Mainstream Media & FBI Push Fake Terror Attack Even After Their Patsy Refused to Do It

The mainstream media is praising the FBI after their agents targeted a “terrorist” who refused to go through with an attack they were attempting to set up.

By Rachel Blevins

Source: The Free Thought Project

It is no secret that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation often look for and take advantage of vulnerable individuals on the internet by gaining their trust and convincing them to carry out attacks—but even in a case where the “terrorist” backed out of the attack, the mainstream media is still celebrating the FBI’s diligence in the War on Terror.

FBI thwarts alleged plan to carry out terrorist attack in San Francisco on Christmas,” the Washington Post reported, claiming that the agency was able to prevent a possible terrorist attack at San Francisco’s Pier 39 after arresting a man who told undercover agents he wanted to carry out an Islamic State-inspired suicide bombing at the popular tourist destination on Christmas Day.”

The New York Post joined in with the headline “FBI thwarts ISIS-inspired Christmas terror attack on San Francisco,” and the claim that the suspect was “former US Marine sharpshooter” Everitt Aaron Jameson, 26, who was discharged from the military for fraudulent enlistment, and now works as a tow truck driver.

The Department of Justice released a statement confirming that Jameson has been arrested for “attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.” If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

“According to court documents, Jameson had several online interactions with a confidential source in which he expressed support for the October 31, 2017, terrorist attack in New York City and offered his services for ‘the cause.’  In subsequent communications with an undercover agent, Jameson referred to his training in the U.S. military and noted he had been trained for combat and war.  Jameson later met with another undercover agent whom he believed to be associated with the senior leadership of the foreign terrorist organization, ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIL).  During his interactions with this undercover agent, Jameson offered to carry out violent acts and to provide financial support for the terrorist organization.”

Now, the question is—how did FBI agents find Jameson, and did he actually pose a threat of carrying out a terrorist attack?

The Los Angeles Times reported that Jameson began studying Islam one year ago, after he became “depressed and even suicidal over losing custody of his children.” However, his family insisted that he did not have violent tendencies, and had never mentioned anything about becoming involved with the Islamic State.

“He just ain’t no terrorist, no way,” Jameson’s father said. “He would never hurt people. Not ever. It’s just unbelievable. That’s not who he is.”

The criminal complaint filed against Jameson claimed that he first caught the agency’s attention when a “credible FBI Confidential Human Source” flagged his Facebook account as suspicious on Sept. 19, for “Liking” and “Loving” posts that were “pro-ISIS and pro-terrorism.”

“To provide an example of the types of posts Jameson was ‘Liking’ and ‘Loving’ during this time period, the CHS reported to the FBI that Jameson “loved” a post on November 29, 2017 that is an image of Santa Claus standing in New York with a box of dynamite. The text of the post reads, ‘ISIS post image of Santa with dynamite threatening attack on New York.’ The Propaganda poster shows Santa Claus standing on a roof next to a box of dynamite looking out over a crowd of shoppers with the words ‘We meet at Christmas in New York… soon.’ Under this post, Jameson selected the ‘Like’ option and then selected the “Heart” option to signify that he ‘Loved’ the post.”

However, the fact that Jameson “liked” a post on Facebook about an ISIS attack in the United States on Christmas day, does not guarantee that he would have actually carried out such an attack by himself.

While the complaint does detail the conversations Jameson had with FBI informants, and it shows that he appeared eager to provide supplies for an attack on a crowded area, and willing to carry out, he was never in contact with a suspected member of ISIS.

It is also important to consider the context. FBI informants were holding bait in front of a depressed, suicidal man, and were giving him a sense of attention and companionship that he was likely lacking in his own life. Ultimately, two days after meeting with FBI informants in person, the criminal complaint noted that Jameson sent a message on Dec. 18, saying, “I don’t think I can do this after all. I’ve reconsidered.”

It was too late. Even though he had not harmed anyone, and had declined to carry out the attack the agents were trying to talk him into, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Jameson’s home the next day. They seized a letter signed by “Abdullah Abu Everitt,” a last will and testament, and a series of weapons including “a Winchester .22 caliber rifle, a Ruger M77, a Ruger 9mm handgun, magazines, ammunition and fireworks.”

Everitt Jameson now faces up to 20 years in prison for engaging in conversations online with FBI informants who intentionally targeted his weaknesses, as the mainstream media celebrates the fact that the FBI has foiled yet another FBI terror plot, and the agents who are responsible for ruining an innocent man’s life, look for their next victim.

If Jameson never had any intention of carrying out a terror attack and the entire idea was forced on him by the FBI, why on Earth would this be on the news and touted as some foiled plot?

Well, the answer to that is simple.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes actually reveals the answer as he defends the tactics used by the FBI to set up poverty-stricken, mentally ill men by offering them large sums of money and weapons to commit crimes.

After he defended the FBI’s role in bribing poor, mentally diminished people to get them to commit crimes, he let out a bombshell statement, confirming what many of us already know.

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cause the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half,” states Fuentes. “You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

There you have it. The FBI puts Americans in danger by grooming otherwise entirely innocent people into doing harm — so they can keep fear alive.

But what would’ve happened if Jameson would’ve actually carried out this attack that the FBI was trying to force on him? Would the FBI still claim they had informants attempting to groom him? Would they admit their role in his life at all?

David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer, had this to say about these most unscrupulous operations:

“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.”

Indeed, we’ve become a lunatic asylum.

 

DISMISSED: Trump Fires Scandal Plagued FBI Director James Comey – What Does It Mean?

Image (from Land Destroyer Report): The FBI has an impressive portfolio of intentionally created, then foiled terror plots. Its methods include allowing suspects to handle both real and inoperable weapons and explosives. These methods allow the FBI to switch entrapment cases “live” at any moment simply by switching out duds and arrests with real explosives and successful attacks. Because the FBI uses “informants,” when attacks go live, these confidential assets can be blamed, obfuscating the FBI’s involvement.

By Shawn Helton

Source: 21st Century Wire

US President Donald Trump has accepted a recommendation to ‘dismiss’ FBI director James Comey. Was this a reprisal for the suddenly widened Russia-gate probe into the White House or was there something else at play within the operations of the deep state?

Comey was at the center of a political controversy over much of the last year during the US presidential election cycle in 2016, and well into 2017. Throughout 2016, the former FBI director opened, closed and reopened (only to close again) a probe into Hillary Clinton, her email server and looking into accusations leveled at the Clinton Foundation, while also entertaining a dubious Russian probe into the Trump administration alleged ‘connections to Russia’ that helped mine various stories, including a so-called ‘dossier‘ regarding the newly elected president in early 2017.

In recent years, there have been many highly questionable actions under Comey’s leadership at the FBI, such as the Orlando nightclub shooting incident – who’s main suspect was previously interviewed by the FBI, as well as a highly questionable ‘ISIS inspired’ shooting event in Garland, Texas linked to an FBI informant case run out of Phoenix, Arizona, and the federal agency’s dramatic encroachment on public privacy following a suspicious San Bernardino mass shooting.  These are only just a few examples…

Grabien News highlights a list of scandals that were either attached to Comey or perpetuated under his watch:

“Here are 10 of Comey’s biggest embarrassments at the FBI:

1. Before he bombed the Boston Marathon, the FBI interviewed Tamerlan Tsarnaev but let him go. Russia sent the Obama Administration a second warning, but the FBI opted against investigating him again.

2. Shortly after the NSA scandal exploded in 2013, the FBI was exposed conducting its own data mining on innocent Americans; the agency, Bloomberg reported, retains that material for decades (even if no wrongdoing is found).

3. The FBI had possession of emails sent by Nidal Hasan saying he wanted to kill his fellow soldiers to protect the Taliban — but didn’t intervene, leading many critics to argue the tragedy that resulted in the death of 31 Americans at Fort Hood could have been prevented. 

4. During the Obama Administration, the FBI claimed that two private jets were being used primarily for counterterrorism, when in fact they were mostly being used for Eric Holder and Robert Mueller’s business and personal travel. 

5. When the FBI demanded Apple create a “backdoor” that would allow law enforcement agencies to unlock the cell phones of various suspects, the company refused, sparking a battle between the feds and America’s biggest tech company. What makes this incident indicative of Comey’s questionable management of the agency is that a) The FBI jumped the gun, as they were indeed ultimately able to crack the San Bernardino terrorist’s phone, and b) Almost every other major national security figure sided with Apple (from former CIA Director General Petraeus to former CIA Director James Woolsey to former director of the NSA, General Michael Hayden), warning that such a “crack” would inevitably wind up in the wrong hands.

6. In 2015, the FBI conducted a controversial raid on a Texas political meeting, finger printing, photographing, and seizing phones from attendees (some in the group believe in restoring Texas as an independent constitutional republic).

7. During its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified material, the FBI made an unusual deal in which Clinton aides were both given immunity and allowed to destroy their laptops. 

8. The father of the radical Islamist who detonated a backpack bomb in New York City in 2016 alerted the FBI to his son’s radicalization. The FBI, however, cleared Ahmad Khan Rahami after a brief interview. 

9. The FBI also investigated the terrorist who killed 49 people and wounded 53 more at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Fla. Despite a more than 10-month investigation of Omar Mateen — during which Mateen admitting lying to agents — the FBI opted against pressing further and closed its case. 

10. CBS recently reported that when two terrorists sought to kill Americans attending the “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas, the FBI not only had an understanding an attack was coming, but actually had an undercover agent traveling with the Islamists, Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi. The FBI has refused to comment on why the agent on the scene did not intervene during the attack.”

It’s important to remember that Comey is not the only FBI director who bears responsibility for the controversial aspects of 2013’s Boston Bombing. Under FBI director Robert Mueller “Tamerlan Tsarnaev came to the attention of the FBI on at least two occasions” prior to allegedly being involved in what many researchers have described as a false flag terror event in Boston. A questionable event that has arguably been used as a pretext to further clamp down on individual rights in the US.

We should also be reminded that the FBI has been routinely caught foiling their very own ‘terror plots’ over the past several years.

In recent years, the investigative tactics of various intelligence agencies have come into question, none perhaps more dubious then the Newburgh FBI sting that involved entrapping four men to participate in a fabricated event created by the bureau. Here’s a 2011 passage from The Guardian describing how an FBI informant named Shahed Hussain coerced four others into a fake terror plot:

“The “Newburgh Four” now languish in jail. Hussain does not. For Hussain was a fake. In fact, Hussain worked for the FBI as an informant trawling mosques in hope of picking up radicals.

Yet far from being active militants, the four men he attracted were impoverished individuals struggling with Newburgh’s grim epidemic of crack, drug crime and poverty. One had mental issues so severe his apartment contained bottles of his own urine. He also believed Florida was a foreign country.

Hussain offered the men huge financial inducements to carry out the plot – including $250,000 to one man – and free holidays and expensive cars.

As defence lawyers poured through the evidence, the Newburgh Four came to represent the most extreme form of a controversial FBI policy to use invented terrorist plots to lure targets. “There has been no case as egregious as this. It is unique in the incentive the government provided. A quarter million dollars?” said Professor Karen Greenberg, a terrorism expert at Fordham University.”

The reputation of the FBI has suffered greatly in the recent past as well as over the past couple of decades. Incidentally, the FBI is on record as ‘handling’ Emad A. Salem, a former Egyptian army officer who was a prized undercover operative thrust into confidential informant status and person who played a key role in the 1993 WTC bombing.

All of this has happened under the watchful eye of the FBI…

Over last summer, 21WIRE observed some curious connections between the Clinton Foundation and FBI director James Comey, as well as his questionable handling of other cases related to the Clinton family. Here’s the following passage to consider in light of the new information related to the Clinton investigation:

“Many will also be unaware that before Comey was installed by the Obama Administration as FBI Director, he was on the board of Director at HSBC Bank – a bank implicated in international money laundering, including the laundering of billions on behalf of international drugs and narcotics trafficking cartels.Forbes also points out where Comey was also at the key choke-point during the case involving dodgy auditor KPMG which followed on by the HSBC criminal case:

“If Comey, and his boss Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, had made a different decision about KPMG back in 2005, KPMG would not have been around to miss all the illegal acts HSBC and Standard Chartered SCBFF +% were committing on its watch. Bloomberg reported in 2007 that back in June of 2005, Comey was the man thrust into the position of deciding whether KPMG would live or die for its criminal tax shelter violations.”

Is this just a surface effort by the White House to clean the slate for an agency perpetually embroiled in controversy?

More from RT below…

Trump fires FBI Director James Comey

RT

President Donald Trump has fired FBI Director James Comey at the recommendation of US Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, according to a White House announcement.

“The FBI is one of our Nation’s most cherished and respected institutions and today will mark a new beginning for our crown jewel of law enforcement,” said President Trump.

“While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau,” Trump told Comey in a letter.

The letter announcing the termination was hand-delivered to FBI headquarters by Keith Schiller, a Trump security aide, according to several reports citing a White House official.

A search for a new permanent FBI Director will begin immediately.

The firing of Comey comes days after he testified to Congress on investigations into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.

RT continues here

Confirmed: “Draw Mohammed” Contest Attackers Were Managed by FBI

david-yerushalmi-pamela-geller-640x480

Anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller and David Yerushalmi

UPDATE: Readers should backtrack to CNN’s 2015 coverage of the Garland, Texas shooting to see just how badly they are being deceived. As readers watch CNN’s video coverage and read the article, they must keep in mind that the FBI had been in contact with the suspects for years, and encouraged them to carry out the attack.

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

To some the 2015 shooting in Garland Texas at a “Draw Mohammed” contest organized by state-sponsored agitators seemed all too convenient.

The protest was meant to prove Muslims were irrational and violent, and amid the protest two armed men did indeed attack, both killed by police who were already on the scene.

The event was meant to reinforce the narrative that Islam is an irrational and dangerous ideology, that Muslims pose a danger to America and the West in general, and that both Islam and Muslims should be actively resisted culturally, politically, and militarily.

It was the culmination of years of agitation through networks maintained by Washington politicians and policymakers, particularly those who have – ironically – not only engineered America’s various and unending wars begun during the so-called “War on Terror,” but who have also armed and funded some of the most dangerous terrorist organizations on Earth via America’s Persian Gulf allies.

Now it is revealed that not only was the protest organized by politicians and organizations associated with Washington, but the shooting was as well.

The two suspects were being directed by undercover FBI agents, one of which reportedly told one of the shooters shortly before the attack to “tear up Texas.”

The Daily Beast in its article, “FBI Agent Apparently Egged on ‘Draw Muhammad’ Shooter,” would report that:

Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent. 

“Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.

The Daily Beast would also report:

That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.

This latest development regarding the 2015 incident reveals how the entire event and attack were organized by the state for the expressed purpose of creating fear, hysteria, and division within American society. It is very likely that similar attacks both in the United States and across Europe are also the work of concerted efforts by Western governments to manipulate public perception.

The toxic climate created by a phenomenon known as “Islamophobia” is helping the West justify an increased police state at home and wider wars abroad. It is also playing a role in helping to radicalize Muslims sorely needed to fill the ranks of the West’s militant fronts in nations like Syria where they are being used to target and overthrow governments obstructing American special interests.

Despite the rhetoric, there are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims on Earth today, meaning that if even 1% were truly as they are characterized by state-sponsored propaganda – as violent fanatics bent on global conquest – that would constitute an army of some 16 million strong – or in other words – an army larger than all of the military forces of the industrialized world combined.

In reality, the number of extremists is extremely low – a fraction of 1% of the total global Muslim population – and the vast majority of these extremists are indoctrinated by US-Saudi funded and facilitated “madrases,” trained, funded, and armed by US and its Persian Gulf allies, and “coincidentally” waging war on all of the West’s enemies – ranging from the now toppled government of Libya to the current governments of Syria and Iraq, as well as even Russia and China.

Those feeding into Islamophobia – then – are in fact aiding and abetting the cycle of violence, ignorance, and fear that keeps viable the West’s use of terrorism as a geopolitical tool both at home and abroad. It is particularly ironic that the “radical Islam” many Westerners are now paralyzed in fear over, is in fact a creation of the modern Western state, springing out of Washington-based policy papers, not the pages of the Qu’ran.

US Law Enforcement Knew Florida Shooter BEFORE Shooting

Mateen-NYPD

Did radicalization by NYPD make Omar Mateen a trigger-happy homophobe?

Recent Bloodbath Looks Almost Identical to FBI-Staged Entrapment Cases in 2015.

By Tony Cartalucci

Source: Land Destroyer

A horrific mass shooting unfolded in Florida claiming the lives of at least 52 with scores more injured. The British Independent would report in its article, “Omar Mateen: Orlando gay club gunman identified by police,” that:

Police have identified the gunman in the mass shooting at a gay club in Florida as 29-year-old Omar Mateen, an American citizen whose parents are from Afghanistan. 

Authorities in Orlando said they were investigating the shooting as an act of terrorism, as the death toll rose to 50 with a further 53 wounded.

At face value – it appears to be another senseless tragedy perpetrated by a “terrorist” inspired by militant groups the US claims to have been fighting for now nearly two decades. However the Independent reports another fact further down in the body of its article, claiming that:

ABC News reported he had been on police’s “radar”, though not subject to an investigation.

If this sounds like a familiar narrative, that’s because virtually every high-profile “terrorist attack” carried out in North America and Europe in recent years has been done so by suspects long under investigation by US, Canadian, and European law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

CNN’s article, “50 killed in Florida nightclub, shooter pledged ISIS allegiance,” would further elaborate on Mateen’s background, stating: 

Two officials tell CNN that the FBI had investigated Mateen at some point for possibly having ties to or sympathizing with Islamic extremism. A law enforcement official said there were two cases opened involving Mateen but the probes didn’t result in enough evidence to charge him with anything.

In the past two weeks Mateen legally purchased a Glock pistol, found at the shooting scene, from a St. Lucie County area gun store, a law enforcement official said.

What CNN fails to mention is the long history the FBI has of taking “sympathizers” through a series of steps to acquire “enough evidence,” including posing as terrorists and providing suspects with weapons and plans for attacks precisely like the one that just unfolded in Florida.

To understand the implications of yet another high-profile terror attack involving a suspect already known to law enforcement agencies, one must examine previous examples of admittedly set up attacks “foiled” at the last moment by the FBI, as well as attacks that have been carried out by individuals tracked for years and even arrested multiple times by Western police and intelligence agencies only to be let go time and time again until finally carrying out “the big one.”

ISIS Inspired? Or FBI Inspired? FBI Set Up Multiple Attacks in 2015 Almost Exactly Like the Florida Shooting

A terror suspect armed to the teeth storming a public place and killing scores is actually a very familiar script. The FBI wrote several such scripts in 2015 alone, including entrapping and arresting a mentally-ill suspect after providing him with an arsenal of deadly weapons almost identical to the arsenal recently employed in Flordia.

The Intercept would report in its article, “Another “Terror” Arrest; Another Mentally Ill Man, Armed by the FBI,” that:

U.S. law enforcement officials announced another terror arrest on Monday, after arming a mentally ill man and then charging him with having guns. 

ABC News quoted a “senior federal official briefed on the arrest” as saying: “This is a very bad person arrested before he could do very bad things.” 

But in a sting reminiscent of so many others conducted by the FBI since 9/11, Alexander Ciccolo, 23, “aka Ali Al Amriki,” was apparently a mentally ill man who was doing nothing more than ranting about violent jihad and talking (admittedly in frightening ways) about launching attacks—until he met an FBI informant. At that point, he started making shopping lists for weapons.

The Intercept would also reference the FBI’s affidavit (.pdf), stating (emphasis added):

According to the affidavit, Ciccolo first talked to the FBI informant about attacking two bars and a police station. Later, he spoke of attacking a college campus with a homemade pressure-cooker bomb like the one used in the Boston Marathon terror attack; he also talked about using guns and a lot of ammo. Ciccolo, according to the affidavit, then “ordered the firearms from a confidential human source (“CHS”) working with the FBI.”

The list of weapons provided to the mentally-ill suspect by the FBI informant is shocking. Revealed in the official FBI affidavit (.pdf), the weapons included a 9mm Glock 17, a 10mm Glock 20, a .223 Colt AR-15 rifle, (referred to by the media as an “assault rifle”), and a 556 Sig Arms SG550 rifle (also often referred to as an assault rifle). Also included in the affidavit is the same hysterical rhetoric encouraged by FBI informants now evident in the recent actions of terror suspect Omar Mateen in Florida.

FBI_ShoppingList_for_Terrorists

Image: The FBI literally handed these weapons to a mentally-ill man who was contemplating attacking bars, police stations, and university campuses. Two of the four weapons were Glocks, a weapon used by Mateen in the recent Florida shooting. Both the 2015 patsy and Mateen also appeared to have been in possession of improvised explosive devices.

The FBI literally provided a mentally-ill man they helped plan a terrorist attack together with, an arsenal of deadly weapons – arresting him just before he committed his crime. The only factor that prevented the 2015 entrapment of Ciccolo from becoming a live Florida shooting-style attack was the fact that the FBI arrested Ciccolo before he carried out his planned attack – while those following Mateen did not arrest him.

The role of the FBI in Mateen obtaining his weapons will never be known since Mateen is now – conveniently – dead. Even if he purchased them “legally” at a gun store, it should be noted that in other FBI entrapment cases, suspects were encouraged to purchase weapons themselves, with the FBI arresting them only after they left gun stores with their newly acquired arsenal.

Image: Another patsy set up by the FBI in 2015 was allowed to purchase two semi-automatic rifles at a gun store before being arrested upon leaving with the weapons.

Image: Another patsy set up by the FBI in 2015 was allowed to purchase two semi-automatic rifles at a gun store before being arrested upon leaving with the weapons.

NBC Cincinnati affiliate WLWT5 would report in their 2015 article, “FBI: Cincinnati man bought rifles, planned to attack U.S. Capitol,” that (emphasis added):

Agents said that on Tuesday and Wednesday Cornell met with the informant the final time to plan their trip to D.C. to execute their plan. He purchased two Armalite M-15 5.56 mm semi-automatic rifles Wednesday morning, along with 600 rounds of ammunition, and was arrested. 

Cornell bought the rifles at the Point Blank gun store on Harrison Avenue in Colerain Township. He passed a background check and paid $1,900 in cash, $700 for each rifle and about $400 for the ammunition. 

The gun store owner, John Dean, said FBI agents notified him that Cornell was going to come in to buy the guns about 10 minutes before he entered the store. 

Dean said the agents told him to allow the purchase and agents would stop Cornell after he left the store.

What if agents didn’t stop him after he left the store? He had two semi-automatic rifles and 800 rounds of ammunition – more than enough to carry out a Florida shooting-style attack. Some may be immediately tempted to conclude that the FBI would never allow an attack they played a role in planning to go “live.” However, they would be wrong.

A Notorious FBI-Staged Attack that Went Live

The FBI in fact was presiding over the terrorists who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The role of the FBI leading up to the deadly attack would most likely have gone unreported had an FBI informant not taped his conversations with FBI agents after growing suspicious during the uncover operation. The New York Times in their article, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast,” reported:

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City’s tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars.

The FBI and other US, Canadian, and European law enforcement and intelligence agencies “accidentally” failing to stop terror suspects they have long-known about and have even arrested multiple times has since become endemic. In recent years, virtually every suspect has either been known by such agencies beforehand, or has been involved in a history of crime and terrorism before carrying out their final acts of grand terrorism.

Such was the case in the various French attacks. Many from the network that carried out the French attacks were then directly involved in the Belgium attacks. To explain away the fact that virtually all the suspects had been within European security agencies’ grasp for years but were still able to carry out their deadly attacks – the Western media has attempted to cite a lack of resources.

In reality, what is playing out is an engineered strategy of tension using both the threat of terrorism and actual terrorism to create hysteria, fear, division, and ultimately obedience and capitulation across Western populations.

It should be remembered that Al Qaeda itself began as a US-Saudi joint venture to fight proxy warfare against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan where conventional Western forces could not go. It should also be pointed out that since then, Al Qaeda and its more recent affiliate, the self-proclaimed “Islamic State,” have enjoyed logistical support from the US and NATO for years in proxy wars ranging from Libya to Syria to Iraq and the frontiers of Iran, southern Russia, and western China.

More recently it has been admitted even within the Western press that the “Islamic State” is being resupplied and reinforced from NATO territory itself, with the UK Telegraph admitting in its article, “US-backed Syrian opposition forces surround Isil in key city and cut off main supply route,” that:

…Syrian opposition forces have completely surrounded the Islamic State-held stronghold of Manbij and cut off the group’s main route to the outside world….. 

The loss of Manbij will be a huge loss to the group. It had been a waypoint on an Isil supply line between the Turkish border and the extremist group’s de facto capital, Raqqa. 

Again, we see that while the US claims to fight the “Islamic State,” its NATO partner Turkey is quite literally the source of the terrorist organization’s fighting capacity, with US forces permanently stationed in Turkey for decades and Turkey having been a NATO member since the 1950s. Despite open acknowledgments that the “Islamic State” is operating out of Turkey, the US has used the presence of the terrorist organization inside Syria as a pretext for intervening in the war directly.

Were the US truly interested in stopping the “Islamic State,” it and its allies in Ankara would be easily able to wield maximum force within Turkey’s territory to cut the group off before it even reached Syrian territory.  That both Washington and Ankara are feigning an inexplicable inability to do this, and insist instead that the war must be fought inside Syria exposes the cynical nature with which the West uses – not fights – terrorism to further its geopolitical and domestic political agendas.

As special interests attempt to leverage this latest terrorist attack – all of these actual facts must be kept in mind to ground us to a reality Western politicians and media outlets will attempt to detach us from in the coming days and weeks.

 

Related Link: Zero Hedge Orlando Shooting Updates

Zero for 40 at Predicting Attacks: Why Do Media Still Take FBI Terror Warnings Seriously?

By Adam Johnson

Source: FAIR

On Monday, several mainstream media outlets repeated the latest press release by the FBI that country was under a new “heightened terror alert” from “ISIL-inspired attacks” “leading up to the July 4th weekend.” One of the more sensational outlets, CNN, led with the breathless warning on several of its cable programs, complete with a special report by The Lead’s Jim Sciutto in primetime:

TerrorAlert

The threat was given extra credence when former CIA director—and consultant at DC PR firm Beacon Global Strategies—Michael Morell went on CBS This Morning (6/29/15) and scared the ever-living bejesus out of everyone by saying he “wouldn’t be surprised if we were sitting [in the studio] next week discussing an attack on the US.” The first piece of evidence Morell used to justify his apocalyptic posture, the “50 ISIS arrests,” was accompanied by a scary map on the CBS jumbotron showing “ISIS arrests” all throughout the US:

RecentISISArrests

But one key detail is missing from this  graphic: None of these “ISIS arrests” involved any actual members of ISIS, only members of the FBI—and their network of informants—posing as such. (The one exception being the man arrested in Arizona, who, while having no contact with ISIS, was also not prompted by the FBI.) So even if one thinks the threat of “lone wolf” attacks is a serious one, it cannot be said these are really “ISIS arrests.”  Perhaps on some meta-level, it shows an increase of “radicalization,” but it’s impossible to distinguish between this and simply more aggressive sting operations by the FBI.

In any event, this nuance gets left out entirely. As I’ve previously shown, in the media’s rush to hype the threat, the fact of FBI-manufactured—or at least “assisted”—terror plots is left out as a complicating factor altogether, and the viewer is left thinking the FBI arrested 50 actual ISIS sleeper cells.

Nevertheless, the ominous FBI (or Department of Homeland Security) “terror warning” has become such a staple of the on-going, seemingly endless “war on terror” (d/b/a war on ISIS), we hardly even notice it anymore. Marked by a feedback loop of extremist propaganda, unverifiable claims about “online chatter” and fuzzy pronouncements issued by a neverending string of faceless Muslim bad guys, and given PR cover by FBI-contrived “terror plots,” the specter of the impending “attack” is part of a broader white noise of fear that never went away after 9/11. Indeed, the verbiage employed by the FBI in this latest warning —“we’re asking people to remain vigilant”—implies no actual change of the status quo, just an hysterical nudge to not let down our collective guard.

There’s only one problem: These warnings never actually come to fruition. Not rarely, or almost never, but—by all accounts—never. No attacks, no arrests, no suspects at large.

Here’s a selection of previous FBI and DHS “terror warnings” over the past 14 years, not a single one of which actually predicted or foiled a terror attack:

October 2001: “Potential use of chemical/biological and/or radiological/nuclear weapons

November 2001: California bridges

February 2002: “Hollywood studios”

May 2002: Statue of Liberty

June 2002: “Around the Fourth of July holiday”

July 2002: Stadiums

August 2002: “Landmarks”

October 2002: “AQ to attack Amtrak

November 2002:Spectacular Al Qaeda attacks

February 2003: “Apartments, hotels, sports arenas and amusement parks

May 2003: “Possibility of multiple attacks”

May 2004: “Attempt to affect the outcome” of presidential election

July 2004: “Military facilities and large gatherings” on July 4th

August 2004: VA hospitals

January 2005: Dirty bomb

March 2005: US/Mexican border

October 2005: NYC & Baltimore subways

March 2006: “Sporting events”

June 2007: Colleges

December 2007:Shopping malls in Chicago and LA”

November 2008: “Al Qaeda to attack transit during Thanksgiving

November 2010: Mass transit in New York City

October 2011: “Americans in Europe” facing “commando-style AQ attack”

February 2011: “Financial institutions”

May 2011: “Threats of retaliation”

June 2011: Al Qaeda “hit list”

July 2011: “Private jets of executives” involved in drone manufacturing

September 2011: “Small planes”

September 2011: “New York City or Washington around…10th anniversary of 9/11

September 2011: Airports

March 2012: “Terrorist hacking”

August 2012: Anarchists blowing up bridge during Tampa RNC

September 2012: “Islamic violence over movie

August 2013: “San Fransisco on high alert

November 2013: “cyber attacks”

April 2014: “College students abroad”

December 2014: ISIS targeting Mississippi River bridge

December 2014: ISIS “sabotaging US military personnel” over social media

April 2015: ISIS targeting “parts of California

May 2015: ISIS targeting “military bases

A casual search reveals the FBI and DHS are a pitiful 0 for 40 warning of terror attacks—some of which were specifically about 4th of July threats, none of which materialized in any way. This should not be considered a comprehensive list of all threat warnings transmitted by media; I tried to narrow the scope to warnings that were at least in some way specific.

The actual terror attacks carried out on US soil—the Times Square bomber, “Underwear bomber,” Boston bombing and Garland attacks—were accompanied by no such warnings. (Nor were the often deadlier terrorist attacks by right-wing white terrorists–but terrorism in this category is rarely if ever the subject of FBI warnings.)

So why, a rational person may ask, does the media keeps repeating them if they’re wrong 100 percent of the time?

The problem is three fold:

  1. The FBI has all the incentive in the world to issue warnings and no incentive whatsoever to not issue warnings. Issuing warnings has no downside, while not doing so is all downside.
  2. The FBI, like all agencies of the government, does not operate in a political vacuum. Emphasizing the “ISIS threat” at home necessarily helps prop up the broader war effort the FBI’s boss, the president of the United States, must sell to a war-weary public. The incentive is to therefore highlight the smallest threats. This was a feature that did not go unnoticed during the Bush years, but has since fallen out of fashion.
  3. It has no actual utility. What does it mean to be “more vigilant”? It’s a vague call to alertness that officials, aside from “beefing up security” by local police, never quite explain what it means. If the FBI wanted to tell local police departments to up their security of the 4th of July weekend, surely they could do so quietly, without the chair of the House Committee on Homeland Security having to go on all major networks talking over b-roll of ISIS in apocalyptic terms.

When I brought up these objections up to CNN’s Sciutto, his response was less than satisfying:

fair question, the point is about the wider threat, FBI encourages people to attend events but be vigilant.

Yes, I would prefer warnings only when attacks were imminent. Which, of course, they never are. Because if they were, the government would actually attempt to stop them, rather than running a three-day PR tour. CNN‘s Jake Tapper, to his credit, would raise my concerns to Michael Chertoff later that day:

View image on Twitter

Ex-DHS head pushes back against terror warning skeptics http://cnn.it/1LyERVV 


While the attempt to introduce some skepticism is very much appreciated, Tapper missed the fundamental problem altogether. Next time he has on a Chertoff or a McCaul discussing a vague government terror warning, I’d like him to ask this simple question: “Has the FBI ever successfully warned, or foreshadowed in anyway, a terror attack in the United States? Because so far the count is 0 for 40+, and I’m curious what makes this time different.”

Put the burden of proof on those who are attempting to scare us, march our men and women off to war, and line their private security firm’s pockets. Don’t demand “FBI warning skeptics” disprove those in power; make those in power justify their own consistently discredited “warnings.”

If journalists still insist on disseminating these vague “threats,” I ask this question: How many false positives would be required for you to eventually stop doing so? Seventy? Two hundred?

Because 14 years on, I’m curious when, if ever, this media trope will ever end.

h/t Kevin Gosztola, who caught a 4th of July warning from 2004 I missed.\


Adam Johnson is an associate editor at AlterNet and writes frequently for FAIR.org. You can follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.

No Fly List Used by Government to Intimidate Activists and Recruit Informants

03

The idea of a No Fly List has always been a flawed concept as a true terrorism prevention measure. If people are deemed too dangerous to be allowed to board a flight after being searched and/or scanned and having their bags x-rayed, why would it be okay to let them go free to attack somewhere else? If there’s not enough evidence to suggest they’d stage such attacks they should be allowed to fly. Of course preventing terrorism was merely a stated goal used to justify the unconstitutional No Fly List.

New revelations regarding the true purposes of the No Fly List have been revealed as a result of two recent lawsuits. In 2010, Panagacos v. Towery was filed by Julianne Panagacos and six other antiwar activists against government spy John Towery, who infiltrated at least four different organizations in the Northwest, Port Militarization Resistance, Students for a Democratic Society, the Industrial Workers of the World, and Iraq Veterans Against the War. New documents recently came to light as the result of a Public Records Act request which, according to a WSWS.org article, proved:

Towery attended a Domestic Terrorism Conference in 2007 at which “domestic terrorist” dossiers on antiwar and left-wing activists were distributed for police review. These individuals could later be targeted for state repression ranging from preventing them from boarding airplanes (if they were placed on the federal “no-fly” list) to preventive detention in the event of a mass roundup of supposed “terrorists.”

Of course this comes as no surprise to anyone following independent news sources (and especially activists), but it’s rare to see it supported by official documentation. The same article reveals how, like other instances of FBI entrapment, Towery attempted to recruit one of the plaintiffs in the suit as a terrorist patsy:

Crespo described how Towery had sought to entrap him by persuading him to buy guns and learn how to shoot. After seeming to befriend Crespo while attending antiwar meetings, Towery at one point visited him at home and showed him a gun and how to load and unload it. Later, he showed Crespo documents about military tactics and suggested making use of them in “our actions.” Subsequently, he gave Crespo a copy of a proposed article written from the perspective of the 9/11 hijackers. Fortunately, Crespo’s reaction to these approaches—which he described as “the weirdest thing in the world”—was to keep his distance.

Read the full article here: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2014/03/01/anti-m01.html?view=article_mobile

In a new article just posted at RT, another lawsuit in a New York federal court has revealed how the No Fly List has been used by the FBI to recruit Muslim informants:

FBI ‘intentionally and unlawfully’ used No Fly List to recruit Muslims as informers

By RT.com

The FBI used a no-fly list to recruit four US Muslims as informants, violating their constitutional rights to freedom of speech, association and religion. That’s the claim being made by four US Muslims in a New York federal court Tuesday.

Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah, Naveed Shinwari and Awais Sajjad, who are between them either US residents or permanent US residents, are demanding that the FBI remove them from the no-fly list which contains the names of people who are not permitted to board a commercial aircraft for travel in or out of the United States, according to threat and intelligence reporting.

“This impermissible abuse of the No Fly List has forced Plaintiffs to choose between their constitutionally-protected right to travel, on the one hand, and their First Amendment rights on the other,” says the lawsuit.

One of the plaintiffs, Awais Sajjad, a lawful permanent US resident, learned that he was on a No Fly List in 2012 when he tried to board a flight to Pakistan. The FBI agents questioned Sajjad at the airport before releasing him. Soon they returned with an offer: he could work as an FBI informer and in return the agency would give him citizenship and compensation, the Washington Post reported.

When he refused, the bureau “kept him on the list in order to pressure and coerce Mr. Sajjad to sacrifice his constitutionally-protected rights,” says the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, three other complainants – Tanvir, Algibhah and Shinwari – said they were added to the list immediately after they refused to work as FBI informants for religious reasons.

Shinwari, a legal US resident from Omaha, Nebraska, said that after his arrival from his native country, Afghanistan, in 2012, he was twice detained and questioned by FBI agents who wanted to know if he knew anything about national security threats. He was soon put on the No Fly List, though he has never been convicted of a crime or posed a threat to national security, according to his lawyers.

In one of their visits, FBI agents wanted to know about the “local Omaha community, did I know anyone who’s a threat?” he says.

“I’m just very frustrated, [and I said] what can I do to clear my name?” says Shinwari. “And that’s where it was mentioned to me: you help us, we help you. We know you don’t have a job; we’ll give you money,” The Guardian reported him as saying.

Though Shinwari was allowed to fly within the United States in March, he still fears that if he flies to Afghanistan to see his wife and family, whom he hasn’t seen for at least two years, he might not be able to return.

“Defendants’ unlawful actions are imposing an immediate and ongoing harm on Plaintiffs and have caused Plaintiffs deprivation of their constitutional rights, emotional distress, damage to their reputation, and material and economic loss,” adds the lawsuit.

According to Jameel Algibhah, from the Bronx, New York, the FBI asked him to get access to a Queens mosque and even pose as an extremist in online forums.

“We’re the only ones who can take you off the list,” an unnamed FBI agent told him, Algibhah told The Guardian.

The fourth plaintiff, Muhammad Tanvir, started taking action against the FBI in October 2013, after he refused to spy on his local Pakistani community. Now he can’t visit his ailing mother.

Ramzi Kassem, associate professor of law at the City University of New York, told the Washington Post that “the no-fly list is supposed to be about ensuring aviation safety, but the FBI is using it to force innocent people to become informants.”

Meanwhile, the lawsuit seeks not only the plaintiffs’ removal from the no-fly list but also the establishment of a more robust legal mechanism to contest placement upon it.

“This policy and set of practices by the FBI is part of a much broader set of policies that reflect over-policing in Muslim-American communities,” said Diala Shamas, one of the lawyers for the four plaintiffs.

The FBI has not commented on the lawsuit.

Meanwhile, this is not the first No Fly List-related lawsuit against the FBI. In 2010 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attempted to sue US Department of Justice and the FBI over their barring of American citizens, including several veterans of the US military, who ended up on the No Fly List and have been denied entry to their own country.

The No Fly List was created by the US government’s Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. In 2012, the list was extended to around 21,000 individuals.

The list, including US citizens and residents as well as foreigners, has been repeatedly criticized on civil liberties grounds, due to ethnic, religious, economic, political and racial discrimination. It has also raised concerns about privacy and government secrecy.

The ACLU called inclusion on a list a potentially “life-altering” experience, adding that “it is not at all clear what separates a ‘reasonable-suspicion-based-on-a-reasonable-suspicion’ from a simple hunch.”

Until March, no one had successfully convinced a court to force authorities to take them off the No Fly List. Rahinah Ibrahim, a Malaysian architect, became the first person ever removed from the notorious list after the managed to force officials to admit she had been placed on the list due to an error by the agency.

Related Podcast: On the 4/21/14 broadcast of the Project Censored radio show, host Mickey Huff is joined by  co-host Dr. Deepa Kumar and Dr. Arun Kundnani, author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. The topic of the show is Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, from the national insecurity state to drone wars and beyond in the 21st century.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/Pcradiodos/PROJECT-CENSORED-041814.mp3

 

“All Wars Are Based on Deception” – Sun Tzu

I’ve been thinking of Sun Tzu’s line from “The Art of War” a lot lately because of the blatant lies about Syria currently being pushed by U.S. government officials and the corporate media. The quote is just as true today as it was in ancient China. Another quote that applies to our current situation is “Those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it.” (Edmund Burke). There’s much truth to that, but it’s only part of the story. I would add that those who profit most from major historical events such as wars and stock market crashes are motivated to recreate the conditions to repeat them. And those who only learn the winner’s version of history and are ignorant of the truth are more likely to be okay with it and let it happen. That’s why I encourage everyone to read an important article by Michael Rivero called “Fake Terror – The Road to War and Dictatorship”. It outlines how lies and deception were used to start wars from 70 BC Rome to America in the 1990s (though the lying has ramped up quite a bit since then) . Even wars we think of as being “good wars” like World War 2 are not exempt, as explained in this excerpt from the article:

Roosevelt needed an enemy, and if America would not willingly attack that enemy, then one would have to be maneuvered into attacking America, much as Marcus Licinius Crassus has maneuvered Spartacus into attacking Rome.

…The first step was to place oil and steel embargoes on Japan, using Japan’s wars on the Asian mainland as a reason. This forced Japan to consider seizing the oil and mineral rich regions in Indonesia. With the European powers militarily exhausted by the war in Europe, the United States was the only power in the Pacific able to stop Japan from invading the Dutch East Indies, and by moving the Pacific fleet from San Diego to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Roosevelt made a pre-emptive strike on that fleet the mandatory first step in any Japanese plan to extend its empire into the “southern resource area”.

…To enrage the American people as much as possible, Roosevelt needed the first overt attack by Japan to be as bloody as possible, appearing as a sneak attack much as the Japanese had done to the Russians. From that moment up until the attack on Pearl Harbor itself, Roosevelt and his associates made sure that the commanders in Hawaii, General Short and Admiral Kimmel, were kept in the dark as much as possible about the location of the Japanese fleet and its intentions, then later scapegoated for the attack. (Congress recently exonerated both Short and Kimmel, posthumously restoring them to their former ranks).

But as the Army board had concluded at the time, and subsequent de-classified documents confirmed, Washington DC knew the attack was coming, knew exactly where the Japanese fleet was, and knew where it was headed.

On November 29th, Secretary of State Hull showed United Press reporter Joe Leib a message with the time and place of the attack, and the New York Times in its special 12/8/41 Pearl Harbor edition, on page 13, reported that the time and place of the attack had been known in advance!

The much repeated claim that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence on its way to Hawaii was a lie. Among other intercepts still held in the Archives of the NSA is the UNCODED message sent by the Japanese tanker Shirya stating, “proceeding to a position 30.00 N, 154.20 E. Expect to arrive at that point on 3 December.” (near HI)

Read the complete article here: http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/ARTICLE5/index.php