Not satisfied with archiving the musings of a mentally impaired man, the FBI created a terrorist plot and drew Booker into it. The government informants provided Booker with information that included how to build a bomb.
In conversations with the FBI's confidential informants, Booker allegedly said "he wanted to see the fear in the soldiers' eyes as he pushed the button and they ran for their lives."
The government claims that Booker then allegedly directed the informant to area retailers where he could buy the materials, but based upon past entrapments of this sort, it seems more plausible that it was the informants who were in fact directing Booker. Likely under government direction and at their urging, prosecutors further claim he then made a propaganda video and scouted out the best routes to carry out an attack.
The FBI readily admits that at no time was there any danger to soldiers stationed at the base and that security personnel at the base were aware of the investigation. "I want to assure the public there was never any breach of Fort Riley Military Base, nor was the safety or the security of the base or its personnel ever at risk," said Kansas City FBI Special Agent in Charge Eric Jackson. Regardless, most media accounts portrayed the arrest of Booker as the timely foiling of an active terror plot.
Booker's arrest is similar in many ways to the countless other terrorism cases supposedly thwarted by the FBI. The agents provided the money and materials for the plot, and there is a stunning dearth of evidence that Booker could have engaged in any criminal activity had he not been urged and enabled by federal agents and informants.
Human Rights Watch and Columbia Law School's Human Rights Institute examined many of these cases in detail. In their report, a pattern quickly becomes clear in which you begin to see that there is often less to the alleged terrorist plots than meets the eye. In more than a decade since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FBI, often targeting American-Muslim communities, has regularly worked to create ersatz terrorist plots. Agents and their informants routinely supply the plan, the means and even the motivation. They then vigorously encourage their target to follow through with the government-inspired attack, often offering a financial incentive. In many if not most of the documented cases, those targeted for these "investigations" suffered from mental illness or were desperately poor, or sometimes both.
"Americans have been told that their government is keeping them safe by preventing and prosecuting terrorism inside the US," said Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch and one of the authors of the report. "But take a closer look and you realize that many of these people would never have committed a crime if not for law enforcement encouraging, pressuring, and sometimes paying them to commit terrorist acts.
"The theory behind some of these cases is that these people are terrorists-in-waiting. If the FBI hadn't shown up and taken them down the path of committing this terrorist act, Al-Qaeda would instead," Prasow said. "But we don't have evidence of that actually happening."
Naureen Shah, former associate director of Columbia School of Law's Human Rights Institute, said, "These were not individuals who were planning on their own to actually conduct terrorist activities. They were individuals who were vulnerable to being recruited. They're young men - an 18-year-old, they're people with mental illness - schizophrenia, they're people who are susceptible because they want money and they could be bribed."
All of this begs the question of exactly what group would actually recruit such ill-suited individuals for terrorist attacks. "The idea that there is a terrorist group that would have found criminals so incompetent as these to become terrorists is ridiculous," said Mike German, a former FBI undercover agent.
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