The Entrapment Dividend: Setting A Few Knuckleheads Up, And Knocking The Rest Of Us Down

U.S. Lawmakers Take Aim

According to Catherine Herridge of FOX News:

U.S. Lawmakers Take Aim at Homegrown Terrorist Threat

Many Americans believe that the threat of homegrown terrorism is gravest in Europe, but according to the U.S. government, in the last 18 months more than a half-dozen plots were thwarted right here at home.

Indeed.

That's what they say. But what really happened? How much do we know about the homegrown terrorist threat in America?

Catherine Herridge chooses a couple of the FBI's most visible recent successes to illustrate her point.

Three young Ohioans were convicted in June on terrorism charges after officials gathered evidence against them that included suicide bomb belts filled with ball bearings.

Mohammed Amawi, Marwan el-Hindi and Wassim Mazloum were part of a terror cell in Toledo that wanted to launch attacks against U.S. troops overseas — made all the easier by their status as Americans.

Several questions arise here, among them: How did these three men get radicalized?

We might also ask how dangerous a belt full of ball-bearings would have been in the absence of any explosives. And we might follow up that question by asking why anyone with no bombs would ever make such a belt.

We might also ask why a group of men in Ohio found it necessary to contemplate attacking American troops overseas. If they were really driven by anti-American sentiment, surely they could have found suitable targets at home. No?

And what exactly is the status of American troops overseas? Are they legitimately considered as targets of terrorism? Isn't terrorism a strategy which attacks innocent people in order to induce fear in the general population?

Attacking American troops overseas is a matter of national self-defense, or at least that's how it seems to the citizens of occupied countries. And what are American troops doing overseas in the first place, if not occupying foreign countries?

If foreign troops were occupying America, would attacks against them be rightfully considered terrorism?

FOX News wants no part of any of these questions. Instead Catherine Herridge turns to Andrew Cochran of the Counterterrorism blog, which describes itself as

a unique, multi-expert blog dedicated to providing a one-stop gateway to the counterterrorism community

and which takes itself seriously, to say the least:

We envision the blog’s audience to be the policymakers in Congress and the Executive Branch, as well as serious students elsewhere...

No kidding. This blog is so serious that it's currently in the middle of a series about how al Qaeda has taken root in Gaza. But I digress.

Here's Catherine Herridge again:

"Being an American gives you a passport around the world," said Andrew Cochran, chairman of the Counterterrorism Foundation and editor of the Counterterrorism blog. "These again are instances of homegrowns who take it to the limit. ... These people wanted to go all the way to Iraq."

This case shows one of the distinguishing features of homegrown terrorism in the United States: a total mismatch between aspirations and capabilities. Three guys who couldn't manage daily life in Toledo were going to travel to Iraq -- to attack American troops! Sure, they were!!

Fortunately for our story, which would be far too ludicrous otherwise, not all homegrown terrorists want to "take it to the limit" -- and "go all the way to Iraq". As Catherine Herridge points out,

Other homegrown terrorists have planned attacks on the homefront. Derrick Shareef, then just 22, was inspired by a violent Islamist ideology to plan a grenade attack against a shopping mall in Rockford, Ill. He eventually pleaded guilty to terror charges.

This is quite true, and I have covered Derrick Shareef's story extensively on these pages -- in a somewhat less strident, but nonetheless extremely serious way. I also note without pleasure that -- with one notable exception -- Derrick Shareef's story has received no critical attention from so-called "professional" journalists.

But ... We Know!

Because the Toledo terror cell was tried in open court, and because a key figure in Derrick Shareef's case also testified in open court (in connection with another case), we know quite a lot about the two homegrown terror cases which illustrate the point of this FOX News article.

In both cases the major radicalizing force has been identified, though never officially acknowledged. This institutional sleight-of-hand has led to an astounding opportunity for those within the federal government who are working hard to curtail your freedom.

On their behalf, Catherine Herridge alleges without any hint of evidence:

The Internet is fast becoming the dominant tool for the training and recruitment of terrorists.

She then continues as if she had identified websites that enable the violent radicalization of homegrown terrorists:

Some lawmakers are attempting to shut down such sites and those with the most extreme propaganda tapes, often made by Al Qaeda's media arm, As-Sahab.

What does she mean by "such sites"? There's no indication in the article. Could she be referring to unnamed websites that promote Islamic extremism? And if so, what does that mean? There are those who believe the government may be interested in shutting down any website that doesn't present a Pentagon-approved view of the news of the day. Since the Pentagon lies about everything all the time, and the mainstream media go along with it almost every time, the internet -- for all its warts and sinkholes -- is the last bastion of truth, and they would love to see it shrivel away and die.

The bipartisan American foreign-and-domestic policy establishment is running an agenda so thoroughly evil that it cannot be spoken of openly and truthfully, and that's why the internet -- with its amateur truth-seekers and dedicated debunkers of official nonsense -- is portrayed as "very dangerous" to the "cream" that rises to the "top" of the military-industrial-media complex.

The "Danger" Inherent In The Internet

I don't view the internet as "dangerous" to the military-industrial-media complex, let alone "very dangerous". I see it primarily as a black hole into which much useful energy disappears every day. But on the other hand, it is the world's largest "free speech zone", and that's why any professional military organization -- perfectly aligned against the truth, trained to seek out every potential enemy and destroy it -- would tend to see it as more dangerous than it really is. In any case, dangerous or not, the Internet is now a target.

"I am continuing to work to try to bring down the terrorist Web sites on the Internet," [disgraced former Democratic Senator Joe] Lieberman said. "I think the critical role… [is] reaching out to try to stop the problem in local areas before it starts."

This preemptive approach -- "stopping" the "problem" before it "starts" -- is a foolproof recipe to "justify" meddling in anything at all, doing whatever is "necessary" to solve "problems" which don't even exist!

Yet this is exactly what federal authorities are doing.

And it's only costing us billions of dollars and our most treasured civil rights.

Catherine Herridge notes:

The shutting down of certain Web sites is a prospect some critics are dreading.

And -- great big surprise! -- she finds an Arabic defender of the Constitution to give voice to that dread:

"We have a First Amendment and we champion the Constitution, and so in no way, shape or form should we engage in censorship of the internet," said Kareem Shora, national executive director for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

The "journalistic" device we see here is quite despicable (though fully predictable) in that it gives anti-American wingnuts the opportunity to pretend that only Arabs and Muslims support the First Amendment. From there, it's an easy step to pretend that only terrorist sympathizers support the Rule of Law.

In reality -- but not on FOX -- patriots of all ethnic and religious backgrounds support the Constitution and all its amendments, particularly the Bill of Rights. But many others -- including the current administration and nearly everyone in the national media, especially FOX "News" -- take a different view: that the truth is dangerous, that the people are dangerous, and that sooner or later all of them -- the truth and the people -- will have to be destroyed.

Catherine Herridge goes on to portray an open internet as a very dangerous place indeed:

Ultimately, experts say, the Web will replace traditional terrorist training with cyber training, making it easier to recruit homegrown terrorists.

"It's not a substitute for physical field training, but it can come close to creating situations on how to train for an urban attack, a mall attack," Cochran said. "It's somewhat like what some of the 9/11 hijackers used in flight simulation software."

Beyond Ridiculous

This claim is beyond ridiculous, of course, in many ways. Terrorists training online for a mall attack? Sure! Why not terrorists going online to train for swimming to Iraq and killing American troops there?

And meanwhile: How many terrorists per year does the American government train? Count all the terrorist groups our government openly supports, such as the Special Forces. Count all terrorist groups doing clandestine operations on behalf of our government as well. But don't forget the "students" we train at schools for torture, like the infamous School of the Americas. And don't forget terrorist training at the most basic level: boot camp.

Quite apart from the numbers, American-trained terrorists are far more capable than anyone trained on a website.

And "our" terrorists are never short of resources: they are armed and equipped, fed and sheltered, moved around the world like "dumb, stupid animals" (in Henry Kissinger's notorious phrase) by the psychopathic elite they worship (and which includes Kissinger himself).

Talk about radical extremists! But I digress. Catherine Herridge continues:

According to experts, young, middle-class American Muslims are most at risk — men who don't know a lot about their religion and in an effort to educate themselves fall victim to an extreme ideology.

Herridge doesn't identify her experts, but this part of her claim is partially kind of almost true, at least somewhat.

Young, middle-class American Muslims are most at risk because they are the group being most aggressively infiltrated by violent radicals; and those who don't know much about their religion are especially vulnerable, because they're not secure enough in their beliefs to tell the violent radicals to get lost!

And, as Catherine Herridge notes,

American Muslim groups say that formula amounts to racial profiling.

Unfortunately, it does. And there's a reason for that: because it is. Furthermore, racial profiling is not only offensive to many innocent people; it's also very inefficient at detecting the dangerous elements among us.

"Giving parameters as far as race, religious views or age groups really misses the point. We should be much more sophisticated in the way we approach threats against our country," Shora said.

And that's quite true, or at least it would be, if our government were really interested in shutting down terrorism. But it isn't -- not much. It's quite a bit more interested in fomenting terrorism and using it as a political weapon. And that's why it's utterly misleading to say, as Catherine Herridge does, that

U.S. lawmakers also are looking at ways of addressing the root causes of homegrown terrorism.

Among the many problems with this claim, perhaps the most important is that it describes a question posed in a vacuum.

A Nation Of Vicious Idiots In Denial

The people who have the most trouble understanding the root causes of terrorism -- homegrown or otherwise -- deny in absolute terms that it has anything at all to do with America's foreign policy. To hear them tell the tale, it's all about "ideology".

So they write and talk and rant and rave about the "primitive" and "perverse" "radical" "violent" "hateful" "ideology" of Islam, because of which -- according to them -- people are taught to regard human life as having no value, and so on. But at the same time they deny the obvious and horrible fact that their country has deliberately killed millions and millions of innocent people, in Muslim countries and elsewhere around the world, in overt wars and convert invasions that were demonstrably carried out under false pretexts -- and continued at huge human expense long after the falsehoods were exposed to the world.

In addition to the millions of innocent people killed for lies, American troops and undercover operatives (and non-Americans hired, trained, fed and clothed, motivated and transported by American government officials) have maimed millions more, captured and tortured hundreds of thousands, and turned many millions of other innocent people into homeless refugees.

What Do We Think?

In the wake of these state-sponsored atrocities, what do we think goes on in the minds of the survivors? Do we imagine that none of them are consumed with rage over what we have done to them? Do we imagine that none of them are smart enough to figure out who did it?

YES! That's what we think. Some of us think so. Maybe most of us think so.

Barack Obama thinks so -- or at least he says so! In his supposedly brilliant speech about race in America and how it's not really an issue anymore (for light brown rich guys who have white relatives and attended elite law schools), Obama declared that "the conflicts in the Middle East" are "rooted primarily" -- not in any nation's actions or policies -- especially those of Israel -- but in "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

It's a simple solution to a complicated problem, but it's utterly useless, because it achieves its simplicity by ignoring an ocean of historical fact.

In the cesspool that's sometimes referred to as the "right" side of the blogosphere, Obama's analysis was echoed at the Doctor Bulldog and Ronin blog by Ronin, who wrote:

Hundreds of millions of muslims have conducted jihad for centuries not a single one of them ever logged online. They came from all types of races, cultures, sects of islam and they had only a single common denominator-the koran.

Ronin's solution to the terror problem is equally straight-forward:

Read the koran, understand it, outlaw it, seize them and destroy them. Problem solved.

One might wonder about the "hundreds of millions of Muslims" who have been waging their jihad for all these centuries and why so few of them have found their way into reputable history books. Invisible Muslims? Invisible jihad? Errr...

One might also wonder how anyone could possibly think that these "perverse and hateful" people would all stop attacking us if we would only seize and destroy the one book they consider Holy.

But please let's not get hung up on such irrelevant questions.

Many more penetrating questions remain to be asked, such as: What do we know about the three-man Terror Cell from Toledo? And what do we know about the lone-wolf Mall Bomber from Rockford?

The Toledo Terror Cell

The terror cell from Toledo, the group that included Mohammed Amawi, Marwan el-Hindi and Wassim Mazloum [L-R in photo], had another member whose name doesn't appear in the FOX News report quoted above, probably because he wasn't convicted along with the others.

But he was the ringleader. His name was Darren Griffin and he was the one who brought the others together.

Why wasn't he convicted? Why wasn't he even charged? Because he was working for the FBI. That's why.

According to an AP report published in the International Herald Tribune,

Griffin testified that he won the trust of the men by posing as a disgruntled soldier who converted to Islam. He secretly recorded his conversations with them for about two years until they were arrested in 2006.

At one point, Griffin told an FBI agent that he would meet with the men and "get them together to train," according to a transcript of the conversation.

Apparently, the jury didn't care how or why the "terror cell" had been brought together, or whose idea it was. Obviously, the jury didn't care whether the "terrorists" were actually planning to commit an act of terrorism or whether they were merely humoring a bizarre "friend" about his a crazy plan to attack an impossible target.

The jury also didn't care, apparently, that "investigators arrested them even though they found no guns, explosives or targets."

Instead, they paid attention to the recordings. FBI investigators, sifting through two years of recordings secretly made by Darren Griffin, pieced together a narrative that made it seem as if the three convicted "terrorists" were actually guilty of making this "terror cell" happen, and that the fourth one -- the ringleader, the planner, the FBI asset -- was entirely innocent.

It's not the first or only time something like this has happened.

The Rockford Mall Bomber

Derrick Shareef [left], the so-called "CherryVale Mall Bomber" form Rockford, Illinois, is sometimes referred to as a "lone wolf", but he wasn't plotting alone -- not by any means. Shareef was "helped along" by Jameel Chrisman [below, right], if you don't care what you say; you'd say "pushed along" if you wanted to be more accurate.

It was Chrisman who suggested attacking the CherryVale Mall; he also suggested the date of the attack (the last Friday before Christmas, 2006); and he suggested the weapons to be used (hand grenades). Shareef and Chrisman cased the mall twice, having driven there in Chrisman's car, and it was Chrisman who set up a bogus "arms deal" in which Derrick Shareef thought he was going to obtain grenades.

The "arms deal" was suspicious enough to alarm anyone not suffering from terminal stupidity: Shareef was to receive four hand grenades, a handgun and some ammunition, in exchange for a pair of stereo speakers.

But Shareef didn't suspect a thing, and the grenades were nonfunctional, and the ammo was blanks, and as soon as Shareef took possession of the "weapons" and placed them in the trunk of Chrisman's car, he was arrested by FBI agents, who had been watching the entire bogus transaction.

What happened? Derrick Shareef had been deceived. Jameel Chrisman, like Darren Griffin, had been working for the FBI. Chrisman had been sent to Rockford to meet Shareef, to "befriend" him, and to lead him across an invisible line. And Chrisman, who had performed similar services for the FBI in the past, was wonderfully effective.

When Chrisman arrived in Rockford, Shareef was working in a video store. Chrisman went there to meet him, introduced himself as a fellow Muslim, and found out it was his lucky day: Shareef was homeless and preparing to move in with the store manager. So Chrisman offered Shareef a place to live -- with his three wives and nine children.

Within hours Shareef was moving into the home the FBI had bought for Chrisman. The two "new friends" lived together for several months before Chrisman arranged the bogus arms deal that led to Shareef's arrest; in that time Chrisman recorded every conversation he and Shareef had. The FBI produced a selection of snippets edited from these hundreds of hours of recordings, a selection chosen to show Shareef in the worst possible light, while hiding as much as possible Chrisman's role as a provocateur.

But it was a dismal failure. The affidavit filed by the FBI in this case clearly shows Chrisman leading -- every step of the way.

Rolling Stone and "The Fear Factory"

Rolling Stone featured the Shareef / Chrisman story in an article by Guy Lawson called "The Fear Factory", which pulled too many punches for my liking, but also broke some new ground.

Guy Lawson spoke with agents of the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) who explained how the feds were working hard to market their "counter-terrorism" program in the face of opposition from local police chiefs who see people getting killed all the time due to gang warfare and other gun-related violence (to name just a few problems) and who see "terrorism" more as a threat to their already limited budgets than to their continued existence.

As Lawson wrote:

There is considerable skepticism in local police departments in northern Illinois about the nature and extent of the threat posed by terrorism. There are 415 local law-enforcement agencies in the district, many of which remain unconvinced that the threat is as dire as the JTTF maintains. Many departments refuse to allocate even one or two officers to spend four hours on basic terror training. Rather than consider the idea that the cops closest to the ground might have a better perspective on their communities, the JTTF addressed the problem by forming a TLOC —Terrorism Liaison Officer's Committee. The point is to merchandise the menace of terrorism to the police.

"It's a matter of marketing strategy," says Mark Lundgren, a special agent who oversees the TLOC. "These terrorism acts are trending toward the homegrown, self-activated, self-radicalized — the sort of thing that could literally pop up in your back yard. The typical things we would use to detect terrorism don't work, because these people are off the charts, so to speak. Nine times out of ten, for the next decade, it's going to be the local cop who stops the terror attacks."

Lundgren, who resembles a young Gary Busey, fairly glistens with certainty about the value of his work. "What are you trying to sell to the local police departments?" I ask.

"Awareness. Motivation," he says. "It's a very hard sell. You walk into a chief of police in a crime-ridden district. The first thing he's going to tell you is, 'The guys in this area are killing people. The guys you're telling me about —it's not make-believe, I understand that — but they haven't killed anyone lately in my district.' "

"Or ever," I say.

"Exactly."

Lawson's article drew a fiery response from the FBI. The FBI's piece, written by Assistant Director John Miller, claimed that Lawson had ignored facts that didn't support his pre-ordained conclusion. Unfortunately for John Miller, this is an unsupportable claim. Guy Lawson's conclusion springs naturally from the information readily available in the public record; his own research clearly confirms what astute observers had already deduced.

But John Miller clearly doesn't care about any of that; he's telling the story the way he wants it told. He shows his disdain for the truth in many places, but never more brazenly than in the following passage:

At any point during his planning process, Mr. Shareef could have stopped his actions, but he chose not to. There is no evidence that he ever wavered in his desire to murder holiday shoppers in the CherryVale Mall that day. Would he have succeeded had it not been for the diligence of the JTTF?

In point of fact, it was Chrisman who was unwavering, while Shareef hesitated. It was Chrisman who wanted to murder holiday shoppers; Shareef himself didn't want to murder anyone. Shareef was talking about vandalizing a courthouse in the middle of the night when nobody was around. He certainly didn't see himself as a killer -- let alone a suicide bomber! The idea of attacking shoppers, the idea of attacking just before the holiday, the idea of using hand grenades, the idea of murdering innocent people -- these ideas all sprang from the fertile imagination of William "Jameel" Chrisman, an FBI asset, an entrapment specialist, and a good one.

Shareef was being manipulated by a professional; and if he had balked, he might have found himself homeless; at the very least he would have been endlessly humiliated with respect to the "fellow Muslim" who had offered him a home.

And John Miller has the shameless gall to ask, "Would he have succeeded had it not been for the diligence of the JTTF?"

Clearly the question is meant as rhetorical, and the expected answer is "Maybe". But in reality the question is answerable, and the answer is an unqualified "NO."

Derrick Shareef wouldn't have been trying to get grenades; he wouldn't have been trying to attack CherryVale Mall; he wouldn't have been trying to kill anyone at all, had it not been for the "diligence" of the JTTF!

If it shocks or even surprises you to see an Assistant Director of a national security agency lying in such a despicable fashion, you haven't been paying attention. That's how they do it nowadays. It would be shocking if he stood up and told the truth.

And in any case, John Miller's obfuscation is the least of our problems. But it does fit in with some other basic truths about which the FBI feels distinctly uncomfortable. As the Texan blog Grits For Breakfast reported, the FBI won't assure Congress it doesn't tolerate 'serious violent felonies' by informants. Makes you feel a bit safer, doesn't it?

Federal Legislation To Enable The Study [sic] Of Violent Radicalization And Homegrown Terrorism

In "response" to the "threat" posed by "homegrown terrorists" such as "The Toledo Terror Cell" and "The Rockford Mall Bomber", Congress has been working on an act which will grant enormous funding and vast police powers to a government which is already overloaded with both; in addition it will create an "academic center" for the "study" of "violent radicalization".

In truth, this "research center" will be a vast data repository, where the feds will store every available tidbit about every available warm body, then use still-to-be-discovered data mining techniques to wring every possible political advantage from the terabytes of personal data the center is designed to house.

It won't be a proper study of violent radicalization, nor will it provide anything resembling an accurate view of homegrown terrorism, for two main reasons. First, as mentioned above, America's military role in destroying much of the rest of the world is off-limits for such a study; in the official US government narrative, from which none may depart, Muslims are radicalized by violent and perverse ideologies alone.

Furthermore, the role of the government-funded agents provocateur is always scrubbed from the official tales of these homegrown terrorists, forcing professional liars like John Miller and bottom-feeding pseudo-journalists like Catherine Herridge to resort to sheer pretense. Thus they pretend that these "violent radicals" -- the "mall bombers" and "terror cells" of modern America -- are "radicalized" by the internet. What else can they do? They can't admit that the government itself has "radicalized" a handful of gullible chumps through a series of face-to-face confrontations with deliberate lying instigators. Nor can they admit that these instigators are working hand-in-glove with the FBI, in an effort to draw unsuspecting chumps into legal nightmares. So instead they pretend they've busted real terrorists. They pretend the agents provocateur didn't exist. They pretend that we're utterly, helplessly, hopelessly, stupid. And in many cases we are. But not always.

Earlier this year, Mother Jones published a piece called "Don't Even Think About It", which was aptly subtitled: The war against "homegrown terrorism" is on. Enter the thought police.

In that article, James Ridgeway and Jean Casella wrote:

Largely ignored by the mainstream candidates—as well as the mainstream media—are the latest efforts to bring the fear home by targeting "homegrown terrorism"—another new catchphrase. Only liberal Democrat Dennis Kucinich and libertarian Republican Ron Paul have warned that in the name of stopping domestic terrorist plots before they happen, Congress is in the midst of passing legislation aimed not at actual hate crimes or even terrorist conspiracies, but at talking, Web surfing, or even thinking about jihadism or other "extremist belief systems." Last October, a piece of legislation called the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 sailed through the House with near-universal bipartisan support; it is likely to reach the floor of the Senate early this year and appears certain to be signed into law.
...

The legislation would create a National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism composed of 10 members whose vaguely defined job would be to "examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence," and to "build upon and bring together the work of other entities" including various federal, state, and local agencies, academics, and foreign governments. The commission is charged with issuing a report after 18 months. It also directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to set up a center to study "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism" at a U.S. university, and to "conduct a survey" of what other countries are doing to prevent homegrown terrorism.
...

The bill raises the potential for government encroachments on civil rights in part through the way it defines some basic terms. The text of the bill says that "the term 'violent radicalization' means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change." It gives no clue as to what would qualify, under this law, as an "extremist belief system," leaving this open to broad interpretation according to the prevailing political winds.

In addition, simply by designating the "process of adopting or promoting" belief systems as a target for government concern or control, the bill moves into dangerous territory. The director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office, Caroline Fredrickson, said in a statement on the bill, "Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be extreme."
...

What the Homegrown Terrorism bill does is bring back into the equation not just violent actions, and not just violent plots, but the words and ideas that may (or may not) inspire or encourage them somewhere down the road. It moves toward designating people as terrorists based not on what they do, but on what they say and what they think.

And all of this is allegedly necessary to study what causes violent radicalization. Hah!

We could do better with a complete study of violent radicalization through entrapment; from the limited amount of reliable published material, we know a fair bit about how and when it works, and how and when it doesn't.

When Entrapment Works, It's Ugly ...

From the available evidence we can conclude that Chrisman's entrapment of Shareef was guaranteed when Shareef agreed to move in with Chrisman and his very unconventional family. Shareef's dependence on Chrisman -- for something as essential as shelter -- was a very powerful weapon working constantly in Chrisman's favor.

Not all entrapment is done in-house, of course, and not all of it is done by the FBI, either. In New York City, Shahawar Matin Siraj [left] was entrapped by a specialist named Osama Eldawoody [below, right], who was working for the NYPD.

Eldawoody ingratiated himself to his intended target by offering him rides across the city. The FBI asset would often drive Siraj home from work, and along the way he would "teach" him about radical Islam.

Siraj and his family had come to America from Pakistan, where they were persecuted for being "too secular" -- i.e. not sufficiently radical. Siraj was working in his father's bookstore when Eldawoody walked in; according to his family, Siraj had never had a violent thought in his head until Osama Eldawoody started planting "perverse and hateful ideologies" there. Eventually Siraj came to see Eldawoody as a mentor, a father-figure. And Eldawoody took full advantage, playing the gullible Siraj like a toy fiddle.

The NYPD arrested Siraj in August of 2004, just before the Republican National Convention opened there, and accused him of plotting to bomb a subway station. Ever since, he's been known as "The Subway Bomber", even though he didn't have a bomb, didn't have access to one, didn't know how to make one, and had no interest in bombing anybody.

In recordings played during Siraj's trial, Eldawoody prompts Siraj (and co-conspirator, and mental patient, James Elshafay) to talk about bombing a subway station. Siraj doesn't like the idea much; he says he'll have to ask his mother! Does this sound like a committed suicide bomber to you? Nevertheless, the jury convicted Siraj, and the NYPD put Eldawoody on the payroll: he now receives $3200 per month for "services rendered" in an arrangement likely to be "permanent".

In a bizarre coda, after Siraj was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the "conspiracy", his parents cried "entrapment" and the whole family was promptly arrested. A little truth goes a long way, and the NYPD were not having any of it. Siraj's mother and sister have been released on bail; to the best of my knowledge his father is still incarcerated.

... And When It Doesn't Work, It's Still Ugly

The question of dependency is crucial, and it was grievously overlooked in the southern California case of Craig Monteilh.

On the first Friday of each month, Mohammed Elsisy, an Egyptian-born software engineer, usually drives from his home in Irvine, Calif., to the King Fahad mosque in Culver City, Calif., to deliver the khutba, or sermon.

Elsisy thought the first Friday of this past June would be no different.

But little did he know something totally unexpected was about to happen that would make this particular Friday the most memorable for years to come.

Elsisy had two passengers in his car at the time.

In the back seat sat Ahmed Niazi, 33, a language teacher and a friend, while in the passenger seat sat a man who converted to Islam almost a year ago.

The man was 44-year-old Craig Monteilh, but he went by the name "Farouk Aziz."

"Monteilh started talking about the Iraq war," Niazi said. "He went off on a rant against U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East."

But then, out of the blue, Monteilh said something that sent chills down the spines of his companions.

He asked Elsisy and Niazi if they knew of an "operation" he could be part of.

Pin-drop silence followed. Elsisy’s eyes bounced over to the rearview mirror and traded a horrified glance with Niazi.

"Blood froze up in our veins," Elsisy recalls.

Monteilh had violated one of the essential rules of successful entrapment stingers: he hadn't created any dependencies. He wasn't even driving the car.

In one of the most laughable details of this particular sad story, Monteilh had apparently followed his handler's instructions to the letter, and the instruction manual had obviosly told the stinger to spend a year getting to know the target.

Exactly a year earlier, Monteilh had walked into the Islamic Center of Irvine and declared his intention to embrace Islam.

Issa Edah-Tally, president of the center, said Monteilh, known only as Farouk then, was just another convert among many who took Shahada, or declaration of faith, at the center and became regulars at the mosque.

"We don’t ask people for their real names and don’t keep track of who attends prayer service," Edah-Tally said.

Monteilh started attending regularly and enrolled in the weekly adult Arabic class taught by Niazi.

"Farouk told me his real name was Frederick Jordon," Niazi recalled. Monteilh also told Niazi that he was of French and Moroccan descent.

However, when Monteilh joined the Berlitz Language Institute’s Costa Mesa branch – where Niazi works – to learn Arabic, he filled out a form and wrote his name as Craig Monteilh.

"I don’t know why he lied about his real name," Niazi said. "And I don’t know why he chose to write down his real name knowing I worked at the Berlitz."

Monteilh wasn't the slickest entrapment artist ever, was he? But still ...

A few months after his conversion, Monteilh was able to make several friends at the mosque. Some recalled how he often went on anti-American tirades, blasting U.S. foreign policy and decrying the suffering of Muslims throughout the world.

But then he started talking about something else.

Ashruf Zied, a software engineer from Irvine, Calif., said Monteilh approached him one day claiming to have access to weapons and asking if he wanted to join him in "waging jihad."

Zied was floored. "I was completely taken aback by what he said," Zied said. "I said, hold it there. What are you talking about?"

Zied said he tried to give Monteilh advice, but found him argumentative and set in his ways.

As his call for armed war became more aggressive, some frightened worshippers stopped attending the prayers altogether.
...

Elsisy, Niazi and Zied were shocked to find out [...] that Monteilh had a criminal record.

Monteilh had told the three he worked as a fitness trainer and was a former pastor.

However, a routine search on the Internet revealed that Monteilh had an extensive criminal record dating as far back as 1987.

The charges included the following: separate charges of grand theft in 1987, 2002 and 2003; burglary in 2002 and forgery in 2003.

That's not the way it's supposed to work, of course. The supposedly freshly converted Muslim is supposed to hide his criminal record (like Chrisman, a convicted felon, hid his history from Derrick Shareef). And he's supposed to find dim-witted Muslims who will depend on him and ride around in his car (like Chrisman and Eldawoody did), not software engineers who drive their own cars.

Why is is all this entrapment going on? In the absence of unvarnished truth from our national media or from the Assistant Director of the FBI, we may never know for sure, but we can certainly make reasonable deductions from the available facts.

The immediate objective of all this entrapment is clearly to find gullible Muslim knuckleheads and draw them into making rash statements, posing for martyrdom videos, and doing other stupid things to incriminate themselves: thus we have one chump trading speakers for nonfunctional weapons in Rockford, and three others stuffing ball bearings into inert "suicide belts" in Toledo.

This would be almost funny, except ...

Important Aspects Overlooked

Some of the most important aspects of this story are the most overlooked.

It's bad enough that a law "enforcement" service should use criminal informants whose illegal conduct is then protected, as if these lying rats were somehow above the law.

It's bad enough that the gullible young fools who are entrapped by these informants are doomed to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

But the larger ramifications of this multi-layered farce are much more disturbing.

The barrage of news stories about how we are constantly under threat from the "violent radical Muslims" who walk among us is not only palpably false but also feeds directly into the false "justification" for our wars of aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and perhaps in Iran next -- in which we have already killed more than a million completely innocent people.

Furthermore, the fear generated by these not-quite-legitimate terrorists has almost led us to the point of voluntarily accepting a police state. But not quite.

Implementing Legislation That Hasn't Even Been Passed

The "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act" has not yet been passed. It's been approved by the House but it's still in committee in the Senate. However, despite this seemingly vital impediment, some portions of the bill are already being implemented -- just as if it had been passed and signed into law!

[Thanks to Laurie Dobson for this video. If you live in Maine, you ought to vote for an independent Senate candidate who stands for Peace and Sanity (and you only have one to choose from). And if you don't live there, you should still support her, in my cold and humble opinion. This has been a public service announcement.]

In Short

The threat of homegrown terrorism is now so grave that we must take extraordinary action to protect ourselves.

This grave threat is personified by the Toledo Terror Cell and the Rockford Mall Bomber, who are presented to the nation by the likes of FOX News and the Counterterrorism blog as the face of the homegrown terror threat. They are portrayed as such for a reason: they are the most visible "successes" of the FBI and its JTTFs. However:

Both of these cases were the work of admitted agents provocateur. In both cases the agents provocateur were entrapment specialists working for the FBI. In neither case -- according to the government -- was the public in any danger.

But the threat posed by these terrorists and others of their ilk is so serious that we must shred some of our remaining civil liberties in order to protect ourselves, even though they are now in prison for having taken part in the plotting of crimes they never could have accomplished, and never would have thought of on their own.

The shredding of our civil liberties to protect ourselves against this threat is so righteous and so vital to our continued existence that it has been started even before the legislation enabling it has been passed.

Does that make sense to you? It makes perfect sense to me!

We are now so far through the looking glass, most of us can't even remember when we fell in.

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The Torture State: Innocents Suffer; Villains Walk; Media: "Next!"

In an excellent piece posted Friday, Chris Floyd provides an overview of the week's revelations regarding the Bush administration's deliberate and illegal efforts to institutionalize torture.

It's the most despicable tale, yet I urge you to read as much of it as you can stand. We simply need to know what's being done -- to our country, to our world, to our future, and in our name -- if we are to have any hope of dealing with it properly (or at all).

Floyd provides copious links, to the recent McClatchy series on the subject and much else; as he says, it really has been a remarkable week -- yet another totally disgusting, nauseating week for those who care about truth, and justice, and what used to be called "the American way".

There's no longer any way to deny the plain fact that Bush, Cheney, and their circle of spinners deliberately concocted a false "justification" for the horrendous acts which they were determined to commit. And yet, as Floyd points out, no consequences appear to be forthcoming -- soon or ever.

Why not?

Floyd suggests the answer can be found between the lines of a piece from Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times.

Rutten has also compiled a damning account of the administration's embrace of torture, but he argues that there shouldn't be any criminal or legal responsibility attached to this gruesome record, because in America we solve problems like this through the electoral system.

In other words, according to Rutten, if you can get yourself elected, no matter what you do while in office, the worst that should happen to you is that you might lose your job.

Floyd quotes Rutten:

The Bush administration has been wretchedly mistaken in its conception of executive power, deceitful in its push for war with Iraq and appalling in its scheming to make torture an instrument of state power. But a healthy democracy punishes policy mistakes, however egregious, and seeks redress for its societal wounds, however deep, at the ballot box and not in the prisoner's dock.

And Floyd comments:

The cognitive dissonance of this conclusion was so painful and severe that I had to read it several times to fully take in that it meant exactly what it said: Rutten believes with all his heart that the official practice of deliberate, systematic torture – a clear and unambiguous war crime which he himself has just outlined in careful detail – is ultimately nothing more than a “wretched mistake,” a “policy difference” that should not be “criminalized.” And how can this be? The answer is obvious, if unspoken: because it was done by the United States government – and nothing the United States government ever does can possibly be criminal, or evil. It can only be, at most, a mistake, a conceptual error, an ill-considered policy, a botched attempt at carrying out a noble intention.

If any other country had a policy “to make torture an instrument of state power, " Rutten would undoubtedly condemn it as a vicious evil.
...

But it appears that Rutten's outrage at injustice has its limits. It does not extend to actually punishing those responsible for torture and murder – if those responsible are the leaders of the American government. They are to be allowed to finish their terms, then live out their lives in wealth, privilege, comfort and safety. To do otherwise, says Rutten – to insist that no one is above the law – "risks the stability of our own electoral politics."

There's a lot more from Chris Floyd and I suggest you read it all. But there's also more to the story.

Arun, musing, suggests the hidden subtext of Rutten's column may be somewhat different. In Arun's words,

it could simply be that the politicians consider themselves to be a special breed of human being to whom the laws that apply to the rest of the United States do not apply.

I don't see these observations as mutually exclusive. In my view, these are two poisonous forces working together: America can do no wrong, and elected officials are above the law.

I won't quibble with Chris Floyd regarding Tim Rutten's sincerity, or his status as a "respected" "liberal" "journalist". A less generous writer might suggest that Rutten's status, given his context, reveals something about the nature of propaganda.

Rutten's suggestion that America's troubles can be sorted out through the electoral process -- and that the most "justice" a politician can suffer is the loss of his job -- would be thoroughly worthless, as Floyd points out, even if we had a functional electoral process. But we don't.

The torturers and war criminals we're talking about here were never legitimately elected -- a fact that has magically vanished as far as the national media are concerned -- and every day that major newspapers carry on as if they were elected [twice!] constitutes nothing less than a crime against humanity.

They have no right to the offices in which they do their evil work. They longed for a crisis, then they precipitated one; they started "the long war", and then they used the war to "justify" the extraordinary powers claimed by the unelected president. Everything this administration has done has been illegitimate -- every single act of war, every single draconian bill passed, every single "extra-judicial" killing, every single act of rendition, every single act of torture.

All of it -- the stolen elections, the self-inflicted terror, the regime of torture, the wars of aggression, the secret laws -- all of it -- was quite evidently planned in advance and predicated on the notion that the national "news" media would go along with it. Which they have.

What we're looking at here is a situation in which no major newspaper will call for charges against men who are obviously -- and admittedly -- guilty of treason, war crimes, and horrendous crimes against humanity.

So let's get this straight: There is no possible punishment which could even begin to approach "justice" in this case. None.

The dogs of war -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gates, Rice, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Grossman, Woolsey, and all the rest -- have done so much damage to the entire world that no punishment could possibly be sufficient. Nothing could even come close.

Imagine the most horrible sort of punishment being inflicted on one of these people. Picture him (or her) under the worst conditions of torture you can contemplate. See his home and belongings destroyed; listen to his children weeping. Imagine that all his descendants were doomed to inhabit a land in which every single thing was contaminated with radioactive waste. Think of all his friends and relatives scattered to foreign countries where they aren't welcome, or living among death and fear and foreign troops and foreign mercenaries and all the other debris of modern war.

Now multiply by a million.

This is what these people deserve. But no opinion columnist (liberal or otherwise) for any establishment newspaper (left coast or elsewhere) could ever get such an opinion published -- and if he wants to keep his job, he'd best not submit such a thing to an editor, either.

Justice is as justice does. Derrick Shareef is in prison, probably for the rest of his life. His crime? He fell under the influence of an FBI agent posing as a wannabe terrorist, who gave him a place to live, strung him along by the nose, and arranged an "arms deal" in which Shareef gave another undercover agent a pair of stereo speakers for four nonfunctional grenades.

Shareef's motives may have been despicable, but he never hurt anybody. He's in prison for what he agreed to do, for complying with the suggestions of an entrapment expert who was sent to get him. And he's one of many angry (or stupid) young Muslims who have been entrapped by "counter-terrorists" working for the federal or local governments.

At the other end of the spectrum we find George Bush and his criminal cronies, who openly conspired not only to break the law but to get it changed so that it would no longer constrain them, so that they could claim legal cover for acts and policies which no sane American could possibly countenance. And they're scot-free.

Meanwhile, nobody who writes for an establishment publication can call 'em like they see 'em. Not a one. Not anymore -- unless he sees 'em crooked.

Tim Rutten is playing a game we've discussed here more than once. He's connecting the dots with a false narrative. He's leaving out essential bits of context, and leaping to conclusions that are not warranted by any facts or any logical reasoning, although they may well be essential for the continued comfort of Tim Rutten and his family.

And it's one of the most important ways, in my observation, that the establishment "news" outlets protect the criminal regime they serve.

In previous situations where I've observed this game being played, I have suspected that the journalist in question was doing -- or thought he was doing -- the best he could under the circumstances. He was getting factual information into the public record, and even though it was wrapped in manure, his path to print may have seemed like a better option than the path followed by, let us say, William Glaberson.

Glaberson writes for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune (the Eastern liberal "elite" and their European connections) and recently he's thrown all his skill and craft into a spectacular hit piece against William Kuebler. Kuebler, as we've seen, represents Omar Khadr, the young Canadian held at Gitmo, whom the Americans want to try for war crimes for something he may or may not have done when he was fourteen years old.

Kuebler has been claiming that the evidence against his client has been fabricated; the prosecution doesn't deny it. Kuebler has been saying that his client has been tortured; the prosecution doesn't deny that either. Kuebler has been saying there's no way Omar Khadr should be on trial based on the so-called evidence, and that there's no way he could get a fair trial even if there were evidence against him, because the military tribunal process is inherently flawed.

Glaberson's take on it: Kuebler is a crank. He should shut up about the process already and get on with it -- start going through the motions of pretending to offer a defense while an illegitimate and thoroughly corrupt government gets on with the ruination of the young man's life -- and that of the whole world.

Khadr is accused of throwing a hand grenade that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002.

Think about that for a second.

If we can bomb, invade and occupy a country we've been destroying by proxy for more than twenty years, all based on one false pretext after another, and anyone who opposes the invading army can be captured and incarcerated for six years and branded a terrorist and tried for war crimes...

... in a "legal" setting where where torture is OK, where confessions extracted under torture -- and under conditions no one wants to read about -- are considered sufficient, where so-called "respected liberal journalists" discuss such practices without seeking to redress them, and where other "journalists" feed their faces by ridiculing the honest people ...

... then where are we?

Here. And now. And sinking fast.

~~~

Explore some links, if you will:

Seton Hall University: Guantanamo Reports

Tom Lasseter for McClatchy: America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men

U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases

Militants found recruits among Guantanamo's wrongly detained

Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret

Taliban ambassador wielded power within Guantanamo

Documents undercut Pentagon's denial of routine abuse

Ex-detainees allege that U.S. troops abused Quran

U.S. hasn't apologized to or compensated ex-detainees

Deck stacked against detainees in legal proceedings

Warren P. Strobel for McClatchy: General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

Strobel quotes Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, US Army (retired), who "led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison":

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes [...] The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

More from Warren Strobel: Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross

Andy Worthington at AntiWar dot Com: John McCain, Torture Puppet

Juan Cole at Informed Comment: The Great Torture Scandal

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post: Abu Ghraib? Doesn't Ring a Bell.

Think Progress: Ex-State Dept. official: Hundreds of detainees died in U.S. custody, at least 25 murdered.

Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times: Torture began at the top

William Glaberson: An unlikely antagonist in the detainees' corner

Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque: Torturegate: Truth, But No Consequences

Arun (Musing): Now I understand

Bogus Terror: Feds Wage War Against The Rule Of Law

The Other Osama

Shahawar Matin Siraj [photo] was a young man when his family moved from Pakistan to the United States. The family had been persecuted in Pakistan because they were "too secular", and they came to the US looking for religious freedom. But they found something else again.

Matin Siraj was working in his father's store when Osama Eldawoody walked in. Eldawoody talked up Siraj, a doe-eyed dolt who was barely competent to sell Islamic books. Eldawoody found out that Siraj lived across the city, and that he rode the subway a lot. Eldawoody started offering Siraj rides home from work. The two would talk in the car.

The much older Eldawoody established a surrogate-father relationship with the innocent and gullible youngster, taught him about violent jihad, told him that to be "true" to Allah he had to attack the Americans, and got him to draw a map of the Herald Square subway station. This crude drawing would be used against Siraj at trial, after Eldawoody "blew the whistle" on Siraj and his plans.

Unknown to Siraj -- or to an alleged accomplice, James Elshafay -- Eldawoody was working for the NYPD counter-terrorism unit.

He had been assigned to visit mosques and write down the plate numbers of the cars in the parking lots, to visit the Islamic bookstores looking for a likely mark. He couldn't have found a better one than Siraj, who had never had a violent thought in his life -- until Eldawoody took the young man "under his wing", so to speak.

Eldawoody [photo] led Siraj along by the nose, or at least he tried to. At one point Eldawoody asked Siraj if he was ready to attack and Siraj replied that he had to ask his mother.

Hi Mom, it's me. I was wondering, well, actually one of my friends was wondering, would it be OK if me and some friends blew up the subway station? Puh-leeze!

Siraj was arrested in August of 2004 and charged with plotting to bomb the Herald Square station. He was convicted in 2005, even though he had no bombs, no bomb-making materials, no knowledge of bomb-making, and even more importantly, no desire to hurt anyone. In January of 2006 he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, and at that point his family, who had been quiet thus far, started talking about entrapment.

The next day -- early the very next morning -- his entire family was arrested and taken into custody, charged with immigration violations. After a lengthy publicity battle, the government allowed Matin's mother and sister out on bond, and now they work in the store, while Matin serves his time ... and the father is still in prison, more than a year later.

It's not about immigration. It's about entrapment. The word must not be uttered.

Heavy Pieces

In the Terror War against the Rule of Law, the heavy pieces are beginning to move into place, and quite visibly, too: even the so-called alternative media are starting to get a vague idea about some of it. Their coverage comes way too late, and it's too fragmented to do any of us much good, in my opinion. But then again, I've been wrong before. I would love to be wrong about this.

As I was saying: a couple of long and relevant pieces have appeared recently in the quasi-dissident media, both with good points, both with gaping holes. At least they complement each other.

Mother Jones has a heavily annotated piece by James Ridgeway and Jean Casella called "Don't Even Think About It" which describes the crackdown on your civil rights that's sure to come as more and more resources are devoted to striking at "the roots of terrorism". Unfortunately for you, the striking is being done by people who have no idea where the roots of terrorism lie, and/or no intention of finding out, and they certainly wouldn't share that information with you even if they did have it. Oh well.

At Rolling Stone, Guy Lawson's "The Fear Factory" delves into the world of fabricated terror, shining a spotlight on William "Jameel" Chrisman [photo right], the former FBI asset who entrapped Derrick Shareef [sketch below].

Lawson also points out that the FBI counter-terrorists have no intention of sharing any information with you, either.

Neither piece does a very good job at showing the "big picture", but they both show parts of that picture fairly well.

The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces

Lawson's piece focuses on the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces, about which he observes:

Since 9/11, the number of such outfits across the country has tripled. With more than 2,000 FBI agents now assigned to 102 task forces, the JTTFs have effectively become a vast, quasi-secret arm of the federal government, granted sweeping new powers that outstrip those of any other law-enforcement agency. The JTTFs consist not only of local police, FBI special agents and federal investigators from Immigration and the IRS, but covert operatives from the CIA. The task forces have thus effectively destroyed the "wall" that historically existed between law enforcement and intelligence-gathering. Under the Bush administration, the JTTFs have been turned into a domestic spy agency, like Britain's MI5 -- one with the powers of arrest.

Lawson questions the practice of instigating terror plots, and points out it tends to produce the "victories" in the war on terror that are so essential to the continuation of the war.

He mentions a series of famously "foiled" "terror plots", all of which were set up by law-enforcement agents who had "infiltrated" groups of wannabe terrorists, or recruited such groups themselves, after which they served as agents-provocateur, organizing the alleged wannabes to work on an impossible plot for which they could then be busted.

Lawson provides a host of frightening insights into the mentality of the people who are supposed to be protecting us. One of my favorites: a telling exchange with Sgt. Paul DeRosa of the Chicago Police Department:

Chicago has one of the largest Muslim populations in the country -- some 400,000, DeRosa estimates. "Experts say that between five and ten percent of Muslims are extremists. So you take it down to one percent. What's one percent of 400,000? Forty thousand? Technically there could be 40,000 —"

"You mean 4,000," I say.

DeRosa pauses. "Right," he says. "Four thousand." He forges on. "Most people who come to America who are Middle Eastern come for a good reason. But there's still a percentage that may be here that don't like us. They are with the extremists."

Aside from the obvious difficulty with easy math -- if that's what it was -- the question begs to be raised: If there are 4,000 extremists in Chicago alone, why aren't any of them attacking?

The Circular Dance

Ask a question such as this in a JTTF context, and you can go around in circles forever, as illustrated by the following conversation between Lawton and Special Agent Robert Holley, a JTTF Counterterrorism Squad supervisor

When I ask what kinds of cases his CT squad has made, Holley cites the example of a local cab driver who came up on the JTTF's radar some time back —he won't say how or why. The man was East African, Holley says, a suspected Islamic extremist "connected to known bad guys overseas." After being interviewed by the JTTF, the cabbie decided to leave the country. Nothing criminal had occurred, and no charges were laid. The cab driver had simply come to the attention of the JTTF, and that in itself was enough to dispose of the matter.

"Can we consider that a success because we didn't put him in jail?" Holley asks. "Absolutely. This guy is no longer here. He is not a threat to one person in the United States."

"Was he ever a threat?" I ask.

"We opened up an investigation."

"But isn't that a circular argument?"

"Was he a bomb-thrower?" Holley concedes. "Probably not. Did he want to go into a mall and attack? No."

And that's just the beginning of the circular dance.

The next morning, I meet with three members of the Field Intelligence Group. [...] None of the three analysts in the FIG have Arabic-language skills or extensive experience in the countries they are supposed to monitor. To keep informed, they read newspapers and intelligence reports. They then issue bulletins to police departments about perceived threats.

"What is the biggest threat?" I ask.

There is a long pause.

"I think it's very dangerous if we start to identify that," an analyst named Julie Irvine says.

"The enemy is listening," Assistant Special Agent in Charge Gregory Fowler adds later. "I drill that into my people's heads every day. Foreign-intelligence agencies and terrorists are listening. The FBI is on a war footing."

When I express skepticism at the nature of the cases being brought by the JTTF, and the wild-goose chases that seem to occupy its time, Fowler says people don't understand the "threat stream" facing the nation. [...]

"The public is never going to see the evidence we have," Fowler says. "We don't want to reveal our hand or tip our sources. You cannot judge the nature of the terrorist threat to the United States based on the public record."

"But with such strictures," I ask, "how does a citizen become informed about the threat?"

"I have access to the information," Fowler says. "I have a lot of faith in the judgment of the common citizen. A lot of people understand the nature of the threat."

Are you dizzy yet? People don't understand the "threat stream" facing the nation but they do understand the nature of the threat. Yeah, right!

And that's good enough for you because DON'T ASK QUESTIONS!

In one of the more chilling passages, Lawton portrays the coming crackdown as a planned reaction to the next terrorist attack:

Despite the rapid and widespread proliferation of JTTFs, very little has been reported about what goes on inside the War on Terror's domestic front. The FBI building that houses the JTTF for the Northern District of Illinois has been moved from the middle of the city to a more spacious, fortresslike building on the industrial west side of Chicago, a place out of the city's Loop, literally and figuratively. The glass tower is surrounded by a tall metal fence, and layers upon layers of security inside and out add to the sense of siege. When Special Agent Robert Holley, who supervises the JTTF's Squad Counterterrorism 1, offers to escort me to his office on the eighth floor, we are stopped by his superior before we even reach the hallway. The entire floor, the supervisor declares, is considered secure -- there are classified documents on desks -- and therefore off-limits to outsiders.

Holley, an ex-military type who is built like a bullet, rolls his eyes but complies. There is no problem finding another room for a meeting. There are acres of empty offices and cubicles in the eerily futuristic building, the premises far larger than current requirements dictate but ready for expansion should the need arise with another terrorist attack.

And so on. It's fairly good work given the circumstances, and well worth checking out, despite its many deficiencies.

Deficiencies? For starters, it provides no annotations, it neglects some easily available relevant material, and it gives no sense of the shoe that's about to drop on us next.

Lawson even manages a somewhat hopeful -- and, to my mind, thoroughly pointless -- conclusion:

There are signs, however, that judges and jurors are getting fed up with such concocted "threats." In December, the prosecution of the "Liberty City Seven" ended in one acquittal and a hung jury for the rest of the accused. The supposed cell was accused of preparing a "full ground war" against America by bringing down the Sears Tower and other buildings. At trial, however, it emerged that the men had no operational abilities, that the plots were dreamed up at the exhortation of two paid FBI informants while smoking dope and that the group had been provided its camera, military boots and warehouse by the JTTF.

Despite 15,000 surveillance recordings of the men, including one in which they swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, the jury refused to convict. "This was all written, produced, directed, choreographed and stage-designed by the United States government," Albert Levin, an attorney for one of the accused, said in his closing argument.

Undeterred, the government is taking six of the men back to court. The retrial was scheduled to begin on January 22nd.

This is my main criticism of Lawson's piece: The conviction or otherwise of the knuckleheads recruited by the counter-terrorists in this particular bogus foiled "terror plot" is not the point! The point is that the publicity generated by the arrest (forget the hearings if any, the trial if any, and the sentencing if any) is enough to "justify" the crackdown on radicalization.

The Crackdown Is Coming

For more on the coming crackdown, Mother Jones provides a resource although its piece also has serious limitations.

To wit: even though it gives a good picture of how The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act is going to take away a lot of your freedom (and that of your children, and theirs...), and even though it provides many important links, it gives no hint that the bulk of the "terror" being invoked to "justify" the new legislation was bogus.

Nonetheless, it does report:

After a couple of hearings—described by OMB Watch as "primarily one-sided, with the bulk of the witnesses representing law enforcement or federal agencies"—the bill went to the House floor, where it was it passed with only six members voting against it—three Democrats and three Republicans. (Twenty-two others were absent.) Currently, a nearly identical version of the bill awaits a vote in the Senate's Committee on Homeland Security, where it has a supporter in chair Joseph Lieberman. Committee member Barack Obama has gone on record as being undecided on the bill (after an earlier email to constituents that seemed to indicate support)—but no presidential candidate is likely to cast a vote that could be seen as soft on terrorism.

The legislation would create a National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism composed of 10 members whose vaguely defined job would be to "examine and report upon the facts and causes of violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence," and to "build upon and bring together the work of other entities" including various federal, state, and local agencies, academics, and foreign governments. The commission is charged with issuing a report after 18 months. It also directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to set up a center to study "violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism" at a U.S. university, and to "conduct a survey" of what other countries are doing to prevent homegrown terrorism.
...

The bill raises the potential for government encroachments on civil rights in part through the way it defines some basic terms. The text of the bill says that "the term 'violent radicalization' means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change." It gives no clue as to what would qualify, under this law, as an "extremist belief system," leaving this open to broad interpretation according to the prevailing political winds.

In addition, simply by designating the "process of adopting or promoting" belief systems as a target for government concern or control, the bill moves into dangerous territory. The director of the ACLU's Washington legislative office, Caroline Fredrickson, said in a statement on the bill, "Law enforcement should focus on action, not thought. We need to worry about the people who are committing crimes rather than those who harbor beliefs that the government may consider to be extreme."

We also need to worry about any bill that raises the potential for government encroachments on civil rights.

Worrying About The Wrong Stuff, On Purpose

And there's the rub. We've got bogus terror on one hand, instigated by agents of the rapidly coalescing law-enforcement military complex ("lawfare", as Lawson points out). On the other we have a drastic new law that will enable all sorts of unwarranted surveillance, not to stop terrorism per se, but to "study" the process of "radicalization".

But this study will never work, can never work -- not for the purpose for which it was ostensibly designed -- because it's based on bogus analyses of bogus terror plots, by which I mean the analyses are stripped of any indication that the plots were bogus. As a rookie computer programmer I was taught the inviolable GIGO rule (Garbage In, Garbage Out). It applies to more than computers, of course. But clearly the designers of this process don't care whether garbage comes out. All they want is output!

Mother Jones again:

In his book on terrorism, Unconquerable Nation: Knowing Our Enemy, Strengthening Ourselves, [Brian Michael Jenkins, of the Rand Corporation] wrote, "In their international campaign, the jihadists will seek common grounds with leftist, anti-American, and anti-globalization forces, who will in turn see, in radical Islam, comrades against a mutual foe." Once a terrorist is defined by thought and word rather than deed, there will be room for all of us in the big tent.

In other words, we're all losing our rights -- rights to privacy and security, among others; rights that our ancestors fought and died for -- as a pre-planned "reaction" to the arrests of bogus "terrorist cells" which were actually recruited, inspired, funded and supported in numerous other ways by agents of the lawfare state. How quaint!.

All this power-grabbing is clearly based on false pretexts, and that's becoming increasingly obvious, which is another problem (for another day, perhaps).

Much of the so-called "justification" for the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act comes from a report compiled by the New York Police Department. One of the "featured terrorists" in this report is Shahawar Matin Siraj, the so-called Subway Bomber.

The NYPD entrapped him, the feds jailed his family, and a bogus tale regarding his "violent radicalization" is being used to drive acceptance of a draconian new law.

Even the world's best marketers couldn't sell this "lawfare" nonsense unless they had a pile of stories to hang it on -- so who cares whether the stories are true or false as long as they sell?

Rolling Stone again:

There is considerable skepticism in local police departments in northern Illinois about the nature and extent of the threat posed by terrorism. There are 415 local law-enforcement agencies in the district, many of which remain unconvinced that the threat is as dire as the JTTF maintains. Many departments refuse to allocate even one or two officers to spend four hours on basic terror training. Rather than consider the idea that the cops closest to the ground might have a better perspective on their communities, the JTTF addressed the problem by forming a TLOC —Terrorism Liaison Officer's Committee. The point is to merchandise the menace of terrorism to the police.

"It's a matter of marketing strategy," says Mark Lundgren, a special agent who oversees the TLOC. "These terrorism acts are trending toward the homegrown, self-activated, self-radicalized — the sort of thing that could literally pop up in your back yard. The typical things we would use to detect terrorism don't work, because these people are off the charts, so to speak. Nine times out of ten, for the next decade, it's going to be the local cop who stops the terror attacks."

Lundgren, who resembles a young Gary Busey, fairly glistens with certainty about the value of his work. "What are you trying to sell to the local police departments?" I ask.

"Awareness. Motivation," he says. "It's a very hard sell. You walk into a chief of police in a crime-ridden district. The first thing he's going to tell you is, 'The guys in this area are killing people. The guys you're telling me about —it's not make-believe, I understand that — but they haven't killed anyone lately in my district.' "

"Or ever," I say.

"Exactly."

They do an aggressive sales job. It's a tough sell. But it's necessary if we're going to be safe!

Except it's all hogwash!

Well, there you go. That's my story, at least for the moment.

Sadly, no major American media type is interested in putting the pieces together. The best they can do is throw out a few pieces at a time. Oh well. Thanks for the pieces. But that's not the most amazing thing.

The most amazing thing to me is that the American public doesn't seem to care very much. And that's a shame, because in the long run, the destruction of the Rule of Law is going to hurt us and our descendants much more than the destruction of our national "honor", not to mention our military, in Iraq.

~~~

The problem of fabricated bogus terror is not restricted to the United States.

See also: Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War.

Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War

Terror Games

Suppose you were running a counter-terrorism unit. What would you need? A huge budget -- obviously! But what else? You'd need lots of good people, and you'd need good ways to train them, and good ways to test them. You'd also need to make sure that they passed their tests.

If you were running a conventional military unit, you could do quite a bit of training and testing using relatively short war games. A war game is a simulated battle, with people from the same army (or its allies) playing both "sides". One side "attacks" and the other side "defends", and even though it's not exactly like a real battle, it can be an excellent learning tool. Some war games are designed to last a long time, but many are not, because you can do a lot of training, and a lot of testing, in a week, or even a weekend.

But the war on terror is a different kind of war, and it requires a different kind of war game. Instead of a series of battles, the war on terror involves complex surveillance operations lasting months -- or years. So a war game in the war on terror -- a "terror game" -- would be designed to last a while.

If you were planning a terror game, you wouldn't want your people playing bad guys for months at a time, if you could get somebody else to do it. Fortunately for you, it wouldn't be too hard to recruit some "bad guys" and give them a "plot" to work on. Then your people could watch them while you waited for -- or arranged -- a most opportune moment to "foil" "their" "plot".

In this way you could "pass" your "test", "prove" your "worth" and "justify" an enormous increase in your huge budget.

Knuckleheads And Cutouts

As in most endeavors, much depends on your people. For this job you'd need to avoid anybody bright enough to suspect you of scamming, so you'd be looking for knuckleheads. Fortunately, plenty of knuckleheads are available.

You couldn't do the recruiting directly. The knuckleheads you'd be looking for would never knowingly work for you. Instead you'd have to use a "cutout" to do the recruiting for you. But this wouldn't be a problem. And it would have some powerful advantages.

If the cutout did his job properly, the knuckleheads would never think anything was amiss. They wouldn't suspect they were dealing with a cutout, let alone working for you. And they certainly wouldn't know they were part of a terror game.

It would all be very serious business to them -- and rightly so, for the aftermath of a terror game isn't like that of a conventional war game, when the two "adversaries" get together for steaks and beers to compare notes and so on ...

The "bad guys" in a terror game won't be invited to any barbecues. They'll be arrested; incarcerated and possibly tortured; tried, and potentially convicted and sentenced to long prison terms. For them, it's not a game by any means.

There's enormous deception going on here, and if you were running it, you could set it up in a couple of different ways. You could use a single cutout, but he'd have to be a great actor because he would have to deceive all the knuckleheads all the time. Or you could use two cutouts, one of them deceiving the other, who then passes the messages on to all the rest. In this model, the cutout dealing with the knuckleheads is himself a knucklehead!

People are always more convincing when they believe what they're saying. So using a knucklehead as a "leader" of knuckleheads is almost always a good idea. It simply requires a second cutout.

The term "cutout" comes from covert operations. In a covert op, a cutout isolates the perpetrators from the planners. The perpetrators think they're working for the cutout; they don't know anything about the planners. So even if the perpetrators are captured, they can't implicate the people who are actually running the operation.

This is one of the ways in which covert operations stay covert. And most covert operations do stay covert long enough to be considered successful, if not forever. But if things go wrong and the perpetrators get captured, then the planners can protect themselves by eliminating the cutout (or cutouts).

Using multiple cutouts may seem overly complicated to you. But to any reasonably sophisticated covert agency, it's child's play.

The Plot

If you were running a counter-terrorism unit, and you decided to recruit some knuckleheads for a terror game, you would want to engage them in some tactical or logistical planning, but not in any strategic decision-making.

In this way you could retain overall control of the plot, by proxy through the cutout (or cutouts). And there are many ways in which you could use this control to your advantage. Above all, you'd want to make sure that, technically, the plot was well beyond the knuckleheads' ability to implement it.

You'd do this for two reasons. First, you wouldn't want to cause any damage. (You may be scamming here but you're not trying to hurt anybody. In fact your job is to make sure nobody gets hurt.) And it would be time-consuming and very expensive to watch all the knuckleheads all the time. So you'd need other ways to make sure that their plot would never amount to anything. And you could achieve this quite simply by making the plot impossible.

It would still have to be frightening, so it would have to seem possible, at least superficially. Otherwise no potential victims would be scared, and no potential knuckleheads would be interested.

So it would have to be at least semi-plausible. But it would also need a very serious core difficulty. And this difficulty would have to be kept as secret as possible.

Foiling The Plot

The second advantage of making the plot impossible is that it would take the knuckleheads forever to get anywhere with it. So you could let the plot "simmer" for as long as you liked, and "foil" it whenever it best suited you.

And this would also work to your advantage, because you could plan things. You could make a big deal of the bust. You could get some quotables to exaggerate the danger of the "catastrophic act of terror" that you and your crew had "prevented". And so on. In another walk of life this would be called making hay while the sun shines.

It would be perfect. You'd be a hero, and your budget and your power would be increased. Your boss would never say a word -- even if he suspected (even if he knew!) that you were scamming -- because he'd be a hero too, and his budget and his power would be increased as well.

So even if you didn't play your cards quite right, there'd be nobody with both the incentive and the ability to stop you.

Politics And Terror Since 9/11

In the years since September 11, 2001, it has often happened that a spectacular bust has been made at a key political time, and a big splash has been created over a semi-plausible narrative, while a core impossibility has been hidden.

Thus Shahawar Matin Siraj became New York City's "Subway Bomber" in August of 2004 after he was arrested for allegedly planning to bomb the Herald Square subway station.

Politically, the timing of the Siraj bust was extremely oppotune. In the summer of 2004, many New Yorkers were furious that the Republicans had chosen to party in the city they hadn't managed to protect three years earlier -- yet here they were, using the ruins of Manhattan as a backdrop for their festivities.

But the publicity generated by the arrest of "the subway bomber" turned things around -- for that convention and for a long time thereafter -- and instead of having to defend themselves against charges of incompetence or even complicity, the Republicans were suddenly able to scold the protesters: "See how much danger you're in? See how well our policies work? How dare you criticize?"

And this sudden shift happened despite the facts that Siraj had no bomb, no bomb-making materials, no knowledge of bomb-making, no independent access to any of the above, and no desire to hurt anyone.

It is said that Siraj was planning to blow up the subway during the Republican National Convention. Judging by the absence of bomb-making materials, that couldn't have been the case. The police just chose to arrest him right before the convention started, in order to maximize the publicity value of the bust (and to provide a pretext for their coming assault on those who did protest at the convention).

The "Liberty City Seven" have become similarly infamous for a plot that was similarly implausible. Homeless men from the Miami area who couldn't even afford boots were somehow going to get themselves to Chicago and bomb the Sears Tower? Fanciful at best, no?

The so-called "JFK Airport Bombing" plot was even less plausible -- some would say "even more impossible" -- because of the technical difficulties in what the plotters were allegedly planning to do. And the same characteristic also appears in many less-famous cases.

But the most outrageous foiled terror plot of all was a very famous one, in conjunction with which the most drastic security measures have been taken.

The Liquid Bombers

On August 9th and 10th, 2006, British authorities arrested 25 so-called "terrorists" who came to be known as the Liquid Bombers.

We were told they were planning to to destroy ten or twelve airplanes simultaneously by smuggling common household liquids aboard the planes and using them to make bombs, which they would then detonate, killing "hundreds of thousands of people" in a coordinated attack even more devastating than 9/11.

We were also told that even though the police had been watching the suspects for many months, they weren't sure they'd captured all the plotters, and that the 25 arrests had caused an increased risk of something or other. Extremely tight security arrangements were implemented, virtually shutting down Heathrow Airport for a while and banning such innocuous items as books!

Eleven of the 25 suspects have been charged with "conspiracy to murder", and another four have been charged with lesser offenses. All fifteen have said "not guilty"; their trial is expected to begin in late spring of 2008. The other ten alleged "terrorists" were released without charges.

Realistically, there's never been any increased threat of anything because of those 25 arrests, and the security arrangements were relaxed -- a bit -- after a while, but a very restrictive regime of airport security remains in place. And we can still fly, but we can't take a bottle of water with us, unless it holds no more than four ounces and is enclosed in a clear plastic zip-locked bag, along with our passport and, presumably, all our other vital documents.

Why must we do this? Are we afraid some terrorists are going to smuggle bomb-making ingredients aboard an airliner and mix them up and make a bomb and blow the plane out of the sky? Not at all! It can't happen! But if you got all your news from the papers and/or the TV, you might have no idea just how outrageous the "Liquid Bombers" plot was.

It's not just that they didn't have tickets, or reservations, or passports. These facts prove that the attack was not imminent, and lead some skeptics to question the timing of the bust, which in the political context seemed most opportune. Such questions tend to challenge the sudden increase in security that came along with news of the arrests.

But the timing is not the main point, in my analysis. Terrorists can get passports, they can buy tickets, and they can make reservations. So even if no attack was imminent, that doesn't mean the plot wasn't dangerous.

It's not a question of whether the danger was imminent or not, in my view. There was no danger -- ever! -- because the plot was impossible.

As with all the other implausible plots, the main difficulty is always hidden from the public. In this case, the hidden difficulty lies in the chemistry.

Mother Of Satan

It is definitely possible to make explosives out of household liquids. The simplest such explosive is TATP (tri-acetone tri-peroxide), which can be made from hydrogen peroxide, acetone and bleach. But it's not easy, nor is it quick.

If you wanted to make some TATP, you'd need good quality glassware, otherwise the impurities might cause a weak or premature explosion. And the ingredients themselves would have to be pure, otherwise you'd get the same result, a weak or premature explosion, or none at all.

If you're a suicide bomber, there's no point in killing yourself if you don't hurt anybody else. So you'd want to do it right: you'd want to get the purest ingredients you could find. You'd want to store them in the best glassware you could get. You'd want to do everything possible to protect the purity of these liquids, which would be vital to your plan of attack.

If you'd been studying your chemistry, you'd be ready to go once you got yourself and your liquids on the plane. But you'd wait until the plane was "safely" aloft. And then there would be no time to lose.

You'd mix the acetone and the peroxide first. From that point on, the reaction would generate a lot of heat, and you'd need to watch the temperature carefully. If it rose above 10C (50F) you'd be finished. So you'd need a thermometer -- and plenty of ice.

Having mixed the acetone and peroxide, you would then start adding the bleach -- one drop at a time -- while stirring constantly. Once all the bleach was added, you'd stop stirring and leave it alone for a while. Quite a while, actually.

The reaction takes at least 6 or 8 hours -- some sources say overnight, while others say 2-3 days. And the TATP -- the explosive compound produced by the reaction -- is a white crystal that must be filtered out, then rinsed and dried before it can be used.

They must have been hoping the transatlantic flight was going to be a long one. Only a very hopeful plotter -- or an utter knucklehead -- would imagine that there'd be enough time for all this, between London and New York.

Worse still, it would take a bathtub full of acetone, peroxide and bleach to make enough TATP to knock a hole in the fuselage of a commercial airliner. But that didn't stop the Liquid Bombers.

Lucozade

According to the official story, the "terrorists" were planning to disguise their bomb-making ingredients by adding dyes to make them look like Lucozade -- a popular British "sports drink" which comes in yellow, orange and red (or "citrus", "orange" and "fruit punch", if you prefer).

The plotters were going to make false bottoms for Lucozade bottles and dye their ingredients the same color as the drinks. Then they would fill the bottoms of the bottles with their color-matched bomb-making ingredients and the tops of the bottles with real Lucozade, or so we're told.

Then, presumably, if they were challenged while trying to bring the bottle onto the plane, they could drink from the tops of the bottles. And when they tipped the bottles upside-down and started drinking, the security guards would never notice that the bubbles rose only halfway up the bottles.

So the terrorists would get through the gates that way, and once they had boarded their planes and got themselves over the Atlantic, they were going to step into the restroom, mix their ingredients together, and come back out a minute later with a bomb. Or so we're told.

But what we are never told is crucial. Making such a bomb would take hours -- or days -- even if the ingredients were pure. And it wouldn't be possible at all if the ingredients were contaminated -- no matter how much time and space the terrorists were given on the plane, and no matter how many false-bottomed Lucozade bottles they were carrying.

Thus the "Liquid Bomber" plot wasn't just impossible. It was beyond impossible. And the natural next question is: Why? Who would recruit so many knuckleheads for a mission that was so thoroughly doomed?

Rashid Rauf

We were told that Rashid Rauf was the recruiter. Given the little we know about him, he would be the perfect man for the job.

Rashid Rauf was raised in Birmingham, UK, and moved to Pakistan in 2002, just after the fatal stabbing of his uncle. Shortly after he arrived in Pakistan, he married a very close relative of the founder of Jaish-e-Mohammed, so we are told.

J-e-M is a vicious terrorist group which likes to attack India and Kashmir, and which has made successful bombing attacks on Indian trains and train stations. J-e-M is also suspected in the London bombings of 7/7/2005.

Rashid Rauf is elsewhere described as affiliated with Lashkar-e-Toiba, another vicious Pakistani terrorist group, which has received open support from members of the Pakistani government, and which has also made successful attacks on India and Kashmir. L-e-T has recently gone underground in the face of the GWOT, only to re-appear as JUD.

In August of 2006, when the Liquid Bombers were arrested, we were told that Rashid Rauf was the mastermind, or the bomb-making expert, or maybe just the messenger. But no matter what his role was, he was always described as the link to al Qaeda.

Given his family connections in the UK (including his brother Tayib, who was one of those arrested and released without charges in August of 2006), plus his "street credibility" as a fugitive from British justice (and a potential killer), and his affiliation with various terrorist groups, Rashid Rauf had an admirable profile -- as a potential cutout.

It was Rashid Rauf's arrest in Pakistan that triggered the 25 arrests in Britain, according to the official tale, although the mechanism is unclear.

Some analysts think Rashid Rauf was tortured into giving up the names of the British plotters, who were promptly arrested; others say that when he was arrested he (or perhaps an accomplice) sent a text message to the plotters telling them to go ahead with their attack, and that this message was intercepted by the police. The questions may never be answered -- satisfactorily or otherwise.

There are many ways to eliminate a cutout. Rashid Rauf supposedly "escaped" from the Pakistani police, even though it's fairly clear that he was deliberately released. And we may never see him again.

Thus the cutout has been removed, and the trail from the knuckleheads to the planners has been cut. But if you could follow it, where would the severed trail lead? To J-e-M? L-e-T? al Qaeda? More than one of the above -- or even all three?

Here we can get profoundly confused, especially if we forget that J-e-M is tolerated and L-e-T openly supported by the military government of Pakistan, which itself doesn't like India very much. Both these banned terrorist groups are apparently protected by the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, which itself cooperates closely with Britain's MI6, as befits a virtual branch of the CIA.

You may recall Major General (Retired) Tanvir Hussain, who in the previous session served as Parliamentary Defense Secretary. Major Hussain raised a few eyebrows in a parliamentary debate when he said he had been a member of L-e-T. When he was asked for clarification, he didn't distance himself from the terrorists, nor did he claim that his association with them had ended. Instead the Parliamentary Defense Secretary of America's leading Asian ally in the Global War On Terror said that he speaks at L-e-T's conventions and admitted that he gives them other forms of assistance, too.

Don't be surprised if you haven't heard of this. Tanvir Hussain's statements were reported matter-of-factly in the Pakistani press, mentioned in a quizzical way by an Australian daily, and howled over by the Indian papers. But they were never reported anywhere else; no Western "news" outlet breathed a word of the story.

The connections between and among the various banned and/or state-sponsored terrorist groups are enough to make your head spin, and potential understanding of crucial issues can easily be lost on this very point.

In my view of the plot, and of the surrounding context, it doesn't really matter which -- or how many -- of these terrorist groups Rashid Rauf belongs to.

The confusion is irrelevant here, so the deception is ultimately inadequate. It's clear that the central and essential question looks like this:

Why?

Why would any terrorist group waste so much time and effort -- and sacrifice so many people -- trying to do something that's six kinds of impossible?

There's no question that J-e-M and L-e-T know how to make bombs. Hundreds -- thousands! -- of otherwise healthy people are now dead because of their bomb-making skills.

And we've been warned once or twice about al Qaeda and their sophisticated style of coordinated attacks, how they can bomb an embassy, or a warship, or a couple of office buildings and a military headquarters -- all on the same day!

So it seems only fair to ask: If they can do such things, why would any of these groups waste their time -- and their people -- trying to implement a plot that's beyond impossible?

And if you don't believe the world's most dangerous terrorists would knowingly waste their time and energy instigating plots that were doomed to fail, then you have to ask youself: Who would?

The answer to that question seems clear:

Suppose you were running a counter-terrorism unit...

~~~
thirty-first in a series