In the Shadow of 9/11 (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] i was never good at being no type of scam artist this is the first time in life i'm ever really trying to run a scam they got convicted on not what they were able to do but what they were able to say the question is are they willing to commit these acts my mind can't see that is the feds that's putting the strength they gave who they thought to be an al qaeda operative exactly what he had asked for they had no money they had no weapons they weren't even islamic extremists now on front line in the shadow of 9 11. what time is it 6 48 i think he's just gonna be so happy to be a free man so happy to see his children oh man 13 years ago my face was all over the news media the fbi told me i was on larry king live the day i was arrested from everybody no i'm just the average person walking down the street this would took place because of bad choices of worms that he made and that's all he ever did was sing speak talk nonsense batiste intended to recruit and supervise individuals to organize and train for a mission of war against the united states garcia he had good intentions but he is also a good country and when the two run a foul this is what you get mayhem federal authorities described the group as radical black muslims their goal was simple to commit attacks against america it's like the gang that couldn't shoot straight they got convicted on not what they were able to do but what they were able to say six to eight people are now in federal custody after allegedly plotting to attack well-known u.s cities the federal government is calling this bust a major victory on the domestic front in this shadowy war next to being a pedophile a terrorist is the next worst thing you can be narcille batiste claimed his soldiers would quote kill all the devils we can an fbi informant promised them fifty thousand dollars if they pledged allegiance to al qaeda federal bureau investigation they invented the players they invented the theme they invented how it was going to go down they they wrote this script they wrote this script they conducted surveillance they conspired to murder countless americans through attacks that would be in their words quote just as good or greater than 911 greater than that this is not the case that they want america to see there are there are some serious terrorists out there that america need to be concentrating on this right here was just uh it's almost like a let's do a dry run if we can convict somebody as lazy and sorry as this crew was then we can convict anybody [Music] so [Music] in 2005 i was the acting supervisory special agent with the fbi miami the domestic al-qaeda squad i was born in the bronx my brother and i both my parents became addicted to heroin which wasn't very unusual for that period in american history my father had been arrested a few times he was involved in the credit card ring another time he was arrested for narcotics coming from that experience you're always looking for an angle because everybody has a hustle so i graduated high school how i don't know but i did spent nine years in the military went to school at night and then i put in an application with the fbi fbi calls nine months later and i ended up at quantico got out in 92 ended up in miami and you wake up and 10 years have gone by [Music] and then 9 11 happens on september 10th if we would have saw a movie on the events that happened on september 11th we all would have left that movie theater and said that is a phenomenal movie but it could never happen in the united states and on september 11th it did and what did they use they didn't use bombs or weapons they used box cutters and and complacency we got sucker punched on september the 11th enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country the evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al qaeda director robert mueller had been the director of the fbi for one week prior to 9 11. he went to brief president bush within a minute of telling the president vice president others about the 19 hijackers that we'd already learned about and everything president bush cut him off and said that's all well and good mr director but i want to know what the fbi is doing to prevent the next attack director mueller's job was then to take that mission to take the fbi from that reactive crime solving agency to a preventative national security agency mr pistol with respect to preventing 911 obviously you get a failing grade so the concern within the fbi immediately after 9 11 that there were other either sleeper cells or there are other terrorist operatives in the u.s and who else did they have positioned to commit a second attack and what how that attack might manifest itself we didn't know because there was a gap in the intelligence about what attacks might be taking place we realize there are huge gaps that we didn't know the answers to one of the the good things about the fbi's history was the ability to identify and develop cooperative witnesses and informants so in the decade after 9 11 let's say there was a great focus on developing human sources of information about attacks potential attacks we would get a tremendous amount of intelligence in the form of leads now it's post-9 11. so each one of these has to be shaken out [Music] one of my colleagues comes in and he says look i have some information um from an informant that there's a group of guys in miami in liberty city that are conducting military training that are interested in overthrowing the us government um and that want to meet al qaeda this was you know like a unicorn how does al-qaeda pop up in liberty city some areas were high drug trafficking areas and there were shootouts all the time the group were part of this hybrid religious militant organization [Music] they do military type training they do not believe in the laws of the united states they were basically anti-government so at this point we're assessing the veracity of the informant's information the person he was referring to was narcio batiste [Music] batiste was the leader we're still trying to determine what his motive is what is he really up to i wanted to be an actor it was interesting to see myself intrigue people over a character [Music] i went to mauling school i had a big interest in modeling and enacting at the time i always loved martial arts that's just come from watching shaolin temple kung fu master movies you know narcill was the baby he was the last one my mother had just had narcial she came home from the hospital and put him in my bed and told me it was my baby that she don't change diapers and she don't fix bottled milks and for me to take care of him my mom and dad they did baptist preaching they was ordained baptists at that time my parents were very wealthy from my dad's construction company my dad was doing government jobs like building post offices colleges prisons so he really blew up in his construction business what changed in narcell's life he met this man that wore these diapers on his head and carried a cane and his name was ggg something thinner he was telling me narcissist 33 something of the 76 something that he's jesus i said no my brother is not jesus then the next thing i know my brother started changing he started wearing diapers on his head and carrying the staff [Music] well i created my own style a religion you know what i mean my rose and what i wore was very unique nobody else on the street wore what i wore my style had something like much more of a martialized egyptian type of mixture outfit i wear a lot of velvet and indian cotton sage rope a staff and my hand or a rod that's what i look like an ancient type of holy man look like i stepped out of the bible that's beautiful brother beautiful brother you see like he fell out of heaven you know he had that innocent quality to himself [Music] [Music] i was born in the united states but my mom and dad from haiti 17 18 i got baptized when i got baptized i was feeling it you know it was just something on me i was feeling it and by that time in my life i knew things wasn't fair when we talk about leaders and who we look up to you know we looked up to naz because naz knew the bible he spoke it and he really was about it he grew up you know real close to god so we always was searching so when he smiled you know it was something that he had that was almost innocent you know he ain't he wasn't spoiled so he was like the rest of us that's was perfect there was no street in them at all [Music] i was like 19 18. i was the youngest one out of everybody and i was still going to night school trying to graduate my high school diploma nas was black activists wanting to help out the community that's what you got off the top he was really savvy when it came to the bible decoding it or making the bible in layman's term making it to a point where i could understand it he asked me to read a passage or something he realized i couldn't read [Music] and then he was like okay it's all right you could start right there and pull me to the side later he's like how old are you i was like i'm like 19 he's like you really should work on that like learning how to read i was like yeah i know it's like if you want i could help you sometimes and say okay cool i didn't introduce nas to nadi i introduced nas to my brother pat knew sunny sonny brought levi [Music] eventually they did become my followers they joined the temple and they agreed to give me the head position as the uh the high priest of the temple [Music] the actual temple was right across the street from our projects that they call the pork and beans projects there's a lot of gun selling drug dealing and a lot of violence that goes on at um drive-by shootings so we rent the warehouse but it was supposed to be a temple a temple [Music] we had bibles we had quran we had certain books krishna we had certain books because it was everybody was welcome to our table that was the whole one thing about why we called it the temple because we were saying the temple is where you actually get into your temple and pray we wasn't muslims but we had to understand the religions of the world and how they related to the people that we're going to talk to so 99 we study the bible the temple was called more science temple of america and universal divine saviors it sounded cool man said the whole reason i came to miami was to make all you guys more s marsh americans like moorish americans you may not have heard of the moorish nationals it comes from a black religious group that's been around for nearly a century most of its members obey the law but not everyone this man was arrested by police in fayetteville north carolina but his wife claims the arrest was illegal because he is a member of the moorish nation he was telling me um the more science temple is like indigenous people to america and we have sovereign rights and i understand what none of that was i was like what the song right what snatch you up is when they tell you you didn't come over here just on no slave in a more science temple it makes christianity judaism and islamism all in one they are geared to help the black community so we sitting down just building on the bible and talking about making a great change you know and can we do it can we actually you know change not just our condition but the condition of our moms and dads and cousins and community you know you can't come into the community and you ain't no strong man so we came across like yo we are soldiers you know we soldiers for god is [Music] they had uniforms that they will wear paramilitary uniforms khaki type shirt and they were wearing the same type of pants this is the moorish star you know for the religion and then of course them living in america they have the american flag and what was so ironic about this whole thing is that the government tried to paint them is that they were unamerican [Music] you know we brought in experts to tell us hey what which uh what flavor of kool-aid is this because we haven't seen this before something is not making sense you had a group of guys that were in liberty city that wanted to meet somebody from al qaeda everything had to be followed up because some of the things that fell through the gap that allowed 9 11 to happen we could not allow for anything like that to fall through a gap again i had never heard of the informant abbas al saeedy [Music] abbas had worked at a convenience store you know in a medium to low-income neighborhood he started out as a snitch initially for drugs new york city has its own intelligence unit which was focused on terrorism after 9 11. they found this young guy from yemen who's pretty street smart to be somebody that they could use in in their investigation in new york at some point in time there became a threat that they considered to be a threat against him they encouraged him to move out of new york city and and ultimately he he moved down to miami i was 18 years old at this time going on 19. i just kind of was in love with him and did what he told me to do and i trusted him and that was one of my biggest mistakes we had three dollars between the both of us and we got into a really physical argument he beats the crap out of stephanie one day ends up in jail i had bite marks on my neck bruises on my face even though it was his first domestic violence he went to jail for a couple months he kept calling the connections that he had in new york he reaches out to the lieutenant in new york hey can you help me out i'm in jail yada yada tells them the story the guy says look i can maybe you know reach out to the fbi and see if they might have an interest and an agent comes and visits him in jail he told me that when he came out of jail that the fbi was waiting there to go to work he found the brothers and that's all he needed to do the job i used to go to corner store and see him all the time and he was extra friendly he would try to act black so much smoking weed in the store blasting tupac i'm like damn i like this dude's wild he's like what's up all right what's up i used to go to the store all the time buying guards and the smoke the weed that he had the marijuana he had was a great substance and it was the kind of substance that i really enjoyed so my friend that worked there would get it for me one day he seen me with nas he's like oh you know the brother he switched it up now he's like all muslim and he's like yes brother he's not even using it he's not smoking he's not using the n-word he's not cousin he's all muslim now he's a muslim hat i like what happened he seemed very religious but he seemed very street like street hustler so that's why i related to him in a sense because he had game he had street five [Music] one day his cousin comes down he like y'all don't want to mess with her boss man and then we couldn't get it because we ain't thinking about no fbi no police like man y'all wanna mess with him man he dirty i remember him saying abbas is working with the police what he said the boss was involved in setting people up with law enforcement and that if he ever gets a chance to he'll fabricate a story on me [Music] that's why we met him the government says that when i met a boss i went into his store asking him can you hook me up with a song i've been a lot and already terrorist guy that's what they were saying and no never happened what the informant initially said i met a guy who has a group they want to overthrow the united states they want to meet al qaeda operatives and they want to align themselves with al-qaeda [Music] one of the critical capabilities that a terrorist organization such as al qaeda needs is resources here in the states if they could acquire the capability of a u.s citizen or a group of u.s citizens that are completely off the radar well that's that's a pretty formidable threat [Music] so at the time i'm thinking maybe something was miscommunicated misunderstood you know one of the ways we resolved that is reconstitute the conversation and capture it on audio this is special agent john p stewart the federal bureau of investigation for miami division today's date october 3rd 2005 the time 2 45 pm it was just one of the worst i guess you could say things that could have ever happened to us in our life because this cry from this man turned garcia to help him turn out actually to be what actually said everything for us in turmoil the turning point between me and the boss is when i went to the store i seen ice there immigration custom enforcement a boss was rampaging back and forth in the store brother uh i'm in a lot of trouble right now they're trying to deport me of course being the man that garcia is he would want help at any given opportunity narcio had told him if you need any help reach out to us and of course he did and then from there started the nightmare how you doing with them with them the phone calls of him calling me just just increased instead of being like every two weeks he'll call me see how i'm doing it was like every day um i don't know if you want me to come over or if you want to come over i'm free for all right now they just called me on the job and i have to go look at a job at the airport so i'm gonna be leaving it about an hour he's saying he needs to meet me right away and what was your response uh soon as i get a chance to because i was very busy with work with the construction company thank you for calling you reached a stick of stucco and masonry and acme organizations incorporated please leave your name and number and someone will return your call as soon as possible i stack a stucco in mason area i love the name s decker because fantastic ancient indians were master builders so i adopted that [Music] pat was in the construction field sunny was in the construction field nas was a truck driver i was doing security and a little side hustle and we need to make money pat was like i have an idea we gonna team up and you know let's put a small construction company together we got the skills we got the determination we got a willingness and we got there's the need [Music] i'm coming home dead tired and man i was happy i was like man i'm doing something i'm doing something you know change is coming it was the first time in my life i was working towards my own business my own business i dived all in i had all my cars in the construction game sacrifice weeks without even getting paid wake up early and go to sleep late and there's no money on the table i'm not getting paid we had several instances where we were not getting paid plus the investment we ever already had made and uh remodeling the temple so we was at a financial distro [Music] i got a lot of people that's not you know don't want to pay me on time and stuff like that i'm trying to finish this job so i can have your money but you know and then it cost me it cost me so much money to do all that plumbing work inside the biggest mistake he was consistently making was using other job money to cover a job because he underestimated his job the number one rule in construction every job pay itself you don't use money from another job to cover build another job that's bad business and i'm kind of like in a jam right now i have the means of paying and just said i'm just waiting to finish this project and these people pay me i just knew it became very overwhelming for him oftentimes he would just not sleep everybody wanted a better way of living so he felt the pressure of all these families on him yes this is badly today's date is 11 21 2005. time is 1 38 p.m let's record you at the temple at seven o'clock or you want to come over here to the to the um uh i mean i'm in my house it's it's more safe you know over here it's quiet okay [Applause] brother thank you very much man obaz kept begging and begging back and he just kept promising you just don't realize the opportunity that i can have for you you know we're gonna do something really really really great together financially i can really help you guys if you just trust me just a little bit just to come by and talk so it wasn't let's see how we could build a mousetrap put a big piece of cheese on there listen i don't even know if this is a mouse and if it is a mouse i don't even know if this mouse wants any cheese so we looked at batiste and said he doesn't look like you know i don't know he's he's saying these things that a mouse would say but let's give him another shot and then we had nowhere else to go but to put the piece of cheese on the trap when you're sending an informant into a meeting you're not giving them a script you're giving them an outline with with some objectives to achieve revisit this conversation let batiste explain in his own words what it is that he was asking about for assistance the outline for that was in the form of a boss telling narcio batiste remember you told me you wanted to meet an al-qaeda guy um well i i got the guy my boss has a friend of his that he wants me to meet who's a financial guy a rich guy this than the other and that he would help back us up whenever we need it but we need to follow his direction in this okay so he wants us to make sure that we're really good muslims he's like yeah you got to be really good good muslim men i know christianity so so go buy some qurans i like uh he has a uncle coming down who's a philanthropist and he loves people who's helping the community that's what habas must have repeated a thousand times man my uncle like to help people who help people don't worry about nothing he's that's what he do i'm gonna talk to my uncle my concord going to help you you know we're gonna get some money and we are gonna you know we're gonna make some money we wanted the money we want the funds because we we were not bad nobody had the knowledge of how to run a business so we would pick up what we was doing this is balaam date is 11 21 2005. time is 7 58 p.m [Music] has ended when we get there we're still in our work clothes because we just left the job me and patrick abraham [Music] just laughing and talking about the situation that a boss was was talking to us about so what happened to the temple you fix it up brother our intention from the beginning was to put this to bed he wants to meet al qaeda okay tell him you got a guy see what he says the expected response would be what do you what are you talking about i i never i don't remember ever saying that remember the guy i told you about i told you somebody was supposed to be coming over yeah still coming over i was wondering man i'm not sure what day yet that was echoed me if i was able to send somebody to get him from the airport so he could have said hey listen i i i was a little out of my lane i was off my meds and i don't know what you're talking about and then we would have happily have closed that investigation because it wasn't like we were looking for work would you pick him up from the airport i would all right thanks let him know i thought outboss was an avenue to relinquish my financial difficulty if i can just get the money i can pay these immediate bills that was the only thing that kept driving me that if i get that one handful of money then it's over with realistically speaking one dollar is good enough for me because that's what i don't have to push forward on the mission but i know one thing once i get at least 30 to 40 000 on this mission it is over i had no belief into fighting any jihad holy war or anything that's going on in the middle east and even though it was against one world values i felt like if i could go through it and just get the money then all of that would be washed away we need to be organized we have to have the plan ready we need this amount of money something like this but if we don't come up with no plan how how can we get support [Music] well tony we got the tape okay so what are we doing well he asked him hey you remember when you wanted to meet the elk and he said yeah so what are we doing now okay well you're going to have to put somebody that's going to pretend to be arcade in front of them my name is eli assad a former undercover operative for united states government we identified an informant that had been previously used in another fbi investigation in miami so they needed to to get somebody else a little bit stronger a little bit more forceful so they bring in the closer the closer is is uh ellie assad and eli assad was a professional informant he used to refer to himself to his friends as tony montana from the uh scarface you know the evil character are we ready you ready okay um hold on sure okay when we initially got the information we're looking at this and we're like do we think that these guys really want to meet somebody from al qaeda you know common sense sort of suggested probably not but let's see where it goes and so we decided on using him because we did not expect for it to go beyond that first meeting i'm good i never lost the case i never lost a case all these years even sometimes when they have already on ongoing cases where they feel they're gonna lose it and they bring you to uh jump in and put it back on track abbas is talking about eli assad but he's using his name as uncle yeah that's that's his name aliasad no good [Music] we rented a hotel room the hilton downtown miami again we set up surveillance so we could capture the meeting in video and audio [Music] i'm in a room close by where we can monitor the meeting we also have a surveillance unit outside of the hotel [Music] abbas continued to call us and call us until ali assad came and he called me all that day to go meet him well he initially promised me like around 20 grand or whatever he said i'll have it for you i just need you to be here the surveillance team says you're not gonna believe this but your subject is walking down biscayne boulevard in a white robe and a cane that's six feet tall looking like moses i got on the radio and i said are you sure it's our subject and they're like it's it's their guy they look at our team in the room and i'm like what what's going on room 612 i knocked on the door aside open up the door and he says come on in brother let's talk i was at the airport i think i could be slick enough to say what i had to say in there and just get that money and break off doesn't blink he could have said listen i was just joking i'm going to a halloween party and fine so brother what um he had somewhat of an ego if you will listen to me that is very important you don't play with me with nobody no you don't tell me unless you don't test me you are not killed for testing me i think he sort of felt he needed to guide this conversation more affirmatively and at times i think he he may overdo it tell me what's going on with you what you want from me you're not here capable of testing me you don't know who i am you don't know who i am and what i'm capable of you don't know i'm capable of many things many things so it's your choice you tell me what's going on what you want from me now i was never good at being no type of scam artist this is the first time in life i'm ever really trying to run a scam [Music] i'm exhausted financially okay in everything i'm trying to do we have nothing and a little bit that i have i took it to fix the moss you'll have boots they don't have what you know what it's beautiful so first point first point you want boots and your photos but that's when you're too like what give me this what you want give me all the lists what you want don't later on tell me i missed something i want everything on the list he was like all right so what do you need i knew that i had to make something up right then and there of course i was not prepared for any kind of list i didn't bring any kind of list because this was something i was just brainstorming on so i wrote a whole bunch of crazy things down on the list i didn't need high boots things didn't make sense [Music] yes i put guns on there i couldn't name him he kept asking me the name from i didn't know any name of guns because i never owned a gun pilot is [Music] the list that he took he tore up several times and eventually there was a list that was made he was like i'll go back and talk to a boss about everything and we'll work on getting the money to you [Music] i left the room felt a lot of fear i felt like a big cavity was inside my chest empty we're in the room where we're like okay what happens now so we went back to the uh to the bullpen and sat down and says okay guys let's let's whiteboard this what are we gonna do okay we could go knock on batiste door and say hey listen we you met with somebody who said they were with al qaeda now how serious are you because if you're not okay you need to knock it off they could just go off and not do anything for another year or two years or three years there aren't enough resources to commit to that type of you know monitoring so we wanted to find out um how committed batiste was to what he had told eli assad brother i'm not trying to show you your job this whole thing was way beyond me the rhetoric and the talk and the relationship with the biases went way out of control training is a word that being used everything well [Music] my hustle wasn't even talk about terrorists at the very beginning i was slowly wielded into that with the boss whatever we listen we need to speak about it now we need to find it now find all the accessories we need peoples places he really set these guys up there's really no other way for me to put it a bath saw from working in the store that these men didn't have a lot of money and he also played on that that they were poor they just kept getting pushed forward and forward and forward by a bass and a bass is putting all these ideas in their head it was like a big joke to him at home it was all he could do is laugh about it he thought it was hilarious he was like i can't believe they think i'm really al-qaeda it didn't matter if that's how he was going to get his money if that's how the fbi was going to pay him [Music] whatever they think of in heaven is they see it right in front of them whatever comes up to your mind you see it right there if you think about women's you see women if you think about honey you get rivers of honey alcohol is rivers of avocados in the informant world are they paid of course they're paid they got paid expenses it wasn't like hey listen if you get a conviction you're going to get 100 100 000 that's not how we [Music] i finally get a call from a boss telling me look um assad definitely wants to meet with you he's got the money you just have to pick him up he told me that if you're going to get the money you got to make it sound for real talk big like you're going to blow something up he said you say that they're going to come through i was high up for marijuana one time i was right in the backseat of the car and he whispered over to me said you got anything in mind you can say big say you're from chicago you should better come up with something i thought in my mind well the sears tower i said blow that out what did that sound and he cracked up laughing and he said that would be great chicago i hope there's a lot of spinning award downtown chicago that was the basis motivation that was the whole thing was about who could scam who out of the money did you think that that could go wrong for you yes did i linger in that thought no what you are saying right now in this moment that united states will remember the whole will remember for a million years coming [Music] directly i told you i admire some of somebody now the only thing like like i did from the very beginning is ask you for your help and it has to be financial it has to be ask them for money i need to give them something solid like i said i don't know what it's going to take for you to get that first 50 pounds okay let me tell you something to let them approve the 50 grand they have to see something solid he's gonna give you money what the do you think the money is for terrorism he wants you to do an act just like a uh murder for hire what's present in our mind is when you give it to me i'm not killing nobody this is mine what you gonna do because if you're really that powerful you would've had your own crew right here you ain't you're just a rich mother that is gonna give the money to us and then you're gonna disappear whoa man it's like terrorism you know it never popped in our mind like yo this is something serious it's like these two fake guys playing some damn game baptists fighting for control over some damn donations and it was it all made me sick i want to prove these guys didn't want to do this i want to prove that this conversation that the informant may have misquoted didn't happen and this is what it is but that's not what happened every time i thought we were gonna get off the highway we hit another mile marker yeah he left yesterday so i was watching the basketball yeah come on what you do that's bad you don't drink you smoke marijuana marijuana yeah do you i was taking a lot of marijuana substance at least an ounce every two days and it had me live in a world of fear and fear was pulling all of this into a detrimental path with myself as far as trusting my own judgment of what's right and wrong in terms of the scam of going further or not and son of another when he spoke about what he writes them and he heard them one of the clan was on his desk was one of yours whenever i you know my attention fell on him it's like well you talk talking crazy and they're doing all of that just to get the convince of god to give you some money we're gonna launch a full ground floor what we're going to have a full blower well yeah that means that we're going to kill all that as we can i was just trying to get into assad's head you know see what would make him happy because he kept looking at me like you know i need more say something more believe it or not we need horses horses horses why because you gotta you gotta that's chicago right this guy just make a crazy ass statement and then less than 10 seconds later he's in a basketball game the tv faced us so a lot of time you see me there i'm looking i'm watching the game this which one okay this is the favorite right this is all of this like this close now when i point out here [Music] so what would happen you all exploded i wasn't feeling good about what i was saying but at the time i felt like i had to to make up this story one more time for this guy so i was just constantly just flipping through different pictures in my mind that i seen on the media i grabbed that from just in the world type of movies because a lot of that was going on at the time tidal waves type of movies if we see them surviving i'm not going to do anything i'm just talking a whole bunch of crap here and i'm high so you're speaking about how many people like hundred thousand thousand hundred thousand crosstalk if batiste is having these conversations with somebody he believes is from al qaeda you know al qaeda would say okay maybe maybe we should target the sears tower and and and by the way you think we should as the survivors run out shoot him we didn't even think of that write that down i i don't know [Music] i just want enough money to do it dude you you really have to do all of that you do have to really doing all that back and forth with the guy yeah he going character you know get the money i'm gonna get the money why whatever man i was sick of it matter of fact i remember uh when i went home i got sick somehow another i was doing a lot of vomiting it's like okay let's say he is crazy that's a dangerous dialogue we never expected again to get to where we ended up because we thought at some point he would say look this is what i'm this is all a charade director mueller is being briefed daily and we knew that this was included in his presidential briefs that brief is look there's a group of kids in miami-dade that formed an organization and want to align themselves with al qaeda to start a war in the united states the prosecutors wanted more overt acts so anytime there's a conspiracy involved you have to have overt acts in furtherance of that conspiracy anything that a prosecutor could use as evidence to convince a judge or jury that these people were serious a conversation is an act so you don't need to pick up a gun or or let off a bomb or make a bomb for it to be an overt act i think the idea came from the fbi through cia and the idea was to have some sort of formal allegiance some pledge to al qaeda to see if they went forward with it the idea was introduced to further test their commitment to their interest in aligning with al-qaeda by saying well look you have to take an oath of loyalty [Music] assad came by the temple he says the reason why i hold back the money from you is because you don't have a commitment i said well what do you mean he said we got to have some type of commitment between us and he didn't call in an oath or any uh swearing allegiance to any and we have to discuss this organization some more and then we can proceed further [Music] i drove to his location and he got in the car and he pulled out this piece of paper and he says this is the commitment or the oath that i need you to read you repeat after me because you are the leader of the group yeah but i i have to read and you have to repeat that listen if you're not 100 on board with this here's your here's your chance to get out [Music] here's your chance to get out and so eventually i read it no you have to repeat exactly you have to repeat but i can't say yeah but yeah but this is for english version of course okay i feel like it was stupid i didn't feel like it was a real akaido um usually when somebody wants you to swear legions to a dangerous organization it's gonna be something some type of dramatic thing they're gonna actually read from the piece of paper they're gonna probably you know do something crazy to you or have you do something crazy were you not worried that this could all catch up with you very quickly of course i was worried and yeah yeah i thought i could still uh make this deal go through to the directive of al-qaeda is the direction that was given was if batiste takes the oath then you tell him that all of the members of his organization have to take the oath so this was already pre-planned tomorrow with the brother to present our commitment our agreements yeah well let's go ahead and get it out the way i felt like i was getting deeper into a trap then i might not better get myself out of this trap if i play this game even further [Music] the approach that we took was to create a platform to capture conversations with the group that particular area where their warehouse was was incredibly difficult to surveil it was a high drug trafficking area so we looked at telling batiste hey listen one of the things we can do is we could get you a better training facility [Music] the idea came up renting a warehouse pre-wiring it so we could capture audio and video then take that warehouse and identify three other warehouses and tell batiste hey listen let's go look at some warehouses we're going to buscane and 63rd street and you have to go west on 63rd uh let me get the others right i was told by assad i got a warehouse and we need to go look at one you can pick out any one and we'll just give it to you and that'll be a part of the financial help that we'll give you and let me give you the other address also okay 6300 north east 4th coast i mean this isn't rocket science we got a really nice warehouse it's a bentley of warehouses and then two other warehouses that you know you wouldn't even want to yeah burn for insurance money the question is supposed to batis which warehouse do you want one we picked the one the fbi wanted us to pick how much control is that's why i'm tripping the one we pick we pick is the one they had set up that they wanted us to pick so this how so much it was over our head they knew how to make us pick what they wanted us to pick there was a boat in there there was a van in there they both had keys both had deeds in them it was all ours there was a a refrigerator filled with fish and all type of seafood or like 10 pounds of shrimp it's like wow somebody just bought this it was fresh we flipped the switch we got a title three wiretap intercept okay let's see what happens i told you you want it okay this yours it was huge you know so we had places for bunks places to work out places to store our equipment it was an office in the front so even for us it was like whoa this would be a step up it's dumb deep commodities the key would be with us so we can bring all the brother if we get the key in the morning we can bring the brother in the night yeah yeah we'll come in the night is the night all of us do you remember about the pledge yeah did you talk to the brothers about this uh in part in part do you feel you were being honest with the brothers at this point in terms of holding back information yeah i held back information why i felt like they would adjust the situation to be not worth it and we could lose out on the opportunity that we've already worked ourselves into you're happy okay that's it no more rent my friend no more take it bad boy bad what you boy do once they come for you [Music] so this song is very famous around the world [Music] now is telling us already that don't worry about what this guy's saying it's just all bull because before then we came from a construction site before we went in here that day we came off of doing a job i really didn't that's what i'm trying to get trying to say i don't give a we grew up from nothing we grew up from watching people that we love die get shot in the street we didn't grow up where everybody talked their way out of trouble we grew up everybody got killed or got sent to jail so it's like our way of life was if he didn't if we didn't see him display this type of violence then he's not on it he's not he's just talking and he's fully [Music] today march 16 2006 time is 9 35 p.m [Music] the scenario was batiste would bring them in and each one would have to take the other not as a group again the reason for that is maybe somebody is in that group and they're not saying anything but they're like i you know i i draw the line here the first thing is that we're all very grateful for all the help and support that's coming through so here i am i complete my promise to you and from now this stat is not my step anymore it's your step i told him that he had some silly commitment that he was asking us to read but don't take it seriously lefties already spoke to us this no matter what's going on he's just trying to get some money to just don't say nothing just back him up okay explain it to the brother i will explain to them and i will and i can't really tell you detail how it transferred to the whole old thing i just know it happened because during this whole time i'm getting high like a mother this al-qaeda pledge for al qaeda pledge i am representing the sheikh osama bin laden god's pledge is upon me and so is his compact and that i will be a soldier of the islamic soldiers until god's word is exalted and i commit myself along my brothers pass on the road of jihad you understand me all of you was clear now you repeat after me when he says that i looked towards baptiste i was like yeah i baptized this chord this all right man it's all right all right yeah cause you really tell them we like gritting our teeth and we like we put our hands up you know we backing up our man when i say to commit myself each one has to say his name it settles you to commit myself now your turn [Music] meanwhile i was in the background just giving the brothers an eye for insurance like this is just this ain't real this is just a game to commit myself to commit myself to commit myself to to commit myself [Music] okay we barely had time to even think and who give hopes to osama bin laden in al qaeda for the movies this is what we see on tv it's not even if it was real it wasn't real because it doesn't happen where we come from to the path of holy war [Music] once everyone took the oath eli assad was instructed to introduce a plot by al qaeda to blow up five fbi offices miami being one of them and that al qaeda would like some assistance in doing reconnaissance and surveillance and other things and then provide a video cam [Music] the chef is preparing for a hit for five buildings in united states washington chicago los angeles new york and miami we are taking down the five fbi buildings but he asked me if i can tape it tape the building i don't know where the buildings are so he asked me if i can send him back the videotape even though it didn't make sense to me i was more focused on baptists that moment i felt betrayed i felt betrayed and and honestly that was the one time i should not hold my composure because that time i really wanted to punch him in the face i'm thinking this this this straight bull crap this straight bull crap yeah i when i when i do these video tapes you're gonna have to be very careful with those papers i feel really like baptists crossed the line so after everything finished happening i took my wife my kids i took monkeys out of school ran up ran uncle and left that soiled us to a point where i don't know if we would we was able to to come back from that that night because we start to lose respect for you know not just ourselves but for baptiste and for what we was doing and is it was it was ugly it was ugly they were very disappointed in themselves as well as disappointed in me that all this had to happen from just one single thought what about if we can scam money out of these people it was just a nasty deal nasty scam that nobody really liked [Music] osan had rented a van for us because i told him i didn't have any transportation or anything i figured that if i just ride around with a camera in my hand and then say it's all i'm gonna do that would satisfy first the end of my hustle and my scam baptiste he like man these pictures right here you can um get these pictures online you know we're gonna just give it to them and it's the last bit we have to ever do to deal with this guy you know this is it it's over assad said you do this one more project for me take the picture i'll give you the money it was fifty thousand too do you know why he might picture oh yeah he wanted to blow him up oh yeah that was no secret did that bother you no and yeah because i didn't believe it i ain't really it you know i'm not scared of thinking is a real terrorist group really wants some pictures of federal buildings you know i'm not scared of that because this guy is not no terrorist assad you know i was trying to put him together why is he doing this my mind can't see that is the feds that's pulling the strings i can't imagine you know a government agency of put this together they take footage of the u.s attorney's office in miami and i believe they took footage of the miami police department we had only asked for reconnaissance on the fbi office and then they provided that that video footage to to assad the problem is the problem is we're having problems it's not clear right you're doing a good job good job but it's like you are driving you are not like right stopping it because when you stop it when you stop it it's not feeling clearly the picture they could have gone to walmart and took a picture of the back so they could have done a number of things even at that point in the investigation but they didn't what they did was that they gave who they thought to be an al qaeda operative exactly what he had asked for what i want to understand i can't get the frozen shot with the video camera just let's not let that turn the shot just like let it let it roll on the building a little bit like here for a couple seconds batiste is mentally competent to represent a threat that would be of interest to somebody like al qaeda or isis you know they they'd love to identify people like this so what what was this yeah see that's the security right there that's that that's what they usually stand at that's the guard post right here okay all the way on the other side they got guys this is another street they got guys walking on that street all there they have at least five federal agents and i'm not suggesting that they're going to recruit him to put a backpack filled with explosives and walk into a mall the fact that he's willing to assist in a conspiracy to blow up a building in the united states is no less dangerous whether that's acquiring sim cards or checking out library books stealing a car on its own it's doesn't seem like much but if the ultimate purpose is to conduct a terrorist attack well then yeah i think he does represent a threat [Music] so the decision was made that we were going to indict batiste the other six members of his group and arrest them [Music] one of the things that they did to earn a living was they they did stucco for buildings and so we called a contact that has several rental properties in miami and says would you call these guys and see if you could hire them to do some stucco work for you [Music] my understanding is they were actually on ladders when they were arrested by the swat team breaking news out of miami anti-terrorism raids by the fbi as well as state and local police seven people right now are under arrest i had my nervous there i had my daughter in the cassia and my son prince they told me and my family to get on the ground they all they held machine guns to my kids and my wife's head in my head i was scared for my life or they would shoot us they had guns drawn at us pointing at my children i thought it was just something as a ticket he hadn't paid or or maybe a violation he had made somewhere it was like 50 agents they swarmed around me real quick and i get on [Music] i'm thinking everything i did back in the day i'm like damn they caught up with me and then the oath and then the pictures and everything flash in my mind i'm like it was a setup breaking news tonight terror-related arrest in miami fbi agents swoop in on a liberty city neighborhood to foil an alleged plot to commit terror acts in miami and chicago i see my brother on television saying he's a terrorist investigators say one of the seven narcial batiste was the ringleader ringleader i said a ring leader oh my god i said this boy can't even put cows in the pasture has he a ringleader i'm like this is no way and i mean i was so hurt i just fell to my knees and i started crying because i'm like this is not true this is not my brother we now go back to larry king's exclusive interview with the director of the fbi robert mueller federal agents are conducting a terrorism-related investigation in liberty city that's an area of the city of miami what can you tell us i can tell you we do have an ongoing operation in in miami we are conducting a number of arrests and searches big concern whenever we undertake an operation like this we would not do it without the approval of a judge we've got search warrants and arrest warrants and the like and so yes it's a concern [Music] good morning i'm joined today by fbi deputy director john pistol and assistant attorney general alice fischer of the criminal division the fact that there was a press conference where the attorney general speaks it's a pretty big deal for the department of justice seven men were arrested yesterday in miami on charges of conspiring to support the al-qaeda terrorist organization by planning attacks on numerous targets including bombing the sears tower in chicago listen we're going to go after people to engage in any any kind of contact that's similar to this i think that's a very powerful message a very powerful tool that the attorney general is using the stick of the department of justice to try to discourage this kind of behavior from happening again these individuals wish to wage a quote full ground war against the united states the ridiculousness of that opening announcement by gonzalez is astounding i think i wrote that wager ground war against the united states this group couldn't wage a ground war against a jar of peppercorns it was clear that from the highest levels of the department of justice that this prosecution had been approved and was being touted as like a success of the government's counterterrorism program i think what struck everyone was that alberto gonzalez seemed to know very little about the specifics of this case the man to have any actual contact with any members of al-qaeda that you know of any no yeah the answer that the answer to that is no they had no money they had no weapons they weren't even islamic extremists ultimately we realized it was a sting operation the way this all unfolded seemed very improbable very forced and it really looked like the fbi led these men down the primrose path was there anything against the sears tower except this one apparent just just kind of a mention of the series tower doesn't look like they have two pictures or did it one of the individuals was familiar with the sears tower had worked in chicago and had been there so was familiar with the with the tower i wanted to distinguish this for the media because one of my concerns was that we not over hype things that you know this is this is another 911 cell that if they're ready willing and able to die and have the means of accomplishing their attacks and so i described it as an that this was an aspirational group rather than operational group in terms of the plans it was more aspirational than operational i think the public and the media began to realize very quickly that this was just not a strong case that it was a weak case it looks like these guys were actually asking for material support from what they thought was al-qaeda these guys couldn't buy boots on their own they don't sound like very sophisticated or or you know effective operators these guys didn't have you know the ability to you know blow up anything let alone the sears tower did you find any explosives weapons and you raise a good point you know you know our philosophy here is that we try to identify plots in the earliest stages possible because we don't know what we what we don't know about about a terrorism plot you know i hate to criticize an attorney general but when he said we had taken out an al-qaeda cell yes [Music] i knew that was going to be a problem he went overboard they were not an al-qaeda cell they were not directed by al-qaeda you know that is a an overstatement so the charges were valid it was it was the over hyping of the case they're charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization namely al-qaeda even though there was no actual connection to al-qaeda the problem with terrorism cases is you have to stop the act and so you really in a way have to predict who's going to do what um and so stings are very important but if you overstate what you have done in this thing then people begin to lose confidence in what you're doing they think you're just out there creating a terrorist yourself i had been doing undercover work in terrorism cases for a decade before 9 11. and before 9 11 if i had called fbi headquarters and said i want to initiate an undercover operation targeting a terrorist group uh the first question they would have asked me is okay what terrorist group do this these individuals belong to and if i said well they don't actually belong to a terrorist group they're just saying things that sound kind of scary and things the terrorists might say and they would say okay well what kind of weapons do they have and if i replied well they don't actually have any weapons and part of the plot would be to supply them with weapons and then they would say well what plot do they have in mind i would say well they haven't actually identified a plot yet part of the operation would be to identify a plot and then provide them the weapons so that they could be terrorists uh they would have sent me for counseling thank you thank you through 2005 and 2006 there had been a very heated debate over extending expiring provisions of the patriot act so i think that there was great pressure on the fbi to demonstrate both that there was a powerful threat that still existed inside the united states that justified this expanded surveillance authority and that the tools that they had been given through the patriot act were actually effective in identifying these spots correctional officers in the building all of a sudden start running to my cell and pointing at me and bringing people so it's like all of a sudden everybody coming to take a look at me and it was like well this is a terrorism case you know you finna get shipped to guantanamo when he said that i can feel my stomach turn think for the next three days i had like diarrhea it was just it was a shock and then i knew what i was getting charged with and you know i just i just hid up under the um the blanket you know why people come point at me and you know is it was horrifying if they were homegrown terrorists they grew up here on this miami street stanley fonor was born in this house likeliness and lamorin moved in across the street with his mom when he was just six and today the two mothers both haitian told us in disbelief there were no terrorists raised on 45th street they have this everything they have these two fertile why do you find that money to pay and they call him immigrant on a tv my son is good from your country [Music] the objective then becomes to solicit the cooperation of one of the defendants to flip someone and he was telling me are you seriously thinking about spending the rest of your life in prison i said man i don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison they're like okay then so the only way you could do that is by signing these papers i'm like i'm gonna set myself free without signing those papers we was looking at the younger brothers um not a mermaid and we was like you know what just um just sign what you gotta sign you know [Music] we told them brothers another miranda man sign what you gotta sign man and get out of this you know you real young and you know they got upset it was like no we're not signing we're facing 70 years and three life sentences and you know them brothers was like nah they not you know and i definitely wasn't you know so yeah nobody was willing to um sign off that there was terrorism but more so nobody was willing to yeah nobody was willing to send a brother who they know what we was out there doing in them streets you know up the road for a charge that that wasn't us i refused every plea i thought to my lord to my lord mallory could understand and i told him that's basically where i got to be because i was with these brothers i knew what it was about i knew if i could take any plea even regardless of pleaded say that i didn't know nothing about that then i'm then it actually saying something about my brothers that's left in there that i knew that was not about what they said it was about prosecutors laid out their case against seven men dubbed the liberty city seven accused of conspiring to blow up the sears tower in chicago you have to understand that in the counter-terrorism field the criminal penalties associated with the laws that are used particularly laws like the material support for terrorism law come with draconian penalties so if a defense attorney went to a client who was charged with terrorism charges and said hey look you know you're looking at 30 or 40 years in jail if you go to trial and are convicted but the government's offering you to plead out to five years even somebody who's entirely innocent or believes that they were induced into committing some kind of crime wouldn't be unusual for them to plead guilty to it so the liberty city city 7 case was fascinating to me both because it showed me that all of the defendants were willing to go to trial showed me that they were convinced they had done nothing wrong and moreover it gave one of the very first opportunities to really examine the fbi's tactics because all of the information would come out through the criminal trial the challenge for the liberty 7 defense the suspects did indeed pledge an oath to al-qaeda when you have the attorney general of the united states having a press conference i realized that i was in for a major battle going forward our story was a simple one they didn't have the manner and means they had no money they barely had vehicles they didn't have horses and they certainly didn't have bombs this is a case manufactured primarily by the government or in my case my client's case this wasn't his idea it was just a complete you know set up by the government the plot was being moved forward by the informants and the fbi who directed their activities they ran this whole show they provided the script they provided the choreography okay they provided the direction this was not a terrorist case at all let alone a case where the actors the defendants were moving the plot forward they invented the players they invented the theme they invented how it was going to go down they wrote this script they wrote this script one of the other defense attorneys said this was all really an inner city scam well we do know that first of all that one of the things that was done in this case is that there was a serious question with regard to 50 thousand dollars being given to these individuals to help them to revitalize this building here's garcia saying we got to get this 50 000 so man just go along with this plan for me and then we're going to be good after that just go along with it no we're not going to do anything but just go along with it and so the defense became that that these guys were doing this just for the money that this was one big scam it would have been a scam it would have been a scam had he given us pictures of the waffle house or you know given us a blank disk or just not have given us footage of the fbi office the u.s attorney's office and the miami police department so it's not a scam i mean that that is an executed agreement whether these people were being paid or not the question is are they willing to commit these acts whether it's for money or for free so it really made no difference prosecutors told the jury they'll hear from among 15 000 government recordings of the group's plan to create chaos [Music] i'm hearing this from the first time now i know why we got indicted because in my mind i thought the only meetings that occurred was the ones i was there [Music] is you running your damn mouth for on and on and on [Music] my life was on the line but i just couldn't believe the words that was coming out of baptiste's mouth [Music] i couldn't believe i was on trial for these conversations you know still got to understand i was literally yelling at him about how his stupidity and the things he did got these guys in trouble and he's sitting up there and he's crying and you know and i said here you are you stepped off what we call uh uh the square if you will which is of righteousness and you led these guys down you know to the wrong path and everybody is now sitting up here indicted by a federal government looking at being called terrorists and he's he's bawling he's crying i cried about it on the witness stand said that was something that i really didn't mean inside but then i was just going along with him using his language him and assad one snapper shout out said i'm not this person i'm really a good person on the inside i would never do these things it was just a kind game i kind of felt that he should have um been a little stronger you know what i mean because we was all together you know trying to give each other support but he'll just um he'll just ball up in the corner and it was just it was a lot of guilt you know of the things he said you know you know all of us getting locked up with him and you know his family image you know everything was destroyed and you know it took a toll on him [Music] i did a maybe a year and eight months in um miami fdc i was in solitary confinement they call it the shoe yeah you probably go crazy in there you know and now i tell people maybe i am maybe i'm not out but it's um you don't do that to another human being one day a guy walked by me and then he like said what's up to me with just a head nod you know i was at the little window it's like a little six inch window and i'm looking i gave him a head knob then i walked back to my chair and i'm just sitting there and it hit me i just seen baptiste so i i couldn't believe it you know i couldn't believe it he was a totally different person he was skin and bones and you know it was times i hear i heard him you know screaming in his cell and i think it just about killed them i think it just about killed them [Music] after two long months of trial the jurors couldn't decide any of the charges for the so-called liberty city seven there was a lot of disagreement but all the jurors worked very hard everybody gave it gave it their all and came here every day for many many months and did the best that we could i think the jury as a whole kind of felt sorry for these guys that they got they wound themselves up in this position but you know they to some extent they did it themselves there were a few people that really bought into this idea that they were just doing this to scam this guy out of money which seems sort of odd like um to be scamming al qaeda they're not the type of people that you would think about really running a scam on i wouldn't think they would seem like kind of scary guys to to cross that's why i think there was a hung jury except on one defendant who they felt really had very little connection and wasn't around for most of this and we dismissed the case against him found him not guilty one of seven miami men accused of plotting to join forces with al-qaeda has been acquitted and a mistrial has been declared for the six other men they said likewise no more now gives you for the first charge lagging for the second shot for the third trial for the fourth chart everybody was so happy was he crying i couldn't tell from yes we both were very emotional levi was found not guilty at the first trial and it was fantastic thought he'd be able to move on with his life well i went back we all thought i'm going home my stuff and then that's when immigration came and got [Applause] [Music] the judge found that he had associated himself with the terrorist group and that in and of itself was deportable you look at my case i have no conviction nothing that tried was my only thing and i've been working all my life i got kids wife i married the american i beat the case i beat the case and i'm sent home you can be found not guilty but it still doesn't mean you're not guilty in the eyes of the us government he couldn't even come back to the united states for his 15 year old son's funeral when he was killed along the highway trying to assist a motorist who had been stalled and their car had broken down it's a pain where you can't you don't know it's almost like your heart's closing and you don't know what to do and after asking that you know life start over life ain't finished god is great i'm gonna continue to be me i'm gonna continue to strive to better myself [Music] it's really nothing change of how i feel america i love america america's a great country but what happened to us it's not america that did it you know it's not america it's a few people america the people put their choice in [Music] federal prosecutors say they will retry the six men on whom the jurors deadlocked judge joan leonard said jury selection for january it's hard to be able to look at the media once you've arrested somebody and call them a terrorist and then drop the case against them after one trial saying okay we're going to let them back out on the streets to complete what they were trying to do and so the government had to retry the case and they tried it a second time and it hung a second time for the same reason we did we tried it again and there was another mystra a federal judge has declared another mistrial prosecutors now have a week to decide if they're going to try them for a third time when that trial came to um a hung jury again we just knew that was gonna throw this case out they ain't no way they're coming back again for another trial with us because it was so embarrassing my experience has been it's two times and they're done but it depends on the case if they want somebody bad enough they continue to go after the person and they wanted these guys badly two juries failed to reach a verdict now a third jury will try imagine if we did nothing about this case instead of the fbi coming to to batista one of these organizations actually came to batista and provided him the explosives so could we ignore it and if we had ignored it and he had blown up a building he had done damage to this building you're sitting in right now and people were killed wouldn't you be coming back to us to say why didn't you do something about it why did you ignore it this is the question do you want us to stop them before they commit this kind of crime or do you want to let it happen first so the government said we're going to give this one last try a third time and each time they tried the case the case got smaller and more defined and more focused and even with the third trial they really flailed because the jurors were out for almost 12 13 days so it looked like it was going to be another hung jury the jury went out for deliberations and there was one juror who refused to deliberate she just refused so the judge had to excuse that juror within 24 hours an alternate was brought in and he joined the other 11 and convicted five of the six a sixth defendant was found not guilty after the verdict was read the one liberty six member who was acquitted called the prosecution of his friends bogus you had no intention of doing any of the things that you talked about that was all a whole bunch of hogwarts from the beginning you weren't serious about any of it nobody was serious about nothing it's not rich give us a little space it took three years and three trials but a group of florida men accused in a plot to destroy chicago's sears tower are each facing decades in prison i felt like i got hit in the head with that 80-ton concrete ball or something all knocked out i cried thought my life was over all based on what i said a certain part of me just died there and now i was left with four young children to raise without no other family no other help but just me and them you're taking this innocent man away from his and all the rest of these young men away from their families without no evidence i can't be living this i can't i can't be living this [Music] i have a responsibility to the people that i i work for which are the citizens of the united states to go where the facts and evidence leads i looked at this a thousand ways to sunday tr i wish i could say look this is what happened and and this is how i just can't i can't get myself there they did what they were convicted of the problem was there were a lot of sensitive issues in this case for instance we got them a warehouse where we had cameras and and they had a meeting and they swore the oath to al-qaeda but we could have delivered them a load of arms or munitions made the arms of munitions inoperable but delivered once they accepted that we could have taken them down with the munitions in their hand and i think that would have been uh far far more effective but at that time the bureau was so nervous about providing potential terrorists with weaponry that they just flat out said no you can't do that al qaeda didn't know any of these individuals they didn't have anybody who could have done a full ground war in the united states or taken down the sears tower but many americans believe they did because the fbi manufactured this plot i was hoping that they would learn that this case wasn't overreached they had gone too far and perhaps undermined public trust in the counter-terrorism tactics that they were using but they seem to have taken the opposite lesson and what you see in the sting operations after liberty city 7 is an effort to sensationalize the cases even further to where they will go to the extent of actually providing significant weaponry to these groups arrested yesterday during an fbi sting operation pitts faces charges after he communicated with an undercover [Music] if you lay out sting operations on a chart you know what you see is this enormous uptick after 2009 i think it's just further emboldened the fbi and the department of justice and its use of these types of sting operations knowing that essentially if they can convict these guys in miami you know they can convict just about anybody the liberty city sears tower case was significant in sense of taking people with bad motives bad intent off the street holding them accountable and then serving as deterrent to other potential terrorists were these terrorists in a real sense my personal opinion was no because and that's why i described them as aspirational rather than operational because i didn't believe they they could do something based on what i had seen i'm not going to hype these cases to be something that they're not but they're very important because if if we can't do them it's going to be hard to stop terrorists the liberty city case was one of the cases that we would use in training okay this is a cautionary tale you know be careful as to how far your your undercover agents or your informants push and when you do a rest you know don't overstate what's what you've got the goal is not to take somebody that is not a terrorist and make them a terrorist they weren't really the the terrace that we were seeking out [Music] this is my job i was hired as a supervisor underneath the project manager to run the job site with small contractors this is excellent uh it's it might not be as as good as me subcontracting things on my own and making more money in a momentous type of way but it's a steady income i'm on salary and i'm just happy did you ever imagine that you were being recorded yes you did [Music] you knew that you were being video yes it was it was clear did you see where the video came no they were hitting cameras [Music] did you tell the brothers that you thought your meetings with assad might have been recorded by law enforcement yes i still don't really understand how you thought you could get away with it even if you got money yeah i didn't see i didn't really at the end of the day i thought about it and say i probably won't get away with it but i'll just spend some of it and if they caught me hey i'm sorry i took the money can i give it back i spent some of it that's what i thought i could use as this excuse i wonder if he's trying to save face because he realized how stupid he was everybody makes mistakes but not everybody mistakes is recorded for the world to see over and over and over again his is so that that was his best answer was trying to say ah yeah i'm smart nah he was just that dumb that's all that was that's all that was she came back he didn't know [Music] finance was becoming a problem because of my case so it was hard to find employment or anything else so when i did find employment it was like a job and i said i'm gonna take this job and take this check and i'm gonna mix it through what i know best which is go back to the street and go back to the hustling game to the cocaine or whatever and just mix and mingle with the people i know they're so concerned with terrorists uh a a watch i was selling dope under their eyes the whole time and i was on federal probation so they couldn't be that concerned with me they couldn't have i made money [Music] in terms of batiste no i wanted to strangle the guy man because i feel like you don't listen you get caught up in yourself and now this is where this will come down and this is not just something that affect us immediately it affects all every last one of our families of course i want to strangle his ass [Music] lose part of me i lost everything i was my whole 30s was spent in prison in your 30s that's when you buy a house you know what i mean you start to be financially sound you know having kids you know i spent all that time in prison so i'm out right now i don't got no kids no no wife no girlfriend no real job [Laughter] oh man [Music] so [Music] for more on this and other frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org frontline [Music] front lines in the shadow of 911 is available on amazon prime video [Music] you

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 370,222

Keywords: frontline 911 documentary, frontline liberty city seven documentary, dan reed documentary, leaving neverland documentary, liberty city seven documentary, fbi documentary, documentaries about 911, watch 911 documentary free online

Id: lZUj8sXpvSk

Length: 113min 19sec (6799 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 10 2021