Now you're at the level of the evil terrorist masterminds out to blow up our skyscrapers.
Well,
not really. They're actually almost entirely bumbling morons who
couldn't tie their own shoes or buy the laces without FBI instigation
and support. The FBI plants the ideas, makes the plans, provides the
fake weapons and money, creates the attempted act of terrorism, makes an
arrest, and announces the salvation of the nation.
Over and
over again. The procedure has become so regular that intended marks
have spotted the sting being worked on them simply by googling the name
or phone number of the bozo pretending to recruit them into the
terrorist brotherhood, and discovering that he's a serial informant.
Between
911 and August, 2011, the U.S. government prosecuted 508 people for
terrorism in the United States. 243 had been targeted using an FBI
informant. 158 had been caught in an FBI terrorism sting. 49 (that we
know of, FBI recording devices have completely unbelievable patterns of
"malfunctioning") had encountered an agent provocateur. Most of the
rest charged with "terrorism" had little or nothing to do with terrorism
at all, most of them charged with more minor offenses like immigration
offenses or making false statements. Three or four people out of the
whole list appear to be men whom one would reasonably call terrorists in
the commonly accepted sense of the word. They intended to and had
something at least approaching the capacity to engage in acts of
terrorism.
These figures are not far off the percentages of
Guantanamo prisoners or drone strike victims believed to be guilty of
anything resembling what they've been accused of. So, we shouldn't
single out the FBI for criticism. But it should receive its share.
Here's how U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon understood a case that seems all too typical:
"The essence of what occurred here is that a government,
understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism, came upon
a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing
an act of terrorism on his own. It created acts of terrorism out of
his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come
true. . . . I suspect that real terrorists would not have bothered
themselves with a person who was so utterly inept."
When we hear
on television that the FBI has prevented a plot to blow up a crowded
area of a big U.S. city, we either grow terrified and grateful, or we
wait for the inevitable revelation that the FBI created the plot from
start to finish, manipulating some poor fool who had zero contact with
foreign terrorists and more often than not participated unwittingly or
for the money offered him. But even those of us who do the latter might
find Aaronson's survey of this phenomenon stunning.
During some
of its heretofore darkest days the FBI didn't use informants like it
does now. J. Edgar Hoover's informants just observed and reported.
They didn't instigate. That practice took off during the war on drugs
in the 1980s. But the assumption that a drug dealer might have done the
same thing without the FBI's sting operation is backed up by some
statistics. There is no evidence to back up the idea that the
unemployed grocery bagger and video game player who sees visions, has
never heard of major Islamic terrorist groups, can't purchase a gun with
thousands of dollars in cash and instructions on how to purchase a gun,
understands terrorism entirely from the insights of Hollywood movies,
and who has no relevant skills or resources, is going to blow up a
building without help from the FBI.
(Which came first, the FBI's terror factory or Hollywood's is a moot question now that they feed off each other so well.)
Read
this book, I'm telling you, we're looking at people who've been locked
away for decades who couldn't have found their ass with two hands and a
map. These cases more than anything else resemble those of mentally
challenged innocent men sitting on death rows because they tried to
please the police officer asking them to confess to a crime they clearly
knew nothing about.
Of course the press conferences announcing
the convictions of drug dealers and "terrorists" are equally successful.
They also equally announce an ongoing campaign doomed to failure. The
campaign for "terrorists" developed under President George W. Bush and
expanded, like so much else, under President Barack Obama.
Aaronson
spoke with J. Stephen Tidwell, former executive assistant director at
the FBI. Tidwell argued that someone thinking about the general idea of
committing crimes should be set up and then prosecuted, because as long
as they're not in prison the possibility exists that someone other than
the FBI could encourage them to, and assist them in, actually
committing a crime. "You and I could sit here, go online, and by
tonight have a decent bomb built. What do you do? Wait for him to
figure it out himself?"
The answer, based on extensive data, is
quite clearly that he will not figure it out himself and act on it.
That the FBI has stopped 3 acts of terrorism is believable. But that
the FBI has stopped 508 and there wasn't a 509th is just not possible.
The explanation is that there haven't been 509 or even 243. The FBI has
manufactured terrorist plots by the dozens, including most of the best
known ones. (And if you watched John Brennan's confirmation hearing,
you know that the underwear bomber and other "attacks" not under the
FBI's jurisdiction have been no more real.)
Arthur Cummings,
former executive assistant director of the FBI's National Security
Branch, told Aaronson that the enemy was not Al Qaeda or Islamic
Terrorism, but the idea of it. "We're at war with an idea," he said.
But his strategy seems to be one of consciously attempting to lose
hearts and minds. For the money spent on infiltrations and stings, the
U.S. government could have given every targeted community free education
from preschool to college, just as it could do for every community at
home and many abroad by redirecting war spending. When you're making
enemies of people rather than friends, to say that you're working
against an idea is simply to admit that you're not targeting people
based on a judicial review finding any probable cause to legally do so.
The
drug war's failure can be calculated in the presence of drugs, although
the profits for prisons and other profiteers aren't universally seen as
failures. The FBI's counterterrorism can be calculated as a failure
largely because of the waste of billions of dollars on nonexistent
terrorism. But there's also the fact that the FBI's widespread use of
informants, very disproportionately in Muslim communities, has made
ordinary people who might provide tips hesitant to do so for fear of
being recruited as informants. Thus "counter terrorism" may make it
harder to counter terrorism. It may also feed into real terrorism by
further enraging people already outraged by U.S. foreign policy. But
it's no failure at all if measured by the dollars flowing into the FBI,
or the dollars flowing into the pockets of informants who get paid by
commission (that is, based on convictions in court of their marks). Nor
do weapons makers, other war profiteers, or other backers of right wing
politics in general seem to be objecting in any way to the production
of widespread fear and bigotry.
Congressman Stephen Lynch has
introduced a bill that would require federal law enforcement agencies to
report to Congress twice a year on all serious crimes, authorized or
unauthorized, committed by informants (who are often much more dangerous
criminals than are those they're informing on). The bill picked up a
grand total of zero cosponsors last Congress and has reached the same
mark thus far in the current one.
The corporate media cartel has
seen its ratings soar with each new phony incident. Opposition to
current practice does not seem to be coming from that quarter.
And
let's all be clear with each other: our society is tolerating this
because the victims are Muslims. With many other minority groups we
would all be leaping to their defense.
It may be time to try thinking of Muslims as Samaritans, as of course some of them are.
***
David Swanson's books include "War Is A Lie." He blogs at
davidswanson.org and warisacrime.org and works for the online activist
organization rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.alternet.org/world/top-us-terrorist-group-fbi?paging=off
|
(February 23, 2013) A careful study of the FBI's own data on terrorism
in the United States, reported in Trevor Aaronson's book The Terror
Factory, finds one organization leading all others in creating terrorist
plots in the United States: the FBI.
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