Another mythic construct of the "War on Terror" confesses to being a complete fraud. Like so many others, the motive was money -- media sensation -- and a government that wants to pump up fear to justify its policies and war/security budgets.
LONDON (Reuters) - A British-born Pakistani man who said he had links to al Qaeda and had sent young men for terrorism training in Pakistan has told a court that he was lying about his past. Hassan Butt, 28, told Manchester Crown Court he had fed stories to the media and that his portrayal of himself as a terrorist planner who later renounced violence in order to fight Islamist extremism was a fabrication. He made the confession in December during the trial of a former friend, Habib Ahmed, who was subsequently convicted of belonging to al Qaeda. Restrictions on the reporting of the case have only now been lifted following the conclusion of another trial involving Butt's wife.
((Geez! The crown witness confesses to fraud but the proceeding is kept secret and the patsy's convicted anyway.))
"At no point have I ever been training, have I ever been a jihadi," Butt told the court, according to a transcript of the proceedings.
Questioning Butt about his past, prosecutor Andrew Edis asked: "So, you were a professional liar then?"
Butt replied: "I would make money, yes." He had, he said, told stories that "the media wanted to hear."
The confession will come as a surprise to many as Butt was for years regarded as a leading Islamist who had subsequently turned himself into a proponent for "de-radicalizing" young men in order to combat extremism.
((SNIP lots of good stuff -- here's one of the corporate media shills steeled in his determination to keep shovelling the lucrative bullshit.))
Shiv Malik, a journalist who has profiled Butt and who wrote a book called "Leaving Al Qaeda: Inside The Life And Mind of A British Jihadist" based on interviews with him, said he planned to carry on his research. Malik is now writing a book about Butt's life and trying to piece together what was true and what was false. "All this had to come from somewhere, so there's definitely a story there," he told Reuters. "I particularly want to look at Butt's involvement with Britain's security services."
((The last bit indicates that Mr. Malik, after writing a full book's worth of Butt's lies, may be ready to look at the obvious, so let's be hopeful after all.))
---
As for how "terrorist threats" were manufactured by the authorities in the US, don't forget "The Fear Factory," an excellent in-depth expose by Guy Lawson in Rolling Stone, early 2008:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/18137343/the_fear_factory/print
Rollingstone.com
The Fear Factory
The FBI now has more than 100 task forces devoted exclusively to fighting terrorism. But is the government manufacturing ghosts?
GUY LAWSON
Posted Feb 07, 2008 12:00 PM
EXCERPT:
But a closer inspection of the cases brought by JTTFs reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything. According to a study by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, only ten percent of the 619 "terrorist" cases brought by the federal government have resulted in convictions on "terrorism-related" charges —a category so broad as to be meaningless. In the past year, none of the convictions involved jihadist terror plots targeting America. "The government releases selective figures," says Karen Greenberg, director of the center. "They have never even defined 'terrorism.' They keep us in the dark over statistics."
Indeed, Shareef is only one of many cases where the JTTFs have employed dubious means to reach even more dubious ends. In Buffalo, the FBI spent eighteen months tracking the "Lackawanna Six" —a half-dozen men from the city's large Muslim population who had been recruited by an Al Qaeda operative in early 2001 to undergo training in Afghanistan. Only two lasted the six-week course; the rest pretended to be hurt or left early. Despite extensive surveillance, the FBI found no evidence that the men ever discussed, let alone planned, an attack —but that didn't stop federal agents from arresting the suspects with great fanfare and accusing them of operating an "Al Qaeda-trained terrorist cell on American soil." Fearing they would be designated as "enemy combatants" and disappeared into the legal void created by the Patriot Act, all six pleaded guilty to aiding Al Qaeda and were sentenced to at least seven years in prison.
In other cases, the use of informants has led the government to flirt with outright entrapment. In Brooklyn, a Guyanese immigrant and former cargo handler named Russell Defreitas was arrested last spring for plotting to blow up fuel tanks at JFK International Airport. In fact, before he encountered the might of the JTTF, Defreitas was a vagrant who sold incense on the streets of Queens and spent his spare time checking pay phones for quarters. He had no hope of instigating a terrorist plot of the magnitude of the alleged attack on JFK —until he received the help of a federal informant known only as "Source," a convicted drug dealer who was cooperating with federal agents to get his sentence reduced. Backed by the JTTF, Defreitas suddenly obtained the means to travel to the Caribbean, conduct Google Earth searches of JFK's grounds and build a complex, multifaceted, international terror conspiracy —albeit one that was impossible to actually pull off. After Defreitas was arrested, U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf called it "one of the most chilling plots imaginable."
Using informants to gin up terrorist conspiracies is a radical departure from the way the FBI has traditionally used cooperating sources against organized crime or drug dealers, where a pattern of crime is well established before the investigation begins. Now, in new-age terror cases, the JTTFs simply want to establish that suspects are predisposed to be terrorists —even if they are completely unable or ill-equipped to act on that predisposition. High-tech video and audio evidence, coupled with anti-terror hysteria, has made it effectively impossible for suspects to use the legal defense of entrapment. The result in many cases has been guilty pleas —and no scrutiny of government conduct.
As it says at the beginning of that article, don't forget to "Click here to read a history of every homeland-security terror alert and the real news that was buried" ...
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