‘FBI Gets More Points for Killing Bad Guys Than Saving Good Ones’

Radio Sputnik spoke with Matt Schrier an American photojournalist who escaped captivity from Al Qaeda in Syria. The man revealed how he escaped from his captors and how the FBI stonewalled inquiries from his concerned parents about his whereabouts.

Sputnik: In 2012 you traveled to Syria as a freelance photographer, how were you captured by the terrorist organization and when was your capture noticed by US authorities?

Matt Schrier: In 2012, I was in Syria for the first time, to photograph refugees and returned a month later to photograph the combat inside Aleppo. I was there for about 18 days. On my way home, on New Year’s Eve, I was grabbed by the Al-Nusra Front and for the next seven months was held captive in six different prisons until I escaped.

What happened during the time of your captivity?

Matt Schrier: They took my personal information, everything from my social security number to my banking, passwords and they made hundreds of purchases online. A lot of those purchases were laptops and tablets. And the FBI was monitoring the whole thing. We know that this is not a theory that they were monitoring everything. They admitted to a governmental official over the phone before they even spoke to my family. They basically thought that I joined Al-Qaeda being that they were letting them steal my money.

You have to say well what’s the angle, why would the FBI let terrorists steal money? You look at what they were purchasing, laptops and tablets. It all makes sense, all the pieces fit. Obviously, they were intercepting these laptops and tablets, playing their little spy game and delivering them right in the hands of Al-Qaeda.

How many days you were in captivity?

Matt Schrier: 210

When were you declared missing?

My mother reported me missing on January 31.

Sputnik: Did they ask you to call your mother or your relatives or anybody to ask for, I don’t know, money or anything else?

Matt Schrier: No. Obviously they were going to one day to ask for something, but they never got around to it. I escaped too quickly. Because I know they made some ransom requests for terrorists I was in a room with after I got out. And I’m sure they’ve got millions of dollars from Qatar for handing them over so yeah, I mean, that was obviously the plan: it’s a large investment keeping somebody alive for an extended period of time. Nobody does it for no reason.

Why would Qatar pay for the American?

Why would they pay for the American hikers who were held in the captivity in Iran? Because the US government asked them to do it, because officially we don’t talk to them. So we find a third party to do so.

 When you were a missing person, did the FBI look for you? When did the FBI become involved in your case?

Matt Schrier: That’s the question. My mother reported me missing on January 31 and the State Department basically jerked my mother around for almost two months, without telling her to call the FBI and pretending they never called the FBI themselves. But anyone who has a common sense knows that the State Department calls the FBI when somebody is missing in Syria. And anyone who went on my website — my website I think had 33 pictures from Aleppo — so they knew where I was. But for some reason they were making my parents, you know, they were stringing my mother along for as long as possible at the State Department, while the FBI did all this. As you can see, this turned out to be very profitable for the FBI, so longer my family didn’t contact them, the better it was for them.

What are your main complaints against the FBI?

Matt Schrier: What they did is they conducted an illegal operation using me as bait. If they were doing what they did with the computers to help me, then I wouldn’t have a problem with it. But they weren’t doing that. They were doing the opposite. You know their whole point of view was: “we told you not to go over there, and you are not coming home anyway, so we might as well exploit the situation and make the best of it. And that, basically, was hanging me out to dry.

And so what was it that the FBI gained by exploiting you in your opinion?

Matt Schrier: They gained 19 laptops and tablets that they were able to deliver to the hands of Al-Qaeda and spy on them without knowing it. So they get the laptops, the IP addresses, they puts GPSs in them, who knows what else. I mean this is like arguably one of the best intelligence gathering opportunities they’ve ever had in post-9/11. It has been five years, no one has been arrested, some of these guys have moved back to Canada. None of them have been arrested.

One of them mailed two tablets to himself under his real name in Quebec. They do have foreign fighters over there. That is a large organization, Al-Qaeda, there are like 10,000 of them. Some of them are Canadians. Those are the ones that were brought in to interrogate me due to the language barrier. And due to the knowledge of how the West works. You know, the typical Syrian doesn’t know what a social security number is. Canadians do. So they brought them in to do all this and there were the ones who were most probably making purchases or the bulk of the purchases.

Have you filed a complaint to anybody regarding this?

Matt Schrier: I filed a complaint to everybody: to the FBI’s internal investigation section with evidence, to the Inspector General, to the FBI building in person. I did it to the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Department of Justice, I even filed a police report with my local police because I have the evidence that agent Perody was illegally hacking it into my PayPal account. I have taken every single route. I’ve gone to Fox News, during prime time saying I’ve got evidence I want to hand over to the Justice Department. They are trying to ignore this, hoping that the media covers it for a few days and it goes away. But it’s not going away. […] So, we have to realize that FBI gets more points for killing bad guys than saving good guys these days.