The videos are choppy and grainy, and some are just a few seconds long. Many were shot through an open window, and the herky-jerky technique was, at best, headache-inducing.
As basic as they are, the dozens of videos that Syed Haris Ahmed and a friend made during a 2005 road trip to Washington, D.C. are the centerpiece to a federal terrorism trial that began Monday against the 24-year-old former Georgia Tech student.
Prosecutors contend the videos, which include shots of the Pentagon and the Capitol, were not meant to be sophisticated but instead a way for Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee to earn respect from overseas terrorist leaders.
“Look what I can get you,” Robert McBurney, assistant U.S. attorney, characterized Ahmed as saying. “I can get right up next to the Capitol.”
Defense attorney Jack Martin, who claimed the talk was boastful chatter from a misguided student, said federal investigators overstated the videos’ importance. After showing one particularly erratic video of the World Bank, Martin deadpanned it could prove useful — “if a terrorist was attacking on a pogo stick.”
The clips, as well as Ahmed’s attempts to connect with terrorists in Canada and Pakistan, are at the center of federal charges that Ahmed provided support for acts of terrorism in the U.S. and abroad. He could face up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
Sadequee, who has also pleaded not guilty, is scheduled to go on trial in August.
McBurney conceded that investigators had no evidence Ahmed was trying to act on the talk. But he contended the government had to nab Ahmed before he went any further because he was “one step removed from the bomb-throwers.”
Martin, for his part, portrayed the allegations as “momentary ideas” from an immature student whose idea of paramilitary training was shooting paint ball guns in the north Georgia woods.
“This is a silly video, amateurish video,” Martin said. “It was nothing more than a childish act to achieve stature from people abroad.”
Ahmed, who was wearing a skullcap and sporting a scraggly beard, quietly spoke with his attorney several times throughout the day. His most outspoken statement, though, was a silent one: He refused to rise when the judge entered the courtroom.
Before the trial began, a federal judge granted a request by The Associated Press and other news organizations to access about 12 hours of an audiotaped FBI interview with Ahmed as well as the “casing” videos at the center of the trial.
Federal authorities say they began building a case after the pair — both U.S. citizens who grew up in the Atlanta area — took a bus to Toronto in March 2005 and met with at least three other targets of an FBI investigation.
Authorities say they brainstormed strikes against targets that ranged from military bases to oil refineries, and plotted to disrupt the Global Positioning System satellite network.
Prosecutors say the talk amounted to the beginnings of a conspiracy, but Martin contended it was just “passing talk” of using sophisticated weaponry to knock out the system.
“Where are you going to get lasers?” asked Martin. “Radio Shack?”
Prosecutors, however, say Ahmed wanted to translate his plot into action. They contend he drove his pickup truck to Washington with Sadequee a few weeks later and made the videos of Washington landmarks, as well as the fuel depot and a Masonic Temple in northern Virginia. The two also were accused of discussing an attack against Dobbins Air Reserve Base just outside Atlanta.
He took another step toward acting on his plot, McBurney said, when he traveled to Pakistan on a one-way ticket in July 2005 to seek out Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based group linked with attacks in the disputed state of Kashmir.
He returned to Atlanta about a month later after abandoning his attempt to join the group. But McBurney said Ahmed began to regret his decision soon after he arrived home.
“The ultimate goal was to get into a training camp,” he said, “and pursue violent jihad.”
