the use of explosives…”
The indictment stretched credulity. It had all the earmarks of an overzealous FBI informant creating crime by conditioning impressionable poor blacks looking for a cause against a system they had grown to hate. It’s not rocket science to understand what produces the self-hating American syndrome among some blacks who constitute more than a third of America’s 2.2 million prisoners, the largest per capita incarcerated in Western democracies.
Sixty percent of all drug offenders are black. In nine U.S. states, simple possession accounted for 50 percent of all drug offenders. State and federal prisons are often a horrific experience for young blacks who get raped repeatedly by older convicts. One-third of the entire black population of some 30 million will pass through the criminal justice system at one point in their lives. Katrina’s thousands of black victims huddling in the New Orleans arena without food or water were a grim reminder of an underclass that is not enamored of an administration that can spend almost half a trillion dollars on a war of choice disapproved by 60 percent of Americans.
That a black man or woman identifies with Islam is hardly surprising since one-third of six million American Muslims are black. The FBI has been under great pressure to uncover at home what is known to exist in Canada, Britain and most European countries. Home-grown terrorist cells do not take orders from al-Qaida central, but become motivated by pro-al-Qaida Web sites that teach everything there is to know about making explosives and all manner of terrorist and guerrilla operations. There were an estimated 15 such sites before 9/11. The number is now pushing 5,000, well larded with peonage for Osama bin Laden and Islamist extremism.
Since 9/11, the FBI has been plagued not only by costly computer interface glitches, but also by a shortage of agents who could speak Arabic or Urdu. Militant mosques had been located to not much avail. What once transpired in some militant mosques is now conducted on the Internet. While al-Qaida cells undoubtedly exist in the United States, there are certainly far fewer than in Europe where Muslim minorities stick to their deprived suburbs on the edge of major cities. In America, immigrant families from the Middle East, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia are to a large degree integrated, Americanized and successful.
The leader of the Liberty City gang, Narseal “Prince Marina” Batiste, 32, is the man who established contact with the FBI informant who convinced him he was the real McCoy from al-Qaida. After that, it does not take an overwhelming effort of imagination to see how the others were mightily impressed and swore “bayat,” or an oath of loyalty to the al-Qaida operative, and then hatched plans to form an Islamic army in Liberty City that would unleash a full ground war against American targets, including Chicago’s 110-story Sears Tower, America’s tallest building, and the world’s third tallest, and Miami’s federal building (where the FBI is located).
The wannabe bush league terrorists — five U.S. citizens, one legal Haitian and one Haitian illegal — told their new al-Qaida leader they needed boots, uniforms, guns, radios, vehicles and $50,000.
To prove his al-Qaida bona fides, the FBI informant supplied the seven with five pairs of army boots, a small digital camera, a cell phone, $3,500 sans explosives or weapons. That should have raised the alarm among the seven that their al-Qaida guru didn’t swing much weight among his superiors. But they soldiered on for “Allah” until their arrest last week.
Mercifully, the FBI’s Deputy Director John Pistole conceded the pseudo-al-Qaida gang’s plans were “more inspirational than operational.” Without the FBI informant, it would have been more fantasy than inspiration. If counter-terrorism operations are to include all those fantasizing about doing harm to America, several new prisons will have to be built.

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Copyright 2006 by United Press International.
All rights reserved.
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