Posted on 06/06/2009 6:54:41 AM PDT by Impala64ssa
The informant wears a Yankees cap and rumpled white shirt, the top three buttons open. His face is recognizable from the hazy FBI videotapes made when he was working undercover in Albany. He was called Malik in that case, Maqsood when he came to Newburgh last year. Customers at his upstate business know him as Michael. "I am Hussain," he says. As in Shahed Hussain, the Pakistani businessman alternately credited and condemned for the 2006 conviction of an Albany imam and assistant imam on money-laundering charges, the charismatic informant who worked for a year in Newburgh as part of a federal investigation that led to the arrest of four city men accused in a plan to bomb synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at Stewart Air National Guard Base. He says he won't discuss specifics of the case and asks that his location not be revealed because he fears for his family's safety. But he wishes he could talk, he says. He wants to sit down after the Newburgh case is resolved and talk about everything. He's been reading all the news accounts he can find. It's an incomplete picture, he says, and people have lost sight of the nature of the suspects. "These kids were not angels," Hussain says of the Newburgh 4. David Williams, 28, Onta Williams, 32, Laguerre Payen, 27, and James Cromitie, 44, have all served prison terms. Keeping up with popular opinion He reads the opinion blogs as well as the news stories. He figures they're about 50-50, for and against the FBI investigation, and him in particular. He hands over a computer printout of a particularly nasty attack that instructs Muslims to circulate his description. Handwritten at the top of the page is "Attn: Robert Fuller" — the FBI agent who led the Newburgh investigation. It's a hint Hussain takes the threats seriously. The excerpts of taped conversations and court papers filed in the Newburgh arrests should prove to people the suspects weren't joking, Hussain says. What would have happened, he asks, if the men had met someone who was really from a terrorist organization? "You see what they were willing to do," he says. His critics say he is little more than a criminal himself. It was, after all, a plea bargain in 2003 on a fraudulent driver's license scheme that put him on the road to FBI informant. They ask if Hussain is creating would-be terrorists in order to keep his handlers happy. Shamshad Ahmad is president of Masjid As-Salam in Albany. He says he's listened to roughly 50 hours of taped conversations between "Malik" and the mosque's imam, Yassin Aref, and assistant imam, Mohammed Hossain. The imam and assistant imam are each serving 15-year prison sentences largely because of Hussain's work. Muslims say entrapment was used Ahmad says Hussain entrapped two good men who had no intention of helping terrorists and the Newburgh case sounds like a familiar path of slow, steady ingratiation by a master manipulator. "He is extremely cunning, talkative and knowledgeable," Ahmad said. "When he talks about licenses, business, that kind of thing, it's real knowledge." Members of Masjid al-Ikhlas in Newburgh say Hussain trolled the mosque for as long as two years, trying to entice recruits for a violent plot for misguided jihad. Federal prosecutors have claimed the suspects approached Hussain because of their own extremist hatred. Hussain says for now the only ones who know the full story are the suspects, the FBI and he. He says he's looking forward to all the information to come out.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.