Is That a Bomb in Your Pants? More Tales of Entrapment

Let me get this small item out of the way before you read on. The first story was brought to my attention via Information Clearing House. The original article, posted below, first appeared in the Guardian. But ICH version gave us something that the Guardian couldn't, an informed comment regarding Naomi Wolf's use of Judith Miller as a a source.

There is nothing more that I wish to, or need to, add to that which is already writ below.

The Buddha Within wrote:

Judith Miller, who shilled for the Bush regime about Iraq's supposed WMD while at the NY Times, and Newsmax are "conservative" disinformers for the power elite. I believe Judith is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She and Newsmax are not worth citation, particularly on a topic such as this. I'm surprised someone of Ms. Wolf's caliber would use Miller or Newmax as a source. (Comment ICH)

The spectacle of terror and its vested interests

A cycle of overhyped terror plots involving government agency entrapment feeds a multimillion-dollar surveillance industry
Naomi Wolf
9 May 2012

The news stories, which quickly surface, long enough to cause scary headlines, then vanish before people can learn how often the cases are thrown out. These are stories about "bumbling fantasists", hapless druggies, the aimless, even the virtually homeless and mentally ill, and other marginal characters with not the strongest grip on reality, who have been lured into discourses about violence against America only after assiduous courting, and in some cases outright payment, by undercover FBI or police informants.

They have become a litany in recent years. The terrifying 2003-2004 national news stories that a Detroit "sleeper cell" had sent Muslim terrorists to blow up Disneyland and other landmarks, including in Las Vegas, was later thrown out of court, with accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, to almost no press attention – the same cycle of hype and failed convictions that have characterized many such stories. The evidence had included a home video taken in Disneyland, "doodles", and a guy with a credit card fraud problem, who had been pressured to diminish his own sentence by accusing his buddies.
But the tales of entrapment and terror hype continue apace – ten years after 9/11. Judith Miller, in Newsmax, writes that one recent case was so lame that even the FBI distanced itself from NYPD: "Despite FBI Doubts, NYPD Convinced Pipe Bomb Case Posed Real Danger", noted the headline on her 28 November 2011 article. A 27-year-old Dominican immigrant, Jose Pimentel, aka Muhamad Yusuf, had been monitored by NYPD for two years. Last fall, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr charged Pimentel with constructing pipe bombs to attack "police cars, post offices, veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and other targets".
An email in the case, which purports to show that Pimentel was writing about violent jihad to the al-Qaida-supporting "glossy magazine" Inspire, was described to Judith Miller by anonymous "law enforcement officials". Given Miller's journalistic history, this sentence alone should raise eyebrows. But the alleged email is, she writes, "part of a vast investigative file containing over 400 hours of surveillance audio and video tapes, interviews, and other material amassed by the NYPD". New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, in a flashy press conference, called the young man a "lone wolf" terrorist – a recent DHS soundbite. But the case was so shaky that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as federal prosecutors, did not want to join the case: "Too many holes in the case", other anonymous officials told Miller.
Pimentel was one of what has become an army of FBI- or NYPD-entrapped losers. He had no money, no job, and at key points lived with his mom. The New York Times noted that he may have been psychologically "unstable", and that he had made threats after smoking pot. Officials say that in May 2010, he repeated loudly in Arabic that "America is my enemy." This scary guy was a circuit city clerk in Schenectady, New York.
Additional evidence that Miller's anonymous sources give for his being a terrorist? In 2010, he had $100. One witness told police "that he had flashed a $100 bill when he made some purchases."Another? "Pimentel scraped the heads of some 750 matches, officials say." The scenario that entrapped Pimentel involved a surround-sound of informants trying to entrap him in cyberspace and to lure him to incriminate himself in taped phone conversations. But the FBI dropped its involvement after they judged that the informant had been too active in helping: urging or arranging for Pimentel to start drilling into pipe pieces – the evidence that he intended to set off a bomb.
Many other, much-ballyhooed cases of "homegrown terrorism" show this creaky, effortful, farcical quality of people who, left to their own devices by the FBI or NYPD, would have remained harmlessly playing video games in their childhood bedrooms, smoking their doobies, or babbling gently to themselves, on their anti-psychotic meds, about geopolitical forces.
The "Newburgh Four" is another such case, as Russia Today reported: four African-American Muslims were found guilty recently of a plot to place bombs in two Bronx synagogues and to shoot down military aircraft in Newburgh. Another flashy press conference in May 2009 showcased these four men as "the faces of homegrown terrorism". The FBI had claimed that the men had planned to commit their acts of terrorism on the day that they were arrested. Joseph Demarest from the FBI called it "a terrifying plot".
The men were low-income former convicts who could not read or write with literacy. They could not drive and had no passports. Shahid Hussain, a Pakistani immigrant who was an FBI employee, got them to say they were going to commit these crimes – paying them $100,000. Hussain presented the men with a fake stinger missile, and Hussain offered these poverty-stricken men cars and money in exchange for their promise to carry out the manufactured plot.
The men's relatives accused the FBI of entrapment. "I do not think this is entrapment. I know it is. This is entrapment," said Alicia McWilliams-McCollum, aunt of 29-year-old David Williams. As with many of these scenarios, one can easily imagine poor people with criminal records, offered large sums of money by a fake jihadist, trying to get the money and then trick the instigator. Also, as any AA or Al-Anon counsellor can tell you, if drugs or alcohol are in the mix, entrapment is a ridiculous premise, too: an addict will say anything, and make any ludicrous promise, to get a giant check. It doesn't mean the addict has any intention of delivering on the supposed contract. David Williams' aunt says that her nephew is in prison because of a pretend terror attack created by the FBI:

"They are creating scenarios; they are manufacturing crimes. That would not have occurred if you had not planted an unconstructive seed into a community."

Attorney Steve Dowds, who tracks cases like the Newburgh Four, argues the US government is systematically employing preemptive prosecution:

"They are taking some down and out vulnerable individuals and not only planting the ideology of jihad on them, giving them all the things they need, all of the material. They are setting up the plan, giving them all the research and then grabbing them and claiming these were homegrown terrorists. It is just a fiction."

Now we have another "underwear bomber" – declared by the Pentagon to have been about to launch a major attack via a US-bound plane, but who appears, reportedly, to have been a CIA-run double agent. What is the evidence that the "device", which is supposedly so sophisticated that there is doubt as to whether existing surveillance technologies in US airports would have caught it, actually exists? As with so many of these stories, we have no independent verification – because reporters from the British Daily Telegraph, to Reuters, to the Huffington Post are simply taking dictation from New York Representative Peter King and from the Pentagon, and scarcely asking for backup evidence of their elaborate assertions.
It is important to note that we can no longer assume that the FBI and the CIA and the NSA work, first of all, for the safety of the American people; they also now represent a revolving door of government officials who become security industry lobbyists and manufacturers, which, in turn, get the multimillion-dollar contracts for tackling the very problems these stories appear to highlight. The stories about the first "underwear bomber" preceded the rollout of former DHS chief Michael Chertoff's costly scanners; the press interviews for this round of mystery "underwear bomber" stories are practically a press release for some expensive technological upgrade – or yet more hellishly invasive and demeaning search technique. The sad truth is that we can no longer report and consume such stories as if there were no commercial vested interests involved in creating and sustaining such "terror theater".
You know we have "terror theater" in the US because nations such as Israel, which are genuinely focussed on deterring terrorism, downplay risk and threats rather than trumpeting them, as DHS does. If the threat is real, they don't reveal all the details of the latest "planned attack" to the news media – because they are busy investigating real planned attacks, rather than doing corporate PR and product placement. Instead of TSA groping, aviation security, from Britain to Israel, to Spain to Norway, uses much less invasive and more acute security processes, such as face-to-face, in-line interviewing. They do not sell commercial products that subvert recall surety issues, such as the various costly and vastly lucrative new "Global Entry Trusted Traveller Network", an apparent government program that is not transparent or accountable. You can sign up for for a fee of $100 a year, after an interview. No TSA representative I interviewed knows who owns the initiative, which they said was private, not a government program; nor could they tell me where the money really goes.
Actual terrorism-fighting nations would never devolve such security concerns to private contractors or sell easier travel access for cash – because it is both dangerous and absurd to do so. In fact, what the FBI and CIA and the Pentagon are up against is that people – including Americans – are waking up to the fact that there would be no enemy if we weren't manufacturing new terrorists by taking out civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. An end to foreign wars (which are already costing us thousands of casualties a year) would be a much more effective counter-terror strategy than this hyped, synthetic threat to justify a corporate surveillance-and-security product gold rush. Instead, we are treated to a spectacle orchestrated by alarmist officials who keep holding frightening press conferences promoting the threat of dazed, poor, drugged-out "lone wolves". The true, Orwellian agenda is to support a vast new crony-capitalist industry that uses terror theater to turn open democracies into surveillance societies. Gruniad

Underwear Bomb Seizure Being 'Exploited' By FBI

Urges Restoration of Searches Without Warrants
By News Agencies
May 10, 2012

THE HEAD of the FBI says his agency is “exploiting” the alleged seizure of an intact and advanced form of underwear bomb that "Islamic militants" in Yemen apparently wanted to use to blow up a US-based jet.

Robert Mueller told a congressional hearing in Washington yesterday that the supposed plot, revealed by the Associated Press on Monday, demonstrated the need to renew surveillance provisions that expire at the end of the year.

FBI Director Mueller urged the reauthorization of an act passed by Congress in 2008, that gives federal authorities the ability to conduct warrantless searches.

“We also remain concerned about the threat from homegrown violent extremists,” he said. “Over the last two years, we have seen increased activity among extremist individuals. These individuals have no typical profile; their experiences and motives are often distinct. But they are increasingly savvy and willing to act alone, which makes them difficult to find and to stop.” ICH

Does The West Have A Future?
By Paul Craig Roberts
May 11, 2012

Living in America is becoming very difficult for anyone with a moral conscience, a sense of justice, or a lick of intelligence. Consider:

We have had a second fake underwear bomb plot, a much more fantastic one than the first hoax. The second underwear bomber was a CIA operative or informant allegedly recruited by al-Qaeda, an organization that US authorities have recently claimed to be defeated, in disarray, and no longer significant.

This defeated and insignificant organization, which lacks any science and technology labs, has invented an “invisible bomb” that is not detected by the porno-scanners. A “senior law enforcement source” told the New York Times that “the scary part” is that “if they buil[t] one, they probably built more.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “the plot itself indicates that the terrorists keep trying to devise more and more perverse and terrible ways to kill innocent people.” Hillary said this while headlines proclaimed that the US continues to murder women and children with high-tech drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Africa. The foiled fake plot, Hillary alleged, serves as “a reminder as to why we have to remain vigilant at home and abroad in protecting our nation and in protecting friendly nations and peoples like India and others.”

FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the fake plot proves the need for warrantless surveillance in order to detect--what, fake plots? In Congress Republican Pete King and Democrat Charles Ruppersberger denounced media for revealing that the plot was a CIA operation, claiming that the truth threatened the war effort and soldiers’ lives.

Even alternative news media initially fell for this fake plot. Apparently, no one stops to wonder how al-Qaeda, which has become so disorganized and helpless that it is on the run and left its revered leader, Osama bin Laden, in a Pakistan village alone and unguarded to be murdered by US Navy Seals, could catch the CIA off guard with an “undetectable” bomb, to use the description provided by Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein, who was briefed on the device by US intelligence personnel.

Notice that the Secretary of State has committed the bankrupt US and its unravelling social safety net to the protection of “India and others” from terrorists. But the real significance of this latest hoax is to introduce into the fearful American public the idea of an undetectable underwear bomb. More, but it goes off on a tangent.

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