Before Omar Mateen Committed Mass Murder, The FBI Tried To 'Lure' Him Into A Terror Plot

[Snarkoleptic]

Interesting read...
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/omar-mateen-committed-mass-murder-fbi-tried-lure-him-terror-plot

Before Omar Mateen gunned down 49 patrons at the LGBTQ Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, the FBI attempted to induce his participation in a terror plot. Sheriff Ken Mascara of Florida’s St. Lucie County told the Vero Beach Press Journal that after Mateen threatened a courthouse deputy in 2013 by claiming he could order Al Qaeda operatives to kill his family, the FBI dispatched an informant to "lure Omar into some kind of act and Omar did not bite."

While self-styled terror experts and former counter-terror officials have criticized the FBI for failing to stop Mateen before he committed a massacre, the new revelation raises the question of whether the FBI played a role in shifting his mindset toward an act of violence. All that is known at present is that an FBI informant attempted to push Mateen into agreeing to stage a terror attack in hopes that he would fall into the law enforcement dragnet.

This is the technique the FBI has used to entrap scores of young, often mentally troubled Muslim men and send them to prison for as long as 25 years. As Aviva Stahl reported for AlterNet’s Grayzone Project, the FBI recently encouraged an apparently mentally disturbed recent convert to Islam named James Medina to bomb a South Florida synagogue and pledge allegiance to ISIS, a militant group he had no prior affiliation with. Now on trial for planning to commit an act of terror with a weapon of mass destruction, Medina is insisting through his lawyer that he is mentally ill.

Trevor Aaronson, a journalist and author of “Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror,” revealed that nearly half of terror cases between 9/11/01 and 2010 involved informants -- many of whom were themselves criminals raking in as much as $100,000 from the FBI. “Is it possible that the FBI is creating the very enemy we fear?” Aaronson wondered.

[Snarkoleptic]

1. Despite this revelation, he was still allowed to by a firearm...WTF?

"Mateen threatened a courthouse deputy in 2013 by claiming he could order Al Qaeda operatives to kill his family"

[kpola12]

10. You don't get it.

Even if Mateen was unable to get the guns at the store the FBI would have furnished them.

[99th_Monkey]

15. +10

[Octafish]

2. How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

Old news to some, big news to the majority who get their news exclusively from ABCNNBCBSFauxNoiseNutworks:

How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

By Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone, May 15, 2012

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did.

The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling "very pressured" by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: "We're in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don't cut it," he said. "And it's actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that." Though when Cleveland's NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it "Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence."

In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. ("They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items," one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. "I'm not sure," he responds, "I just downloaded it last night.&quot It’s a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now they’re white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that's not what they're doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power – the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.

SNIP...

Not everything is the same since the 1970s, of course. The media has changed: Newsday editorialized in 1972 of the Camden case, "We have come to expect such tactics from totalitarian nations that have no respect for individual rights permitting dissent. They have no place in American and those who advocate them have no place in this government." You don’t see that sort of language much any more. Indeed, Newsday appears not to have covered the arrest and trial of Hemant Lakhami at all. "Such tactics" are just not a very big deal any more.

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/how-fbi-entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-20120515

The tee vee has not brought the historical context into the uh coverage. Thank you for conducting journalism, Snarkoleptic.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. And the wonder why the Gov. has zero credibility with so many of us.

Once again excellent info, Octafish.

[Octafish]

6. Remember that British Jail Break in Iraq?

British commandos arrested in civilian clothes after shooting dead an Iraqi policeman who'd approached their car, which, for some reason, was filled with bomb-making gear. Rather than explaining it to a judge, the British sent in tanks to bust them out of jail.



Iraqi prison stormed by British tanks and helicopters

"It works the same in every country." -- Reichsmarschall Hermann Wilhelm Göring

[dixiegrrrrl]

9. you might be interested in Barry Eisler

who has written a dozen or so books featuring a guy named John Rain, which are enjoyable thrillers

but the important thing about Eisler is he just written God's Eye View, a "fiction" book about who really runs things.

he has a blog, says some interesting stuff about what is going on
https://barryeisler.blogspot.com/

[malaise]

12. I remember that well

Truth will out

[Rex]

21. Same Shit, Different Decade Different Empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_America_(airline)

[certainot]

17. that actually looks like holder but it was going on

long before him and he's never need to know about that

reagan and then bush/rove/cheney really polluted our gov agencies with fundies and hacks and agents

[Rex]

20. Year after year, we have been talking about this issue and every time

it gets ignored or downplayed. The FBI should NOT be in the business of making terrorists and will anyone be held accountable? No, never.

[NightWatcher]

3. Did anyone "lure" him into what he did?

Maybe the Feds should fight actual crime and not create crimes to solve.

[Snarkoleptic]

5. I hate to go all conspiracy theorist here, but LEO's

'worked' this guy before, so we cannot discount the possibility it happened more than once.

[bemildred]

7. Nine Lost Souls the FBI Charged as Terrorists While Letting the Orlando Shooter Go

In the midst of Omar Mateen’s shooting rampage in Orlando, law enforcement officials say the 30-year-old Florida resident called 911 and proclaimed his support for the Islamic State. Although FBI officials say they have not identified any direct connection between Mateen and the terrorist group, his case has once again brought calls for a harsh crackdown on individuals who might commit acts of domestic terrorism.

In the United States, 88 people have been arrested on charges of supporting ISIS since 2014, according to statistics compiled by George Washington University’s Program on Extremism. Who are they? Most are young, male, and American citizens. But in contrast to the Islamic State’s own propaganda, as well as the statements of many political figures, many of the U.S. supporters of ISIS come across as more pathetic than fearsome. While media reports have trumpeted the danger of sleeper cells, most of the people arrested by the FBI appear to have been wayward, isolated young men (and a few women) with little connection to international terrorist groups.

Recent coverage of the Orlando shooting has indicated that Mateen was motivated by homophobia and mental illness as much as any militant ideology; the FBI had investigated Mateen on two occasions and interviewed him but never pressed charges. The FBI’s handling of his case, along with its handling of the often-hapless people it does arrest on terrorism charges, shows the complexity and, perhaps, the impossibility of the task — trying to identify and imprison real terrorists before they commit acts of terrorism.

Using court documents, interviews, and Google images of major landmarks from their personal lives, The Intercept has constructed brief portraits of nine recent cases of “ISIS in America.”

https://theintercept.com/2016/06/17/nine-lost-souls-the-fbi-charged-as-terrorists-while-letting-the-orlando-shooter-go/

[MinM]

8. This American Life: The Convert

471: The Convert
Aug 10, 2012

In 2006, a new convert showed up at a mosque in Orange County, California, eager to study the Koran and make new friends. But when he started acting odd and saying strange things, those friends got suspicious. To them, he was Farouk al-Aziz. But his real name was Craig Monteilh, and he was working undercover for the FBI.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/471/the-convert

The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: 'There is no real hunt. It's fixed'

Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau's more ethically murky practices...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/20/fbi-informant

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101645055

[malaise]

11. There is something seriously wrong with this slaughter

It is frighteningly convenient

[Snarkoleptic]

13. Has a certain Kabuki theater feel, no?

n/t

[malaise]

14. Last Sunday I wrote (to much condemnation)

that this scumbag was no jihadist - LGBTQ and Latinos - nah that stinks to high heaven. I'm patient - truth will out.

[melman]

18. No

No, it actually doesn't.

[bluescribbler]

16. It's called job security.

Without these manufactured plots, the PTB would be unable to keep the populace cowed into submission before the holy War on Terror.

[randr]

22. DEA play book

Find paid informants and perpetuate criminal behavior. Serves many masters at once.

[melman]

19. .

"Omar became very agitated and made a comment that he could have al-Qaida kill my employee and his family," Mascara said Wednesday. "If that wasn't bad enough, he followed it up with very disturbing comments about women and followed it up with very disturbing comments about Jews and then went on to say that the Fort Hood shooter was justified in his actions."

Oh, is that all? This guy was unfairly targeted. Obviously

http://www.tcpalm.com/news/special/orlando-shooting/pga-village-residents-question-how-orlando-shooter-went-undetected-35523c28-ee5e-2242-e053-0100007fa-383208751.html