alternet | Before Omar Mateen gunned down 49 patrons of 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
pushing Mateen towards an act of lethal violence.
Since
9/11, the FBI has relied heavily on informants 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 with which he had no prior affiliation. On trial for
planning to commit an act of terror with a weapon of mass destruction,
Medina has insisted 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, including some with criminal backgrounds raking in as much
as $100,000 from the FBI. The FBI's assets have often preyed on mentally
ill men with little capacity to resist their provocations. “Is it
possible that the FBI is creating the very enemy we fear?” Aaronson
wondered.
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