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"That no one here suspected (him) of hating Americans suggests he was either an extremely talented undercover terrorist or a troubled young man at war with himself, going out of the way to befriend Americans he lived with while, the authorities say, plotting to kill thousands of people when he surfed radical Islamic chat rooms online." Or perhaps he's neither of the above, just an ordinary person justifiably angry about Washington's war on Islam but not plotting a terror bombing to retaliate.
According to his father in Jordan:
The charges against his son are "completely fabricated and in our family we never condoned terrorism." He added that his other son Hussein, aged 18, was also arrested in California, apparently related to Hosam's case. They both entered the country legally in 2007 on student visas.
The Smadi case is a typical FBI sting, much like others designed to entrap unwitting victims, this time with undercover agents, other times with paid informants usually charged with crimes and offered leniency for their cooperation.
One of many earlier cases involved the "Fort Dix Five" - innocent Muslim men convicted of conspiracy and other charges related to plans to kill as many soldiers as possible on the Army base, a ludicrous charge but it stuck. Described as "radical Islamists," the media played along and the result was predictable even though there was no plot and no crime, just a familiar FBI sting operation to entrap them, then intimidate a jury to convict.
According to Anthony Barkow, former federal prosecutor and current executive director of the Center on the Administration of Criminal Law at New York University's School of Law:
"A person (often) is entrapped when he has no previous intention to violate the law and is persuaded to commit the crime by government agents."
Further, US conspiracy law prosecutions can be based on such thin evidence that former Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson once said it "constitutes a serious threat to fairness in our administration of justice." According to other legal experts, it let's prosecutors target people they don't like, want to convict to set an example, or simply show government is removing dangerous terror threats. Today, most often they're Muslims or environmental or animal rights activists, and virtually never is a charged suspect guilty. Yet they're usually convicted and sentenced to hard time in federal prisons - the fate now awaiting Smadi and the others when their cases come to trial.
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