Fort Dix plot trial is ready to open

It is the stuff of a 21st-century spy novel - terrorism, jihad, Osama bin Laden - but with a suburban twist.

Five foreign-born Muslims raised in Cherry Hill go on trial tomorrow on charges that they plotted to launch an attack on Fort Dix from the back of a pizza delivery truck.

Evidence indicates they practiced at a shooting range in the Poconos and in paintball games in woods and farms in the Hammonton, N.J., area.

They talked strategy, philosophy and religion at another suburban landmark - a Dunkin' Donuts.

And they attracted the attention of the FBI after they had the Circuit City in a Mount Laurel strip mall copy a video of one of their Poconos trips.

In announcing their arrests in May 2007, Christopher J. Christie, the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, said they were "the model for post-Sept. 11-era terrorism."

The defendants were homegrown radicals with no ties to any foreign Islamist terrorist group, authorities allege, but espoused the philosophy of jihad and bin Laden in conversations secretly recorded during a 16-month FBI investigation.

The defendants celebrated that philosophy, authorities contend, by watching, discussing and sharing videotapes of speeches, beheadings, and other violent acts aimed at so-called "enemies of Islam."

More important, prosecutors say, they were motivated by it.

Defense attorneys have argued that their clients are much less than that: angry, misguided young men, all in their 20s, who talked a more serious game than they ever intended to play, egged on and in some cases entrapped by paid FBI informants.

"Intent is going to be the fighting issue in this trial," Assistant U.S. Attorney Norman Gross said at a hearing Thursday before U.S. District Judge Robert Kugler in Camden.

The prosecution and defense agree that the heart of the government's case is secretly recorded conversations in which the defendants talked about attacking U.S. military personnel and how their understanding of the tenets of Islam justified such action.

"In recorded conversations that will comprise a substantial portion of the United States' trial evidence in this case, the defendants speak almost obsessively about 'jihad,' " prosecutors noted in one pretrial motion.

But did they intend to back up that talk with action?

The defense is expected to argue that the two government informants - one a convicted felon facing possible deportation - manipulated the plot and steered the defendants into incriminating conversations.

Whether attacking the credibility and motives of the informants will be enough to persuade jurors to attach less weight to the prosecution's case is the key challenge for the defense.

Prosecutors will use other evidence to support the charges.

There were, for example, "surveillance" trips to Fort Dix and other area military complexes by one of the defendants, Mohamad Shnewer, 23, and FBI cooperating witness Mahmoud Omar.

There was a map of Fort Dix supplied by another defendant, Serdar Tatar, 24, whose father owned a pizzeria just outside the base.

And there was the attempt, on the night they were arrested, by two other defendants, brothers Dritan and Shain Duka, to buy assault weapons - four AK-47s and four M-16s - from an FBI agent posing as an illegal gun dealer.

The fifth defendant, Eljvir Duka, 24, is the brother of Dritan, 29, and Shain, 27, and the brother-in-law of Shnewer.

The concept of a group of five to seven men attacking a sprawling U.S. military base from the back of a pizza delivery truck might seem farfetched, prosecutors concede. But they will ask the jury to consider it in light of the radical, Muslim jihadist philosophy espoused in the conversations of the defendants and the videos they watched incessantly.

"Their statements speak for themselves," Gross said at another point in Thursday's hearing, later adding that "only a jihadist would attack an American military complex," because the mission is almost certainly suicidal.

Now an anonymously chosen jury of eight women and four men will begin the process of deciding the defendants' fate.

All five could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted of the most serious charge, plotting to murder American military personnel.

They also face related weapons and conspiracy charges.

The trial is expected to take about eight weeks, and will include dozens of conversations taped by Omar and the other informant, Besnik Bakalli. Both also are expected to testify.

The jury will also hear from FBI agents who worked the case, experts on terrorism, local law enforcement investigators who had a hand in the probe, and dozens of others who had some kind of contact with the defendants, including Brian Morgenstern, the Circuit City clerk whose concern over some of the things he saw on a video he was asked to copy in January 2006 helped set the investigation in motion.

The video, which Morgenstern, 27, said he had found "disturbing," showed 10 men shooting rifles at a firing range, calling for "jihad," and shouting, "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great").