UM Law School Professor Bruce J. Winick Quoted in Miami Herald Article About the Liberty City Seven
UM Law School Professor Bruce J. Winick was quoted in the following Miami Herald article about the trial of the Liberty City Seven.
LIBERTY CITY 7 CASE: Liberty City 7 defense up next
Published on 2007-11-02, Page B3, Miami Herald
By Jay Weaver
With the prosecution wrapping up its case Thursday, federal jurors in the Liberty City 7 trial will now have to make sense of apparent contradictions about the alleged homegrown terrorist cell.
Consider: A veteran terrorism expert described the seven Miami men charged with scheming to overthrow the U.S. government as "jihadists.''
Yet an FBI agent who oversaw the seizure of evidence from the men's Liberty City warehouse said his team found no firearms, explosives, blueprints or terror plans. Instead, agents discovered a samurai sword, machetes, martial arts equipment and books such as the Koran, Bible and The Way of the Ninja.
The Liberty City 7 are charged with conspiring to support al Qaeda in an alleged insurrection involving blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and FBI buildings in five cities, including Miami. Yet the defendants, poor black and Hispanic men who were barely scraping by as construction workers, possessed nothing remotely like weapons of mass destruction when the FBI arrested them in summer 2006.
On Tuesday, a dozen federal jurors will begin hearing the defense's evidence.
During the past month, prosecutors skillfully used wiretaps, phone recordings and videotapes to show that reputed ringleader Narseal Batiste and his followers may have had sinister aspirations.
But collectively, the prosecution's evidence suggests that Batiste and the others -- who were persuaded by an FBI informant with promises of money -- had barely begun to carry out a terror plot.
One legal expert who has been following the case said the Justice Department may have jumped the gun in seeking its indictment while the alleged conspiracy was unfolding.
MOVED 'TOO QUICKLY'
''The problem here is the government may have proceeded too quickly before things started moving forward and there was more evidence of an actual terrorist plot,'' said University of Miami law professor Bruce Winick. "They weren't blowing up the Sears Tower, so why not watch them for a while?''
The defendants, who hung out, trained and worshipped in a warehouse dubbed ''The Embassy,'' were arrested in June 2006 in a high-profile case hailed by the Bush administration as a major victory in the war on terrorism. They each face up to 70 years in prison.
Batiste, a struggling contractor who headed the local branch of a Moorish religious group that embraced Christianity, Judaism and Islam, brought the six other men under his sway. In the beginning, his small band of followers was unfamiliar with his grandiose mission to create a separate Moorish nation within the United States.
In late 2005, a veteran FBI informant, Elie Assad, infiltrated Batiste's group through a mutual friend. Born in Lebanon, of Syrian descent, Assad was living in Mexico when the FBI tapped him to play the most critical role in the investigation.
That December, a nervous Batiste met with Assad in a room at a Radisson hotel and gave him a list of must-have items for a jihad: uniforms, boots, machine guns, radios and sport utility vehicles. Over the next two weeks, he gave the informant more lists -- including a request for $50,000 cash.
The mission was to blow up the Sears Tower, Batiste told the FBI informant.
After months of little progress, Assad coaxed Batiste and his six followers into taking an oath to al Qaeda in March 2006 -- all under surveillance by the FBI.
''Taking of the oath is the manner that al Qaeda binds an individual to that organization,'' the government's expert witness, Georgetown University professor Raymond Tanter, testified this week.
At the direction of the FBI, Assad then talked the seven men into joining a fictitious al Qaeda terror plot to destroy federal buildings in Miami and four other cities, which became the thrust of the government's case.
At trial, prosecutors showed a videotape of Batiste, Stanley Phanor and Rotschild Augustine taking pictures of alleged targets in Miami -- the federal courthouse, federal detention center and criminal justice building. They also had surveillance of Batiste and Patrick Abraham taking pictures of other sites, including the FBI building in North Miami Beach and the National Guard Armory in North Miami.
Batiste and Burson Augustin turned over the photos to the FBI informant.
But two other members of Batiste's group -- Naudimar Herrera and Lyglenson Lemorin -- were not directly involved in casing out these buildings.
CON MAN, BIG BUCKS
Defense lawyers devoted most of their cross examination to suggesting that Assad was a ''con man'' who teased Batiste with big bucks to gain his commitment to the al Qaeda plot.
'Do you know the meaning of the word 'con?' '' Lemorin's attorney, Joel DeFabio, asked Assad. The FBI informant said he did not.
Abraham's lawyer, Albert Levin, said Assad was not only paid $80,000 by the FBI but was also working on a book deal about his decade as an agency informant. Levin discovered the information when he asked Assad about a lawyer he hired in 2003 and how he was going to pay him.
Said Assad: "So he's not billing me any money, sir, until I decide I want to do the book.''
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posted 12-November-2007
