{"id":16708,"date":"2013-03-21T06:28:52","date_gmt":"2013-03-21T13:28:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=16708"},"modified":"2013-03-21T06:28:52","modified_gmt":"2013-03-21T13:28:52","slug":"fbi-manufactures-terrorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=16708","title":{"rendered":"FBI Manufactures Terrorists"},"content":{"rendered":"

FBI\u2019s penchant for “manufacturing terrorists” probed in new book<\/strong>
\nCharlotte Silver – The Electronic Intifada – 20 March, 2013<\/p>\n

Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations since one week before the 11 September 2001 attacks, recently wrote a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee bemoaning the \u201cacross-the-board cuts\u201d imposed on the agency while outlining the areas of law enforcement that will suffer as a result. Among the areas in which the FBI and Department of Justice would be forced to downsize their activities would be the financial sector. \u201cLeft unchecked, fraud and malfeasance in the financial, securities and related industries could hurt the integrity of US markets,\u201d Mueller warned.<\/p>\n

In light of the reality of US economic woes, Mueller\u2019s admonition is disingenuous, if not downright pernicious. In fact, the FBI\u2019s 12-year absence from monitoring financial fraud saw the nation\u2019s biggest economic meltdown \u2014 itself a direct result of the financial sector running roughshod over what few regulations remained. And now, more than four years after that manmade collapse, the Department of Justice has yet to investigate, let alone prosecute, the criminals responsible for the devastation.<\/p>\n

What the FBI was doing before, during and after the financial crisis is the subject under examination in Trevor Aaronson\u2019s new book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI\u2019s Manufactured War on Terrorism.<\/p>\n

The book unveils the FBI\u2019s domestic counterterrorism program that began after the 11 September attacks and has continued well into Barack Obama\u2019s second term in office. The program, vividly portrayed by Aaronson, is defined by a wanton use of informants and sting operations in order to produce a high rate of convictions \u2014 thus ensuring that Congress continues to write out checks to the FBI\u2019s counterterrorism program to the tune of $3 billion annually.<\/p>\n

Since the 11 September attacks, the FBI has employed more than 15,000 confidential informants nationwide. And, according to Aaronson, for each official informant there are as many as three unofficial informants \u2014 known within the FBI as \u201chip pockets.\u201d By 2011, the Justice Department had prosecuted more than 500 individuals on terrorist charges, a handful of whom Aaronson categorizes as \u201cactual terrorists.\u201d The rest were hatched within the context of FBI sting operations, informants and agents provocateur.<\/p>\n

Until 2009, the specifics of the Department of Justice\u2019s terrorist cases were classified. But when Attorney General Eric Holder decided to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a Manhattan courtroom, he was called upon to prove how capable US courts were of convicting terrorists. In order to do so Holder made public the document containing the track record of the DOJ\u2019s prosecution of terrorists. With that information divulged, Aaronson \u2014 already watching \u201cterrorist\u201d convictions with a fair amount of skepticism \u2014 grabbed the opportunity to investigate who these alleged terrorists really were.
\nSordid practice<\/p>\n

What Aaronson discovered was that, far from preventing terrorism, the FBI uses its funds to \u201cmanufacture\u201d terrorists out of marginalized, desperate, mentally ill or immature men (many of the convicted individuals profiled are in their early twenties). In Aaronson\u2019s words, \u201cThe FBI has been effective at creating the very enemy it is hunting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taking his readers through several FBI sting operations, Aaronson reveals a sordid practice in which the FBI often employs criminals to infiltrate Muslim communities to turn otherwise powerless malcontents into \u201cterrorists.\u201d According to Aaronson\u2019s accounts, these so-called terrorists would have no more than the capability to mouth off in a chat room if it weren\u2019t for the inert weapons and cash that informants would literally place in their hapless hands, thus creating \u201cbogeymen from buffoons.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Terror Factory adroitly covers the context in which the informant program emerged, including interviews with several current and former members of the FBI. Aaronson portrays a feeble pre-11 September FBI, comprised of Luddite lawyers and technocrats whose negligence appears in no small part responsible for the 2001 attacks, transformed by an influx of cash and a new set of instructions.
\nCoercion<\/p>\n

In addition to providing intimate and harrowing portraits of individuals framed as terrorists by the FBI, Aaronson also elucidates precisely how the agency similarly creates informants. Whether by leveraging an individual\u2019s criminal history, exploiting a precarious immigration status or manipulating the expansive no-fly list, the FBI frightens and coerces vulnerable people into acting as spies for the agency.<\/p>\n

Aaronson confines his critique of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d to the FBI\u2019s use of informants and sting operations. The narrow parameters of his book allow Aaronson to effectively drive home the important point that the proliferation of informants among Muslim-Americans has not only fragmented communities and devastated lives, but is entirely ineffectual at preventing terrorism.<\/p>\n

However, this limited scope proves perilous when Aaronson attempts to navigate around the distinction he makes between a \u201creal terrorist\u201d and a manufactured one, hampering his ability to fully critique the FBI\u2019s counterterrorism program and the war on terror. This problematic tension is felt at various points throughout the book, but is starkly revealed when Aaronson describes the list Holder declassified in 2009: \u201cWhile the list did include one dangerous terrorist, Najibullah Zazi, as well as people who were raising money for or sending money to terrorist groups such as Hamas, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, others who made the list were terrorists only because the Justice Department had labeled them as such.\u201d …more<\/a><\/p>\n

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FBI\u2019s penchant for “manufacturing terrorists” probed in new book Charlotte Silver – The Electronic Intifada – 20 March, 2013 Robert Mueller, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations since one week before the 11 September 2001 attacks, recently wrote a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee bemoaning the \u201cacross-the-board cuts\u201d imposed on the agency while more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[2658],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16708"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16708"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16708\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16710,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16708\/revisions\/16710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}