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missile that I showedyou.” Hussain pronounced the word missile as mee-zile , as if he were attempting a Russian accent. None of this seemed to register with Aref, who never looked up from counting the money. (Aref, whose English is poor, would later maintain he never heard the word mee-zile and that he didn’t realize the trigger mechanism was part of a weapon. 26 ) “So as soon as [the money] comes, I’ll give you—this is $5,000, so next couple of weeks, or less, I’ll get you more money,” Hussain continued.
    â€œ Insha’Allah ,” Hossain said. “It’s no problem, see, actually, I didn’t need all that. I just need to keep going, just so I can pay the bills.” 27 Hossain, as the line suggested, believed the money was for a personal loan, not for weapons.
    The FBI and Hussain stayed close to Hossain and Aref for the next several months, presumably in the hopes of documenting some type of criminal behavior. There were dozens of conversations during this time, and in some between Hussain and Hossain, the informant used a code word for the missile, chaudry . According to the government, this was evidence that Hossain knew about the missile, but from the transcripts, it isn’t clear whether Hossain knew the informant’s meaning of chaudry . Hossain also began to pay back Hussain with regular checks, as he had agreed, suggesting that the pizzeria owner truly believed their arrangement constituted a loan, not money laundering. In fact, on the memo line of one check, he wrote that it was for a loan repayment.
    Finally, after seven months without criminal activity by either Hossain or Aref, the FBI arrested the pair in August 2004, charging them with conspiring to aid a terrorist group, providing support for a weapon of mass destruction, money laundering, and supporting a foreign terrorist organization. They went to trial together in September and October 2006.Because Hossain and Aref had not encountered a real terrorist during the entire FBI operation—only an informant posing as an arms importer for terrorists—the prosecution needed to find a way to link Hossain’s and Aref’s recorded statements to terrorism. For that, the U.S. government turned to Evan Kohlmann, a then-twenty-seven-year-old self-described terrorism expert whom an FBI agent once dubbed “the Doogie Howser of terrorism.”
    A Florida native whose Manhattan apartment walls are covered with pictures of terrorists, Kohlmann is the government’s most prolific terrorism expert, having served as an expert witness in seventeen terrorism trials in the United States and in nine others abroad since 2002. With most of his knowledge gleaned from the Internet—the type of information the CIA describes as “open source intelligence”—Kohlmann has testified to juries about the history of Islamic terrorism, how terrorist organizations finance themselves, and how they spread propaganda and recruit others for terrorist acts. Since 9/11, Kohlmann has made a living testifying for the prosecution in terrorism trials as well as appearing on cable news as a terrorism expert. Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, described Kohlmann to New York magazine as having been “grown hydroponically in the basement of the Bush Justice Department.” 28 Several defense lawyers, including those in the cases of “dirty bomber” Jośe Padilla and the so-called Virginia jihad group, have tried to have Kohlmann disqualified as an expert witness, arguing that his only qualifications as a terrorism expert are self-fashioned. 29 However, because few experts with university credentials and social science backgrounds are willing to testify about terrorism, the Justice Department has had little trouble persuading judges to allowKohlmann to take the stand, where, as one of his critics put it, he spews “junk science” by suggesting that