Forum Post: FBI role in terrorist bomb plots

For the past 20 years, the FBI has used informants and agent-provocateurs to induce Muslims and others to plan terrorist bombings, and in many cases it is known that the FBI actually supplied weapons, money, and explosives to individuals who otherwise would have had no capability of carrying out any sort of terrorist action on their own.

It is well documented that an FBI informant participated in the building of the bomb that killed six and injured 1,000 at the World Trade Center in New York on Feb. 26, 1993. A former Egyptian military officer, who had also been trained by U.S. special forces, was used by the FBI to infiltrate a circle of Muslims and to help them build a bomb. At the last minute, the FBI was supposed to substitute harmless powder for the real explosives, but somehow the FBI "messed up" and left the genuine explosives in place which were then used in the deadly bombing.

After many months of press accounts of how the FBI had cracked the case by painstaking detective work, the truth started to come out on Oct. 28, 1993, when the New York Times reported:

"Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

"The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an FBI supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be used, the informer said.

"The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City's tallest towers."

The FBI's role was just recently brought up on April 16, the day after the Boston Marathon bombings, by Fox TV's Ben Swann, on a "Reality Check" segment, who asked if the previous day's bombings were the product of an FBI entrapment operation gone awry. Swann described the New York 1993 bombing, and said, "So the question tonight must be asked, did the FBI have any knowledge of this plot before it happened?" and, "Is the practice of the FBI creating terror plots only to break them up before they can actually happen, really making us safer? What happened here?"

After the 9/11/2001 attacks, and continuing in the Obama Administration, the FBI has carried out numerous entrapment operations, to the extent that most terrorist prosecutions in the past ten years in the U.S. actually involved plots created by the FBI. According to a report by last summer by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, "there have been 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001," and these informants have usually crossed the line "from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself."

One of the most egregious of these cases is the so-called "Newburgh Four" in New York State, in which an informant in 2008-09 offered the defendants $250,000, as well as weapons, to carry out a terrorist plot. The New York University Center for Human Rights and Justice reviewed this case and two others, and concluded: "The government's informants introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and, moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe it was their duty to take action against the United States."

The federal judge presiding over the Newburgh case, Colleen McMahon, declared that it was "beyond question that the government created the crime here," and she criticized the FBI for sending informants "trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role—any role—in criminal activity."

In Portland, Oregon, it was disclosed during the trial of the "Christmas Tree bomber" earlier this year, that the FBI had actually produced its own terrorist training video, which was shown to the defendant, depicting men with scarf-covered faces shooting guns and setting off bombs using a cell phone as a detonator. The FBI operative also traveled with the target to a remote location where they detonated an actual bomb concealed in a backpack as a trial run for the planned attack.

In Brooklyn, New York, in 2012, an FBI agent posing as an al-Qaeda operative supplied a target with fake explosives for a 1,000-pound bomb, which the FBI's victim then attempted to detonate outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan.

In Irvine, California, in 2007, an FBI informant was so blatant in attempting to entrap members of the local Islamic Center into violent jihadi actions, that the mosque went to court and got a restraining order against the FBI informant.

The Boston FBI office has its own history of this. In the 2011 case of Rezwan Ferdaus, accused of planning to send miniature planes carrying explosives crashing into the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon, the FBI went even further. According to the London Guardian (Sept. 29, 2011), the FBI provided money to Ferdaus to travel to Washington and to buy an F-86 Sabre miniature plane for the attack. "The prosecution case also reveals how Ferdaus ordered the plane and rented a storage facility in which to keep it and then took delivery from the FBI of 25 pounds of C-4 explosives, three grenades, and six AK-47 rifles." (Emphasis added.) The official FBI press release, on Sept. 29, 2011, explicitly acknowledged that the FBI provided Ferdaus with "approximately 1.25 pounds of actual C-4 explosives."

This operation was publicly defended by both Richard DesLauriers, the head of the Boston FBI office, and Carmen Ortiz, the United States Attorney — both of whom are still in place overseeing the Marathon bombing case.

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