Manufacturing Terrorists
How FBI sting operations make jihadists out of hapless malcontents
By Michael German
March 16, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"Reason" - Imagine a country in which the government pays convicted con artists and criminals to scour minority religious communities for disgruntled, financially desperate, or mentally ill patsies who can be talked into joining fake terrorist plots, even if only for money. Imagine that the country’s government then busts its patsies with great fanfare to justify ever-increasing authority and ever-increasing funding. According to journalist Trevor Aaronson’s The Terror Factory, this isn’t the premise for a Kafka novel; it’s reality in the post-9/11 United States.
How FBI sting operations make jihadists out of hapless malcontents
By Michael German
March 16, 2013 "Information Clearing House" -"Reason" - Imagine a country in which the government pays convicted con artists and criminals to scour minority religious communities for disgruntled, financially desperate, or mentally ill patsies who can be talked into joining fake terrorist plots, even if only for money. Imagine that the country’s government then busts its patsies with great fanfare to justify ever-increasing authority and ever-increasing funding. According to journalist Trevor Aaronson’s The Terror Factory, this isn’t the premise for a Kafka novel; it’s reality in the post-9/11 United States.
The Terror Factory is
a well-researched and fast-paced exposé of the dubious
tactics the FBI has used in targeting Muslim Americans
with sting operations since 2001. The book updates and
expands upon Aaronson’s award-winning 2011 Mother
Jones cover story “The Informants.” Most readers
likely have heard about several alleged conspiracies to
attack skyscrapers, synagogues, or subway stations,
involving either individuals whom the FBI calls “lone
wolves” or small cells that a credulous press has tagged
with such sinister appellations as the Newburgh 4 or the
Liberty City 7. But they may be astonished to learn that
many of these frightening plots were almost entirely
concocted and engineered by the FBI itself, using
corrupt agents provocateurs who often posed a far more
serious criminal threat than the dimwitted saps the
investigations ultimately netted.
Drawing on court records and interviews with the
defendants, their lawyers, their families, and the FBI
officials and prosecutors who oversaw the
investigations, Aaronson portrays an agency that has
adopted an “any means necessary” approach to its
terrorism prevention efforts, regardless of whether real
terrorists are being caught. To the FBI, this imperative
justifies recruiting informants with extensive criminal
records, including convictions for fraud, violent
crimes, and even child molestation, that in an earlier
era would have disqualified them except in the most
extraordinary circumstances.
In
addition to offering lenience, if not forgiveness, for
heinous crimes, the FBI pays these informants tens to
hundreds of thousands of dollars, creating a perverse
incentive for them to ensnare dupes into terrorist
plots. Aaronson quotes an FBI official defending this
practice: “To catch the devil you have to go to hell.”
Such an analysis might make sense when police leverage
one criminal to gain information about more-serious
criminal conspiracies—in other words, to catch a real
“devil.” But Aaronson’s research reveals that the
targets in most of these sting operations posed little
real threat. They may have had a history of angry
anti-government rhetoric, but they took no steps toward
terrorist acts until they received encouragement and
resources from government agents.
Aaronson describes the case of an unemployed and
practically homeless 22-year-old named Derrick Shareef,
befriended by an FBI informant with an armed robbery
conviction who gave him a place to live. When Shareef
couldn’t (or wouldn’t) raise the money to buy weapons
needed for a plot suggested by the informant, he was
introduced to a faux weapons dealer who was willing to
trade four hand grenades and a pistol for Shareef’s used
stereo speakers. The fact that Shareef believed a real
weapons dealer would accept such a barter provides a
clue as to his criminal experience.
Aaronson correctly takes pains to avoid portraying those
caught in the stings as completely innocent of malice.
But he demonstrates that they almost universally lack
violent criminal histories or connections to real
terrorist groups. Most important, while they may have
talked about committing violent acts, they rarely had
weapons of their own and, like Shareef, usually lacked
the financial means to acquire them. Yet the government
provided them with military hardware worth thousands of
dollars that would be extremely difficult for even
sophisticated criminal organizations to obtain, only to
bust them in a staged finale.
This aspect of Aaronson’s narrative is most troubling to
me, as a former FBI agent who worked undercover in
domestic terrorism investigations before 9/11. Prior to
September 11, 2001, if an agent had suggested opening a
terrorism case against someone who was not a member of a
terrorist group, who had not attempted to acquire
weapons, and who didn’t have the means to obtain them,
he would have been gently encouraged to look for a more
serious threat. An agent who suggested giving such a
person a stinger missile or a car full of military-grade
plastic explosives would have been sent to counseling.
Yet in Aaronson’s telling, such techniques are now
becoming commonplace.
My
concern is partly that the artificially inflated scale
of the threat in these cases seems designed to overwhelm
judges, jurors, and the general public, who might
otherwise view such methods as illegal entrapment. The
FBI often announces these arrests with great fanfare,
highlighting the scope of the damage that could have
been caused by weapons provided entirely by the
government. Such pretrial publicity creates a climate of
fear that is likely to influence judges and jurors.
Indeed, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon severely
criticized the investigation that led to the 2009 arrest
of James Cromitie, a small-time ex-con from Newburgh,
New York, whose apparent reluctance to join a fake
missile plot was overcome when an informant offered him
$250,000 to participate. At his sentencing, Judge
McMahon observed that “only the government could have
made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery
is positively Shakespearean in scope.” Yet McMahon let
the jury’s conviction stand and sentenced Cromitie to 25
years in prison. Of 150 defendants charged in these
schemes, Aaronson documents only two acquittals.
The exaggerated significance of these manufactured
terrorist plots also raises the possible penalties for
those charged, due to “terrorism enhancement” sentencing
provisions. The majority of defendants plead guilty to
mitigate draconian penalties, raising an additional
question of whether the purpose of this government
tactic is to avoid judicial and public scrutiny
altogether. Law enforcement has no business staging
theatrical productions that intentionally exaggerate the
seriousness of a defendant’s criminal conduct.
Even more unsettling is the flawed reasoning that drives
the use of these methods. FBI agents have been inundated
with bigoted training materials that falsely portray
Arabs and Muslims as inherently violent. The FBI also
has embraced an unfounded theory of “radicalization”
that alleges a direct progression from adopting certain
beliefs, or expressing opposition to U.S. policies, to
becoming a terrorist. With such a skewed and biased view
of the American Muslim community, the FBI’s strategy of
“preemption, prevention, and disruption” results in
abusive surveillance, targeting, and exploitation of
innocent people based simply on their exercise of their
First Amendment rights.
Aaronson fails, however, to recognize that these tactics
are neither new to the FBI nor exclusively used against
Muslims. The FBI’s earliest documented use of agents
provocateurs with criminal backgrounds was revealed
during congressional investigations of labor “radicals,”
pacifists, and socialists in 1918. The bureau’s
investigations of radicals led to nationwide warrantless
raids, resulting in thousands of arrests and hundreds of
deportations, yet solved no terrorist bombings and
discovered less than a handful of firearms. Although
reforms were implemented, decades later the Church
Committee’s inquiries revealed that covert operations
conducted as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO investigations
had targeted civil rights and anti-war groups because of
their First Amendment–protected activities from the
1950s through the 1970s.
Recalling this history is important because in both
cases, reform of these improper practices was
implemented by restricting FBI intelligence activities
and requiring a reasonable suspicion of criminal
activity before initiating investigations. These
restrictions have once again been relaxed, and the rapid
increase in sting operations under the Obama
administration that Aaronson documents is directly
attributable to amendments made to the FBI’s guidelines
in 2008, authorizing the use of informants without
requiring any factual predicate of wrongdoing. The FBI
also has used these dubious tactics against aged
anti-government militiamen and misfit anarchists, so
Muslims are not the only targets in its crosshairs.
Without reforms to FBI guidelines, anyone holding
unorthodox views or challenging government policies
could find himself targeted by overzealous federal
agents using unscrupulous informants. The FBI should be
investigating violent crime, not inventing it.
The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on
Terrorism, by Trevor Aaronson, Ig Publishing, 256
pages, $24.95
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