The Newburgh Sting TV - The New York Times online -
The FBI says it has thwarted a terror plot: Federal investigators say the suspects are four men with a shared hatred for America.’ The Newburgh Sting, television news, Sky Atlantic 2017
In the Spring of 2008 the FBI sends an undercover informant to Newburgh, New York, on a mission to find terrorists. ibid. caption
Hussain: ‘I can make you $250,000 …’ ibid.
‘Nobody is armed; nobody has a bomb.’ ibid. defense
The Newburgh 4 lost on appeal. They are taking their case to the United States Supreme Court. ibid.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the ‘compassionate release’ of three Hudson Valley men who were part of a group known as the Newburgh 4 after finding that FBI agents had used an ‘unscrupulous operative’ to persuade them to join a plot to blow up synagogues and bring down military planes more than a decade ago.
The decision, by Judge Colleen McMahon of United States District Court in Manhattan, was scathing in its description of the methods used by the FBI in its pursuit of the three — Onta Williams, Laguerre Payen and David Williams — calling the plot in which they were convicted of participating in 2010 ‘an FBI-orchestrated conspiracy’.
‘A person reading the crimes of conviction in this case would be left with the impression that the offending defendants were sophisticated international terrorists committed to jihad against the United States’, Judge McMahon wrote. ‘However, they were, in actual reality, hapless, easily manipulated and penurious petty criminals’.
Under the judge’s order, Onta Williams’s, David Williams’s and Mr. Payen’s sentences will be reduced to time served plus 90 days. They were sentenced in 2011 to at least 25 years in prison. The New York Times online article 27 July 2023, ‘Judge Orders Release of Three of Newburgh Four, Criticizing FBI’