Trial for Fort Dix Five begins tomorrow

It was paintball and jihad, Dunkin' Donuts and Osama bin Laden - terrorism come to suburbia.

And if the plot had been carried out, prosecutors say, the bodies of U.S. Army personnel would have been strewn across the fields of the Fort Dix military base.

Jury selection begins tomorrow for the trial of five foreign-born Muslims from the Philadelphia area charged with planning a jihad-inspired attack on the South Jersey military complex.

The government's case is built primarily around secretly recorded conversations made by two cooperating witnesses who befriended the defendants. Those conversations, prosecutors say, detail "plans to attack Fort Dix and kill American soldiers" and include "discussions of the supposed justifications for such attacks rooted in radical jihadist ideology."

But defense attorneys contend their clients talked a bigger game than they intended to play, portraying them as easily manipulated individuals led into a plot by paid FBI informants who created a conspiracy out of hollow words and empty threats.

"Any conspiracy that plots death and destruction has to be taken seriously," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert who teaches at Georgetown University and who is following the trial of the so-called Fort Dix Five.

But Hoffman said that there are no stereotypical "homegrown" terrorists and that each case has to be evaluated on its own.

Challenging the credibility of informants and arguing entrapment have been common defense strategies used in other terrorist trials, he said.

Sometimes effectively, he added.

Those are the issues jurors will have to wrestle with during the trial, which is expected to last several weeks.

The first of an estimated 1,500 potential jurors will report to U.S. District Court in Camden tomorrow morning and begin filling out questionnaires designed to determine how much they know about the case and whether that knowledge or any other inherent beliefs or biases should preclude them from the jury.

Twelve jurors and six alternates will be chosen to determine the fate of the defendants, all in their mid- to late 20s, who face potential life sentences.

Opening arguments, before Judge Robert Kugler, are expected next month.

The Fort Dix trial is one of three major prosecutions of suspected terrorists under way, or soon to begin, across the country.

In Houston, the retrial of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, a Texas-based Muslim charitable organization charged with funneling $12 million to Palestinian terrorists, began this month. The first trial ended with a hung jury last year.

And in Miami, prosecutors are gearing up for a third try at convicting members of the so-called Liberty City 7, who were charged with plotting to blow up the Sears Building in Chicago and several federal offices in Florida. Two earlier trials ended with hung juries. In the first, one of the defendants was found not guilty.

Six suspects were originally charged in the Fort Dix case.

One, Agron Abdullahu, 25, a baker in a ShopRite store near Williamstown, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge, admitting he had given weapons to three of the other defendants who were illegal immigrants. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison.

The five other defendants, charged with the more serious offense of plotting to kill soldiers, are brothers Dritan Duka, 29, Shain Duka, 27, and Eljvir Duka, 24; Mohamad Shnewer, 23; and Serdar Tatar, 24.

The Dukas and Shnewer are from Cherry Hill. Tatar is a former Cherry Hill resident who was living in Philadelphia when he and the others were arrested.

Shnewer, who was born in Jordan, is a U.S. citizen. Tatar, born in Turkey, is a legal resident immigrant. The Duka brothers, ethnic Albanians from what is now Macedonia, have been living in the country illegally since arriving as young children by way of Mexico in the late 1980s.

The Dukas were in the roofing business. Shnewer drove a taxi and worked in his family's food market in Pennsauken. Tatar was a clerk/manager of a 7-Eleven store. His father owned a pizzeria just outside the gates to Fort Dix.

Among other things, Tatar is accused of supplying a map of the base he got from his father's pizza shop. The conspirators planned to launch their attack from a pizza-delivery truck, authorities allege.

The arrests of the plotters in May 2007 capped a 16-month investigation that started after a worker at a Circuit City store in Mount Laurel contacted authorities about a "troubling" tape he was asked to copy onto a DVD for some customers.

The tape, which will be played at trial, shows the defendants at a shooting range in the Poconos firing guns, calling for jihad (a holy war or struggle), and shouting "Allahu Akbar" (God is great).

It will be one of several videos shown to the jurors. Others were made by FBI surveillance teams.

There will also be dozens of tapes recorded by two cooperating witnesses who befriended the defendants at the behest of the FBI.

Those informants, authorities allege, took part in "training sessions" that included paintball games in wooded areas and farms around South Jersey.

They also recorded conversations and were shown Islamic militant videotapes that promoted the ideals of al-Qaeda and bin Laden, investigators contend.

Several of those conversations took place at a Dunkin' Donuts near a Palmyra mosque where some of the defendants attended Friday prayer services.

After prayers, they would meet at the shop where they discussed politics, religion and, among other things, how to repair cars.

The defense is expected to argue their clients were young men blowing off steam and occasionally making ill-advised comments to government informants who were wearing body wires.

The prosecution and defense arguments in the case are similar to those made in other terrorism trials where wiretaps, electronic audio and video surveillance, and informants have been employed.

According to a study by the Center on Law and Security at New York University Law School, 62 terrorist suspects were convicted between Sept. 11, 2001, and Sept. 11, 2007.

In most of those cases, as in the Fort Dix probe, there was no link between the defendants and any foreign terrorist organization.

In the Fort Dix case, however, prosecutors are expected to use taped conversations to support their argument that the defendants were aware of and often celebrated the radical Muslim philosophy that is at the heart of the terrorist movement.

They include potentially damaging quotes already cited in court papers in which:

Tatar tells one of the cooperating witnesses, "It doesn't matter to me whether I get locked up, arrested or taken away, it doesn't matter. Or I die, doesn't matter. I'm doing it in the name of Allah."

Shnewer says, "My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers."

Eljvir Duka explains, "When someone attacks your religion, your way of life, then you go to jihad."

Whether attacking the credibility and motivation of the cooperating witnesses will be enough to offset incriminating conversations by the defendants is one of the biggest challenges for the defense in the case, legal observers say.

One of the cooperators has a criminal record for bank fraud and was facing deportation to his native Egypt when he began working for the FBI.

Both cooperators were paid.

The exact amounts are expected to be made public during the trial, but defense attorneys have already estimated cash in excess of $50,000 changed hands.

The defense will argue that was another incentive for the witnesses to steer the alleged conspirators into a plot they never intended to carry out.

A similar argument appeared to resonate with some jurors in the Liberty City 7 case, which has ended twice with hung juries. Some defendants, in fact, testified they were trying to scam a cooperating witness out of $50,000 by claiming they needed it to finance planned attacks when, in fact, all they were doing was trying to get his money.

Hoffman, the terrorism expert from Georgetown, said that could be an effective defense strategy.

He noted, however, that the alleged Liberty City 7 plot "sounded more amateurish than the Fort Dix plot," in which defendants are accused of, among other things, scouting out the perimeters of Fort Dix and other area military complexes and arranging to purchase weapons from an undercover agent introduced into the investigation by one of the cooperating witnesses. Two of the Duka brothers were arrested after allegedly purchasing AK-47 and M-16 assault rifles from what they thought was an illegal gun supplier.