Monday, February 25, 2013

Manufactured terror

A short while ago, I caught a bit of a "Book TV" segment on Trever Aaronson's new work "The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism." For quite a while, some of us have suspected that the "terror" cells brought to justice by our federal agents hardly posed the danger that the newspaper headlines suggested. Aaronson has proven the point. He methodically went through the files and found the damning data: Terror cases owe everything to the work of infiltrators and informers who often play the classic "agent provocateur" role.
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.
Mother Jones has published a story derived from Aaronson's book. One section of his piece impacts my suspicion that Anwar al-Alaki may himself have been Uncle's "inside man" within Al Qaeda:
Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born, high-ranking Al Qaeda official who was killed in a US drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011, became something of the terrorist group's Dear Abby. Have a question about Islam? Ask Anwar! Muslim men in nations throughout the Western world would email him questions, and Awlaki would reply dutifully, and in English, encouraging many of his electronic pen pals to violent action. Awlaki also kept a blog and a Facebook page, and regularly posted recruitment videos to YouTube.
Maybe I'm wrong about Awlaki. Still, a Murdoch paper once came that close to identifying him as an American agent, and the Yemeni government never confirmed his death-by-droning. If Awlaki was not "ours," then can you explain why YouTube takes down lots of terror-advocating videos while keeping the cinematic stylings of Anwar al-Awlaki available for your viewing pleasure?

Maybe Aaronson (or another writer) should write a follow-up book, demonstrating how our "terrorism" theatricals have become a global masquerade. The terror bugaboo has replaced the Cold War. Not much more than two decades ago, people called me a traitor and a communist whenever I said that there was no evidence that the USSR had engaged in a conspiracy to conquer the United States. Today, I can say those words without much fear of contradiction. When will it be permissible to state that terrorism, though real, does not pose anything like the threat that we've been led to believe?

3 comments:

DanInAlabama said...

Hell, all one has to do is read William Blum's "Killing Hope" to know that the USSR did very little, if anything, of a military nature to protect, promote, or encourage nations to adopt quote Communism as a political structure.

The USSR did sell some arms to some nations during the Cold War, but we vastly out sold arms to the world during the that time, and intervened militarily and via other means in loads of countries during the era to the tune of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of deaths over a 40 + year period.
We, did, and still do, sell more arms to other nations than any nation on earth; ergo, selling arms to other nations can't be a bad thing (snark).

I was 20 + year DOD contractor. I actually said to a co-worker one day:
"Gee, I wonder what these guys are going to do to justify their budget now that the Cold War is over?"
A few years later I got my answer. They found an enemy that could never be defeated.
Talk about job security.

During the Cold War Communist was, to use Joseph's word, the bugaboo, today it's Terrorist.
God, the idiots who run us are such simpletons. Yet, they are out smarting us, so what does that make us?

"The Power of Nightmares" should be required viewing for those who dislike reading. There I go, talking like a fascist.

Anonymous said...

Is there a diff between the pursuit of terrorists and the War on Drugs? I suggest that entrapment is the linchpin for both, while the financial incentives(asset disgorgement) facilitates budgets and keeps jobs from shrinking, and the economy moving.

I worked in Corp America for twenty years when money was cheap and the perqs abundant. That changed slowly starting with dot,com bubble, then dropped to near zero by 2008.

But, I happen to know military contractors are still in the cheap money mode, with high-flying business travel and 5-star hotels. How many private jets for ostensible bizness trips/junkets does the FBI have?

Ben

ColoradoGuy said...

So COINTELPRO is with us still, and that old queen, J. Edgar, watches over the Security State he created. Communism yesterday, Terrorism today, with the Drug War filling in the gaps.