By Mordecai Specktor

Manufacturing crimes, again
“A federal grand jury today returned a six-count indictment against four members of a far-left, anti-capitalist, and anti-government group that allegedly plotted to set off bombs in Southern California on New Year’s Eve, charging them with additional, terrorism-related felonies,” boasted a Dec. 23 press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California.

Among those charged by the feds is Audrey Illeene Carroll, 30, a.k.a. “Asiginaak.” I don’t know any of these people, but “Asiginaak” sounds like an Inuit name. And the alleged terrorists are members of an outfit called the “Turtle Island Liberation Front.”

Also, the Los Angeles Times, in an article purporting to investigate the Turtle Island Liberation Front, noted: “A fifth person was arrested by federal officials in the terror plot investigation — in Louisiana.”

Mainstream press outlets — broadcast and cable TV, newspapers and news syndicates — generally reported the U.S. Attorney’s statement with little embellishment. I immediately thought that it sounded fishy as hell.

Over many years, I’ve reported on the FBI’s sordid history of infiltration and surveillance of dissident groups, including the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement (AIM), socialist parties, etc. And during the Nixon administration, Tricky Dick tasked the CIA with snooping on anti-Vietnam War student groups and other activists that he suspected of having ties to foreign enemies, despite U.S. laws prohibiting the CIA from engaging in domestic spying. (For more on this period, I recommend the new Netflix documentary, “Cover-Up,” which focuses on the career of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War.)

More recently, I’ve written about the FBI’s practice of planting informants with groups of wannabe revolutionists and manufacturing “terrorist” plots. In my day job as editor and publisher of the Minneapolis-based American Jewish World newspaper, I won a 2010 Rockower Award for excellence in editorial writing, for an article titled “Manufacturing crimes.”

That piece discussed the case of the “Newburgh Four,” a group of ex-convicts accused by the feds of conspiring to bomb synagogues in the Bronx, New York, and to bring down a commercial airliner with a surface-to-air missile. At one point in the prosecution, a federal judge ordered the defendants released due to the government’s role in fabricating the terrorist plot.

I wrote in May 2009, regarding the Newburgh Four case: “The tabloid press in New York has been replete with stories over the past week about how one of the bomb plotters spent his days before getting busted smoking marijuana and playing video games. In court, he told the judge, ‘I smoke it regularly,’ then reassuringly added, ‘I understand everything you are saying.’ The New York Daily News reported that one of the Newburgh men had been declared to be a paranoid schizophrenic.”

Here’s how it works: The FBI finds some likely suspects, plants an informant with them and leads them down the path to an ostensible terrorist crime. Of course, the plotters are under surveillance 24/7 and the plot is broken up in the nick of time. The Newburgh Four were ultimately convicted and sent back to prison. It’s very difficult to mount an entrapment defense.

As I wrote in the Jewish World: “The federal authorities contend that these arrests save lives, but Bruce Schneier, who writes on security and security technology, told AP: ‘Most of these guys don’t get tried. These are not criminal masterminds, they’re idiots. There’s huge fanfares at the arrest, and then it dies off.’”

I don’t know what will transpire with the prosecution of the Turtle Island Liberation Front members. On Dec. 16, The Intercept reported on the case: “An FBI investigation into an alleged terror plot in Southern California bears the familiar hallmarks of the bureau’s long-running use of informants and undercover agents to advance plots that might not otherwise have materialized, court documents show.”

The report added that an FBI informant is key to the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Turtle Island radicals: “The limited details available suggest an investigation that leaned heavily on a paid informant and at least one undercover FBI agent, according to an affidavit filed in federal court. The informant and the undercover agent were involved in nearly every stage of the case, including discussions of operational security and transporting members of the group to the site in the Mojave Desert where federal agents ultimately made the arrests.”

Further, “The informant, who has worked other cases on the FBI’s payroll since 2021, had been in contact with the group known as the Turtle Island Liberation Front since at least late November, just two months after President Donald Trump designated ‘antifa’ a domestic terrorism organization.”

Trump has blabbered about going after the “enemy within” ; and federal forces, ICE and other masked thugs, are currently terrorizing residents of the Twin Cities and other locales. There is a rising tide of fascism — when it comes to these alleged terrorism plots, don’t believe the hype.