Orchestrating Terrorism

The US has a vast and very
expensive Homeland Security bureaucracy with nothing to
do. There hasn`t been a terrorist attack in America
since 2001. There have been a vast quantity of terror
alerts, the purpose of which was to scare Americans into
supporting an unnecessary and illegal aggressive attack
on Iraq.

As very few, if any, real
terrorists have turned up, the FBI has resorted to
creating terrorists by soliciting Muslim-Americans and
appealing to them with schemes to aid "jihadists." Recently,
two American citizens were caught in a FBI sting. One,
an Ivy-League educated physician, is charged with
agreeing to provide medical care to wounded holy
warriors in Saudi Arabia. The other, a famous jazz
musician, is charged with agreeing to train jihadists in
martial arts.[United States of America vs Tarik Ibn
Osman Shah and Rafiq SabirPDF]

According to the Washington
Times (June
1) the FBI began its sting in 2003, so it took two
years of work and cajoling to manufacture the

case against these two Americans.

What the FBI has done to Dr. R.A.
Sabir and to Tarik Shah was once known as entrapment.
Judges would throw out entrapment cases, because crime
was believed to require intent to commit a crime. If the
intent was given to the accused by the police through
enticement or threats, it was not regarded as criminal
intent on the accused person`s part.

Unfortunately, "law and order"
conservatives used fear of crime to "give our police
more effective measures to clear criminals off our
streets" and managed to eliminate the entrapment
defense.

Some years ago the FBI, posing as
Arab oil sheiks, entrapped
US Representatives in a sting operation. The

FBI handed out large bundles of cash to Congressmen
who accepted the offer to represent the fake sheiks`
interests. Film footage of the Congressmen stuffing
their pockets with money was all the FBI needed to
convict the members. The fact that campaign
contributions come from interest groups that expect to
be represented did not count in the stung US
Representatives` favor.

Note that the two latest victims,
Sabir and Tarik, could not have offered their services
to jihadists, because no jihadists were present. Note
also that Sabir and Tarik are not accused of actually
performing an act of service. Sabir and Tarik had no
contact with real jihadists, and they committed no act
of service to jihadists. Yet, both face $250,000 fines
and 15 years in prison.

All that happened was that two
productive American citizens were deceived by government
agents for no other purpose than those agents having to
show "results" in the "war on terror."

How does it make us safer to put a
medical doctor and a

jazz musician in prison? Why did the FBI spend two
years entrapping these two American citizens?

Both men have wives and children.
Suppose both men agreed to provide some service to
jihadists. (We don`t know that they did. We only have
the FBI`s word for it, a word that is not worth much.)
The reason could easily be fear of reprisals.

Suppose you are a Muslim-American
and FBI agents misrepresenting themselves as dangerous
jihadists demanded services of you? Neither of the
accused agreed to participate in a terrorist act: no
bombs, no shootings, no hijackings. A doctor agreed to
keep his Hippocratic oath if presented with wounded
people in Saudi Arabia. A

jazz musician agreed to teach martial arts. When was
the last time a terrorist attacked with judo or karate?

Many years ago there was a movie
about a

British medical doctor who treated a man wounded in
an act of rebellion against England. The

English judge, portrayed in the movie as
unjust in the extreme, ruled that being humane was
tantamount to being a rebel and the doctor was sold into
slavery to the West Indies Plantations. Unless memory
fails, the movie was

"Captain Blood" with Errol Flynn.

In the movie, the doctor did
actually treat the wounded man. The charge against Dr.
Sabir is that he agreed to treat a wounded man if
presented with one in Saudi Arabia in the future. There
is no way of knowing if he would have done so. But if
the US is prepared to deny medical treatment to its
opponents, why does anyone doubt the torture stories?

The FBI is so desperate to capture
a terrorist that it spent two years setting up a doctor
on this specious charge.

Like the police who find it easier
to frame people than to convict them on the evidence,
the FBI will find it easier to manufacture "terrorists"
with entrapment than to catch real terrorists.

Paul
Craig Roberts, a former Reagan Administration official,
is the author of

The Supply-Side Revolution and, with Lawrence M.
Stratton, of
The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name
of Justice.
Click

here
for Peter Brimelow`s
Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the
recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

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