A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
The FBI’s war of entrapment amounts to a huge extortion scheme targeting the American people. The object is to terrify the public into surrendering their civil liberties in a twilight struggle with a mostly nonexistent domestic enemy. “These are high crimes, as high as they come, which, in a just world, would warrant many counts of impeachment for both chief executives responsible: presidents Bush and Obama.”
Who Is the FBI Really Trying to Entrap?
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“The FBI has fabricated the illusion of a wave of terror that did not, for the most part, exist.”
Attorney General Eric Holder told hundred of Muslims near San Francisco that the FBI’s sting operations penetrating mosques across the country are an essential “tool in uncovering and preventing terror attacks.” But of course, most of the FBI’s high profile prosecutions for alleged domestic terrorism involve plots that were hatched in almost every detail by paid FBI informants who nurtured the schemes to their pre-planned conclusions. So, in point of fact, the FBI has not been engaged in “uncovering and preventing terrorist attacks,” as Eric Holder claims, but rather, it has spent tens of millions of dollars and many thousands of man-hours concocting, financing, and providing training and equipment for crimes purely of its own invention. The FBI – first under George Bush and then even more aggressively under Barack Obama – has fabricated the illusion of a wave of terror that did not, for the most part, exist. In doing so, the U.S. government has perpetrated at least two classes of crimes: one, against those it has directly entrapped and prosecuted for crimes conceived and executed by the government, itself; and the second, larger class of crime, conspiracy to deliberately deceive and terrorize the American people, for the purpose of depriving the American people of their civil rights, and to foment a public hysteria that would facilitate the launching of military attacks on other peoples.
“Poor and powerless men were manipulated like puppets in theatrical productions directed by the FBI for purpose of frightening an audience of 300 million Americans.”
These are high crimes, as high as they come, which, in a just world, would warrant many counts of impeachment for both chief executives responsible: presidents Bush and Obama. The irony is, the very atmosphere of hysteria and war fever that the fake terror plots engender among the public, insulates the perpetrators from accountability for their crimes. No wonder the incoming Obama administration shielded the outgoing Bush gang from prosecution. Obama instructed Eric Holder to expand the phony terror racket, not to shut it down. Both presidents’ historical legacies are now inextricably tied to a domestic war on terror that is largely a fiction.
The fiction has real victims, including the poor and powerless, largely Black and brown men who were manipulated like puppets in theatrical productions directed by the FBI for purpose of frightening an audience of 300 million Americans. The families of some of these entrapped, involuntary actors in the FBI's fake terror dramas are scheduled to gather at New York University, in Manhattan, on December 16, to devise strategies for seeking justice.
Muslim Americans have been criminalized as a community. In Irvine, California, an FBI operative was so brazen in soliciting recruits for jihad, mosque members got a court restraining order to shut him up. It turns out the informant was paid $177,000 to incite a holy war – the going rate, apparently, for inventing terror where none has previously existed.
So who is the real target of government entrapment? It could not be the individuals sucked into the FBI vortex, since Eric Holder's men knew they were incapable of independently carrying out the crimes and, therefore, represented no danger to society. No, American society, itself, has been entrapped by the Bush and Obama manipulators. The object is to terrify the American public, so that they will surrender their civil liberties – possibly the greatest extortion scheme in U.S. history.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen Ford. On the web, go to www.BlackAgendaReport.com.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.
This week’s featured author is Amanda Lock Swarr. Swarr is Associate Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington.
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