In law enforcement, a sting operation is a deceptive operation designed to catch a person attempting to commit a crime. A typical sting will have an undercover law enforcement officer, detective, or co-operative member of the public play a role as criminal partner or potential victim and go along with a suspect's actions to gather evidence of the suspect's wrongdoing. Mass media journalists occasionally resort to sting operations to record video and broadcast to expose criminal activity.
Yassin M. Aref is religious scholar, writer, and poet of Kurdish background who was the central figure of a controversial sting operation leading to years of incarceration in the Federal Bureau of Prisons. A resident of Albany, New York, Aref was arrested by Federal authorities in August 2004 as part of a counter-terrorism sting operation, convicted in October 2006 of conspiring to aid a terrorist group and provide support for a weapon of mass destruction, as well as money-laundering and supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and sentenced to 15 years in prison in March 2007. In July 2008, the appellate court upheld the convictions, rejecting all of the defense's arguments. The decision caused outrage amongst the local community, as supporters maintained the position that he was being persecuted. After finishing his 15-year prison sentence in October, 2018, Aref was deported to Iraqi Kurdistan in June, 2019.
Jeffrey Leib Nettler Zimbalist is an American filmmaker. He has been Academy Award shortlisted, has won a Peabody, a DuPont, and 3 Emmy Awards, with 13 Emmy nominations. He is the owner of film and television production company All Rise Films.
The Liberty City Seven were seven construction workers and members of a small Miami, Florida-based religious group who called themselves the Universal Divine Saviors. Described as a "bizarre cult," the seven were arrested and charged with terrorism-related offenses in 2006 by a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting investigation although their actual operational capability was extremely low and their intentions were unclear. The members of the group operated out of a small warehouse in the Miami neighborhood of Liberty City.
Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 American documentary film directed by Alex Gibney, and produced by Gibney, Eva Orner, and Susannah Shipman. It won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It focuses on the December 2002 killing of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention and interrogated at a black site at Bagram air base.
Deborah Scranton is an American film director. She directed The War Tapes, a documentary detailing the personal stories of soldiers in the Iraq War. It was the first of its kind in that she sent the soldiers video cameras so they can shoot raw footage of their actual, on hand experiences in combat. The film won several honors, including Best International Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival and Best International Documentary at BritDoc in 2006 and was shortlisted for an Oscar in 2007.
In the United States, a common definition of terrorism is the systematic or threatened use of violence in order to create a general climate of fear to intimidate a population or government and thereby effect political, religious, or ideological change. This article serves as a list and compilation of acts of terrorism, attempts of terrorism, and other such items pertaining to terrorist activities within the domestic borders of the United States by non-state actors or spies acting in the interests of or persons acting without approval of state actors.
Bill Guttentag is an American dramatic and documentary film writer-producer-director. His films have premiered at the Sundance, Cannes, Telluride and Tribeca film festivals, and he has won two Academy Awards.
Tarik Shah is an African American Muslim with a career as a professional jazz musician. As the sole student of Slam Stewart, Shah began playing the upright bass at age 12 and went on to play with Betty Carter, Ahmad Jamal, Abbey Lincoln and Art Taylor among others. He is a composer, a jazz educator, and lyricist. An expert in martial arts, Mr. Shah was arrested in May 2005 at the age of 42 in New York City, accused and eventually charged with providing aid for terrorist activity based on evidence from an FBI sting. He initially pled not guilty to all charges. After 31 months of solitary confinement, he was convinced a fair trial was unlikely given the Islamophobia following 9-11. He pled guilty and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
According to the complaint, both also made a formal oath of loyalty, called a bayat, to Al Qaeda in a meeting with an undercover F.B.I. agent that was secretly recorded. An indictment handed up by a federal grand jury Monday accused the men of conspiring to provide material support for terrorism, specifically for Al Qaeda. It was less than a page long and added no details.
Brandon Michael Darby is an American conservative blogger and activist. He first became known in the fall of 2005 for actions in New Orleans in efforts to help residents, where he was a co-founder of the Common Ground Collective organized there. It coordinated the efforts of hundreds of volunteers from across the country for years.
Robert Fuller is an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who has worked in counter-terrorism. He has questioned suspected terrorists, been a handler of informants in the U.S., and testified in both federal court and Guantanamo military commission trials.
On May 20, 2009, US law enforcement arrested four men in connection with a fake plot concocted by an FBI informant to purportedly shoot down military airplanes flying out of an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, New York, and blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale community of the Bronx using weapons supplied by the FBI. The group was led by the Pakistani Shahed Hussain, a criminal who was working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to avoid deportation for DMV fraud. Hussain has never been charged in the USA with any terrorism related offenses and was paid nearly $100,000 US dollars by the FBI for his work on this plot.
Masjid al-Ikhlas, also referred to as The Islamic Learning Center of Orange County, is a mosque in Newburgh, New York.
Andrew Rossi is an Emmy-nominated filmmaker, known for directing documentaries such as Page One: Inside the New York Times (2011) and The Andy Warhol Diaries (2022).
Adam Ciralsky is an American journalist, television and film producer and attorney. Many of his original reports have been optioned and adapted for film and television through his production company P3 Media. In 2018, Ciralsky's P3 Media signed a first-look deal with ABC Studios for scripted content.
Earth Made of Glass is a 2010 American documentary film, directed by Deborah Scranton, about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Filming occurred in Rwanda and France. It premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, in the World Documentary Competition, on April 26, 2010.
Better This World is a 2011 documentary film that was directed by Kelly Duane and Katie Galloway. It had its world premiere at the San Francisco International Film Festival on April 23, 2011, where it won two Golden Gate Awards for Best Documentary Feature and Bay Area Documentary Feature.
(T)error – stylized as (T)ERROR – is a 2015 American documentary film directed by Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe. The film follows undercover FBI informant Saeed "Shariff" Torres as he engages in a sting operation targeting a Muslim man named Khalifah Ali Al-Akili as well as Tarik Shah. The film won the Special Jury Award for Breakout First Feature at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered.
The Hacker Wars is a 2014 documentary film about hacktivism in the United States, directed by Vivien Lesnik Weisman. It was released on October 17, 2014 in the US.
Mr. Soul! is a 2018 American documentary film produced, written and directed by documentary filmmaker Melissa Haizlip. The film was co-produced by Doug Blush and co-directed by Sam Pollard. The film tells the story of Ellis Haizlip, the producer and host of SOUL!, the music-and-talk program that aired on public television from 1968 to 1973 and aimed at a Black audience. It was released in 2018 and has since received 21 filmmaking awards. Attorney Chaz Ebert, record executive Ron Gillyard, producer and director Stan Lathan, producer Rishi Rajani, producer Stephanie T. Rance, actor Blair Underwood and screenwriter, producer and actress Lena Waithe are the executive producers of the film.
