Did the FBI really indoctrinate and recruit a 9/11 truth activist to bomb the US Capitol?

January 18, 2015

According to an affidavit and press release filed by the Department of Justice, FBI agents from the Cincinnati-Dayton Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested 20-year-old Christopher Cornell Wednesday after they said he purchased weapons intended to kill employees and officials at the US Capitol. As details emerge, however, questions are mounting whether the FBI may have instead actually disrupted one of its own plots.

Here are the facts as we know them so far:

-An affidavit filed by the FBI alleges Cornell had “posted comments and information supportive of [ISIS] through Twitter accounts.”

-The FBI has stated they learned about Cornell from an unnamed informant who, “began cooperating with the FBI in order to obtain favorable treatment with respect to his criminal exposure on an unrelated case.” Operating under FBI control, the informant allegedly met with and made arrangements with Cornell to plan an attack on the US Capitol.

But contradictions have quickly emerged...

Family members interviewed offer a very different narrative saying Cornell was actually a vulnerable Cincinnati teenager who began attending a small local mosque six months ago after he was dooped by the FBI and converted to Islam. Reports by the The Cincinnati Enquirer could not find a single person at that mosque who had ever seen him before, and noted that a young, white, recent convert would have been quite conspicuous at a mosque largely populated by “immigrants from West Africa,” many of whom “speak little or no English.”

Cornell’s father accused the FBI of responsibility for the plot, saying of his son: “He’s a mommy’s boy. His best friend is his cat Mikey. He still calls his mother ‘Mommy.’” His father said that “he might be 20, but he was more like a 16-year-old kid who never left the house.”

He added that his son had only $1,200 in his bank account, and that the money to purchase guns could only have come from the FBI. It was the FBI, he said, who were “taking him somewhere, and they were filling his head with a lot of this garbage.”

 

 

Nonetheless, the affadvit and press release were immediately followed by a parade of main stream media headlines hailing the FBI for preventing an imminent attack. CNN: “FBI says plot to attack US Capitol was ready to go.” MSNBC: “US terror plot foiled by FBI arrest of Ohio man.” Wall St. Journal: “Ohio Man Charged With Plotting ISIS-Inspired Attack on U.S. Capitol.”

With Partiot Act provisions facing renewal and Congressional action late this spring, US House Speaker John Boehner wasted no time to capitalize on this latest homeland security crisis and positioned the arrest as justification for enhanced powers of domestic surveillance. In an extraordinary analysis of the facts of the events, he warned, “the National Security Agency’s snooping powers helped stop a plot to attack the Capitol and that his colleagues need to keep that in mind as they debate whether to renew the law that allows the government to collect information from its citizens. We live in a dangerous country, and we get reminded every week of the dangers that are out there."

An epic terrorism save by the FBI? or another of countless similar cases where the FBI triumphantly disrupts one of its own plots?  EIther way, one certain outcome is more  people imprisoned as terrorists who may not have and could not have acted on their own.

Source and read more: Latest FBI Claim of Disrupted Terror Plot Deserves Much Scrutiny and Skepticism, Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman, The Intercept