Elmer Smith: Terror trial are proving costly

I SPENT A COUPLE of days at the Fort Dix Five trial listening to a paid snitch recall the stupidest plot since a pair of doofuses hijacked a trolley.

By the time FBI informant Mahmoud Omar had finished his stumble down memory lane, I didn't know if these severely challenged jihadists had done it or not.

I couldn't even tell what "it" was.

According to Omar, the five or some subset of them were going to walk a couple of miles to Fort Dix and shoot the place up, then run a quarter-mile with the Army in hot pursuit to a waiting getaway car.

Or, they were going to fire some rocket-propelled grenades across the Delaware River into the Army-Navy game from a Coast Guard station they were going to seize on the Jersey side of the river.

These guys couldn't have seized the seats of their pants with the aid of a rear-view mirror.

Which is not to say that they're innocent. The dangerously stupid and/or stupidly dangerous can and sometimes do pose a threat to national security.

The five - brothers Dritan, Shain and Eljvir Duka, Mohamad Shnewer and Serdar Tatar - may very well have plotted to kill U.S. soldiers if left to their own devices.

I'm just saying that we should not get a false sense of security from the way the Justice Department is waging its war on domestic terrorism.

It's not an isolated case. The Justice Department is about to retry the Liberty City Six, a gang of down-at-the-heels plotters who, in a fit of reefer madness, threatened to blow up the Sears Tower.

The common thread in both trials is that a jury must decide whether either scheme would have been hatched without the prodding of well-paid informants who were facing deportation, prosecution or both.

In two previous trials of the gang from Liberty City, a squalid slum in Miami, federal court juries acquitted one man and twice deadlocked on the six others. Not to be outdone, the government will re-try them for a third time on Jan. 6.

Two years ago, then-U.S. Attorney Alberto Gonzales said the seven, inspired by al Qaeda, plotted to "wage a full ground war on the United States." Turns out they had no explosives and their only connection to al Qaeda was when an FBI informant posing as an al Qaeda operative got them to pledge allegiance to the terrorist group in return for a promise of $50,000 and some nifty terrorist outfits.

John Pistole, an FBI deputy director, called the plot "aspirational rather than operational."

Their defense was that they actually were plotting to rip off the al Qaeda guy for the $50,000.

Makes sense. Everybody else was getting paid. The feds paid informant Abbas al-Saidi, 22, $40,000 for getting the Liberty Seven to take the pledge and for recording their bombastic threats.

Al-Saidi, an undocumented alien from Yemen, had reportedly extorted $7,000 from a friend who had raped al-Saidi's girlfriend.

An FBI agent who knew al-Saidi's record as an informant in New York City drug cases got him out of jail and into federal service.

The goverment's other witness, according to a Miami Herald probe, was a Lebanese immigrant named Elie Assad who was paid $80,000 for his work, even though the prosecution chose not to present him at trial after he failed a lie-detector test.

The reigning magnate of paid informants was Omar who, according to published reports, has been paid about $240,000 for recording the Fort Dix plotters and testifying against them. Omar, an undocumented Egyptian national with a criminal record, was facing deportation.

That doesn't make him a liar. Nor do the dubious characters of all these informants negate whatever threat their targets may have posed.

It's not easy fighting terrorism.

You don't know whether to step in while the plotters are in their apprenticeships or let them go until they light a fuse.

But I can't help feeling uneasy when I see us paying these lowlifes tens of thousands of dollars to trap some hapless wanna-be terrorists. *

Send e-mail to smithel@phillynews.com or call 215-854-2512. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/smith