FBI Entrapment Created 'Illusion' of Terrorist Plots: Report

[Octafish]

58. The Fear Factory

The FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism

How the FBI has transformed from a reactive law enforcement agency to a proactive counterterrorism organization that traps hapless individuals in order to justify the $3 billion it spends every year fighting terrorists.

By Trevor Aaronson
Utne Reader, March 2013

EXCERPT...

Reynolds was a man on the margins, bouncing around from place to place, job to job. In 2005, outraged by the war in Iraq and living in his mother’s house in Pennsylvania, Reyn olds logged in to a Yahoo forum called OBLCrew—OBL for Osama bin Laden—and shared his dream of bombing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. He needed assistance, he told the forum members. No one responded. Reynolds followed up the next day. “Still awaiting someone serious about contact. Would be a pity to lose this idea,” he wrote.

The following day, a person claiming to be an Al Qaeda operative responded and offered $40,000 to fund the attack, which evolved into a plan to fill trucks with explosives and bomb oil refineries in New Jersey and Wyoming, as well as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. They arranged to meet at a rest stop on Interstate 15 in Idaho, where Reynolds believed that he’d collect the $40,000 and move forward with his ambi tious plan. But Reynolds didn’t know that his supposed Al Qaeda contact with money to burn was an FBI informant. On December 5, 2005, Reynolds arrived at the rest stop only to be greeted by FBI agents. At the time of his arrest, Reyn olds had less than twenty-five dollars to his name. Eventually, he was tried and convicted of providing material support to Al Qaeda and received thirty years in prison. “Because of the astute work of the FBI, the diabolical plans of a would-be Al Qaeda sympathizer were uncovered,” Pennsylvania U.S. Attorney Thomas A. Marino said in a statement following Reynolds’s conviction. “Individuals such as Reynolds repre sent a threat to our safety. I commend the FBI and everyone involved in the prosecution of this case for bringing him to justice.”

Despite his conviction, was Reynolds a dangerous ter rorist? The answer is no—he was a troubled man unlikely to escape the fringes of society. He talked big and had a history of doing stupid things. He was unemployed, broke, and living with his mother at middle age, a caricature of the all-Ameri can loser. But an informant posing as an Al Qaeda operative offered him more money than he had ever seen at one time in his entire life and overnight he became a “threat to our safety.”

For years, as an investigative reporter with newspapers, I couldn’t help but notice how the U.S. government was put­ting forward to the public people who seemed to have become terrorists only as a result of the prodding and inducements of FBI informants and undercover agents. In most of these cases, the defendants appeared to be sad sacks like Michael Curtis Reynolds—individuals with no capacity to do any sig nificant harm if left to their own devices—and it was FBI informants who provided the ideas, the means, and the op portunities for horrific plots involving the bombings of gov­ernment buildings and office towers, synagogues, and public transit systems. Curious, I began pulling court records about these cases and documenting which ones involved defendants who, like Reynolds, had no actual contacts with terrorist or ganizations and were lured into their plots by FBI informants. A provocative question underpinned my research: How many so-called terrorists prosecuted in U.S. courts since 9/11 were real terrorists? I wanted to do a systematic analysis of all ter rorism cases since September 11, 2001, to answer this ques tion, but I hit an early roadblock: While the U.S. Department of Justice tracked terrorism prosecutions internally, this data was not made public. I needed to know exactly which cases the Justice Department considered terrorism-related, and so I needed this internal data—which was impossible to obtain without someone leaking it from the inside.

CONTINUED...

http://www.utne.com/politics/war-on-terrorism-ze0z1303zgar.aspx#axzz36vOWaeYz

PS: You are most welcome, Uncle Joe! Thank you for caring about the Constitution.