In a chilling sign of what is sure to become more widespread, three of the Newburgh 4 — a group of Muslim ex-convicts and American citizens — were sentenced to 25 years in prison even after it was exposed that the government manufactured the threat, and entrapped the men into their participation in a false terror plot.
Welcome to counterterrorism operations inside the United States.
The case against the Newburgh 4 actually began to fall apart back in the middle of 2010 after White Plains, NY federal judge Colleen McMahon excoriated prosecutors for covering up evidence that the plot to bomb a Bronx synagogue and a Jewish community center, as well as to shoot down military planes at Stewart International airport was a “plot” by an FBI agent to entrap the four men. She asked a rhetorical question:
Did the government locate some disaffected individuals, manufacture a phony terrorist plot that the individuals would (and could) never have dreamed up or carried out on their own, and then wrongfully induce them to participate in it? (Source)
No matter, in a supreme act of cowardice, she gave the most “lenient” sentence available to her without having the case overturned. The ruling is a clear indication that the failure of any one of these patsy-driven cases threatens to bring down the new system of using entrapment to further counterterrorism efforts in the United States. Continue Reading
