Monday, March 02, 2015

FBI Disrupts One Of Its Own Terrorist Plots (Again)

Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept:
The FBI and major media outlets yesterday [Feb. 25] trumpeted the agency's latest counterterrorism triumph: the arrest of three Brooklyn men, ages 19 to 30, on charges of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS. As my colleague Murtaza Hussain ably documents, "it appears that none of the three men was in any condition to travel or support the Islamic State, without help from the FBI informant." ...

For reasons I and many others have repeatedly argued, these cases are unjust in the extreme: a form of pre-emptory prosecution where vulnerable individuals are targeted and manipulated not for any criminal acts they have committed but rather for the bad political views they have expressed. They end up sending young people to prison for decades for "crimes" which even their sentencing judges acknowledge they never would have seriously considered, let alone committed, in the absence of FBI trickery.
Greenwald quotes former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes, who candidly revealed the FBI's terrorism strategy: "Keep fear alive."

Trevor Aaronson's The Terror Factory: Inside The FBI's Manufactured War On Terror is must-reading on this subject

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