The premise of tonight’s controversial documentary (T)ERROR is quite bloody astounding, and it defies belief how the directors actually pulled it off. The slightly slow paced at times but still solid outing is the first documentary to place filmmakers on the ground during an active FBI counter- terrorism sting operation, an all-too-familiar scenario in post-9/11 USA.
The premise of tonight’s controversial documentary (T)ERROR is quite bloody astounding, and it defies belief how the directors actually pulled it off. The slightly slow paced at times but still solid outing is the first documentary to place filmmakers on the ground during an active FBI counter- terrorism sting operation, an all-too-familiar scenario in post-9/11 USA.
Documentary directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe gained access to both an undercover FBI informant, Saeed, who was working on a counterterrorism operation, and Khalifah, the target that the FBI instructed him to investigate. The film began life when filmmaker Cabral reportedly “discovered” that a friend from her Harlem neighborhood, Saeed “Shariff” Torres, was an active FBI informant. And how did she find out? He told her. And he even agreed to let her film the next sting on which he was dispatched. Seemingly too easy but that is apparently the way that it all played out.
Cabral and Sutcliffe spent seven months in Pittsburgh tracking the highly affable Saeed, an African-American Muslim, and his intended prey Khalifah, an American who was raised Protestant but converted to militant Islam. It is a common story in the press, but how “militant” these targets actually are is often up for debate. Just under an hour of the film is spent looking at Saeed’s life as an FBI informant and the cases he’s worked in the past, which some reviewers reckon drags but I found it quite the backstory. It includes the fact that that Saeed was a part of a major case from years earlier that hit the headlines, one in which a musician named Tarik Shah was eventually convicted of conspiring to provide material support for terrorism. He has been serving a sentence since 2007. We meet Shah’s mother, who speaks of her son’s friendship with Shariff, and gives us details about exactly how he was put away. It is both fascinating and alarming, and leads you to wonder the actual scale when it comes to the number of incarcerations that occurred in exactly that way.
Apart from anything else, I found(T)ERROR to be an interesting character study of a man with a fascinating story to tell. How often do you casually ask an acquaintance what the they do for a crust and get, “oh I’m an FBI informant...” as a reply? I mean SERIOUSLY. Shariff is an engaging, friendly and interesting guy who probably knows most of the people in his neighborhood and gets on well with everyone he meets. He’s also, if you believe him and his employers, on the frontlines of keeping us from the next 9/11.
But anyway. (T)ERROR has definitely exposed the fact that the FBI’s system of counterterrorism informants is inherently flawed, if not totally broken. When the FBI interferes in Saeed’s infiltration it really is a right royal cock up - they force him to introduce an agent to Khalifah, who immediately unmasks him just by Googling his mobile number. After months of getting to know Khalifah, Saeed’s cover is blown in one fell swoop.
The evidence presented makes it look like the FBI is entrapping American Muslims into crimes using highly paid informants, and that is definitely the issue that makes this one hell of an important topic for US and those of us around the world who give a damn. By the end of the movie we begin to look at both Saeed and Khalifah as victims, desperate men played against each other by a government themselves desperate to put on a show of making more arrests. And it is clear that they aren’t the only victims of this approach, given the number of people believed to have been falsely incarcerated over the years since 9/11.
As reviewer Brian Tallerico so eloquently puts it: “this is a film that feels depressingly essential to understanding that just because we haven’t been attacked, it doesn’t mean we’re winning the war”.