Last April, six “Minnesota men” were charged with seeking to support ISIS. These “Minnesota men,” as headlines across the country referred to them, were all young Somali Muslims who planned to leave the United States and take up the call to jihad in Syria (see “The Threat from ‘Minnesota Men,’ ” December 7, 2015). We have since learned there is more to the story. In a sense, the FBI saved the worst for last—except, thanks to the judicial system, the worst might be yet to come.
Ten “Minnesota men” in total were charged with plotting to join ISIS, the last in December. This was the ringleader, a resourceful character by the name of Abdirizak Mohamed Warsame, who last month entered a guilty plea. He will be the beneficiary of an experimental “Terrorism Disengagement and Deradicalization Program” just adopted by the court that will sentence him. Three of the other plotters also pleaded guilty and are eligible for the program. Although it’s still unclear how the experiment will be put into practice, a look at Warsame’s case offers plenty of reasons for alarm about a program trumpeted as the first in the nation.
Reporting the December filing of charges against Warsame, the Star Tribune added this editorial observation: “Minnesota is believed to have produced more would-be foreign fighters than any other state, but it also has a Muslim community that’s exceptionally engaged with efforts to counter extremism.” Yet the newspaper provided evidence of the Somali community’s adversarial stance to the efforts of law enforcement in terrorism-related cases. “The safety of this country is a concern for all of us,” said Sadik Warfa, identified by the paper as a “community leader.” “We’re hoping this case is the last, and we can all move forward where these kind of things don’t happen.” Warfa then expressed suspicions about the case. He wanted to know why Warsame was only being charged in December, long after the original six had been charged in April: “Did the government get new evidence?” And Warfa worried his group would be “victimized twice”: “Islamophobia is a real concern within our community.”
“Islamophobia.” Is that fear of “Minnesota men” acting on their faith and joining the jihad? Or a term of art used to suppress discussion of reasonable concerns raised by these “Minnesota men”? While prejudice against Muslims is virtually invisible in Minnesota, one version of “Islamophobia” is not: the use of the term as a stick by officials including Governor Mark Dayton and U.S. attorney Andrew Luger to stigmatize reasonable fears and suppress discussion of well-founded concerns raised by the threat from “Minnesota men.”
What threat? At a late December pretrial and detention hearing held in Warsame’s case, the FBI unveiled some of its evidence, though it didn’t precisely answer Warfa’s question. The FBI revealed Warsame to be the ringleader of the group seeking to leave Minnesota to join ISIS and a former worker at the Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport.
That last fact gives one pause. FBI special agent Daniel Higgins testified that Warsame worked as a baggage handler at MSP with access to airplanes from April to August 2014. According to information Metropolitan Airports Commission public affairs and marketing director Patrick Hogan provided me, it turns out that Warsame worked on the tarmac for two employers over a period of eight or nine months, from December 2013 to August 2014. By August 2014, the FBI investigation leading to the charges brought against the “Minnesota men” had gotten underway in earnest. The reason for the termination of Warsame’s employment then is not publicly known; it remains one of several loose ends deserving attention.
Higgins also testified that in April 2015 Warsame boasted to one of the six men charged that month, Guled Omar, that he could build rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) that would take down descending airplanes at an elevation of 2,000 feet. The conversation was secretly recorded by an informant as Warsame and Omar walked around Lake Nokomis in south Minneapolis, “in the flight pattern for MSP,” as Higgins noted. In the recording, airplanes could be heard flying overhead.
In another conversation, they discussed a propaganda video about a “tank hunter” who used rocket-propelled grenades. Warsame indicated he would like to take such a role and said he “loved RPGs.” The Star Tribune, incidentally, omitted these poignant details from its story on the hearing. Not to worry, though. Warsame’s attorney elicited the concession from Higgins that the FBI didn’t actually have evidence that Warsame had tried to build rockets. So the discussion may only have reflected his hopes and dreams.
To return to Warfa’s accusatory question, why did the FBI wait until late last year to unveil its case against Warsame? Based on the pretrial detention hearing, it seems obvious that the FBI might have wanted to keep Warsame under surveillance to see what he had up his sleeve or where else he might lead them.
The evidence against Warsame led him to plead guilty to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS. Entering his plea on February 11, Warsame testified that he came from a “very religious” household. He acknowledged that he himself is very religious. He noted that he started talking about joining ISIS with his friends in the early months of 2014 (while he was working at the airport, though this went unmentioned at the hearing). “[I]t was a time to not only talk,” Warsame testified, “but to put it into some action and do that.” Listening to videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, he “started learning about, you know, Islam and started learning about the history of Islam.” He was affiliated with an unidentified local mosque where he studied the Koran and received additional teaching “pretty much the same” as Awlaki’s lectures on YouTube. Inspired to join ISIS, he sought to get in on the combat and beheadings he saw online with the object of restoring the caliphate. Then, “Islam would take over the world and, you know, Muslims would no longer be oppressed all around the world.”
At this point, Judge Michael Davis asked Warsame why he hadn’t joined the armed forces of the United States. You can probably guess the answer: “Because I didn’t think the United States military went by Islam.”
The terrorism offense to which Warsame pleaded guilty carries a maximum sentence of 15 years. But on March 2, Judge Davis ordered the federal probation office tasked with the standard presentence investigation to contract with Daniel Koehler, director of the German Institute on Radicalization and Deradicalization Studies (GIRDS), to prepare its report. Koehler is to make a house call in Minneapolis on Warsame and the other three who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges. Under the experimental “Terrorism Disengagement and Deradicalization Program” adopted by Judge Davis, Koehler is (take a breath) to “provide information to the Court that is otherwise not available to it as a basis for determining the sentence of a defendant convicted of a terrorism offense and to provide purposeful pre-trial and post-incarceration supervision that ensures public safety by monitoring defendants to verify they have not reverted to involvement with terroristic activities and to further the process of disengagement and deradicalization from extremist ideology while rehabilitating them to become successful, law-abiding citizens.”
In determining an appropriate sentence, federal judges have discretion to seek out and apply any relevant data. Judge Davis now looks to Koehler to provide information for the purpose of determining the sentence to be imposed on Warsame. In a press briefing, the judge explained his rationale for adopting the GIRDS strategy: “It does not make sense why someone who’s never been involved in any type of criminal activity, was not seriously religious, [would] in a very short period of time want to go over and be involved in jihad.” Warsame’s own explanation at his plea hearing apparently didn’t answer that question to his satisfaction.
What are we to make of Judge Davis’s experiment? His last one wasn’t a success. Last year he released one of the four “Minnesota men” eligible for this new program to a halfway house “to work with a group that promotes civic involvement as a way to keep youth engaged, with hopes of keeping him on a positive track and reintegrating him into society,” as the Associated Press reported. The judge was forced to order the man back into custody when a box cutter was found under his bed.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy prosecuted the blind sheikh and his co-conspirators for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. McCarthy brings an informed if skeptical attitude to Judge Davis’s latest experiment. “The problem arises,” he told me, “when judges use dubious social science theories as a substitute for the traditional purposes of sentencing—incapacitating bad actors for a period of time that fits the crime while discouraging recidivism and communicating to other potential offenders that the conduct will be treated seriously.” McCarthy adds that “if the German program is willing to confront the fact that a mainstream interpretation of Islam fuels the radicalism and believes this can be countered by a construction of Islam that rejects violent jihadism, this would be helpful. Of course, if this irenic Islam is not credible (i.e., if it does not convincingly answer the literalist interpretation rooted in scripture), it will be of limited usefulness.”
McCarthy observes that deradicalization is not a proven science: “The Saudis, for example, have long run such programs for their own and our terrorist detainees, and there is a high recidivism rate.” On balance, McCarthy says, “I think there could be a place for deradicalization in sentencing, but not in the initial phase when the judge imposes sentence because that would necessarily involve a prospective calculation on the judge’s part that the science is proven and the particular defendant will have a positive outcome—things that are either not settled or not knowable.”
One doubts that German social science holds all the answers Judge Davis seeks. At the least, skeptical questions might fairly be raised about his two-page “Terrorism Disengagement and Deradicalization Program.” None appears to have been raised by prosecutor Andrew Luger; a paragon of political correctness, Luger expressed his full support for the program. Judge Davis declined to be interviewed for this article.
Warsame’s attorney, Robert Sicoli, sums up the case better than you’d expect. “My assessment of my guy is he is not a threat to anybody,” Sicoli told the Star Tribune. Okay, that was about as expected. Here, however, Sicoli may be on to something: “I’m not an expert, but to be honest I don’t think there are any experts on this.”
Scott W. Johnson is a Minneapolis attorney and contributor to the site Power Line
