Tarik Shah

Although both Alanssi and Shelby were active as informants and overlapped in Shah’s case over a four-year period from 2001 to 2005, neither could get Shah to commit any crime. Finally in 2005, Shah was arrested by the FBI on two charges of conspiracy to provide material support to a known foreign terrorist organization after Ali Soufan (founder of the multi-million-dollar Soufan Group, an international security firm), who at the time was the undercover FBI agent posing as an Al-Qaeda recruiter, urged Shah to agree to provide knife-fighting training to Al-Qaeda members, and urged Sabir to agree to provide medical aid to them. Soufan was brought in as the “closer” so the FBI could finally bring a concrete charge against Shah. Violation of Title VIII of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act was the basis of the charge, since specific “training” is included under its definition of “material support or resources,” and this was the reason Soufan’s request to Shah was so specific.

Theodore Shelby (aka Saeed “Shariff” Torres) is the main subject of (T)ERROR , and he speaks about the Tarik Shah case and how he betrayed his friend and teacher. The background of the case is also documented. The film’s emotional climax comes when Torres is browsing Facebook while he awaits a reply on his friend request to Akili [Khalifah Al-Akili, the current target].

Shah, the non-violent, self-defense martial arts expert, served his sentence in the medium- and then low-security Federal Correctional Institution at Petersburg, Virginia, and was released in March 2018 to a federal halfway house in Albany, New York. In June 2018 he was freed, with three years’ supervised release.

(T)ERROR premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize for Break Out First Feature. It was nominated for the International Documentary Association ABC News VideoSource Award, and co-directors Cabral and Sutcliffe received the Emerging Documentary Filmmakers Award. (T)ERROR was named by Newsweek as one of the best documentaries of 2015; it aired on PBS in 2016, and won an Emmy award in 2017 for Outstanding Investigative Documentary. It is available on Netflix.

Realizing that he could not get a fair trial and would be found guilty by association, Shah pleaded guilty in April 2007 to one count of conspiracy to provide aid to a known foreign terrorist organization, even though no actual terrorist contact ever took place, since the “plot” was created solely by the provocateurs, not Shah. His maximum sentence was fifteen years for that single charge. It is not unusual for a terrorism suspect to plead guilty to the charges against him/her, especially if (s)he is placed in solitary confinement pre-trial; such isolated prisoners want nothing more than to end the solitary, and will plead out to end it. Isolation can also destroy the prisoner’s ability to work with his lawyers, as well as his ability to testify on his own behalf at trial. Under the Geneva Conventions, it is illegal to hold a prisoner in solitary confinement for more than 30 days.

Shah was then held for 31 months in solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York from 2005 until 2007.

Shah was set up by the FBI in a sting operation that began in 2001. He pleaded guilty in 2007 to one count of conspiring to provide aid to a known foreign terrorist organization, namely al-Qaeda. However, the plea was undertaken to spare him and his family a trial and sentence of 30 years after he had been in solitary confinement for 31 months and had been pursued by two separate paid FBI informants in the post-9/11 hysteria. Shah was released from prison after 13 years in March 2018. Project SALAM describes his case as an example of preemptive prosecution.

At that time, Shah was making child support payments but had arrears. In 2000, his passport was suspended due to the amount of arrears, thus making him unable to perform in Europe and receive that income. By 2004 he still had some arrears, which were used to constantly threaten his freedom; he would literally be called to Family Court every three months with a demand to pay $2,000 over and above the regular payments, or be threatened with jail. By 2005 he desperately needed the promised cash. It is significant that the sting appealed to Shah’s expertise as a martial arts practitioner, which through teaching was the only other way he could hope to earn a living. Like many other stings, the government fastened on an otherwise innocent activity and said it was evidence of terrorist activity. But any such terrorist-related activity was suggested and facilitated only by the FBI provocateurs and agents, not Shah. The New York Times wrote that “[t]he government has acknowledged that neither Mr. Shah, nor the three others accused in the case…were on the verge of any violent act.”

Shah began learning to play double bass at age twelve and went on to study with Slam Stewart. In 1984, Shah toured across Europe with Betty Carter and worked with Ahmad Jamal, Abbey Lincoln, and Rahn Burton after his return. He later played with the Duke Ellington Orchestra alongside Red Rodney, Sir Roland Hanna, Harold Vick, and Dr. Lonnie Smith. Shah also worked with Vanessa Rubin, the World Saxophone Quartet, and Hamiet Bluiett. In 1992, he was invited to play with the Duke Ellington Orchestra for the inaugural ball of President Bill Clinton. Shah’s older brother, Antoine Dowdell, also musically gifted, worked as a music teacher and jazz pianist.

Tarik Shah (born January 24, 1963) is an American modern jazz double bassist and martial arts expert. His father, Edward Jenkins Jr., nicknamed Dyson, was known as Lieutenant Edward 15X in Malcolm X’s Temple No. 7 (now the Masjid Malcolm Shabazz) in Harlem, which had been a Nation of Islam mosque until the death of its founder, Elijah Muhammad, in 1975. Shah and his youngest sister were named by Malcolm X and raised as Sunni Muslims in Temple No. 7––perhaps one of the reasons Shah was later targeted by the FBI.