The New York Times is estalishing a Twin Cities newsletter it call The Local. The promotional announcement requires some translation I am unable to provide: “The Local is a pilot newsletter to connect readers to their communities through journalism…” Sounds like another brick in the wall of the Minnesota left to me.
The Times announcment has me thinking back to local stories on which my work has overlapped with that of the Times. Once upon a time the charges against the “Minnesota men” (as the Somali defendants were invariably described) charged with supporting Ismalist terrorism made it to page one of the New York Times. Six of them pleaded guilty. Three were convicted at the trial I covered every day in 2016. Jack Healy and Matt Furber reported on the verdicts inside the A section of the New York Times in “3 Somali-Americans found guilty of trying to join the Islamic State.”
No New York Times reporter attended a single day of the trial. Healy and Furber would therefore have missed the scene of Judge Michael Davis throwing community organizer Burhan Mohumed out of the courthouse for multiple violations of the protocols he enforced during the trial. Healy and Furber nevertheless turned to Mohumed for a quote on the guilty verdicts:
The verdict was not much of a surprise to Burhan Mohumed, 26, a friend of the defendants who had been banned from the courthouse by the judge. He called the process “purely political.”
“I left a little hope that they wouldn’t be convicted on a conspiracy to murder charge,” he said. “I didn’t think they had enough evidence to convict them on that. I think that was an overreach.”
Having been expelled from the courthouse for a key part of the trial, Mohumed missed a lot of the evidence. He was a friend of the terrorist wannabes. He lacked any obvious qualification to opine on the the sufficiency of the evidence to support the guilty verdicts against his friends, yet the Times found his comment worthy of a platform in the newspaper of record.
The evidence at trial showed that Minnesota has proved a welcoming host to a huge immigrant community with hostile feelings about those of us who have generously supported it with our tax dollars. However, the Times has never reached out to us for a quote about our feelings.
The Times did not cover the trial. The Times didn’t send a reporter to town until the jury retired to deliberate. Not having seen a Times reporter in court over the weeks I spent at the trial, I wrote Healy when the Times published his story to ask if he had attended the trial. He promptly responded that he regretted he hadn’t.
Healy and Furber followed up in “Justice or ‘conspiracy’? Terrorism trial divides Somalis in Minneapolis.” The division in the Somali community to which the headline referred could be seen in court. Families of defendants on trial conflicted with the families of two defendants who had pleaded guilty and become cooperating witnesses as well as the family of the co-conspirator who turned informant.
As we waited in the hallway to enter the courtroom one morning, the division gave rise to an intrafamily fight between the mother of one such witness and her daughter. The daughter was also a girlfriend of one of the defendants on trial. Wearing a hijab, the daughter started beating on the mother and dropping f-bombs at maximum volume. She refused to relent until she was restrained and removed by an FBI agent. I was standing right next to the mother and daughter when the fight broke out and the shouting started.
I found Healy and Furber’s story of interest. They quoted a Somali or two who found some possible merit in the government’s prosecution. However, they turned again to Burhan Mohumed. As I say, Mohumed had been thrown out of the courthouse for the duration of the trial after repeated infractions of Judge Davis’s protocols that had previously resulted in his removal from the overflow courtroom.
When Mohumed involved himself in the fight between mother and daughter that morning, the marshals removed him and attempted to take his picture pursuant to Judge Davis’s standing order. Mohumed refused to let them take his picture and the marshals accordingly brought him before Judge Davis. Judge Davis had him come forward in open court twice that morning. After questioning him based on information provided by the marshals, Judge Davis banned Mohumed from the courthouse.
Mohumed was a friend of defendant Guled Omar. In its first story the Times gave Mohumed a platform on which to sound off on the trial. Healy and Furber returned to him for more in the follow-up story:
As he watched boys play basketball outside a community center in central Minneapolis, Burhan Mohumed thought of his friend Guled Omar.
He said Mr. Omar had played here before “he was caught up in that storm.” Mr. Mohumed attended the trial regularly but was barred from the courthouse after he intervened in a fight and argued with court security officers.
After the trial, Andrew M. Luger, the United States attorney for Minnesota, condemned the threats and courthouse scuffles as intolerable and “unheard-of.”
Mr. Mohumed supported the three defendants and, echoing others here, he was upset they could face life in prison even though they never left for Syria and never pulled a trigger.
“If they can convict them on words and thoughts, it’s over,” he said. “People will not feel safe in our communities.”
Now if you had read the affidavits supporting the charges against the defendants, or if you had taken a look at the indictment, or if you attended the trial, you knew the defendants were accused of committing numerous acts in furtherance of their ardent desire to join ISIS. You also knew that, in order to return guilty verdicts, the jury was required to find that they committed such acts. That’s what the jury found when it found the defendants guilty at trial.
What about us? We didn’t feel safe in our communities, but it wasn’t because the friends of Burhan Mohumed were going to prison. It was because the friends of Burhan Mohumed wanted to return to the United States after their hoped-for tour with ISIS in Syria and chop heads for Allah.
