Man at center of FBI terror sting may argue he was induced to commit crime

The lawyer of a man nabbed in an FBI terror sting tells The Upshot he is considering arguing that his client was induced by federal agents to commit a crime he wouldn't otherwise have gotten involved in.

Lebanese citizen Sami Samir Hassoun is charged with plotting to detonate a weapon of mass destruction outside of Wrigley Field in Chicago after a Dave Matthews Band concert. The undercover agents gave him a fake bomb that he believed could cause casualties when he dropped it into a trash can, according to the criminal complaint (PDF) against him. A federal judge has denied Hassoun bail, on the grounds that he may be dangerous.

The fake bomb was the culmination of a lengthy sting operation. The FBI asked a cooperating witness to befriend the 22-year-old Hassoun after the bureau began to regard him as a possible terrorism suspect in the spring of 2009. (The FBI hasn't yet disclosed what the basis for such suspicions may have been.) Authorities say that Hassoun told the witness about a bizarre and sinister desire to unseat Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley via the use of fake bombs and similarly unfocused schemes — like poisoning Lake Michigan — and then the informant introduced him to two undercover FBI agents in July.

The agents paid him $2,700 so Hassoun could quit his job and focus on planning attacks. He scouted out potential bomb sites with an FBI-owned camera. When one of the undercover agents said Hassoun's attack would send a message about how America treats Arab people, Hassoun said he didn't agree, that he just wanted to wrest political power from Daley through attacks that would terrify Chicagoans. He said he didn't know how exactly the attacks would translate into political power.

"He's not a terrorist," argues Hassoun's lawyer, Myron Auerbach. "He doesn't have the training, he doesn't have the ideology, he doesn't have the skills."

But the complaint says the undercover agents repeatedly told Hassoun there was "no shame" in dropping out of his plan, and that family members from Lebanon sent him a bomb-making manual. Though he at first agreed that he wanted no casualties — only to generate fear — the complaint says he later began talking about how deaths are necessary for "revolution." And, ultimately, he suggested the location for the bomb because it could result in more casualties.

Auerbach says it is too soon for him to decide on a defense strategy, but that he is considering arguing entrapment, i.e.making the case that Hassoun would not have committed a crime if not for the encouragement of federal agents.

Legal scholar Dru Stevenson writes that the entrapment defense is "elastic" and unpredictable:

Sometimes the Court finds no predisposition [to commit the crime] even where the defendant has a history of similar crimes and needed little persuasion from the undercover agent. In other cases, the Court has found predisposition even where the agent made repeated proposals and provided free materials, ingredients, or equipment for the criminal enterprise.

The entrapment defense has never worked in a U.S. terror case. Law enforcement agents defend sting tactics, saying that they provide solid evidence enabling them to put criminals away before they get a chance to inflict mass casualties.

Former FBI agent Jim Conway says that bureau policy dictates that agents never insert an informant or undercover agent into a situation until it's clear the suspect is predisposed to commit a crime. The FBI "gains control of the operation and it makes it safer for society as a whole."

"Entrapment is something obviously that we want to avoid at all costs," says Conway, who now heads the Houston-based consulting firm Global Intel Strategies. "We're not in the business of coercing people into crimes."

The trail of four Muslim converts in New York accused of plotting to blow up a synagogue in the Bronx is now testing the limits of how far law enforcement can go in terror stings, which may set the standard for future entrapment defenses in the country.

One of the defendants in the case told a paid FBI informant that he was struggling financially and wasn't sure he wanted to do anything "crazy as of yet." Defense attorneys are arguing the four were lured into the plot with cash by the fast-talking informant and were never actually capable of the plot.

(Photo: The bar near Wrigley Field that Hassoun is accused of trying to bomb/AP.)