The
JFK “Plot”: Another
Grossly Inflated Threat
By Bill Van Auken
05 June, 2007
World
Socialist Web
The
weekend’s news in the US was dominated by screaming headlines
and sensationalist broadcast coverage of an alleged plot in New York
to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport’s jet fuel tanks
and supply lines. The attack would have been, according to many accounts,
“more devastating than September 11.”
Four men were charged in
an indictment [http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nye/pr/2007/Defreitas.complaint.pdf]
unveiled Sunday that included features that have become almost invariable
in every such “terror” case brought by the government in
recent years. First, the suspects had not only carried out no acts of
terror, but they apparently lacked any means to realize such an attack.
Second, a central figure in the alleged plot was a paid undercover informant
of the FBI.
Broadcast networks spoke
of the worst threat since the attacks on New York and Washington in
2001, while reporters were sent out to conduct random interviews with
passengers passing through JFK as well as residents living near the
pipelines, asking how they felt about their supposed near brush with
death.
As usual, New York City’s
tabloids excelled in this sensationalism. Rupert Murdoch’s New
York Post Sunday referred to the alleged plot in its headline as an
“inferno plan” and carried an editorial stating that the
purported plan “to do calamitous damage to JFK International Airport
and surrounding residential neighborhoods underscores yet again the
overarching threat Islamist terrorism poses to America.”
The New York Daily News on
Monday carried five pages on the “plot,” with a ludicrous
front-page headline, “Evil Ate at Table Eight,” promoting
an inside interview with the Brooklyn waitress who served a meal to
Russell Defreitas, whom the paper describes as the “mastermind”
of the alleged plot, just before he was picked up by federal agents
and police.
Yet the profile of Defreitas,
a 63-year-old US citizen who emigrated from Guyana 25 years ago, hardly
suggests a terrorist “mastermind.” A former friend describes
him as someone who, before becoming a Muslim, had declared himself a
Rastafarian and grown dreadlocks. He recalled his involvement in various
business schemes to ship air conditioners or refrigerators to Guyana,
none of which ever came to anything.
“He couldn’t
even fix brakes,” the former friend said. “He never built
bombs.”
Other accounts described
him as a retired worker living in an impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood,
who on various occasions had been homeless. New York Newsday, for example,
reported, “Since being laid off from his job as a cargo worker
several years ago, Russell Defreitas has lived a meek existence—at
times sleeping in trains and trying to eke out a living running two-bit
scams, selling incense on street corners and collecting welfare, acquaintances
said.”
Also charged in the indictment
are Abdul Kadir, a citizen of Guyana and former member of the Guyanese
Parliament, and Kareem Ibrahim, a citizen of Trinidad, both of whom
are under arrest in Trinidad awaiting a hearing on a US extradition
request. Lawyers for the two said that they would fight extradition,
likely raising the US record of torturing terrorism suspects. A fourth
defendant, Abdel Nur, also a citizen of Guyana, has yet to be arrested.
A key figure in the alleged
plot, however, is named in the indictment only as “the source.”
He is identified as a convicted drug trafficker who, in exchange for
favorable consideration on a pending jail sentence as well as cash payments,
agreed to infiltrate the supposed terrorist cell.
Much of the evidence contained
in the indictment consists of recordings of conversations between “the
source” and the defendants. What emerges clearly, however, is
the leading role this “informant” played in the alleged
plot. Defreitas is quoted as saying that they saw him as someone “sent
by Allah” to lead them.
The indictment also refers
to meetings and recorded conversations between both Defreitas and the
source and individuals in Guyana, who are identified only as “Individuals
A through F.”
These six unnamed men are
quoted proposing a wide range of terrorist activity, including smuggling
“mujahideen from Asia into Guyana and then into the United States,”
blowing up US helicopters at the Guyanese airport and the plan to blow
up the JFK fuel system. On this last proposal, these unnamed individuals
also suggest the use of dynamite and chemical explosives and advise
on how to obtain these materials. One of these individuals also proposes
that the plotters seek the assistance of a Trinidadian Islamist group,
Jamaat al Muslimeen. In the account of these conversations, Defreitas
is not quoted as saying anything.
The obvious question is why
these six unnamed “individuals” have not been charged. One
likely explanation is that they too were, in one form or another, participants
in an elaborate effort to ensnare a hapless and sometimes homeless retiree
and others in a plot that was fundamentally staged by the US government
for its own purposes.
The blood-curdling accounts
in the media largely reflected the highly charged language of US prosecutors
and police officials in presenting the indictment. Roslynn Mauskopf,
the US attorney in Brooklyn, New York, in announcing the charges, said,
“Had the plot been carried out, it could have resulted in unfathomable
damage, deaths and destruction.” She added, “The devastation
that would be caused had this plot succeeded is just unthinkable.”
The words “unfathomable”
and “unthinkable” were undoubtedly chosen carefully, as
the type of chain reaction of explosions described in the indictment
was quite simply impossible.
Both airport security officials
and pipeline experts dismissed the allegedly catastrophic disaster that
supposedly would have been triggered by blowing up a fuel pipeline or
storage tanks. While the federal indictment suggested that such an explosion
could travel along the pipelines linking tanks in Linden, New Jersey
into Brooklyn, New York and across the borough of Queens, this is impossible,
both because the pipelines are equipped with safety valves that shut
off the flow of fuel in event of a leak and because there is inadequate
oxygen inside the pipes to sustain a fire.
The New York Times, whose
skepticism about the federal indictment was clearly signaled by the
newspaper placing stories on the JFK “plot” on its Metro
pages, quoted Neal Sonnett, a defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor,
as saying, “There unfortunately has been a tendency to shout too
loudly about such cases.”
The Times article went on
to say that Sonnett, also a former 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.”
There is every reason to
believe that the succession of “terror” cases, each one
weaker than the last and virtually all of them driven by “informants”
who seem to play more the role of agents provocateur, are aimed at achieving
precisely this effect. They serve as a means of intimidating public
opinion with fear, justifying attacks on democratic rights and diverting
attention from the ongoing debacle in Iraq.
The problem faced by the
government is that the public is growing increasingly skeptical about
these cases, with a sizeable portion of the population having concluded
that they are trumped up for political purposes.
Under these conditions, the
danger is that those who now control the reins of power in Washington
may be concluding that something more tangible is needed.
On the same day that the
alleged JFK “terror plot” broke in the news, the Arkansas
Democrat-Gazette published a revealing interview with that state’s
new Republican Party chairman, who described himself as “150 percent
for Bush.”
“At the end of the
day,” said state party chairman Dennis Milligan, the owner of
a water treatment business, “I believe fully the president is
doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American
soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001 ], and the naysayers will come around
very quickly...”
The question is whether elements
in the Bush administration are reaching similar conclusions and preparing
to engineer or allow another round of terrorist attacks “on American
soil” as a pretext for suppressing the overwhelming popular opposition
to its policies.
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