The Threat in Our Midst

Al Qaeda puts out a steady supply of videos to inspire the faithful; last year the group produced 48. And they are no longer the clumsy and amateurish productions of a few years ago. Many have English subtitles or are narrated in perfect English by a man who calls himself "Azzam the American"—a California expat, born Adam Gadahn—who converted to Islam and joined Al Qaeda. Law-enforcement officials compare this to a Madison Avenue ad campaign. "Al Qaeda is banking on the idea that if they pump up the volume and increase the number of messages, they'll be able to push fence-sitters over the edge," says a senior law-enforcement official who asked not to be named discussing intelligence issues.

How effective is the propaganda? It's impossible to quantify. The New Jersey case seems to show that at least some believers get inspiration from what they can download from the Web. According to the FBI complaint in the case, one of the key figures in the plot had DVD files of the last will and testament of two of the 9/11 hijackers on his laptop. He also had images of bin Laden and other jihadist leaders exhorting believers to join the cause. The FBI complaint describes defendants erupting in laughter when they watched a war video showing an American Marine's hand being blown off.

But some of the FBI's operations have rounded up disaffected losers who might have been looking for trouble anyway. Over the past two years, the FBI has brought a spate of domestic terrorism cases involving people who were allegedly plotting attacks. In August 2005, the Justice Department indicted four men on charges of planning to attack synagogues and U.S. military installations in southern California. The alleged ringleaders were two former inmates of California's Folsom prison who converted to Islam and formed a radical group dedicated to "killing infidels." (All of the defendants pleaded not guilty; their trial is scheduled for August.) In January the FBI arrested Derrick Shareef, of Rockford, Ill., on charges that he was allegedly planning to plant hand grenades in garbage cans in a local shopping mall. (He pleaded not guilty.) A law-enforcement official who asked not to be named talking about intel matters tells NEWSWEEK that the Feds discovered Shareef had downloaded a 48-minute video by Gadahn, with an intro by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. In other cases, the Feds also arrested alleged plotters in Florida and Ohio.

A list like that can make it seem as though terrorists are all around us. But law-enforcement officials don't know whether any of the alleged conspirators had the will or means to carry out actual attacks. Critics have claimed that in some of the cases, including the one in New York, FBI informants, posing as radicals, encouraged defendants to say questionable things. "It's not like these were spontaneous plots," said Niwad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "What you have are informants who are going to disgruntled, totally messed-up people and trying to provoke them."

But FBI officials insist that they have to rely on undercover agents and informants to identify future terrorists before they strike. That's what they did in the New York case. The investigation began more than four years ago when a confidential informant reported to the FBI that Tarik Shah, the jazz musician, was trying to establish links to Al Qaeda. Shah, who at one time was associated with the Nation of Islam, was also a martial-arts instructor. He purportedly wanted to help train Qaeda members in hand-to-hand combat. Acting under instructions from the FBI, the informant set up a meeting between Shah and FBI agent Soufan, who was posing as a Qaeda operative.

Soufan was the rarest of G-men—a Muslim native of Lebanon, he spoke fluent Arabic and was regarded as one of the bureau's leading Qaeda experts. He had worked the FBI's biggest cases against the organization. Still, when he donned a wire and began meeting with Shah, Soufan was nervous. Shah would boast of his martial-arts expertise. "You really want to learn how to rip somebody's throat out?" Shah asks Soufan at one point on the FBI tape. Shah later introduced Soufan to his other friends, including Sabir, the Florida ER physician, who was also a former Nation of Islam follower. During the meeting in the Bronx apartment, he allegedly volunteered to help treat wounded Qaeda "brothers" during an upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia.