From super-maximum security prison, Shain Duka, one of the Fort Dix Five, maintains he was set up in a terrorism plot by the FBI, and is now appealing to the supreme court for help
As a child Shain Duka often listened to his parents talk about living in fear of their government in communist Albania, before they moved to America and settled in New Jersey to raise their four sons. "I could not fathom or understand what were they talking about. We grew up having freedom. Where we could speak freely. We never lived in a time and place like that," Duka told the Guardian.
But Duka believes he understands now. Duka is one of the Fort Dix Five, a group of Muslims convicted in a terrorist plot to attack a US army base. But the case is far from straightforward and has become emblematic of some of the extreme law enforcement methods deployed in the fight against terrorism in the decade after 9/11. Along with his brothers, Dritan and Eljvir, Shain Duka has become a symbol of so-called "entrapment" techniques used by the FBI to lure, monitor, trap and convict Muslim suspects in plots driven often wholly, or in part, by undercover agents and their informants.
Duka, speaking by phone from inside a high-security prison in Colorado, insists he and his two brothers are innocent and were set up by their own government. "Now I understand what my parents were saying. No, we don't have freedom. When a group is targeted you don't have freedoms," he said in one of the few jailhouse media interviews to have been conducted with people convicted in such high profile "entrapment" cases.
Duka believes his family was simply caught up in a deliberate attempt to intimidate and silence the Muslim community. "This is all political. I am not going to say that every single case similar to mine is innocent. But the majority are innocent. This is a weapon that the government uses... to silence the Islamic community," he said.
But to the FBI, and to the US justice system, the Duka brothers were a serious Islamic terrorist threat: pure and simple. The investigation that ended in their arrest in 2007 lasted more than a year and involved the use of confidential informants who befriended the Dukas, and a young cab driver called Mohammed Shnewer and Serdar Tatar, whose father ran a New Jersey pizza company that delivered to the Fort Dix army base.
Prosecutors used the informants' evidence to paint a picture of a group of men who had been watching bloody jihadi videos, and been recorded lambasting American policy in Iraq and discussing radical Islam, including the lectures of slain Yemeni-American cleric Anwar Al-Awlaki. Shnewer, the FBI said, had conducted surveillance of Fort Dix and the Dukas were picked up after they illegally bought powerful guns in a deal arranged by an informant who had also offered to get them RPGs. All the Dukas got life in jail. Their appeal was turned down late last year.
But that simple version of the trial is barely to scratch the surface of the full story of the Dukas or cases like it. Many entrapment cases have emerged in the past decade in which US law enforcement has sought to lure suspects seen as potential terrorist threats into fake plots or encourage them to formulate their own attacks under close supervision. In the most controversial case, known as the Newburgh Four, an FBI informant offered hundreds of thousands of dollars, a new car and even a paid-for holiday, to lure black American Muslim targets into agreeing to help carry out a terror plot.
Along with the Newburgh Four, the Fort Dix Five have emerged as one of the most high profile cases. Civil liberties lawyers and Muslim community groups have expressed deep concern at the tactics that swept through a typical slice of suburban New Jersey and ended with five men in jail.
The first is the way the men came to the attention of the FBI. They were reported by a clerk in a local branch of Circuit City after dropping off a video to be copied onto multiple DVDs. The video featured the Dukas – who wear Islamic beards – shooting weapons and shouting "Allahu Akbar". That was enough to unnerve the store's clerk, who reported it to the police. The video, which had been shot on a recent vacation in the nearby Pocono Mountains, also included more typical scenes of the men playing paintball, skiing and riding horses.
The shooting had actually occurred at a public shooting range with rented weapons, and even the most fervent law enforcement official might have wondered why a nascent Islamic terror cell would deliver its propaganda to be developed at Circuit City. "We were perfectly innocent, you understand? We didn't think nothing of it. This was supposed to be memorabilia [of the trip]," Duka said of the holiday video. But the incident sparked a sudden and massive FBI probe into the Dukas and their friends.
That investigation centred on the work of two FBI informants: Mahmoud Omar and Besnik Bakalli. Omar was the first to be sent into the field and he rapidly befriended Shnewer, eventually persuading him to go on trips to scout out Fort Dix. The Duka brothers never did so, nor was any evidence presented that showed them as aware of the base as a target. Bakalli, who was Albanian, worked more closely on befriending the Dukas, especially getting them to talk about their Muslim faith.
"He had question after question and one of the main questions which he stood by was the concept of jihad... It wasn't out of the ordinary that that happened because that was what we talked about. The war in Iraq was its peak at that time," Duka said of their long conversations which, unknown to him, Bakalli was recording.
The use of these informants – as it is in many other such "entrapment" cases – is the most controversial element of the case. Both Omar and Bakalli had serious criminal records. Omar had fraud convictions and was facing possible deportation before the FBI persuaded him to work for them. Bakalli, meanwhile, had confessed to attempted murder back in Albania. He was found by the FBI while in jail.
In a move seen by critics as likely to give the informants motivation to secure convictions no matter what, both men also made a fortune out of their new work. Bakalli made $150,000. Omar got $240,000. Nor was their evidence exactly open and shut. It was Omar himself who drew up a list of guns to buy, which Duka says were wanted for another Poconos holiday so they could avoid rental queues. It was also Omar who added RPGs to the list, which were not actually bought.
Omar's recording equipment also mysteriously failed at key moments, such as the vital chats where the gun deal was set up. In later court testimony, Omar actually confessed that two Duka brothers – Dritan and Shain – did not know of any Fort Dix plot. "[They] had nothing to do with this matter," Omar said during the trial.
Indeed, it was only Shnewer who seemed to have direct, recorded thoughts about attacking Fort Dix. But even he failed to do things that Omar asked him to do, like return to Fort Dix or practise making bombs, and he ignored Omar's taunts that he was not doing enough to further the scheme.
Shain Duka believes Omar exploited Shnewer, who he said was young, impressionable and eager to appear tough. "This [Omar] is a guy who can manipulate. He had huge incentive. He knew this guy [Mohammed] is the guy to work with. They did psychological operations on this kid. He was a young kid. Twenty years old. But in his mind he was like a 14 or 15 year old," he said.
The final worrying aspect of the case is the fact that the last member of the Fort Dix Five, Tatar, actually went to the police in Philadelphia to report his concerns that someone – likely either Omar or Shnewer – was pressuring him to get a Fort Dix map, and that he thought it might be linked to terrorism.
Tatar, via his father's pizza firm, had access to a simple road map of the base. But to critics of the case it seems perhaps unlikely that a dedicated terrorist would report his own plot to the authorities.
Not that any of this is comfort to Shain Duka. Three months ago he was moved out of the virtual 24-hour solitary confinement of a Supermax prison in Colorado to a less stringent regime in the same complex, but it left a toll on his mind. "These are places to silence us. To keep you controlled. They are places to strip you away from your family. I consider the Supermax as a psychological torture chamber. That's what it is. It should be illegal that place," he said.
Duka is now filing his case with the US supreme court, but the highest judicial authority in America has no obligation to hear his appeal. In the meantime he is busying himself reading books on Islam and attending a prison course on the history of American presidents.
"I spend the days reading and studying and working out. Just keeping your mind busy. You have to keep your mind working. You know, if you just fall back and you get depressed the world will fall in on you," he said. Duka said that his Muslim faith was giving him comfort, though he worried about the impact on his family, bereft of a husband, father and breadwinner. "They are struggling," he said.
Duka added that he thinks, maybe, justice will come not in this life, but the next. "The people who did this to us can be held accountable. If I do not get justice in this world, then I will get it on the Day of Judgment. My faith in God is what keeps me going. Me and my family," he said.
There is little that Duka can do at the moment. He is filing his supreme court appeal, trying to pull together a legal complaint about his lawyers and seeking to have restrictions removed that might allow him to communicate with his imprisoned brothers. But he remains a convicted terrorist.
In fact, so dangerous does the prison that holds him believe Duka to be that it declined a request from the Guardian for a face-to-face interview, citing security fears. "(We) make every effort to accommodate requests... however, due to continued security concerns, granting your request at this time may disrupt the good order and security of the institution," Governor Charles A Daniels wrote in a letter refusing access.
To Duka that was not much of a surprise. "They don't want us to speak. They don't want our message to get out. They don't want our side, our view, our words," Duka said.