The Terror Factory (8 page)

The timing of the raid was suspicious as well, as the
New York Times
had just revealed on its website a secret Bush administration program that permitted, under the guise of counterterrorism, the CIA and the Treasury Department to review, without warrants or subpoenas, the financial transactions of U.S. citizens and others living in the United States—yet another program that raised questions about whether the Bush administration was overstepping its legal authority in
the hunt for terrorists after 9/11.
¹³
The
Times
story had been in the works for months, and the Bush administration knew it was coming, so the announcement of a terrorist cell bust in Florida pushed that important story below the fold in most major newspapers the following day.

Max Rameau, a Haitian-born activist who led a project to monitor local police and another to seize vacant lots in Miami and build a shantytown for the homeless, and who knew personally the men the federal government charged as terrorists in the Liberty City case, believed that the arrests were specifically timed to coincide with the story in the
New York Times
. “I think the government's immediate intention in announcing the Liberty City Seven case was to draw attention away from the
New York Times
story coming out the next day,” Rameau told me at his office on Northwest Fifteenth Avenue, in the heart of Liberty City, when I met with him in 2009. “The arrests happened on a Thursday. That Friday was the long-awaited
New York Times
story about how the Bush administration was spying on people's ATM transactions. But the day that story came out, it was downplayed because what became big news was the fact that these seven terrorists, black terrorists, reportedly Muslim terrorists, were arrested. I think the initial intention of it was to divert attention away from this story related to terrorism that was very damaging to the Bush administration and they wanted to trump that by showing there was some terrorism actually happening. Of course, they couldn't find any terrorism happening, so they had to manufacture this instead.”
¹⁴

Finally, the area of Miami where the alleged terrorists were arrested—Liberty City—seemed like a peculiar place for them to hide. The poorest section of Miami, Liberty City—which gets its name from the Liberty Square public housing
project built in the mid-1930s under the New Deal—is a largely African American and Haitian American neighborhood that Miami's leaders would just as soon pretend didn't exist. The police presence in Liberty City is obvious at all hours of the day and night, and a number of nonprofit community organizations have feet on the ground there. In short, it's not a neighborhood where anyone—terrorists in particular—would likely go unnoticed.

None of this skepticism, however, was evident in the news media's initial coverage of the arrests. In one report, Rad Berky, a journalist for the Miami ABC affiliate, stood outside the group's warehouse in Liberty City as the phrases “Terror Raid” and “Terror Arrests” flashed across the screen. Berky reported the government's allegations in full, telling viewers that the seven men were preparing to launch attacks in Miami and Chicago. “There is also said to be audio- or videotape of the group members pledging support for violent holy war,” he said. Berky's unquestioning, overhyped reporting of the government's claims is emblematic of the lapdog approach the media has taken in covering federal terrorism cases since September 11, 2001.

The main reason for this is cultural. After 9/11, there was a nearly unanimous belief at the FBI that terrorists were hiding in the United States, preparing to launch a second wave of attacks. Every current and former FBI agent I interviewed in researching this book told me they were certain that terrorist cells were embedded in the United States after September 11, 2001, and that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were just the beginning. “We were bracing for the next attack,” Dale Watson, the FBI's assistant director for counterterrorism on 9/11, told me. This was a popular belief nationwide in the first few years after 9/11; the Showtime
television series
Sleeper Cell
, about a Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates a terrorist cell in Los Angeles, exemplified this national assumption that deadly terrorists were out there and we needed to find them before time ran out and innocent people were killed. The government's story of seven guys plotting to blow up a skyscraper and an FBI office fit perfectly with this widespread public assumption. If the media and the public believe terrorists are out there, they aren't likely to question the government about whether the men trotted out for the cameras are actual terrorists.

This attitude, which is still prevalent today, provides the government with a public suspension of disbelief whenever officials announce terrorism-related arrests. During the first few days of any crime story, even those unrelated to terrorism, law enforcement has a unique ability to control the narrative. Whenever local, state, or federal police announce a highprofile indictment, they do so with the luxury of operating in an information vacuum, as most, if not all, of the initial information comes from the police or prosecutors—details of the crimes and the defendants' backgrounds and motivations. It can take weeks, even months, before journalists are able to interview people related to the defendants or uncover information that provides a more nuanced view than the one law enforcement hand-fed to the media. By then, the story is off the front pages of newspapers and no longer the lead on the broadcast news. In the Liberty City Seven case, for example, four months passed from the day of the indictment before the Miami media were able to interview the primary defendant's wife, who described a very different man from the one presented by the FBI and the Justice Department.
¹⁵

This lack of any immediate doubt on behalf of the media was clear when the Justice Department held a news conference
in the U.S. attorney's office in downtown Miami the day after the arrests of the Liberty City Seven. More than two dozen cameras were trained on a lectern crowded with microphones as media liaisons for the Justice Department passed out to reporters copies of a disc with photos of the accused terrorists. At 11:30 a.m.—about thirty minutes after then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had finished a news conference in Washington, D.C., in which he said the accused terrorists wanted to wage “a full ground war against the United States”—U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta stood behind the lectern. “We believe that these defendants sought the support of Al Qaeda to, in their own words, wage jihad and war against the United States. To ‘kill all the devils that we can,'” Acosta told the gathered reporters. “They hoped that their attacks would be, in their own words, ‘just as good or greater than 9/11.'”

Despite the statements of Acosta and Gonzales, reporters didn't have to look hard for information that suggested the Justice Department might be overselling their case. According to the eleven-page indictment, the seven men who supposedly wanted to wage war against the United States didn't have any weapons or explosives, and their only alleged Al Qaeda connection was an FBI informant posing as a terrorist. Even the management company of the Sears Tower, one of the alleged targets, knew the building was never in danger. “This group never got beyond talking about a workable plot,” Barbara A. Carley, managing director of the Sears Tower, told the
New York Times
on the day of the press conference. “Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they've never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that's ever gone beyond just talk.”
¹⁶
Yet the reporters at the Miami news conference accepted unchallenged
the government's claims that this was an active terrorist group that had sought support from Al Qaeda, which prompted several follow-up questions that the U.S. attorney struggled to answer.

“Was Al Qaeda on its way to responding?” one reporter asked during the press conference. “What kind of feedback did they get?”

“I'm sorry—I don't understand,” Acosta replied.

“They asked for money. They asked for weapons. What kind of feedback did they get from Al Qaeda?”

Acosta had to admit reluctantly that the group had never made contact with Al Qaeda. They were in contact with an FBI informant posing as Al Qaeda—that was their crime.

“How did they get the $50,000?” another reporter asked.

“I'm sorry?” Acosta replied.

“You mentioned $50,000,” the reporter said, clarifying.

Acosta conceded that while the group did ask for $50,000, they had asked the FBI informant for it, not Al Qaeda, and in the end, they never received any money. The only terrorist involved in the case was an imaginary one on the FBI payroll, a man who called himself Mohammed, and whose real name was Elie Assaad.

The story of how Elie Assaad, Howard Gilbert's fellow informant in the Imran Mandhai case, came to pose once more as an Al Qaeda operative named Mohammed begins with another untrustworthy informant—a five-foot-seven, 190-pound, twenty-one-year-old Yemeni man named Abbas al-Saidi. In 2006, al-Saidi ran a convenience store in North Miami, and one of his frequent customers was Narseal Batiste, a thirty-two-year-old former preacher at a nondenominational Christian church, a father of four, and a one-time Guardian
Angel. Growing up, Batiste had split his time between Chicago and Marksville, a small town in Louisiana. He attended a Catholic high school and his father, Narcisse, a preacher himself, had raised his son to be a Christian. Batiste met his wife, Minerva Vasquez, who was born in Estancia de Animas, a small town in Zacatecas, Mexico, in high school, and Narcisse married them shortly after Vasquez gave birth to her and Batiste's second child, a little girl named Narcassia. Batiste had moved to South Florida following a failed attempt to follow in his father's footsteps as a preacher in Chicago. He also saw Miami as a place to start a new life after his mother, Audrey Batiste, died in 2000 from surgery complications. The youngest of five boys and one girl, Batiste took his mother's sudden death hard. “All my kids took it so hard,” remembered Narcisse.
¹⁷

As an adult, Batiste wasn't content in limiting his religious studies to Christian texts, and Islam and the Koran intrigued him particularly—something his father tried to dissuade. “I didn't agree with it, but he was a man by then and I didn't think I could argue with him about it,” Narcisse Batiste said.
¹⁸
Despite this, Batiste never identified himself as a Muslim. By the time he and his family moved to Miami in 2001, Batiste considered himself a member of the Moorish Science Temple, a religious sect that blends Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He'd preach to anyone who'd listen and offered martial arts training to disadvantaged, mostly black, kids in Liberty City. He wanted to help clean up Liberty City, and six men—Haitians and African Americans—joined him to form something of a group. Batiste also ran a drywall business, Azteca Stucco and Masonry, out of a run-down warehouse, and his followers were also his employees.

Above all, however, Batiste was a natural-born bullshitter
and hustler. That's how he came to strike up a friendship with the young al-Saidi at the convenience store in North Miami. Batiste, who was trying to keep his drywall business solvent while he and his family were living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, told al-Saidi he was looking for ways to make money. Al-Saidi said he knew people who could help. “You're always looking for money, and I have some people in Yemen I can introduce you to who would fund your organization, but you gotta spin it the right way, and I'll help you do that,” al-Saidi said, according to the story Batiste told his lawyers.

What happened next isn't entirely clear. What is known is that al-Saidi left the United States to visit his wife and family in Yemen and returned on a ticket paid for by the FBI. His task: to infiltrate a terrorist cell in Miami.

Rory J. McMahon sat behind a conference table inside his office in North Fort Lauderdale. It was a fall afternoon in 2009, several years after he had been hired by defense lawyers to investigate Abbas al-Saidi. But the case still bothered him. A private investigator who had previously worked as a federal probation officer, McMahon was asked to piece together how exactly al-Saidi came to be an informant who identified a supposed terrorist cell in the poorest section of Miami. That investigation led McMahon to a public housing project in Brooklyn, New York, and a young woman named Stephanie Jennings, who was al-Saidi's girlfriend. Jennings told McMahon that al-Saidi had been working as an informant for the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division, which since 9/11 has aggressively monitored Muslim communities in New York and New Jersey.
¹⁹
For some reason—Jennings was never told why—NYPD handlers became concerned for al-Saidi's
safety and moved him and Jennings to a city-funded public housing project. But they didn't stay there long.

One afternoon, one of al-Saidi's friends from the Middle East knocked on the door. Jennings, home alone, let him in, and with al-Saidi not around, the friend raped her in the apartment. Jennings went to the police and pressed charges; when al-Saidi returned home, she told him what happened. “Instead of saying, ‘I'm going to go kill the motherfucker,' his response was, ‘We can use this to get money,' because she pressed charges,” McMahon recalled. “So he goes to the guy. ‘Give me $7,000 and I'll get Stephanie to drop the rape charge against you.' So that's what they do, and he uses the $7,000 for seed money to move to Miami.”

In South Florida, al-Saidi and Jennings lived in a neatly kept apartment building in Miami Beach, just steps from Biscayne Bay and near the Seventy-Ninth Street Causeway. But their relationship wasn't as neatly kept as their building. On November 10, 2004, Jennings stepped out of the apartment to smoke a cigarette, which annoyed al-Saidi. When she walked back in, the Yemeni man punched her in the left eye and in the stomach, then bit her on the neck.
²⁰
When Jennings, crying, began to complain of pain, al-Saidi called 911. After the police arrived, al-Saidi told them, “I bit her because she choked me!” But the police documented that al-Saidi did not have any bruising to indicate he'd been choked, so they arrested him and charged him with simple battery, a misdemeanor. At the time, al-Saidi told police he was an unemployed laborer.