WASHINGTON, Jan 21, (AP): A man convicted in a post-9/11 terrorism sting was ordered freed from prison by a judge who criticized the FBI for relying on an "unsavory” confidential informant for an agency-invented conspiracy to blow up New York synagogues and shoot down National Guard planes.
US District Judge Colleen McMahon on Friday granted James Cromitie, 58, compassionate release from prison six months after she ordered the release of his three co-defendants, known as the Newburgh Four, for similar reasons. The four men from the small river city 60 miles (97 kilometers) north of New York City were convicted of terrorism charges in 2010.
Cromitie has served 15 years of his 25-year minimum sentence. The New York-based judge ordered Cromitie’s sentence to be reduced to time served plus 90 days.
Prosecutors in the high-profile case said the Newburgh defendants spent months scouting targets and securing what they thought were explosives and a surface-to-air missile, aiming to shoot down planes at the Air National Guard base in Newburgh and blow up synagogues in the Bronx. They were arrested after allegedly planting "bombs” that were packed with inert explosives supplied by the FBI.
Critics have accused federal agents of entrapping a group of men who were down on their luck after doing prison time.
In a scathing ruling, McMahon wrote that the FBI invented the conspiracy and identified the targets. Cromitie and his codefendants, she wrote, "would not have, and could not have, devised on their own" a criminal plot involving missiles.
"The notion that Cromitie was selected as a ‘leader’ by the co-defendants is inconceivable, given his well-documented buffoonery and ineptitude," she wrote.
Cromitie was bought into the phony plot by the federal informant Shaheed Hussain, whose work has been criticized for years by civil liberties groups.