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Alicia McCollum Candidly Discusses Newburgh 4 with CagePrisoners

An exclusive interview by Aviva Stahl

Tell me a little bit about David was like growing up.

(In Alicia McCollum’s words): [Beginning cut off] David grew up without a father… this family is run by women, not men. We don’t have male role models for the young men in our family… There’s like fifteen nephews. The women, we do the best we can with what we got.

How do you think that affected [David]?

I believe all young men, especially… people of colour, need a strong role model. When you look at the 1940s and 50s, how the family unit stayed together, and how fathers stayed in their lives back then and showed the men what it is to work and to be responsible and planted positive seeds in their life… You don’t see that in the culture anymore, in our culture, in African American culture anymore. So it’s women who are in the forefront, holding everything down, taking care of the household, without a male figure. And you look at the difference between this generation now, and then when the drugs and the crack era hit our community… When you look at the dividedness around the male figures, that piece is missing. When you watch grandpa, you watch granddad, you watch your father have a work history… when you don’t see that anymore, in our culture, and you see very few. And that plays a hell of a role on our men growing up.

Could you tell me about [David’s] conversion to Islam?

Well, David was introduced to Islam when he went to Newburgh. His grandmother has been in the Muslim community for years. David was introduced when he was about eight. He was introduced to it but he never really took it seriously, he went and became a drug dealer. When he got incarcerated, I think he took it up. Most men, when they become incarcerated, they don’t want to join gangs, so a lot of them go to the Islamic in prison, because it’s peaceful, and they’re going to watch your back….

Most men, when they do go to jail and become Muslims, while they’re in there, when they come home it’s a different tune. It’s because they wanted to be protected by Muslims when they were in there, while they were incarcerated. But for David, he was introduced was he was eight. He believes in it, he considers himself a Muslim, and I believe him. He came home and said he was a Muslim, and I said, “Okay”. We’ve never had a discussion about Muslim versus Christianity, or my god versus his god, we never had discussions on that magnitude. Read the rest of this entry »

FBI Fabricating Terrorism Across the USA

18 Nov

David Williams did not have an easy life. He moved to Newburgh, a gritty, impoverished town on the banks of the Hudson an hour or so north of New York, at just 10 years old. For a young, black American boy with a father in jail, trouble was everywhere.

Williams also made some bad choices. He ended up going to jail for dealing drugs. When he came out in 2007 he tried to go straight, but money was tight and his brother, Lord, needed cash for a liver transplant. Life is hard in Newburgh if you are poor, have a drug rap and need cash quickly.

His aunt, Alicia McWilliams, was honest about the tough streets her nephew was dealing with. “Newburgh is a hard place,” she said. So it was perhaps no surprise that in May, 2009, David Williams was arrested again and hit with a 25-year jail sentence. But it was not for drugs offences. Or any other common crime. Instead Williams and three other struggling local men beset by drug, criminal and mental health issues were convicted of an Islamic terrorist plot to blow up synagogues and shoot down military jets with missiles.

Even more shocking was that the organisation, money, weapons and motivation for this plot did not come from real Islamic terrorists. It came from the FBI, and an informant paid to pose as a terrorist mastermind paying big bucks for help in carrying out an attack. For McWilliams, her own government had actually cajoled and paid her beloved nephew into being a terrorist, created a fake plot and then jailed him for it. “I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone,” she told the Guardian.

Lawyers for the so-called Newburgh Four have now launched an appeal that will be held early next year. Advocates hope the case offers the best chance of exposing the issue of FBI entrapment in terror cases. “We have as close to a legal entrapment case as I have ever seen,” said Susanne Brody, who represents another Newburgh defendant, Onta Williams.

Some experts agree. “The target, the motive, the ideology and the plot were all led by the FBI,” said Karen Greenberg, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, who specialises in studying the new FBI tactics. Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by aseerun on November 18, 2011 in News Items

Tags: Burim Duka, Craig Monteilh, David Williams, Ditran Duka, Duka Brothers, Elie Assaad, Eljvir Duka, entrapment, fabricating terrorism, FBI informant, FBI setup, Fort Dix FIve, Karen Greenberg, Mike German, Narseal Batiste, Newburgh Four, Onta Williams, Robert Mueller, shady informants, Shahed Hussain, Shain Duka, The Liberty City Seven

Flashback: Albany, Fort Dix Five, & Newburgh Four

21 Aug

Democracy Now! Interviews some of the families of the victims of America’s War on Islam, in an overview of the FBI’s prosecution of its personal war on Muslims highlighting their extensive use of convicts and con-artists in their fabrication of terrorism. Using as case studies the cases of the Fort Dix Five (Mohammed Shnewer, Dritan Duka, Shain Duka, Eljvir Duka and Serdar Tatar); The Newburgh Four (David Williams, Onta Williams, James Cromitie, and Laguerre Payen); and Mohammed Hossein and Imam Yassin Aref of Albany, New York the documentry casts light on the FBIs criminalisation of average US citizens whose only apparent crime was that they were poor, minorities and most of all Muslim.

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Posted by aseerun on August 21, 2011 in Collateral Damage, News Items, Videos

Tags: Albany, Burim Duka, Craig Monteilh, David Williams, DemocracyNow!, Ditran Duka, Dritan Duka, Duka, Duka Brothers, Elie Assaad, Eljvir Duka, entrapment, fabricating terrorism, FBI, FBI informant, FBI setup, Fort Dix FIve, James Cromitie, Laguerre Payen, Mohammed Hossein, Mohammed Shnewer, Newburgh Four, Onta Williams, Serdar Tatar, shady informants, Shahed Hussain, Shain Duka, Shnewer, Yassin Aref

The Voice on David Williams and the Newburgh 4

09 Aug

On June 29, David Williams IV and three other Newburgh, New York, men were sentenced to 25 years in prison for plotting to blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and to shoot down military airplanes at Stewart Airport.

Hey... I'm sleazy and I know it!

The Newburgh 4—ringleader James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen—were found guilty in a six-week trial based largely on the work of an FBI informant, Shahed Hussain, who posed as a wealthy Pakistani businessman with ties to an overseas terror group as part of an elaborate government sting operation.

The trial showed that Cromitie had made anti-Semitic and anti-American statements, that he concocted attack plans with Hussain, that the four defendants met to view an anti-aircraft missile, and that they planted what they had been told were bombs at two Riverdale synagogues on May 20, 2009.

The Confidential Informant, Shahed Hussain, was also a key player in an FBI investigation that led to the conviction of the imam and an assistant imam of Masjid As-Salam in Albany.

The evidence, which included secretly taped conversations, painted a picture of four men who wanted to strike a blow for radical Islam. After the verdict, one juror told reporters, “We considered what they did a serious crime.”

Defense lawyers tried unsuccessfully to convince the jury that the government had actually entrapped the four, but none of the defendants testified on their own or gave interviews.

Until now. David Williams tells the Voice what he hasn’t said publicly before: that he went along with the bomb plot because he was trying to cheat Hussain, the government’s informant, out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Even as they were being secretly recorded and trailed by the government, Williams says he and Cromitie were working on their own plot to take Hussain’s cash.

In other words, they wanted to scam a guy who, it turned out, was scamming them. Read the rest of this entry »