By The Staff at AFP -
On Nov. 18 Jose Pimentel, an American citizen from the Dominican Republic, was arrested in New York and charged with constructing a pipe bomb. A federal informant who had been monitoring him sat by, giving him directions, having already instructed Pimentel to attack an American target in revenge for the assassination of American Islamic cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Reuters and other news agencies immediately met reports of the plot with skepticism, especially after they said Pimentel bought his bomb-making materials while accompanied by the informant, who eventually caused his arrest.
This incident was the latest in a series of bogus terror arrests that has drawn the attention of international media sources, particularly Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which ran a Nov. 16 exposé on increasing governmental efforts to fabricate terror incidents in order to generate fear that can be used to control the American people.
The Guardian report followed a study by the University of California at Berkeley showing that only three of the hundreds of terror plots investigated by the United States may have had an existence independent of the FBI. Federal informants have been scouring the country trying to create terrorist incidents in order to help the careers of U.S. attorneys and justify excessive American expenditure on anti-terrorist campaigns.
The FBI has 10,000 field agents on its payroll, and each of those agents is required to have at least four informants working for him full time, manufacturing crimes, in exchange for a paltry $400 a week, plus up to a $2,000 bonus if their lies lead to a conviction. On average, each FBI agent maintains approximately 10 such informants, meaning that 100,000 Americans on the FBI’s payroll do nothing with their day but manufacture criminal conspiracies. The U.S. Marshals, DEA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and BATFE maintain similar programs, meaning that as many as half a million Americans are earning a full-time living attempting to lure other Americans into criminal acts, only to be prosecuted by the government.
“Legally, you have to use the word ‘entrapment’ very carefully. It is a very strict legal term,” said Karen Greenberg, a professor at Fordham University.
Under U.S. law, all an FBI agent has to do in order to “sting” someone for a terror plot is show that he was “predisposed” to commit acts of terrorism. To qualify as predisposed, all one must do is express a strong opinion either opposing the U.S. government or supporting an ideology the government believes is opposed to it. Thus, if a person were to express a strong belief in Islam, that would be sufficient for U.S. domestic intelligence forces to suggest that that person commit a terrorist act, then provide him with items necessary to carry out the act.
Generally, the FBI tries to lure victims into conspiracies, in which several people with similar ideas are brought together and persuaded to commit a crime in unison—a maneuver that means that no actual ability to carry out the attack need be present. But, sometimes, the FBI is unable to bring a group of people together, in which case it manufactures the crime by providing explosives—or explosive material and instructions—to its victim, and then arrests him. Source @AFP
