Minneapolis
When the first group of “Minnesota men” was charged with conspiring to join ISIS in April 2015, it made front pages across the country. By the time the case went to court last month, however, the national media were almost nowhere to be found. Having attended the three-week-long trial daily, I can confidently say reporters should have paid a visit before the jury returned guilty verdicts June 3 against the three conspirators who contested the charges against them. I had to take in the evidence with my own eyes and ears to understand the gravity of the case against the “Minnesota men,” as media reports impassively referred to the Somali-American would-be terrorists. That evidence—overwhelming, devastating, shocking—was newsworthy. In his closing argument, one defense attorney professed that his client may have gotten into a situation over his head. But given the facts of the case—and the statements of those who protested that it went to trial at all—we might be in further over our heads than those convicted.
A total of 10 “Minnesota men” were eventually charged with seeking to leave the United States to join ISIS in Syria. By the time of trial, six had pleaded guilty: Zacharia Abdurahman, Hamza Ahmed, Adnan Farah, Hanad Musse, Abdirizak Warsame, and Abdullahi Yusuf. (Another was charged in absentia and is presumed dead in Syria.) Those guilty pleas spoke to the strength of the government’s case. Nevertheless, their friends Mohamed Farah (Adnan Farah’s older brother), Abdirahman Daud, and Guled Omar chose trial in federal district court. Another friend, Abdirahman Bashir, turned inform-ant, while others made it to Syria without being detected or charged in the process.
The “Minnesota men” have a lot in common. They are all first- or second-generation Somalis in their early 20s who freely took advantage of educational and employment opportunities in the Twin Cities. (Two of the men worked on the tarmac of the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport, while another was briefly a security guard elsewhere.) They all appear to be talented and resourceful young men. They are all observant Muslims (with an occasional weakness for marijuana). They had social lives centered on local mosques and supplemented their education with Islamic studies. They wanted to live under the caliphate declared by ISIS. They yearned to wage jihad and to die as martyrs. They hate the United States and are ungrateful for the opportunities it afforded them.
The prosecution contended that, beginning in spring 2014, the defendants made persistent efforts to depart Minnesota for Syria. The successful departure March 9 of Hanad Mohallim, who traveled from Minneapolis to Syria via Istanbul, inspired the friends he left behind. Abdi Nur and Yusuf Jama followed. Abdullahi Yusuf (already under surveillance) was stopped at the airport by the FBI. Others sought to join them by driving to San Diego and traveling to Syria via Mexico, but their plans were disrupted by Guled Omar’s family.
Still stuck in the Twin Cities, those who hadn’t made it out took another shot at it that fall. In November, Omar was stopped by a federal deputy marshal at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport apparently on his way to Syria via San Diego and Mexico. Told he wouldn’t be flying anywhere, he declined to talk and was sent home. (At trial, Omar testified he was headed to meet a girl he had connected with online.)
A few days later, four of the group (including defendant Mohamed Farah) left Minneapolis by bus for JFK International Airport. There, “the JFK four,” as prosecutors dubbed them, were intercepted by the FBI. Asked where he was headed, Farah said he was taking a solo vacation to sunny Sofia, Bulgaria. When the FBI sent the four back to Minneapolis, Hanad Musse protested that they were “profiling” him because he’s Muslim. The triumph of assimilation! Musse had fully absorbed the American culture of victimization.
In April 2015, the defendants’ efforts to join ISIS culminated in an apparent opportunity to travel to Syria through Mexico with fake passports to be secured in San Diego. By this time, however, Abdirahman Bashir had appeared before the grand jury investigating the “Minnesota men” with the assistance of the FBI. Starting in December 2014 or January 2015, Bashir turned informant. With the FBI, he covertly recorded his friends and ultimately presented them with the chance to fulfill their hearts’ desire with the fake passport scheme. Following their road trip with Bashir, Farah and Daud turned up at their rendezvous with a man named “Miguel” to pick up their passports at a San Diego warehouse. There an FBI SWAT team arrested them. Testifying at trial, “Miguel” disclosed that he is a San Diego law enforcement officer working undercover with the FBI. Fearing that he and his friends were too “hot,” Omar had opted out of the plan and stayed behind in Minneapolis, where he was arrested.
The heart of the case brought against the defendants was conspiracy: conspiracy to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization (by joining ISIS) and conspiracy to commit murder overseas (by fighting for ISIS). The second of the two charges carries a penalty of imprisonment up to life. To support the charges, prosecutors called Yusuf, Warsame, and Bashir to testify to the conspiracy from the inside. Yusuf and Warsame had pleaded guilty and hoped to secure reductions in their sentences from Judge Michael Davis, who has yet to impose sentences (see “Judging the ‘Minnesota Men,’ ” March 21, 2016). No charges have been brought against Bashir.
Defense counsel attacked the credibility of all these witnesses with their concessions that they had given false statements to the FBI and false testimony to the grand jury. But Bashir’s recordings proved a nut they were unable to crack.
In hours of recordings, the defendants expressed their desire to join ISIS, their regret over the failure of their previous efforts to make it out of the United States, their commitment to waging jihad against non-believers, and their ardent wish to die as martyrs. They thrilled to the videos of ISIS butchery in the name of Allah. They talked about their communications with their friends who had made it to ISIS in Syria. And they expressed their contempt for the United States. “I can’t believe I’m driving out of the land of the kuffar,” Daud said during the road trip, using a derogatory term for infidel. “I’m going to spit on America at the border crossing. May Allah’s curse be upon you.”
In another recording, Omar revealed that Nur had commissioned him to kill 16 Americans supposedly responsible for airstrikes on ISIS in Kobane, Syria. ISIS had come up with the names and addresses of the pilots by hacking a military database. Omar complained this information was too “hot”: He had accidentally clicked on the link to the names and addresses, making it possible for law enforcement to track him. He thought Nur should understand that it was harder for jihadists to operate in the United States than in Syria.
The recordings demolished the defendants’ claim of entrapment. Under the law, as Judge Davis instructed the jury, the defense of entrapment applies only to one who is not inclined to commit the crime in issue before he is contacted by someone acting for the government. The recordings proved beyond a reasonable doubt that defendants burned to fight for ISIS and did everything they could to make it happen before Bashir ever started working with the FBI.
Listening in the courtroom to the recordings with transcripts that made it easy to follow along was a chilling experience. If there was a star witness in the case, it was those recordings.
Also listening were the defendants’ families, who filled the courtroom each day wearing native Somali garb and hijabs. They were attended and comforted by members of the Twin Cities’ hard-left antiwar crowd, who also protested outside the courthouse on Thursday afternoons, decrying the FBI’s alleged entrapment and persecution of innocent Somalis, holding signs with lines such as “Stop Targeting Somali Youth” and “Thought Is Not Terrorism.”
FBI special agents and local members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force meticulously investigated the case against the “Minnesota men.” Prosecutors methodically proved that case. Law enforcement efforts to discover a “recruiter” who attracted Somali Minnesotans to ISIS appear to have proved unavailing. Growing up Muslim, receiving religious education, and attending local mosques—the Al-Farooq Youth and Family Center in Bloomington was mentioned frequently—the young men appear to have needed little more than the videos supplied by ISIS to recruit them. American culture has left many citizens with a vacuum of belief; for these immigrants, Islam filled it. The “Minnesota men” could have succumbed to drugs or alcohol in a pattern that has devastated the lives of so many American families. In this case, however, it was Islam that intoxicated them.
Judge Davis himself took up this point with Warsame in the course of his testimony as a cooperating witness. “You understood that if you committed jihad you would die,” the judge observed. “What attracted you to that?”
“The reward you would get and the fact that this life is temporary,” Warsame said. “If you were to go sacrifice yourself and go fight in jihad, the reward would be bigger. You’d save your family and save yourself.” Counter that.
The convictions promptly returned by the jury vindicate the work of the FBI and the office of United States Attorney for Minnesota Andrew Luger. Following the verdicts June 3, they held a joint press conference. Responding to the defamation of law enforcement and criticism of the informant by members of the Somali community and their friends in the peace crowd during the trial, FBI Special Agent in Charge of the Minneapolis Division Richard Thornton commented with unusual bluntness: “I find it shameful that some so-called community leaders have tried to vilify the confidential human source in this case. There is something wrong when you blame the person who did the right thing and defend those who were clearly in the wrong.” One may reasonably infer that the FBI is one institution of the executive branch President Obama has not yet corrupted. His administration has tried to muffle the Islamic component of the conflicts that confront the United States with its talk of “Countering Violent Extremism” and “Building Community Resilience.” While this troubling trial held few consolations, the absence of mind-numbing euphemisms was one.
Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the site Power Line.
