The F in FBI Stands For Fraud

Impact

We have all heard it before: The terrorists are coming!

Such concern, especially by the United States government following the atrocious attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2001, has been increasing ever since.  After all, the government even launched the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in response to 9/11. But is this terrorist threat really as imminent as we have been led to believe? Could the FBI be using this paranoia among the American populace to serve its financial needs?

Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terrorist Factory: Inside the U.S.'s Manufactured War on Terrorism, explores this possibility in his investigation of the 500 suspects accused of terrorist involvement within the U.S. since 9/11. Of those 500, only 50 actually had access to a weapon or bomb. Of that number, only five actually attempted to carry out an attack, only to be thwarted by authorities in time. In fact, many of the remaining suspects turned out to actually be undercover FBI agents and their attacks ... staged by the FBI itself.

Basically, the FBI has been desperate to appear somehow "heroic" to American civilians. Why? Aaronson goes on to explain that the widespread fear resulting from the 9/11 attacks churned out an enormous investment in U.S. national security — a budget which America's chief of police, the FBI, had to make it appear was worth the investment. Their special forces unit had to locate and restrain terrorists on a regular basis, even if — most of the time — there were no real terrorists to be found. What's more, real terrorists such as the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston bombings in April 2013 have been cleared by the FBI before carrying out their attacks. These terror skits, or "stings" as they are sometimes called, went so far as to try to lure recent American converts to Islam or those with grievances against the government into committing acts of terror to gauge if they were a threat. Then even if they turned out not to be, the FBI would either frame them for simply watching one jihadist video or stage an attack showing the previously undercover agent "rescuing" American citizens from the FBI's own attack.

Now what do staged spectacles over something as serious as terrorist attacks simply for the sake of money say about our government? Obviously, if there have been so few actual terrorist attacks within the country and the FBI have not even caught most of the real ones, the United States government needs to start investing this type of money in a different, more real-life concern.