American Free Press
By Paul Craig Roberts
Why does the FBI orchestrate fake “terror plots”? The latest one snared Osman Mohamud, a Somali-American teenager in Portland, Ore. The Associated Press report is headlined: “Somali-born teen plotted car-bombing in Oregon.”
This is a misleading headline as the report makes it clear that it was a plot orchestrated by federal agents. Two sentences into the news report we have this: “The bomb was an elaborate fake supplied by the [FBI] agents and the public was never in danger, authorities said.” The teenager was supplied with a fake bomb and a fake detonator.
Three sentences later the reporters contradict the quoted authorities with a quote from Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon: “The threat was very real.”
The reporters then contradict Balizan: “White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said Saturday that President Barack Obama was aware of the FBI operation before Friday’s arrest. Shapiro said Obama was assured that the FBI was in full control of the operation and that the public was not in danger.”
Then Shapiro contradicts himself by declaring: “The events of the past 24 hours underscore the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism here and abroad.” The story arrives at its Kafkaesque high point when Obama thanks the FBI for its diligence in saving us from the fake plot the FBI had fabricated. After vacillating between whether they are reporting a real plot or an orchestrated one, the reporters finally come down on the side of orchestration. Documents released by U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton “show the sting operation began in June.”
Obviously, the targeted Portland teenager was not “hot to trot,” so the FBI had to work on him for six months. The reporters compare “the Portland sting” to the recent arrest in Virginia of Faroque Ahmed, who was ensnared in a “bombing plot that was a ruse conducted over the past six months by federal officials.”
Think about this carefully. The FBI did a year’s work in order to convince two people to participate in fake plots.
If you are not too bright and some tough-looking guys accost you and tell you that they are al Qaeda and expect your help in a terrorist operation, you might be afraid to say no, or you might be thrilled to be part of a blowback against an American population that is indifferent to their government’s slaughter of people of your ethnicity or religion in your country of origin. Whichever way it falls, it is unlikely the ensnared person would ever have done anything beyond talk had the FBI not organized them into action.
In other cases the FBI entices people with money to participate in its fake plots. Since 9-11, the only domestic “terrorist plot” that I recall that was not obviously organized by the FBI is the “Times Square plot” to which Faisal Shahzad pleaded guilty to trying to set off a car bomb in Manhattan. This “plot,” too, is suspicious. One would think that a real terrorist would have a real bomb, not a smoke bomb. In his May 19, 2009 article, Joe Quinn of online site, Sott.net, collects some of the fake plots, some of which were validated by tortured confessions and others by ignorant and fearful juries.
The U.S. government comes up with a plot and an accused, and then tortures him until he confesses, or the government fabricates a case and takes it to jurors who know that they cannot face their neighbors if they let off a media-declared “terrorist.”
Perhaps the most obvious of these cases is “the Miami seven,” a pathetic group of Christian-Zionist-Muslims that called themselves the “Seas of David” and were quietly living in a Florida warehouse awaiting what they regarded as biblical end-times. Along came the FBI posing as al Qaeda and offered them $50,000 and an al Qaeda swearing-in ceremony.
The FBI told them that they needed to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and various government buildings. An honest Knight Ridder news service reporter revealed: “The Justice [sic] Department unveiled the arrests with an orchestrated series of news conferences in two cities, but the severity of the charges compared with the seemingly amateurish nature of the group raised concerns among civil libertarians,” who noted that the group had “no weapons, no explosives.”
The Justice (sic) Department and tamed media made a big show out of the “militaristic boots” worn by the hapless “plotters,” but the FBI had bought the boots for them.
The biggest piece of evidence against the hapless group was that they had taken photos of “targets” in Florida, but the U.S. government had equipped them with cameras. The U.S. government even rented cars for its dupes to drive to take the pictures.
It turns out that the group only wanted the $50,000, but an American jury convicted them anyhow. When the U.S. government has to go to such lengths to create “terrorists” out of hapless people, an undeclared agenda is being served. What could this agenda be?
The answer is many agendas. One agenda is to justify wars of aggression that are war crimes under the Nuremberg standard created by the U.S. government itself. One way to avoid war crime charges is to create acts of
terrorism that justify the naked aggressions against “terrorist countries.”
Another agenda is to create a police state. A police state can control people who object to their impoverishment for the benefit of the super-rich much more easily than can a democracy endowed with constitutional civil liberties.
Another agenda is to get rich. Terror plots, whether real or orchestrated, have created a market for security. Dual Israeli citizen Michael Chertoff, former head of U.S. Homeland Security, is the lobbyist who represents Rapiscan, the company that manufactures the full body “porno-scanners” that, following the “underwear bomber” event, are now filling up U.S. airports.
