The FBI Informant and the Bronx Bomb Plot: Village Voice

9/11 Blogger
Friday, July 10, 2009

The new issue of the ‘Village Voice’ (July 7) features an article by Graham Rayman on the recent Bronx bomb plot, focusing on what has been learned (in the weeks since the arrest of the ‘Newburgh 4′ in late May) regarding the role of the FBI’s informant.

Full article is here:

http://www.villagevoice.com/2009-07-08/news/the-alarming-record-of-the-f…

Excerpt:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly held press conferences at the synagogues to reassure New Yorkers about their safety. During Kelly’s remarks, it was startling to hear the commissioner refer to al-Qaeda by name, if only to say that the four purported home-grown terrorists had no ties to Osama Bin Laden’s organization.

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

As more details emerged, however, the less the four defendants sounded like men with the skills to plan a sophisticated terror plot. They were small-time crooks, felons with long criminal records whose previous activities revolved around smoking marijuana and playing video games. One defendant, Laguerre Payen, was arrested in a crack house surrounded by bottles of his own urine; his lawyer describes him as “mildly retarded.”

It seemed fairly astounding that, for a full calendar year, such a group could remain interested in and plan anything more complex than a backyard barbecue, let alone a multipronged paramilitary assault, as the indictment against them alleged.

But what the indictment didn’t say, and what the initial news reports didn’t fill in, was the extent to which the fifth man in the plot, an unnamed FBI informant, had provided the glue to hold the Newburgh 4 together….

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