OVERKILL IN RIVERDALE

‘It was their plot and their plan that they pushed forward. We merely facilitated’

- Joseph M. Demarest Jr. of the FBI

Suppose that the FBI’s Riverdale sting had inadvertently stung an innocent Riverdalian.

Clearly, the four Newburgh, N.Y., men charged with plotting to blow up two Riverdale synagogues and shoot down a plane at an airport near Newburgh committed serious crimes, assuming the allegations are proven in court. They should be prosecuted and sentenced to long prison terms if convicted. Maybe the 110 law-enforcement employees who investigated them should be charged with conspiracy and reckless endangerment.

This plot could be described as a manufactured crime, aided and abetted by our government. It was overkill, and it could have become overkill in a literal sense.

Let’s get this straight: These four suspects never possessed the resources necessary to execute such a plot until they partnered with a conspicuous FBI informant, and the FBI made certain to supply them with a harmless arsenal of bombs and a missile launcher. In other words, the Riverdale Jewish Center and Riverdale Temple were never endangered.

The FBI’s sting could have ended with harm to innocent people. If any suspect had a weapon and decided to resist arrest, perhaps an unknowing passerby could have been shot by a stray bullet. No matter how thorough the planning, every operation carries risks, which means that innocent people were endangered…however remote the possibility.

The time, cost and personnel expended on this case seemed to be an outsized utilization of resources that could have been employed for more pressing needs. New York media reported that 110 law enforcement employees, including those from the FBI and city police, participated in the investigation. Such effort might be justified if these defendants were already organized as a terror cell, but they relied on the FBI informant named Shahed Hussain for almost all their weapons and other resources.

The New York Post quoted unnamed sources who said the FBI supplied them with military-grade C4 explosives, which they intended to place near the synagogues, and whose deadly features had been nullified through a chemical process. The FBI also provided them with an actual Stinger missile launcher which they allegedly planned to use for blowing up a large C5 Galaxy cargo plane as it took off from an airport 60 miles north, the Post reported. The FBI had disabled the firing mechanism.

The suspects also bought an illegal handgun from a Bloods gang member in Brooklyn, but the informant was able to get hold of the weapon and pass it on to the FBI, who made the gun inoperable, according to the Post’s sources. Suppose one suspect brought along a workable gun of which the informant was not aware?

Imam Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad, spiritual leader of Newburgh’s Masjid al-Ikhlas mosque, and other mosque members told The New York Times that Hussain often visited the mosque to recruit younger black males. Hussain even asked an official at another mosque for its list of members, the Times reported. Members of the Newburgh mosque swiftly pegged him as a government informant.

It would have been reasonable if authorities arrested the suspects, all ex-cons, when they traveled to Stamford, Conn., to pick up the pseudo bombs and missile launcher at a warehouse. Authorities indeed could have arrested them then and there. The News reported that authorities wanted to catch them in the midst of attempting to execute the plot.

Their lawyers could present an entrapment defense, and the suspects should not be excused because of the FBI’s astonishing involvement. But we are talking proportions here. These guys had big ideas, but it is not clear if they were capable of a crime of this scale until they joined Hussain. It is also unclear if the defendants devised the plot exclusively among themselves or if Hussain and law enforcement authorities contributed to the planning.

A Times reporter asked Joseph M. Demarest Jr., head of the FBI’s New York office, if he thought the suspects were a serious security threat before they met Hussain, and he said, “It was their plot and their plan that they pushed forward. We merely facilitated. They asked for the explosives. They asked for the Stingers, or rockets, I think is the way they described it. They did leave the packages of what they believed to be real explosives, the bags, in front of two temples in the Bronx.”

If anyone was inadvertently killed or injured, perhaps “we merely facilitated” could be equated as conspiracy, a legal term for a criminal offense. There have been police officers who were criminally charged after making split-second decisions. In this case, the prospect of a split-second decision was never necessary. The FBI could have wrapped up the case when the suspects retrieved their arsenal at the warehouse in Stamford.

That would not have been so dramatic as catching them in the act of attempting to blow up two synagogues in a popular, heavily traversed New York neighborhood.

This sounds like the kind of scheme contrived by Bush administration flunkies, and President Obama’s people might have thought it seemed weird but consented to it because the operation was too far along. The government should have managed it differently, if at all.