It's supposed to be bad, right? We hear all this stuff about out-of-control terrorist states whose governments sponsor terrorism?
Yeah, well, so does ours.
The difference? Those other nations' governments mostly sponsor terrorism in other countries.
Ours? Ours sponsors terrorism right here at home. Stephan Salisbury writes in Salon about several of the high-profile terrorism cases in recent years that actually turn out to have been incited, funded, planned, supplied, and managed from end to end not by Al-Qaeda or some shadowy global terror organization, but by the FBI. As Bruce Schneier observed in his Portrait of the Modern Terrorist as an Idiot,
The JFK Airport plotters seem to have been egged on by an informant, a twice-convicted drug dealer. An FBI informant almost certainly pushed the Fort Dix plotters to do things they wouldn't have ordinarily done. The Miami gang's Sears Tower plot was suggested by an FBI undercover agent who infiltrated the group. And in 2003, it took an elaborate sting operation involving three countries to arrest an arms dealer for selling a surface-to-air missile to an ostensible Muslim extremist. Entrapment is a very real possibility in all of these cases.
Salisbury expands upon this:
The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four -- each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds -- provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones -- provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition -- issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions -- leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.
Keep that observation in mind. There'll be a quiz later.
The FBI paid over $130,000 to informants — or, perhaps better, agents-provocateur — to set up the Liberty City case, and it still took the government three trials to get a conviction of five of the seven on at least some of the charges. (Two were acquitted altogether.) In the Fort Dix "conspiracy", videos submitted as evidence by the prosecution had, according to defendants, been demanded by the FBI agent-provocateur. In the Philadelphia case, one of the "conspirators" actually tried to rat out the FBI's agent-provocateur, not knowing that he was working for the FBI:
Another defendant actually called the Philadelphia police, mid-plot, and said he was being pressured to commit radical acts by what turned out to be an FBI informer. Prosecutors dismissed this as an obvious decoy maneuver. The key informer in that case -- the FBI eventually paid two people to spy on the group -- an Egyptian on probation, received $236,000 for his services.
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain"?
That's not the only such case:
After their May 2009 arrests, the four Newburgh conspirators were portrayed as Jew-hating Muslim converts who intended to blow up synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes based at Stewart Airport in Newburgh. "It's hard to envision a more chilling plot," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Snyder at the time, describing the defendants as "extremely violent."
[...]
[...] A decade earlier, Cromitie had been arrested for dealing drugs behind a school. Payen, a Haitian immigrant, is a crack addict and certified paranoid schizophrenic, often found living on the street; his earlier deportation had been on hold due to his mental instability. Onta and David Williams, not related, had pasts pocked by drug busts and spotty work at minimum wage jobs scrounged from Newburgh's depressed economy. All four men were black.
Almost immediately, however, questions about the conspiracy began to arise. For one thing, the FBI informer who broke the case was a Pakistani named Shaheed Hussain, who arrived in Newburgh in the summer of 2008 driving a flashy Mercedes, showing lots of money, and promising jobs to down-and-out African American hangers-on at Masjid al-Ikhlas, Newburgh's main mosque. Convicted in a fraudulent driver's license scheme in 2002, he agreed to work undercover for the FBI shortly afterward to avoid deportation and turned out to have been an informer in a previous terrorism case in Albany in 2004.
The Albany case, in which an imam and a pizza shop owner were convicted of money laundering as part of a phantasmagorical scheme to kill a Pakistani diplomat with a missile, was bitterly contested by defense attorneys. They claimed that the elaborate plan had been concocted by Hussain himself. The jury didn't buy it, convicting both imam and pizza shop owner.
Are we starting to see a pattern here? This sounds to me an awful lot as though the FBI is being played by foreign agents-provocateur who have figured out that the FBI will pay THEM, again and again, to incite "terrorist" incidents within the US.
And then there's the Ummah Conspiracy:
[...] A 43-page criminal complaint describes Abdullah as "a highly placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group consisting primarily of African Americans" whose "primary mission is to establish a separate, sovereign Islamic state ('The Ummah') within the borders of the United States, governed by Shariah law."
[...]
But in its efforts to be all-inclusive, the complaint also features an extraordinary section that describes an FBI informant offering Abdullah $5,000 "to pay to have someone ‘do something' during the 2006 Super Bowl in Detroit." The imam rejected the offer. "Abdullah said he would not be involved in injuring innocent people for no reason," the complaint blandly states. So much for entrapment on the political front.
Despite page after page of braggadocio from Abdullah, following the rebuff over Super Bowl violence, no further effort was apparently mounted to entice him into a terrorist "plot." The complaint outlines no grounds for charges of treason, none for terrorism, and nothing even for a charge of material support for terrorism (that reliable catch-all used to ensnare dozens of American Muslims and institutions and even human-rights groups). Despite the heavy emphasis on descriptions of violent radicalism, the criminal complaint ultimately accuses Abdullah and several congregants of the pettiest of fencing operations -- 54 powertools, 46 TVs, and the like -- involving small amounts of money ($100, $200, $500).
So the great high-profile terrorist of the Ummah Conspiracy turns out to have been a petty thief and fence whom the FBI failed so badly to incite to anything resembling an actual act of terrorism that they couldn't actually come up with sufficient grounds to charge him with anything terrorism-related, even in the current political climate. (Even at that, the FBI apparently had to provide both the warehouse and the stolen goods, as well as money to fund the whole criminal mastermind scheme. ...Er, that is, the petty theft ring. And any petty theft ring that can't even keep itself going without external funding isn't any real threat to anyone.)
Maybe that's why, instead of actually taking him into custody in the Great Warehouse Raid, FBI agents shot him in the back; and maybe that in turn is why the FBI classified all the documents afterwards. For whatever reason, the FBI had decided they wanted Abdullah, and by hook or by crook, they were going to get him no matter what it took, even if they had to duct-tape "evidence" to him to make it stick.
So the key question that has to be asked is, "Why does the FBI appear to be expending so much effort and money to fabricate incidents of domestic terrorism, when that effort could be going to investigating real terrorism? And perhaps the answer is quite simple: Maybe the FBI feels it needs high-profile successes to bolster its reputation, and it's much easier to foil a "terrorist" plot when you already know in advance who the suspects are and the details of the plot, because you set the whole thing up yourself.
But this is a bit like burning your own house down for the insurance, or — perhaps closer to the mark — one of those cases of mall security guards who fake robberies or attacks in order to get their pictures in the paper for "heroically" thwarting them.
Crying wolf is bad enough. Running around the edge of the village at dusk in a wolf costume is worse. But what's saddest of all is when half the time, it appears you've been duped into the whole charade by a sheep thief from the next village, who's laughing all the way home with a lamb under each arm while you run around the village in an ill-fitting wolf costume.
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