Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
Journalist; Author; Host, @SystemUpdate_; Columnist, @Folha; Co-Founder: The Intercept, @TheInterceptBr; @abrigo_hope, @FreedomofPress, @ongcriadefavela. Vegan.

Jul 24, 2021, 13 tweets

FBI Using the Same Fear Tactic From the First War on Terror: Orchestrating its Own Terrorism Plots

greenwald.substack.com/p/fbi-using-th…

Questioning the FBI's role in 1/6 was maligned by corporate media as deranged. But only ignorance or a desire to deceive could produce such a reaction.

To keep fear levels high and the US security state's powers and budgets even higher, FBI has been doing this for decades.

A top FBI official has *admitted* in a little-noticed comment -- part of a documentary about an FBI attempt to entrap "terrorists" in 2009 -- that the FBI needs constant terror threats and plots to keep fear levels high and its own power unquestioned. Look:

Just three weeks ago, the security-state-worshipping sector of corporate media mocked and derided those of us who questioned what the FBI's role was in the groups that plotted 1/6. Yet now, the @BuzzFeed exposé on how the FBI drove the Whitmer "plot" made the same connection:

Given this long history and mountain of evidence, it doesn't take an unhinged conspiracy theorist to interrogate FBI's role in 1/6.

It takes an ignorant servant of the US security state (i.e., liberal journalists) to declare such questions off limits:

greenwald.substack.com/p/fbi-using-th…

I spent a decade reporting on FBI's manufacturing their own terror plots -- by implanting agents who manipulated young American Muslims into plots FBI created -- and the liberal-left never objected. Many cheered.

Now, denouncing the same tactic against the Right makes you QAnon.

And I was far from the only one reporting on and denouncing the FBI's orchestration of their own plots that they would then flamboyantly boast that they "broke up" -- to keep fear levels, budgets & spying powers high. It was a common theme in left media and from the @ACLU.

So again, anyone who asks me "what happened to you?" should instead look in the mirror and ask it of yourself.

I've always found the US security state's manufacturing of terror plots pernicious, and I haven't changed that view because of who the target is. It's *you who changed.

And as I noted yesterday, you have to be very ignorant and/or dishonest to claim it's insane to think FBI purposely stokes terror plots to keep fear levels high. Read what a federal judge said about what the FBI did to James Cromitie, an impoverished Black Muslim, to entrap him:

FBI did this during the Cold War, too -- infiltrated groups to lure people into crimes based on their ideology. That's COINTELPRO. They did it during first War on Terror. We know they're doing it now against anti-government activists on the right:

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

There are only 2 things that have changed: 1) liberals now revere FBI, CIA and the security state generally after Trump because they see those agencies as their allies; 2) liberals are authoritarians who *want* their political adversaries imprisoned. So they like this FBI scheme.

You can see the rise of liberal/Dem authoritarianism in this one 2019 Gallup chart. The two parties have almost completely switched sides on their views of the FBI since 2003: with Dems now overwhelmingly positive about FBI and GOP far more untrusting:

news.gallup.com/poll/257489/fb…

As Gallup put it:

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