The Newburgh Sting is a credible and politically important documentary from HBO. In 2009, the FBI arrested four American Muslims with what look like bombs outside a synagogue. The Newburgh Sting examines the case by showing us the actual FBI surveillance videos and audios, along with talking heads of relatives and community members. And a different reality emerges.
As the story unfolds, the FBI enrolls an informant – a serial con man who needed FBI leverage to hang on to the ill-gotten gains of a previous scam. The informant heads to hardscrabble Newburgh, NY, and flashes cash and expensive cars; he pretends to be an international terrorist who will pay $250,000 for a “job”. The informant finds a local hustler who will say anything to scrounge some cash. The hustler rounds up three more unemployed guys who will also do anything for a little money, let alone $250,000. The informant describes and plans the job, organizes the job and provides all the materials (including fake bombs).
Whether or not this meets the legal definition of entrapment is one thing. But, as a matter of policy, it’s clear that – absent the FBI informant paying them to do so – these guys would never have been involved in such a scheme. It’s also easy for the audience to conclude that the FBI only stopped a “terrorist incident” that it manufactured, spending resources that could have been used against real terrorists with the actual means to carry out an attack.
The most distasteful part of the story is the cable news coverage of the arrests, trumpeting the FBI’s spin: the capture of a terrorist cell intent on mass murder of Americans. By the time we watch this, we have seen the video of the informant and the dumbass suspects actually plotting the “attack”, and we have a pretty clear picture of the personalities involved and what really happened. Because of the surveillance videos, it’s definitely worth a watch.
The Newburgh Sting is playing on HBO.