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CounterPunch
February
1, 2003
Inventing Crimes
The FBI-CIA
Entrapment Tag Team
by KURT NIMMO
So evil are terrorists they will stop at nothing
to destroy America. One such example of this hatred for our TV-watching,
mall-shopping way of life surfaced recently in a plot uncovered
by the FBI. A Minnesota man, Ilyas Ali, stands accused of selling
a whole lot of hashish and heroin so he might buy Stinger anti-aircraft
missiles and sell them to the dreaded al-Qaeda who would, of
course, take out 747s packed with kindergarten children and grandmothers.
Ali, a naturalized US citizen born in India, and two Pakistanis
will be sent to San Diego to face charges. Maybe a layover at
Camp X-Ray is in order? Or maybe a side trip to one of those
infamous interrogation dungeons in Jordan, Egypt, or Morocco?
Sarcasm aside, Ali says he was set-up
by FBI agents. It was a good old-fashioned American ethic that
ensnared the hapless Ali -- a greedy and unchecked desire for
money. After $100,000 was stolen from his St. Paul, Minnesota,
grocery store, Ali was befriended by two men he later identified
as FBI agents; one claimed to be a drug dealer and the other
a weapons specialist. As the drugs-for-weapons plan matured,
Ali told an AP reporter from a jail, the FBI agents paid to fly
him twice to Pakistan and once to Hong Kong. The agents said
they would finance the whole sordid affair. "We just said
OK, OK, because we wanted the money," Ali told Dirk Beveridge
of AP. He had no drug connections and claims not to know anybody
in al-Qaeda. Moreover, he says there is a tape of his conversation
with the FBI agents. "There is absolutely nothing in that
tape," Ali said. "We didn't mention the Stingers. The
only one who mentioned the Stingers was the federal agent."
The case of Ali and the Pakistanis dovetails
nicely with the propaganda of the Bushites (since terrorism and
drugs are twin evils threatening the good people of America).
John Ashcroft has characterized the case as a reminder "of
the toxic combination of drugs and terrorism and the threats
they can pose to our national security." It may eventually
turn out to be a "toxic combination" dreamed up by
scheming FBI agents and conniving bureaucrats in the Justice
Department. Since there seems to be little if any al-Qaeda activity
threatening Our Way of Life presently -- even though we are warned
every few weeks of imminent (and unsubstantiated) attack by tenebrous
doers of evil -- the FBI may need to "stimulate" threats
in lieu of the real McCoy.
The FBI wouldn't do that, would they?
Sure they would. During the heyday of
COINTELPRO, the FBI routinely used entrapment against members
of the civil rights and antiwar movements. In a later and much
publicized case known as Abscam, the FBI (at the behest of the
Justice Department) used agents posing as Arab businessmen to
contact various public officials for the purpose of offering
bribes in return for political favors. "Before the Abscam
sting against members of Congress in 1980," writes Alan
Ehrenhalt, "the idea of inventing crimes and using them
to tempt public officials was virtually unheard of in this country."
If the FBI and Justice Department have
no problem using Gestapo-like tactics in orchestrated witch hunts
against public officials, what do you think they would do to
unknown Indian grocers from Minnesota, especially now with USA
PATROIT on the books and the courts rolling over like trained
dogs on writs of habeas corpus? The specter of terrorism (especially
terrorism created in CIA-funded Afghan camps) gives the FBI and
CIA a perfect excuse to return to the good old days of COINTELPRO/Operation
CHAOS-like operations.
In fact, with a spooky merging of CIA
and FBI operations (increased "cooperation" between
the two agencies has resulted in at least one CIA officer at
each of the 56 FBI field offices, according to Associated Press
reporter John J. Lumpkin), we can likely expect more spurious
terror scams, entrapment scenarios, heavy-handed surveillance
of political "targets," and who knows what else (even
assassination attempts were permitted, or at least not punished,
under COINTELPRO [see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The
COINTELPRO Papers, South End Press).
But setting people up is not limited
to John Ashcroft's Justice Department and Robert Mueller's FBI
-- the Pentagon wants to get in on the action with something
called P2OG, or Proactive, Preemptive Operations Group. P2OG
would roll together CIA and military covert ops personnel (a
"robust, global cadre of retirees, reservists and others
who are trained and qualified to serve on short notice, including
expatriates") who will work to "stimulate reactions"
among those deemed terrorists by the Bushites. After setting
up so-called terrorists the US military would "counterattack,"
i.e., kill them (no messy extradition or legal procedures required;
think Kamal Derwish, a US citizen, killed in Yemen by the judge,
jury, and executioner of a CIA-launched Hellfire missile for
the crime of riding in a car with Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi,
supposedly the "mastermind" behind the alleged al-Qaeda
attack on the USS Cole).
If you think P2OG would be confined to
faraway lands where terrorists run free, think again -- and take
note of the above-mentioned integration of the CIA and FBI currently
underway across America. If Mossad can off its enemies in America,
why not the CIA? If onetime CIA director Bush Senior can give
a wink and a nod to Pinochet's Operation Condor -- which resulted
in the car bombing murders of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier
and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt -- why not carte blanche
for the all-American P2OG from Maine to California?
Consider Operation CHAOS, the illegal
snooping by the CIA on law-abiding American citizens in the late
60s (in direct violation of their charter). As Verne Lyon writes,
"[i]n the classified document creating the DOD [or the Domestic
Operations Division, a super-secret branch of the CIA] the scope
of its activities was to 'exercise centralized responsibility
for the direction, support, and coordination of clandestine operational
activities within the United States,'" activities kept secret
from Congress and the hoodwinked American people. In other words,
we have no clear idea of the full extent of Operation CHAOS covert
ops (if these were anything like CIA ops elsewhere, people not
only lost their jobs, but often their lives).
Beyond the shores of America, the CIA
financed and encouraged the torture, disappearance, and murder
of "socialists and communists" (i.e., people who disagreed
with US-supported ruling elites and military dictatorships) in
Guatemala, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic, Greece, Bolivia,
Chile, and elsewhere. Keep in mind that the current crop of far
right wing types in the Bush White House and Pentagon sharpened
their teeth on Iran-Contra, a covert op with CIA participation
(two CIA agents, Clair George and Duane Clarridge were indicted
for lying to Congress in the scandal).
Finally, it pays to remember REX 84,
the CIA-inspired plan concocted by the NSC's Oliver North and
FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) calling for the
suspension of the Constitution under a number of scenarios (such
as war) and included the establishment of 50 State Defense Forces,
to be composed of members of local law enforcement and military
reserve agencies, who would round up and detain political dissenters
(for more on REX 84, see Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats,
and the FBI, South End Press).
As the expeditious passage of the USA
PATRIOT Act (USAPA) demonstrates, the Bush administration is
serious about the surveillance of those they consider political
enemies. Since not many phantom al-Qaeda terrorists are using
the internet (regardless of what "US officials" say
about internet cafes in Peshawar) or phones to plot their nefarious
deeds, the logical conclusion is the FBI and CIA will use USAPA
primarily against American citizens. As with COINTELPRO and Operation
CHAOS, the idea is to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and
neutralize" (as J. Edgar Hoover put it) the opposition with
an onslaught of wiretaps, undercover plants, agent provocateurs,
poison pen letters, black bag jobs, and other scurrilous tactics.
It's possible Ilyas Ali planned to sell
Stinger missiles to al-Qaeda, but then it is also possible he
was set-up by the FBI. In its ambitious plan to expand the US
corporate and military imperium across the globe, the Bush administration
is determined to show the world that al-Qaeda (and Saddam Hussein,
who will be shortly merged with the mythical al-Qaeda into a
formidable Hydra) are shadowy, dogged, mercurial, homicidal,
and will never stop their pernicious war against the Good and
the Brave (that is, so long as there are profitable natural resources
available for plunder in "failed states" around the
world). Thus the war on terrorism is not only open-ended but
interminable.
Will Bush unleash his own version of
REX 84 as the much delayed but obviously impending attack against
Iraq explodes? War is always a good excuse to go after political
enemies, particularly when those enemies are growing in strength
(as the incipient antiwar movement, Rush Limbaugh and Tom DeLay
notwithstanding, has shown). As the US plunges into war, think
of the Espionage and Sedition Acts (1917), the anti-sedition
section of the Smith Act (1940), McCarthy's inquisitions during
the Korean War, and the ravages of COINTELPRO during the Vietnam
War. Think of the FBI to wanting to harm Martin Luther King's
public reputation and destroy his political influence. Think
of the actress Jean Seberg, so smeared by the FBI she committed
suicide. Think of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, shot to death
by the Chicago police after the FBI told the cops the pair had
numerous guns and explosives and would shoot any police officer
who entered their building.
While throwing placard-waving grandmothers
in FEMA camps may be the stuff of paranoid fantasies, the very
real and threatening potential of increased surveillance and
the undermining of popular political movements by FBI-CIA collusion
is something almost certain to happen. There will, as well, be
more than a spate of politically expedient frame-ups and entrapments
on the Bush engineered road to ultimate tyranny.
In the not too distant future, the victims
of these dirty tricks will not only be named Ali, but Smith,
Robertson, and Adams as well.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent online
gallery. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
We highly recommend regular visits to
Nimmo's website, Another
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January 25
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