Journalist Exposes FBI Secrets

An award winning journalist says the FBI is luring otherwise harmless people into terrorist activities in order to appear successful in the fight against terrorism.

Trevor Aaronson spoke on Oct. 1st to about 80 students, faculty members and local Carlisle residents in the Stern Great Room. The speech was sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the departments of religion and Middle East studies.

Aaronson, co-founder of the non-profit Florida Center for Investigative Reporting, told the audience that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has “under the guise of engaging in counterterrorism since 9/11, built a network of 15,000 informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the Bureau can claim it is winning the ‘War on Terror.’”

In his speech, Aaronson says the FBI has transformed from a reactive law enforcement agency to a proactive counterterrorism organization. His book, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism claims that “While we have captured a few terrorists since 9/11, we have manufactured many more.”

Aaronson analyzed 10 years’ worth of information released by Eric Holder, the U.S. Attorney General. Among the hundreds of court cases Aaronson analyzed, only about “five people you can point to who were ‘actual terrorists.’” Aaronson continues, “The FBI in many cases is taking people off of the street in an imaginary scenario.”

The FBI often uses blackmail or bribery to gain extreme leverage in hiring their informants, says Aaronson. These will informants “go to communities with a direct incentive to find terrorists,” said Aaronson.

In Aaronson’s slideshow, he differentiated actual terrorists from manufactured terrorists. It wrote that actual terrorists had “connections to international terrorists, professional training, and the ability to perform tasks without external factors,” whereas the manufactured terrorists did not.

Afterwards, Aaronson detailed the “FBI Agent Provocateur” as someone with possessing the qualities of, but not limited to: “sociopathic behavior, deception, criminal history, able to play terrorist part, and interested in money.” The “FBI Sting Target” would be one that is “on the fringes of Muslim communities, possesses a crude understanding of Islam, financially desperate or mentally ill, looks up to the FBI informant (wanting to please him), and is easily manipulated by strong-willed FBI informant.”

To clarify, Aaronson says “It’s not like the FBI, as an institution, wants to stick it to the Muslims. The issue is that after 9/11, Congress has allocated a majority of the FBI’s budget to counterterrorism.” He continues, “Pre-9/11, the FBI wasn’t much of an intelligence agency, it mainly focused on financial crimes and organized violence.”

“After 9/11, everything changed,” said Aaronson.

Aaronson concludes asking “Are we still missing the real threats?” He would argue yes, citing an example such as the Boston Marathon bombing in April 2013.

Anthony Scioscia ’16, a political science major, attended the open event, and said “I think it remains to be seen if the people with mental disabilities Aaronson mentioned would be able to be subverted by terrorist organizations and recruited to commit terrorist acts, and I wasn’t so convinced of their innocence.”

Rehoboth Gesese ’17, a political science major, was also in attendance, and he stated, “I agree with much of what he was saying. I think Americans should be, not more critical necessarily, but more aware of what’s going on…We should have been fearful after 9/11, but it has been thirteen years.”

Tom Aanstoos, a local resident of Carlisle Pa. said after the event that “the ‘good news story’ was that we don’t seem to have a lot of truly hardened terrorist types, at least in the view of the author, that have been caught today; that these aspirational people who have disturbed backgrounds do not appear to be the type of terrorist that we’ve been concerned that would appear within our country.” Aanstoos says, “He seems to be dismissive of the current concern that some lone actor could be inspired by the kind of philosophy of internet preachings, to be so moved to act alone, and I don’t think he really has a solution to that.”

Aaronson stayed after the speech for a book signing.

Trevor Aaronson’s website is: http://trevoraaronson.com.