SARATOGA SPRINGS — When Tim Coll arrested Shahed Hussain for running a driver’s license scam, it was the beginning of a long and controversial relationship.
Coll was an Albany-based FBI agent focused on terrorism. Hussain, facing criminal charges and deportation after the 2002 bust, agreed to become an informant and operative. Together, Coll and Hussain would zero in on a Central Avenue mosque and its imam, a man the FBI suspected had terrorism ties.
Whether that suspicion was justified remains controversial, as do the methods used in a sting that imprisoned Yassin Aref, the imam, and Mohammed Hossain, the owner of an Albany pizzeria.
At Coll’s direction, Hussain allegedly convinced the men, using a $50,000 loan as an enticement, to participate in a phony plot for the purchase of a shoulder-fired missile to be used, supposedly, in a terrorist attack. Did they really understand the scheme? Did Hussain’s tactics amount to entrapment?
And should the FBI have been working with a guy of such dubious morality and honesty? (Coll in a deposition said Hussain “was good at being deceptive.”)
Roughly two decades later, those questions remain about a case that, with the benefit of hindsight, seems symbolic of an ugly bloodletting following Sept. 11, 2001.
The case and later stings involving Hussain were, as a New York Magazine article put it, “legal landmarks in the War on Terror, helping establish the legitimacy of secret evidence, warrantless wiretapping, and the government’s practice of inventing terror plots to entrap ordinary Americans with no prior connection to violent Islamic groups.”
Weep for civil liberties and the Constitution. Then fast forward to 2018, when three days after Aref’s release from prison, a limousine with bad brakes accelerated downhill in Schoharie and crashed near the Apple Barrel Country Store, killing 17 passengers, the driver…
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