Robert McKay at the New York Times has a blog posted today that takes the perspective of the lawyer in the case of Ulugbek Kodirov, the Uzbek "student" who was found guilty of plotting to kill President Barack Obama.
The headline says "Alabama Uzbek Who Plotted to Kill Obama Was Victim of Social Media, His Lawyer Says".
The implication is that the young man just surfed the web and stumbled on a lot of jihad stuff, talked to some scary bad guys he didn't really know, but just on the Internet, and then -- because he was being watched by the FBI -- got set up with bombs and guns to look like he was really a terrorist when in fact -- in the words of Registan (which rarely finds a terrorist they believe in), he was "Interneting while Muslim." (That is, arrested for his religious affiliation rather than any actual crime, much the way cops arrest blacks for "driving while black".)
Interestingly, even thought Joshua Foust and Nathan Hamm question everything about terrorism narratives in general, seldom finding them convincing, and don't even seem very persuaded about even the existence of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a group put on the list of foreign terrorist organizations by the US government (and rightly so) -- they haven't taken this position on Kodirov. They seem to accept that the charges are serious, the evidence found, even if via a sting, and they have had virtually no comment on the case. That's by sharp contrast with their reams of dubious justifying claims about the case of Jamshid Muhtorov, which they view as a trumped-up case illustrative of the evils of the "war on terrorism".
Here's my response to McKay below, which hasn't been cleared by moderators yet:
Robert,
I don't know why you are uncritically accepting the lawyer's version of this story, and apparently leaning toward the narrative that this kind of case in the US is about "Interneting while Muslim," or seeming to accepting the defense "the Internet made me do it".
First, you need to read some other media on this. As wset.com reported today, Columbia University has no record of this man ever applying to their medical school:
"But Columbia spokesman Doug Levy said Kodirov never was accepted to the university's College of Physicians and Surgeons.
"From the immediately available records we have no knowledge of this individual and no record of him being an accepted student," Levy said."
It's not clear why he moved to Alabama. If you don't speak English well and you discover a plan to go to college isn't working out, the obvious thing to do is to stay in the New York area where there are numerous Russian speakers and service jobs using Russian-speaking networks and where you can find help and friends -- not go to a state where there are far fewer such imigrants. It makes no sense.
I do follow Uzbekistan quite closely, and I've found this story odd from the beginning, and I don't know whether it's some sort of elaborate staged operation on the part of Uzbek intelligence or what it is. In the Russian-language exile press, Kodirov's mother describes him as having fallen under the influence of radical Islamists preaching in US mosques, not "the Internet".
You also seem to imply that because an undercover US agent posing as a jihadist sympathizer supplied Kodirov with weapons, that there is something concocted and contrived about this case, i.e. it wouldn't exist if it weren't for the sting operation. While that could be possible, you don't seem to concede that people can radicalize and sympathize and agree to help radical Islamist organizations all on their own without prompting, and when they supply material support to such organizations, they are then breaking the law.
There just has to be a lot more curious and unbiased reporting on this story, starting with the basics as the reporters did at wnet.com, calling up Columbia and checking the story that the lawyer simply bought and never checked.
***
Now, some further thoughts.
I have to say, it hadn't occured to me to try to check up on the "student" angle of Kodirov's saga in the US -- I just took it at face value. Of course, we should have started with this. I marvel that a court case could get as far as a conviction, with the lawyer having never proved it, and no prosecutor ever doing due diligence on this. Isn't that where you would start?!
I'd go back further, I'd start with the US Embassy in Tashkent. Uzbekistan is a country where you need an exit visa. You don't just leave Uzbekistan. If you get out by circumventing the state-imposed procedures, which many do, you can't count on coming back or not facing problems of surveillance from the Uzbek secret police abroad or harassment of your family members at home. It's a strict authoritarian country with more than 5,000 political prisoners who were arrested for offenses as innocuous as reading the Koran in groups in their homes or having some literature found in their apartments of unauthorized Muslim preachers.
So who set up an American visa for Kodirov? What educational program did he come to the US under? There are established Embassy-run programs for educational exchange which are avidly encouraged as the US is a big believer in trying to educate young people in countries like this as a way of hopefully getting them to become more liberal and democratic in the future -- a laudable and worthy cause. But obviously some ringers slip through, so the question is: what school under what program had accepted him? Can't the State Department tell us that? Is anyone asking these questions anywhere?
Now, it's always possible that Kodirov didn't come through the regular or usual State Department or Embassy-cleared channels. Maybe his brother-in-law's cousin's nephew sold him a tourist visa and a fake school invitation. Or a visa to some third country from which he then got to the US. That happens.
Maybe he got enrolled in something called not "Columbia University School of Physicians" but something like "Colombia Medic Academy", one of the hundreds of fly-by-night educational operations preying on just this kind of person with little English and lack of how the system worked. They are advertised in droves on bus shelters and subways and billboards in New York City and many people pay them money in the hopes of getting a degree -- and more importantly, a job -- when they are hardly likely to do this, even if accredited. Perhaps Kodirov didn't realize he was on track at best to become a "respiratory therapist" or "home health care attendant" which *you, too, can become in as little as 6 months with a down payment of only $99* as a late-night TV ad might claim.
But...we haven't heard the story and I'm speculating how innocently, a young person on a student visa might get caught up.
As I noted in my reply to McKay, I'm just not getting the Alabama angle, other than to figure that he had some connection there. The US has resettled a number of Uzbeks who fled the Andijan massacre in Arizona and other western states; there are other Uzbeks who have emigrated to the US as part of the large tide of people leaving the Soviet Union and post-Soviet dislocations, often involving ethnic clashes, as occurred against Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan in 2010. So he probably had some contact who promised him a home or a job or something. What was it?
You can debate the sting approach as much as you like, but naturally it's ok to ask why Ulugbek was eager to get these weapons and had acquired so much animosity to Obama.
Given that there was a plea agreement that reduced his sentence, it sounds like Kodirov agreed to inform on others -- and maybe that includes these radical Islamist preachers that may have turned him. I recall reading several poignant pleas from his mother that he was lured to ruin by such persons, despite not being particularly religious when he still lived in Uzbekistan. I will look these up.
The plea doesn't really shed any light on these issues.
I don't know if Robert McKay starts from the same place I do, which is that it's not ok to make common cause with and support terrorist groups on the Internet. He may believe that the "Internet" part of this sanitizes and defangs the "terrorist" part and makes it merely a kind of virtual offense.
Of course, it's just such a crazy long shot -- a deadly pun -- to imagine that this kid with no prior firearms training and not enough money to buy a sniper rifle or ability to make a real plan for how he was going to get near President Obama is really a deadly assassin. Except...such people are, and when we look at the history of people who have shot presidents, we see that -- they can be insane, crazy, vain, vaguely hooked up to political movements but you never really find out why they were working in the Soviet Union -- etc. etc. That's America. So it's ok to prosecute a case like this.
Kodirov was so far gone that he said he didn't care if he got killed in the process, he just wanted to get Obama. So that tells you that he was either psychotic or immersed in a cult -- but I presume he went through psychiatric examination.
You can also see from the plea -- did McKay read it? -- that the hinge in this story isn't the Internet or talking to shadowy people on the Internet, but making a friend who invited him to a mosque and talked to him about jihad and who then gave him the Internet videos to look up on Youtube or other sites.
So you can' say Kodirov is a "victim of social media"; he's the victim of a guy who befriended him and took him to a mosque where he was encouraged to believe that jihad was acceptable -- and encouraged to act on those violent sentiments. THAT is the problem; the Internet only amplifies it.
One thing I really don't like about this complaint, and I wonder why the lawyer let it be put in, is this:
As part of this agreement, the defendant specifically acknowledges and states that the defendant has not been persecuted in, and has no present fear of persecution in, Uzbekistan on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion. Similarly, the defendant further acknowledges and states that the defendant has not been tortured in, and has no present fear of torture in Uzbekistan.
That's just plain up and down false. Indeed, Kodirov does have a well-founded fear of persecution, especially now that he has become publicly known and has been identified with extreme Islamists and a plot to kill a president. But even before that, merely for being a young Muslim man who studied abroad he could face questioning, attempt to make him into a secret police informant, and torture if he refused to cooperate -- there are existing cases like this and it is common in these countries.
There are thousands of Muslims who have been tortured and imprisoned for activities that are not considered crimes in democratic countries -- joining unauthorized religious groups that aren't even designated as terrorist groups and so on.
I suppose the lawyer had to concede this paragraph to get the plea, but it sure sets back progress for everybody else. There's no question Kodirov faces *now* a very high likelihood of torture if he were returned to Uzbekistan, and even before his arrest, merely for floating around and not going to a scheduled program, he could face at least questioning and an effort to turn him, if not worse. So could his family. The Uzbek secret police are deadly.
Strangely, despite this high likelihood of torture as others have found, Kodirov asks to be returned to Uzbekistan.
Now, that suggests to me that this entire story could indeed be a hoax planned by Uzbek intelligence, either with Kodirov's knowledge, or with Kodirov's general goofiness and possible mental illness exploited by cunning secret police -- and with either his knowledge that he will get out of it all by being brought home and quietly released, or with their knowledge that they will either put him in jail anyway at home or compensate him in some way. The point of this exercise? To let us know there are real terrorists in Uzbekistan and to smear the whole Uzbek emigre community, ultimately, for Americans and Uzbeks.
Except, if he wasn't the avatar of an elaborate sting operation on the part of Uzbek intelligence, he went along with the American sting willingly and that is troublesome.
Given that the complaint also contains an agreement to assist in his removal by the provision of documents, etc., I wonder if we can expect that Kodirov *will* be removed in this case.
I will keep researching the emigre press on this and post more later, but meanwhile, I ask these questions:
o Is this another MNB caper, whereby the Uzbek secret police create a hoax and a case like this to influence public opinion and deter would-be jihadists?
o Did the US FBI and/or CIA collude in this hoax?
o Why didn't anybody research the bona fides of his student visa and educational institution here in the US and at the US Embassy in Tashkent?
