"Preventive paradigm" questioned

Wary of a number of federal anti-terror cases that proved to be overblown, two legal experts Tuesday cautioned about attaching too much significance to the arrest of six Muslims for plotting to attack Fort Dix.

The strategy to aggressively intervene early with any suspected terror plot, no matter how small, has sometimes resulted in prosecutions that failed to live up to their initial billing.

"The fact is that most of those arrested [in the past] are small fry and wannabes," said Daniel Benjamin, a terrorism expert and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

The New Jersey case, in which the suspects trained with paintball guns, bears some resemblance to a 2003 Virginia case in which 11 Muslim men from the Washington area were charged with participating in paramilitary training — including playing paintball — to prepare for "holy war" abroad.

A 26-page indictment unsealed Tuesday indicates that the New Jersey group had no rigorous military training and did not appear close to being able to pull off an attack. The arrests in the case began Monday night after two defendants arrived at a home to buy assault weapons, which had been supplied and disabled by the FBI, officials said.

Some say the government's "preventive paradigm" calling upon law enforcement to intervene early yields symbolic victories, but in the long run, may be counterproductive.

David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor, said prosecutors are under pressure to bring cases quickly. "But there's a risk of losing valuable intelligence if a case is prosecuted too early, as well as assembling a weak case against a real security threat — the risk of losing a serious case," he said.

Civil-liberties experts also said the use of paid confidential informants can send up a red flag.

Sheik Abdel-Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric, was convicted of conspiring to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993 largely because of testimony from an informant. But informants, motivated by a paycheck, have also been shown to pressure small players into committing crimes.

The FBI paid an informant $230,000 to infiltrate a Lodi, Calif., mosque to target two Muslim clerics. The clerics were deported, and a Pakistani immigrant and his American-born son were charged in 2005 for lying to the FBI about the younger man's training at a jihadist camp in Pakistan.

Testimony showed that Hamid Hayat, 23, had undergone the training largely at the goading of the informant. He was convicted and is seeking a new trial. The father was acquitted, but later pleaded guilty to lying to a customs agent about trying to carry $28,000 into Pakistan.

Information from The Washington Post is included in this report.