This blog is a part of my body of research that seeks to analyse civil society's and academia's understanding of national security models from an academic perspective with a focus on Canada, Israel and the UK.
Showing posts with label FBI Policing Model. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FBI Policing Model. Show all posts
There’s an organization responsible for more terrorism plots in the United States than al-Qaeda, al-Shabaab and ISIS combined: The FBI.
How? Why? In an eye-opening talk, investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson reveals a disturbing FBI practice that breeds terrorist plots by exploiting Muslim-Americans with mental health problems.
In 2012, Sami Osmakac was 25 years old, broke and struggling with mental illness. His family wanted to get him help. The FBI wanted him to plot a terrorist attack.
(T)ERROR opens to footage of part-time school cook Saeed Torres cursing about being on camera. “I told you I didn’t want my face on this shit,” he tells filmmakers Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe. Minutes later, he’s showing off on the sidelines of the school basketball court.
That contradiction is the first of many 63-year-old Saeed demonstrates in the 90-minute documentary, which offers unprecedented access into the unsettling work of an FBI informant during an active operation.
A former Black Panther, Torres was arrested on larceny charges more than 20 years ago and has been working for “the agency” ever since. His biggest coup came in 2005 when he drew Brooklyn jazz musician Tarik Shah into an admission that would see him jailed for 13 years. Shah’s mother, who appears in the film, is still campaigning to have him released, 10 years into his sentence. Torres says he has "no feelings” for the POI, or “Person of Interest” he’s sent to ensnare. But later in the film he says of Shah: “I liked and trusted the brother.”
In Pittsburgh, where most of the film takes place, Torres is tasked with befriending a white Muslim convert who the FBI suspect of radicalisation. While Torres admits that Khalifa al-Akili “wouldn’t throw rice at a wedding,” he sets about drawing the 34-year-old into a terror plot that would allow the FBI to put him behind bars. “He’s not even a psuedo-terrorist,” Torres says, but continues to angle for a conviction that could fetch him up to $250,000.
Khalifa al-Akili, the "Person of Interest" or POI being tracked by informant Saeed Torres during the film.
Torres and his interactions with FBI agents (he shares his voicemail and text messages with the audience), reveal the dogged and clumsy workings of a programme which has targeted and jailed thousands of Muslims across the United States since the 9/11 attacks, a scheme which civil liberties advocates describe as an “indiscriminate monitoring” and “a violation of religious freedom”.
‘FBI know nothing, they just want to make an arrest’
Directors Cabral and Sutcliffe were drawn to the issue when a 16-year-old student at the Harlem arts college where they taught was arrested on fabricated terror charges, leading to the deportation of the girl’s father. Sutcliffe went on make a film about Adama Bah, who after five years saw her charges dropped and was reunited with her father. But she was one of a fortunate minority – in similar cases the federal conviction rate is 96%.
“The FBI is responding to the latest episode of a deeply embedded historic problem: it’s a response to an event which in itself is a response to power abusing those without power,” Sutcliffe told FRANCE 24 in an interview on Thursday. “We recognise that the threat of terrorism is very real, but to what extent have our own policies exacerbated that problem?”
For Saeed, the FBI is “who’s in control”. But he says they lack understanding of the situation on the ground. “They don’t know nothing, they’re just trying to make an arrest,” he says.
Cabral and Sutcliffe made a request for a statement from the FBI but never received a response.
“We would love to hear their thoughts,” Cabral told FRANCE 24. “I’m sure there are people within the FBI who are frustrated with the counter-terrorism strategy too. But we just get this wall of silence. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle.”
(T)ERROR won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
(T)ERROR opens to footage of part-time school cook Saeed Torres cursing about being on camera. “I told you I didn’t want my face on this shit,” he tells filmmakers Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe. Minutes later, he’s showing off on the sidelines of the school basketball court.
That contradiction is the first of many 63-year-old Saeed demonstrates in the 90-minute documentary, which offers unprecedented access into the unsettling work of an FBI informant during an active operation.
A former Black Panther, Torres was arrested on larceny charges more than 20 years ago and has been working for “the agency” ever since. His biggest coup came in 2005 when he drew Brooklyn jazz musician Tarik Shah into an admission that would see him jailed for 13 years. Shah’s mother, who appears in the film, is still campaigning to have him released, 10 years into his sentence. Torres says he has "no feelings” for the POI, or “Person of Interest” he’s sent to ensnare. But later in the film he says of Shah: “I liked and trusted the brother.”
In Pittsburgh, where most of the film takes place, Torres is tasked with befriending a white Muslim convert who the FBI suspect of radicalisation. While Torres admits that Khalifa al-Akili “wouldn’t throw rice at a wedding,” he sets about drawing the 34-year-old into a terror plot that would allow the FBI to put him behind bars. “He’s not even a psuedo-terrorist,” Torres says, but continues to angle for a conviction that could fetch him up to $250,000.
Khalifa al-Akili, the "Person of Interest" or POI being tracked by informant Saeed Torres during the film.
Torres and his interactions with FBI agents (he shares his voicemail and text messages with the audience), reveal the dogged and clumsy workings of a programme which has targeted and jailed thousands of Muslims across the United States since the 9/11 attacks, a scheme which civil liberties advocates describe as an “indiscriminate monitoring” and “a violation of religious freedom”.
‘FBI know nothing, they just want to make an arrest’
Directors Cabral and Sutcliffe were drawn to the issue when a 16-year-old student at the Harlem arts college where they taught was arrested on fabricated terror charges, leading to the deportation of the girl’s father. Sutcliffe went on make a film about Adama Bah, who after five years saw her charges dropped and was reunited with her father. But she was one of a fortunate minority – in similar cases the federal conviction rate is 96%.
“The FBI is responding to the latest episode of a deeply embedded historic problem: it’s a response to an event which in itself is a response to power abusing those without power,” Sutcliffe told FRANCE 24 in an interview on Thursday. “We recognise that the threat of terrorism is very real, but to what extent have our own policies exacerbated that problem?”
For Saeed, the FBI is “who’s in control”. But he says they lack understanding of the situation on the ground. “They don’t know nothing, they’re just trying to make an arrest,” he says.
Cabral and Sutcliffe made a request for a statement from the FBI but never received a response.
“We would love to hear their thoughts,” Cabral told FRANCE 24. “I’m sure there are people within the FBI who are frustrated with the counter-terrorism strategy too. But we just get this wall of silence. It’s the missing piece of the puzzle.”
(T)ERROR won the Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
"The results, first reported by the Washington Post, concluded that an astonishing 26 of the 28 FBI agents who had provided testimony as expert witnesses at trial based on microscopic hair analysis had made statements to juries that were known to be false." Source: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/21/fbi-jail-hair-mass-disaster-false-conviction
Thirty years in jail for a single hair: the FBI's 'mass disaster' of false conviction
A ‘dirty bomb’ of pseudo-science wrapped up nearly 268 cases – perhaps hundreds more. Now begins the ‘herculean effort to right the wrongs’
In 2013, the FBI admitted that the foundations of what it called ‘hair comparison evidence’ were scientifically invalid. Photograph: Sarah Lee
George Perrot has spent almost 30 years in prison thanks to a single hair. It was discovered by an FBI agent on the bedsheet of a 78-year-old woman who had been raped by a burglar in her home in Springfield,Massachusetts, in 1985.
Perrot, then 17, was put on trial, despite the absence of physical evidence tying him to the crime scene. There was no semen. There was no blood. And so there was no way to conduct a conclusive DNA test.
Even the victim testified that the defendant looked nothing like her attacker: he had a short haircut and was clean-shaven, while Perrot had a long shaggy mop, a moustache and a goatee beard.
But there was that strand of hair. At a key stage in the 1992 rape and burglary trial, an FBI agent named Wayne Oakes took the witness stand, describing himself to the jury as an expert in hair and textile fibers – as would so many of the agency’s trial witnesses, in condemning hundreds of people to long prison sentences.
Individual head or pubic hairs were distinctive, he told the court, to the extent that a well-trained specialist like himself could tell those belonging to one person from another. Oakes went on to bombard the jury with scientific jargon, referring to the medulla, the cortex and the cuticle of hair, likening the task of comparing individual strands to recognizing a specific person in a crowd.
“In 10 years, it’s extremely rare I will have known hair samples from two different people I can’t tell apart,” the self-proclaimed expert bragged.
The FBI agent’s conclusion in front of the jury was emphatic: “The hair found on the sheet exhibits all the same microscopic hair arranged in the same way as the characteristics present in the known hair from [Perrot]. I conclude that the hair was consistent with coming from the defendant,” he told the court.
That testimony, based on a single hair, was so strong, so wrapped in the certainties of science, that it wiped out all doubts and inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case – indeed, it eviscerated the presumption of innocence.
There was only one problem: the “expert” analysis, delivered by Wayne Oakes under oath and effective enough to obliterate one-third of a man’s life and counting, was wrong.
George Perrot as a youngster. Photograph: Supplied
‘Potentially tens of thousands’ of cases gone wrong
In July 2013, the FBI admitted that the foundations of what it called “hair comparison evidence” – a technique that its agents had used in hundreds of criminal cases nationwide and spread through the training of state-based detectives potentially through tens of thousands of other cases – were scientifically invalid. A preliminary review of the FBI’s follicular flaws found that:
Microscopic hair analysis could not scientifically distinguish one individual to the exclusion of all others.
Statistical weight could not be given to comparisons to suggest a likelihood that the hair derived from a specific source.
Expert witnesses should not cite the number of hair analyses they had conducted in the lab to bolster the idea that they could definitively state that a hair belonged to a specific individual.
All three errors were made by Agent Oakes in front of Perrot’s jury.
Over the past few years, advanced understanding in the science of hair types has left hair analysis, as a forensic tool, in tatters. Today’s consensus by real experts is more straightforward than ever: there is nothing that can credibly be said, by FBI-approved analysts or anyone else, about about the frequency with which particular characteristics of hair are distributed in the human population.
In other words, microscopic analysis of hair – the very analysis that put George Perrot and so many people behind bars – is virtually worthless as a method of identifying someone. It can only safely be used to rule out a suspect as the source of crime-scene materials or in combination with the vastly more accurate technique of DNA testing.
As the scientific basis of hair analysis has crumbled, the scale of the judicial catastrophe caused by the FBI’s enthusiastic use of it for decades until about 2000 has now begun to emerge more fully. On Monday, the FBI and the US Justice Department, together with the Innocence Project and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, released the findings of the first stage of a joint investigation into these historic civil rights mistakes.
The results, first reported by the Washington Post, concluded that an astonishing 26 of the 28 FBI agents who had provided testimony as expert witnesses at trial based on microscopic hair analysis had made statements to juries that were known to be false. Their erroneous evidence was found in a full 90% of the trial transcripts the team has studied.
The government has identified almost 3,000 cases in which FBI agents may have given testimony involving the now-discredited technique. So far only about 500 of those cases have been been reviewed.
Some 268 of those involved FBI examiners providing expert evidence in court that pointed to the guilt of the defendant – of which 257, or 96%, included false testimony.
Most shockingly, at least 35 defendants received the death penalty, 33 of which were the subject of false FBI testimony. Nine of the prisoners were executed and five died from other causes on death row.
Chris Fabricant, the Innocence Project’s director of strategic litigation who is representing Perrot in his ongoing struggle for freedom, called the FBI’s use of hair analysis a “mass disaster” for the criminal justice system.
“We have potentially tens of thousands of convictions tainted by false evidence,” he told the Guardian. “It’s going to take a herculean effort to right the wrongs in these cases, and so far we have made only a tiny start.”
In a paper published this month and written with William Tucker Carrington of the University of Mississippi law school, Fabricant traces the first reported use of hair analysis to 1855, when John Browning and his son, Gaston, were tried for murdering a plantation overseer. Hairs were found on a rope in the defendants’ home which were compared to the Brownings’ hair and found to be identical.
The pseudo-science deployed in 1855 changed little in over a century. What did change was that after the second world war, the FBI embraced the technique, giving it a professional veneer – a government stamp of approval.
“They began presenting false evidence to juries based on scientific language that was very impressive to juries. It was like a dirty bomb that went off in the criminal justice system – hair analysis was said to be objective, unbiased and definitive, so it was both very prejudicial against defendants and very powerful,” Fabricant said.
Admitting fault as a nation, as cold cases persist
A review found that microscopic analysis of hair is virtually worthless as a method of identifying someone. Photograph: Steven Puetzer/Getty Images
Despite the FBI’s unqualified admission of error, George Perrot remains in prison, with no immediate resolution to his case in sight. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts continues to oppose a retrial, with a hearing scheduled for late this summer.
Fabricant said he is particularly anxious about the future for potentially thousands of people convicted for serious crimes such as murder and rape on the basis of false evidence given by detectives at state level, nearly all of whom were trained by the FBI in microscopic hair analysis. The federal agency has admitted its mistakes and is now working hard to address the miscarriages of justice on a national level, but state authorities are proving much more sluggish in their responses.
Typical is the case of Timothy Bridges, who is 23 years into his sentence in North Carolina. He was convicted of the 1989 sexual assault and beating of an elderly woman in Charlotte.
The criminal investigation uncovered no physical evidence of any sort to link Bridges to the scene – like Perrot, no semen or fingerprints were found, nor blood or DNA of any sort. But there were two hairs collected at the victim’s home and analyzed by an examiner for the state of North Carolina, who had been trained by the FBI in precisely the same now-discredited techniques.
The two hairs, the examiner told the jury at trial, had “likely originated” with the defendant. Bridges was sentenced to life in prison.
This month lawyers acting for Bridges, with the backing of the Innocence Project, petitioned the county court of Mecklenburg calling for a retrial. The state attorney general is opposing such a measure, but has initiated a search for the hairs in hopes that DNA testing could be carried out that would provide reliable clues. Previously, the state had indicated that the hairs had been destroyed, in violation of North Carolina law.
Fabricant, who is also acting on the Bridges case, said that states where examiners had been trained by the FBI in hair analysis had to act.
“Tens of thousands of people may have been caught in this trap,” he said. “When even the FBI has admitted liability, then states who were trained to use this discredited technique are now legally and morally obligated to step up to the plate.”
A paid FBI informant posing as a terrorism supporter assisted in the arrests of three men allegedly planning to aid the Islamic State. But did the agent help foil their plot or help devise it? We debate the role of informants in counterterrorism.
Originally aired on March 2, 2015
Hosted by:
Josh Zepps
Guests:
Adam D. Perlmutter@ADP_Legal(New York, NY)Criminal Defense Attorney
