A recent NYU School of Law study suggests U.S. government entrapment in bombing cases.

A study from New York University's Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, profiling three terrorism cases in New York and New Jersey, blasts the "myth" of the homegrown threat of Islamic radicalization and says that "government-manufactured" terrorism cases pose "intolerable threats to basic human rights across the country."

All three of the cases in the 92-page report - called "Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the 'Homegrown Threat' in the United States" - relied on evidence from FBI informants that recruited Muslims to shoot, bomb or destroy targets selected by the agents.

The first of three cases is the so-called Newburgh Four, residents of the impoverished city in Orange County, N.Y., ensnared for plotting to blow up synagogues and shoot down military airplanes. They say an FBI informant picked the targets, provided mock weapons and promised them $250,000, along with other material and afterlife rewards.

The men - James Cromitie, David William, Onta Williams and Laguerre Payan - failed to convince the jury that they were entrapped and were convicted in October.

A federal judge dismissed their appeals, despite finding there was "some truth" to their position that the "Government 'created the criminal and manufactured the crime."

The NYU study, however, calls the "home-grown threat" a "myth" perpetuated by the 2007 NYPD report "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat," which identified "wearing traditional Islamic clothing and growing a beard" as signs of the "self-identification" phase of radicalization.

The authors say that dozens of other cases may involve religious profiling, untrained informants or government-created terror plots.

"Our research came across at least 20 other terrorism prosecutions in recent years against Muslim defendants that involved some combination of paid informants, selection for investigation based on perceived religious identity, or a plot that was created by the government," the report states, in three pages of citations.

A second study suggests that Muslims are targeted by the U.S. as dangerous threats to national security. This Briefing Paper by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) documents the U.S. government’s deployment of lower evidentiary standards and lack of due process guarantees in the immigration system against Muslims to further marginalize this targeted group in the name of national security and counterterrorism.

http://chrgj.org/projects/docs/undertheradar.pdf

NYU School of Law Report:
http://www.chrgj.org/projects/docs/targetedandentrapped.pdf

Link:
http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/05/20/36745.htm