Loose Lips

Overstating Threat of Terrorism Risks
Making Us Less Safe

AMANDA RIPLEY / Time Magazine 7jun2007

[More below]

Roslynn R. Mauskopf, United States attorney; Raymond W. Kelly, New York City police commissioner, center; and Mark J. Mershon, assistant F.B.I. director, right, after a news conference in Manhattan on Saturday.

The men charged on June 1 with plotting to blow up New York City's John F. Kennedy Airport hoped to outdo the attacks of 9/11, according to the complaint filed against them. "Anytime you hit [a] Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States," one suspect allegedly told an informant. But the men were amateurs, and the worst their plans might have achieved was not an apocalypse but a fire in a remote part of the airport. Thankfully, authorities foiled the plot before it could get smarter.

Yet when U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf announced the bust, she deployed code-red verbiage: "Had the plot been carried out, it could have resulted in unfathomable damage, deaths and destruction." It was "chilling." The devastation could have been "unthinkable."

This is how prosecutors talk, in fluent hyperbole. In their mind, the trial has already begun, and a press conference is an early chance to sway potential jurors and raise their own profile. But it's also how candidates for President talk: 9/11 Mayor Rudy Giuliani cited the J.F.K. plot as evidence that Democrats can't be trusted to keep us safe. "The Democrats want to put us in reverse to the 1990s," charged Giuliani (a former prosecutor, not coincidentally). "It's not a bumper sticker. It is a real war."

From there, the exaggerations seep into popular discourse. Reporters reinforce the rhetoric. In a question to candidates at a Democratic debate on June 3, CNN's Wolf Blitzer cited the recent arrests: "This alleged plot at J.F.K....could have done, supposedly, horrendous damage and caused an incredible number of casualties."

The problem with bombast is that it comes at a cost. The struggle against violent Islamic extremism is not a show trial. It's a long fight that requires discipline. We must balance fear with reason and weigh probability, not just possibility.

Americans have learned to sense when terrorism is being exploited for personal gain. And each time it happens, the public loses a little bit of faith. We might even begin to think that the threat is not very serious after all. That too would be a mistake. That kind of distrust and complacency would indeed be something to fear.

source: 10jun2007

Mindfully.org note:
By overstating the problem, some of these people attempt to build their own popularity and/or that of their agency, thus gaining funds. It's what George W. Bush does so well. He did it in order to start a war with Iraq and he continues to do so. New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is also no stranger to exaggeration. And while his argument against Democrats is ludicrous, it needs to be strongly emphasised that neither Democrats OR Republicans can be trusted to keep us safe. If we could trust them, there never would have been a war in Iraq in the first place. Nor would there have been one in Afghanistan or most of the places US troops have invaded over the last few decades. The US government is its own worst enemy. And unfortunately, as each day of its brutality has continued, the rest of the world clearly sees it as their worst enemy. How can this continue? These people — Mauskopf, Kelly, Mershon and Giuliani — are not stupid. See their biographies below. What makes them click? How did they get to the state of exaggeration they live in on a regular basis? And precisely how and why do they support this phony war on terrorism? By supporting the official line of the Bush administration, they secure a place in its operation and family. Perhaps their intelligence helps them to maintain the lie where unintelligent people would not be able to do so.

Papers Portray Plot as
More Talk Than Action

MICHAEL POWELL and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM / New York Times 4jun2007

The plot as painted by law enforcement officials was cataclysmic: A home-grown Islamic terrorist had in mind detonating fuel storage tanks and pipelines and setting fire to Kennedy International Airport, not to mention a substantial swath of Queens.

“Had the plot been carried out, it could have resulted in unfathomable damage, deaths and destruction,” Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the United States attorney in Brooklyn, said in a news release that announced charges against four men. She added at a news conference, “The devastation that would be caused had this plot succeeded are just unthinkable.”

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly then stepped to the lectern with a vision only a bit less grim.

“Once again, would-be terrorists have put New York City in their crosshairs,” he said. Mr. Kelly said a disaster had been averted.

But the criminal complaint filed by the federal authorities against the four defendants in the case — one of them, Abdel Nur, remained at large yesterday — suggests a less than mature terror plan, a proposed effort longer on evil intent than on operational capability.

(Ms. Mauskopf noted in her news release that the “public was never at risk” and told reporters that law enforcement “had stopped this plot long before it ever had a chance to be carried out.”)

At its heart was a 63-year-old retired airport cargo worker, Russell M. Defreitas, who the complaint says talked of his dreams of inflicting massive harm, but who appeared to possess little money, uncertain training and no known background in planning a terror attack.

“Capability low, intent very high,” a law enforcement official said of the suspects.

Some law enforcement officials and engineers also dismissed the notion that the planned attack could have resulted in a catastrophic chain reaction; system safeguards, they said, would have stopped explosions from spreading.

The complaint, filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, also suggests that at least two of the suspects had some ambivalence. One of the men was game for bombing the airport but leery about killing masses of people, the complaint says. Another dropped out of the plot for a time to tend to his business.

The suspects had ties with a dangerous Islamic group that once engineered a deadly coup attempt in Trinidad and Tobago, which was approached about underwriting a plot, but in the end, the men decided to stop courting that group and resolved to shop elsewhere overseas for financing.

No one would second-guess the authorities for pursuing and arresting suspected plotters. An enduring lesson that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, have taught prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the danger of inaction.

But as with many post-9/11 terror plots, the line between terrible aspiration and reality can get lost in a murky haze.

In case after case, from what authorities said was a dirty bomber to the Lackawanna Six, federal prosecutors hail arrests of terrorists and disruptions of what they describe as sinister plots. But as these legal cases unfold, the true nature of the threats can come into question.

Ms. Mauskopf and Mr. Kelly declined yesterday to discuss their characterizations of the airport case. Mark J. Mershon, assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s New York office, also spoke at the news conference, and he said yesterday that his message was very clear:

“I believe I spoke the simple truth at the press conference: the ambitions were horrific, the capacities were very limited, but they kept trying. Their signature was their persistence.”

Neal R. Sonnett, a defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor who was chief of the criminal division in the United States attorney’s office in Miami, congratulated the F.B.I. for fine police work in what was clearly “a prosecutable case.”

But he said: “There unfortunately has been a tendency to shout too loudly about such cases.”

“It has a bit of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight to it,” Mr. Sonnett said. “It would have served the federal government well to say that.”

The seeming gap between the rhetoric at Saturday’s news conference and the reality of the threat could reflect a change in approach among law enforcement officials.

By their nature, prosecutors prefer to wait until they have accumulated an overwhelming store of evidence. The characteristic tough prosecutorial language of the post-indictment news release reflects their certainty about their cases.

Now, prosecutors and F.B.I. agents find themselves pouncing sooner than in the past, the better to stamp out potential terror plots before there is a grave risk to life or property.

“The whole goal now is to get these plots at a very nascent stage — and that means the evidence will always be more ambiguous,” said Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor who pursued terrorism cases in New York and helped investigate the Sept. 11 attacks.

“We now need to pay a lot more attention to people’s aspirations to commit terror and worry less about how imminent the threat is.”

A reading of the criminal complaint makes clear why prosecutors and F.B.I. agents grew so alarmed as they learned of the ambitions ascribed to the suspects.

One of the co-conspirators, identified in the complaint only as individual E, described himself as a patron of jihad and paid for some of Mr. Defreitas’s travel expenses.

And Mr. Defreitas, in taped statements attributed to him, was unequivocal about his desire to kill many thousands of his fellow Americans.

But the same papers give reason for doubt about the competence of the suspects. The details tend to suggest a distance between Mr. Defreitas’s dream and any nightmarish reality.

There is, too, the question of the role played by the unidentified undercover informant who befriended Mr. Defreitas.

The informant is a convicted drug trafficker, and his sentence is pending as part of his cooperation agreement with the federal government, said the authorities.

It was to this informant, according to the authorities, that Mr. Defreitas first confided his “vision that would make the World Trade Center attack seem small.” The complaint notes that the defendant “did not discuss the details.”

Mr. Defreitas and the informant drove out to the fuel tanks at night, conducting surveillance, and made video recordings of Kennedy Airport and its buildings.

They also “located satellite photographs of J.F.K.,” the complaint states, “and sought expert advice, financing and explosives.”

But the satellite photographs amount to images easily downloaded from Google Earth.

A law enforcement official characterized the surveillance videos as “amateurish”; but he added that the material offered enough detail, taken together with the Google images, to at least help with planning.

The complaint also states that the men discussed “escape routes” through local roads and highways.

Many of the plot’s larger details are left to the imagination.

According to the complaint, one suspect discussed the need to disable an airport control tower, the better to provide cover to destroy the fuel tanks.

Another problem is that none of the suspects appears to have planned or carried out any previous attacks.

Nor do the men appear to possess relevant military training.

One defendant, Abdul Kadir, is said to have warned the others that the Islamists in Trinidad “had their own rules of engagement and wanted to minimize the killing of innocents such as women and children.” He suggested an early-morning assault to take out buildings rather than people, the complaint says.

Other planners seem to come and go, and in the end, one of the men, Kareem Ibrahim, advises that he will present their terror plan to “contacts overseas who may be interested in purchasing or funding it.”

But law enforcement officials say some caution is advised here. Terror plots, particularly those planned ad hoc by freelancers, tend to be messy affairs. There is no assurance that all the plotters share the qualms of a few. Nor is there any assurance an angry plotter might discard the collective long-term planning and strike alone quickly and violently.

“Even if he shoots up a terminal, it’s a disaster,” said a city law enforcement official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic. “At a certain point, once you’re sure there isn’t a larger Al Qaeda involvement, you just move.”

An official in the Justice Department defended the way the case was presented to the public, saying federal authorities offered a reasoned picture of the case and the threat. “We repeatedly let people know there was not a threat to the airport and this was a plot that was nowhere near completion,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to address the issue. “The documents speak for themselves.”

Mary Jo White, who was the United States attorney in Manhattan for nearly a decade and oversaw the successful prosecution of the first World Trade Center bombers in 1993 and the men who attacked the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, said the challenges to a prosecutor are significant.

“Obviously, when you speak about these plots, you don’t want to scare the public unnecessarily,” she said. “But if we’ve learned anything from 9/11 it is we should never again fail to take seriously the lower-level terrorist or wannabe terrorist or the most seemingly apocryphal plot, because they may well occur.”

But Mr. Sonnett, who also is a past president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, noted that there is a broader risk in overstating the sophistication of a terror plot. At a time when many Americans live in justified fear of an attack, the risk is that drumbeating creates a climate of fear and drives public policy.

“To the extent that you over-hype a case, you create fear and paranoia,” he said. “It’s very difficult for prosecutors and investigative agencies to remain calm.”

source: 10jun2007

ROSLYNN R. MAUSKOPF / The United States Attorney's Office / Eastern District of New York 

Roslynn R. Mauskopf was appointed on September 3, 2002 as the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. In that capacity, she is responsible for overseeing all federal criminal and civil cases in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, as well as Nassau and Suffolk Counties. She supervises a staff of approximately 180 attorneys and over 140 support personnel.

From October 6, 1995 to August 30, 2002, Ms. Mauskopf served as New York State Inspector General. Appointed by Governor George E. Pataki, Ms. Mauskopf directed the statewide, independent office responsible for investigating allegations of corruption, fraud, criminal activity, conflicts of interest and abuse in Executive Branch agencies. Under Ms. Mauskopf's leadership, teams of investigators and attorneys worked proactively, often with state, local and federal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors, on thousands of complaints involving bribery, theft, procurement and other types of fraud against the government, narcotics, excessive use of force, ethics violations, and other forms of corruption. Cases have resulted in criminal prosecution, disciplinary action, ethics sanctions, and recommendations for systemic reform that have improved the efficiency and accountability of state agencies.

On January 23, 1999, Governor Pataki appointed Inspector General Mauskopf as Chair of the Governor's Moreland Act Commission on New York City Schools, charged with examining the operations and fiscal affairs of the New York City Board of Education and the New York City School Construction Authority. The Commission uncovered systemic abuses in the manner in which the Board reports student attendance and enrollment by including on active student rosters children that have died, moved out of the city or country, attend private or parochial school, or are chronic truants. With respect to school construction, the Commission focused on mismanagement and violations of law in capital planning and construction, and the causes of significant cost overruns and scheduling delays, dilapidated facilities, hazardous safety violations, and other issues that affect the effective administration of the City's multi-billion-dollar capital construction program.

From 1982 to 1995, Ms. Mauskopf served as an Assistant District Attorney in the New York County District Attorney's Office, first in the Trial Division and then in the Investigation Division. She handled hundreds of violent crimes and white-collar cases, including the investigation of organized crime's control of trucking in the New York City garment industry, and the largest theft of client funds by an attorney in U.S. history. Ms. Mauskopf was named Deputy Chief of the Special Prosecutions Bureau in 1992 where she supervised and trained prosecutors on financial crimes, investigative techniques, grand jury practice and trial skills. In 1993, she became Chief of the Frauds Bureau, leading the investigation and prosecution of complex white-collar offenses including bank, insurance and securities fraud, sophisticated larcenies, political corruption, organized crime, tax fraud, and cybercrime.

A native of Washington, D.C., Ms. Mauskopf graduated from Brandeis University in 1979, and earned her law degree from Georgetown University Law Center in 1982. Ms. Mauskopf is active in various professional organizations, and has lectured on criminal justice topics at law schools and colleges, and to many law enforcement and community groups. The daughter of two holocaust survivors, Ms. Mauskopf is dedicated to maintaining the legacy of holocaust remembrance and has been active in support of survivors and their heritage.

source: 10jun2007

RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI

He attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School (Class of '61) in Brooklyn, Manhattan College (Class of '65) in the Bronx and New York University Law School in Manhattan, graduating magna cum laude in 1968.

Upon graduation, Rudy Giuliani clerked for Judge Lloyd MacMahon, United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York. In 1970, Giuliani joined the office of the U.S. Attorney. At age 29, he was named Chief of the Narcotics Unit and rose to serve as executive US Attorney. In 1975, Giuliani was recruited to Washington, D.C., where he was named Associate Deputy Attorney General and chief of staff to the Deputy Attorney General. From 1977 to 1981, Giuliani returned to New York to practice law at Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler.

In 1981, Giuliani was named Associate Attorney General, the third highest position in the Department of Justice. As Associate Attorney General, Giuliani supervised all of the US Attorney Offices' Federal law enforcement agencies, the Bureau of Corrections, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the US Marshals.

In 1983, Giuliani was appointed US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he spearheaded the effort to jail drug dealers, fight organized crime, break the web of corruption in government, and prosecute white-collar criminals. Few US Attorneys in history can match his record of 4,152 convictions with only 25 reversals.

source: 10jun2007

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