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Those, the prosecution may well suggest, would be 30 years of indoctrination, during which a shy, impressionable four-year-old might plausibly turn into a 34-year-old fanatic. But "might" is a key word, and the skeptics are many.
Their doubts quickly settled on the government's informant. According to lawyers close to the defense, he is none other than Qubilah's school friend Michael Fitzpatrick, whose life since those days has followed a singular course. In 1977 the 17-year-old was arrested in the bombing of a Soviet bookstore. Subsequently, according to court documents, he turned government informer and betrayed co-conspirators in a second attempted bombing: the Associated Press quoted a former acquaintance as calling him "a setup artist." The government sent him to Minneapolis as part of the witness- protection program and assigned him a new name, under which he was arrested in a cocaine bust. His hearing, as it happens, was scheduled, then postponed, the day before Shabazz's murder-conspiracy arraignment. Shabazz's lawyer, Scott Tilsen, has hinted that Fitzpatrick entrapped her in order to re- establish credit with his understandably disenchanted federal patrons. "She was an easy target," says Tilsen. "If your mother and father had been murdered, and somebody came to you and enticed -- cajoled -- you into discussing what happened, you'd listen, and it could be made to appear that you were in a conspiracy."
Betty Shabazz, who was in Atlanta last weekend to help celebrate Martin ! Luther King Day, said, "It is unfortunate that anyone would do that to a young woman, and it says how quick they are and how they will do anything to get their political ends." James Turner, a Shabazz family friend and national chairman of the Malcolm X Commemoration Commission, confides that Shabazz is "outraged" at the charges against her daughter. Another friend adds that she is concerned about possible retaliation by Farrakhan. But Farrakhan seems otherwise inclined. A spokesperson for the Minister said on Thursday that "his heart goes out to the Shabazz family"; another added that "it would be easy for conspirators to entrap this troubled young woman."
Both parties' comments reflect dire suspicions based in sad history. For decades black radicals -- and especially the Nation -- have appeared prone to paranoia; but events have recurrently proved their fears founded. The FBI's claims about Qubilah Shabazz prompt Turner to recall the '60s and '70s, when "there was a well-orchestrated, high-priority program operating from the FBI to destabilize black organizations that were involved in the civil-rights movement and African-American liberation struggle. This was to be done by planting agent provocateurs, providing false documents and sending bogus letters to the heads of various organizations that would sow the seeds of conflict . . . in order to effectively destabilize them."
Still, it is hard to imagine what good reason the government might have to frame a young woman with no national reputation as an activist, and whether or not she was entrapped into it, no public figure has yet suggested that she did not undertake to commit a horrible crime. In jail or free, her wounds, reopened, will be slow to heal.