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First, they target a Muslim: not due to any evidence of intent or capability to engage in terrorism, but rather for the “radical” political views he expresses. In most cases, the Muslim targeted by the FBI is a very young (late teens, early 20s), adrift, unemployed loner who has shown no signs of mastering basic life functions, let alone carrying out a serious terror attack, and has no known involvement with actual terrorist groups. They then find another Muslim who is highly motivated to help disrupt a “terror plot”: either because they’re being paid substantial sums of money by the FBI or because (as appears to be the case here) they are charged with some unrelated crime and are desperate to please the FBI in exchange for leniency (or both). The FBI then gives the informant a detailed attack plan, and sometimes even the money and other instruments to carry it out, and the informant then shares all of that with the target. Typically, the informant also induces, lures, cajoles, and persuades the target to agree to carry out the FBI-designed plot. In some instances where the target refuses to go along, they have their informant offer huge cash inducements to the impoverished target. Once they finally get the target to agree, the FBI swoops in at the last minute, arrests the target, issues a press release praising themselves for disrupting a dangerous attack (which it conceived of, funded, and recruited the operatives for), and the DOJ and federal judges send their target to prison for years or even decades (where they are kept in special GITMO-like units). Subservient U.S. courts uphold the charges by applying such a broad and permissive interpretation of “entrapment” that it could almost never be successfully invoked. As AP noted last night, “defense arguments have repeatedly failed with judges, and the stings have led to many convictions.”

There are countless similar cases where the FBI triumphantly disrupts its own plots, causing people to be imprisoned as terrorists who would not and could not have acted on their own. Trevor Aaronson has comprehensively covered what amounts to the FBI’s own domestic terror network, and has reported that “nearly half [of all DOJ terrorism] prosecutions involved the use of informants, many of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as $100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration violation.” He documents “49 [terrorism] defendants [who] participated in plots led by an agent provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.” In 2012, Petra Bartosiewicz in The Nation reviewed the post-9/11 body of terrorism cases and concluded: Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants — who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own — have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.

If, as a result, the International Atomic Energy Agency concludes that U.S. assertions about an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program lack credibility, top officials in Washington will have themselves to blame.

At a fundamental level, suspicious activity reporting, as well as the digital and physical infrastructure of networked computer servers and fusion centers built around it, depends on what the government defines as suspicious.  As it happens, this turns out to include innocuous, First Amendment-protected behavior. As a start, a little history: the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative was established in 2008 as a way for federal agencies, law enforcement, and the public to report and share potential terrorism-related information. The federal government then developed a list of 16 behaviors that it considered “reasonably indicative of criminal activity associated with terrorism.” Nine of those 16 behaviors, as the government acknowledges, could have nothing to do with criminal activity and are constitutionally protected, including snapping photographs, taking notes, and “observation through binoculars.”

There are any number of problems with this approach, starting with its premise.  Predicting who exactly is a future threat before a person has done anything wrong is a perilous undertaking. That’s especially the case if the public is encouraged to report suspicions of neighbors, colleagues, and community members based on a “hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck” threshold. Nor is it any comfort that the FBI promises to protect the innocent by investigating “suspicious” people in secret. The civil liberties and privacy implications are, in fact, truly hair-raising, particularly when the Bureau engages in abusive and discriminatory sting operations and other rights violations.

A few months later, a scathing report from the Senate subcommittee on homeland security described similar intelligence problems in state-based fusion centers. It found that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) personnel assigned to the centers “forwarded ‘intelligence’ of uneven quality -- oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections... and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

Law enforcement officials, including the Los Angeles Police Department’s top counterterrorism officer, have themselves exhibited skepticism about suspicious activity reporting (out of concern with the possibility of overloading the system). In 2012, George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute surveyed counterterrorism personnel working in fusion centers and in a report generally accepting of SARs noted that the program had “flooded fusion centers, law enforcement, and other security outfits with white noise,” complicating “the intelligence process” and distorting “resource allocation and deployment decisions.” In other words, it was wasting time and sending personnel off on wild goose chases.

Under federal regulations, the government can only collect and maintain criminal intelligence information on an individual if there is a “reasonable suspicion” that he or she is “involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity.” The SAR program officially lowered that bar significantly, violating the federal government’s own guidelines for maintaining a “criminal intelligence system.” There’s good reason for, at a minimum, using a reasonable suspicion standard. Anything less and it’s garbage in, garbage out, meaning counterterrorism “intelligence” databases become anything but intelligent.

yet another burgeoning secret database that the federal government calls its “consolidated terrorism watchlist.” Inclusion in this database -- and on government blacklists that are generated from it -- can bring more severe repercussions than unwarranted law enforcement attention. It can devastate lives.

There is hope, however. In August, four years after the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of 13 people on the no-fly list, a judge ruled that the government’s redress system is unconstitutional. In early October, the government notified Mashal and six others that they were no longer on the list. Six of the ACLU’s clients remain unable to fly, but at least the government now has to disclose just why they have been put in that category, so that they can contest their blacklisting. Soon, others should have the same opportunity.

As of August 2013, there were approximately 47,000 people, including 800 U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents like Mashal, on that secretive no-fly list, all branded as “known or suspected terrorists.” All were barred from flying to, from, or over the United States without ever being given a reason why. On 9/11, just 16 names had been on the predecessor “no transport” list. The resulting increase of 293,650% -- perhaps more since 2013 -- isn’t an accurate gauge of danger, especially given that names are added to the list based on vague, broad, and error-prone standards.

The No Fly List is only the best known of the government’s web of terrorism watchlists. Many more exist, derived from the same master list.  Currently, there are more than one million names in the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, a database maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center. This classified source feeds the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), operated by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center. The TSDB is an unclassified but still secret list known as the “master watchlist.” containing what the government describes as “known or suspected terrorists,” or KSTs.

Nothing encapsulates the post-9/11, Alice-in-Wonderland inversion of American notions of due process more strikingly than this “blacklist first, innocence later... maybe” mindset. The Terrorist Screening Database is then used to fill other lists. In the context of aviation, this means the no-fly list, as well as the selectee and expanded selectee lists. Transportation security agents subject travelers on the latter two lists to extra screenings, which can include prolonged and invasive interrogation and searches of laptops, phones, and other electronic devices. Around the border, there’s the State Department’s Consular Lookout and Support System, which it uses to flag people it thinks shouldn’t get a visa, and the TECS System, which Customs and Border Protection uses to determine whether someone can enter the country.

According to documents recently leaked to the Intercept, as of August 2013 that master watchlist contained 680,000 people, including 5,000 U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. The government can add people’s names to it according to a shaky “reasonable suspicion” standard. There is, however, growing evidence that what’s “reasonable” to the government may only remotely resemble what that word means in everyday usage. Information from a single source, even an uncorroborated Facebook post, can allow a government agent to watchlist an individual with virtually no outside scrutiny. Perhaps that’s why 40% of those on the master watchlist have “no recognized terrorist group affiliation,” according to the government’s own records.

This opens up the possibility of increased surveillance and tense encounters with the police, not to speak of outright harassment, for a large but undivulged number of people. When a police officer stops a person for a driving infraction, for instance, information about his or her KST status will pop up as soon a driver’s license is checked.  According to FBI documents, police officers who get a KST hit are warned to “approach with caution” and “ask probing questions.” When officers believe they’re about to go face to face with a terrorist, bad things can happen. It’s hardly a stretch of the imagination, particularly after a summer of police shootings of unarmed men, to suspect that an officer approaching a driver whom he believes to be a terrorist will be quicker to go for his gun. Meanwhile, the watchlisted person may never even know why his encounters with police have taken such a peculiar and menacing turn. According to the FBI's instructions, under no circumstances is a cop to tell a suspect that he or she is on a watchlist.

Inside the United States, no watchlist may be as consequential as the one that goes by the moniker of the Known or Appropriately Suspected Terrorist File. The names on this blacklist are shared with more than 17,000 state, local, and tribal police departments nationwide through the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Unlike any other information disseminated through the NCIC, the KST File reflects mere suspicion of involvement with criminal activity, so law enforcement personnel across the country are given access to a database of people who have secretly been labeled terrorism suspects with little or no actual evidence, based on virtually meaningless criteria.

And once someone is on this watchlist, good luck getting off it. According to the government’s watchlist rulebook, even a jury can’t help you. “An individual who is acquitted or against whom charges are dismissed for a crime related to terrorism,” it reads, “may nevertheless meet the reasonable standard and appropriately remain on, or be nominated to, the Terrorist Watchlist.” No matter the verdict, suspicion lasts forever.

The SARs program and the consolidated terrorism watchlist are just two domestic government databases of suspicion. Many more exist. Taken together, they should be seen as a new form of national ID for a growing group of people accused of no crime, who may have done nothing wrong, but are nevertheless secretly labeled by the government as suspicious or worse. Innocent until proven guilty has been replaced with suspicious until determined otherwise. Think of it as a new shadow system of national identification for a shadow government that is increasingly averse to operating in the light. It’s an ID its “owners” don’t carry around with them, yet it’s imposed on them whenever they interact with government agents or agencies. It can alter their lives in disastrous ways, often without their knowledge. And they could be you. If this sounds dystopian, that’s because it is.

Thus, the study clearly demonstrates how resources for fighting terrorism have mostly been used to target individuals who are suspicious and easier to prosecute because they practice a certain religion or have an “ideology” the general public will resent. And if most of these people were not people of color with Arabic-sounding names that could be used to promote a fear of foreigners in the criminal justice process, their crimes would be given the same light treatment other members of the general public typically receive.

Not only did the Russians move in, but they did that without the ICRC whose personnel refused to go because of the lack of security guarantees from Kiev. The Russian response to that lack of security guarantees was a) to order this unarmed convoy in and b) to clearly state in the official statement: We are warning against any attempts to thwart this purely humanitarian mission which took a long time to prepare in conditions of complete transparency and cooperation with the Ukrainian side and the ICRC. Those who are ready to continue sacrificing human lives to their own ambitions and geopolitical designs and who are rudely trampling on the norms and principles of international humanitarian law will assume complete responsibility for the possible consequences of provocations against the humanitarian relief convoy. Again, from a logical, political or moral point of view, this is rather self-obvious, but from a legal point of view this is a threat to use force ("complete responsibility for the possible consequences") inside the putatively sovereign territory of the Ukraine.

The Ukie plan has been to present some major "victory" for the Sunday the 24, when they plan a victory parade in Kiev to celebrate independence day (yup, the US-controlled and Nazi-administered "Banderastan" will celebrate its "independence"... this is both sad and hilarious).  Instead, what they have a long streak of *very* nasty defeats during the past 5-6 days or so.  By all accounts, the Ukies are getting butchered and, for the first time, even pushed back (if only on a tactical level).  That convoy in Luganks will add a stinging symbolical "f**k you!" to the junta in Kiev.  It will also exacerbate the tensions between the ruling clique in power, the Right Sector and Dmitri Iarosh and the growing protest movement in western Ukraine. Bottom line: this is a risky move no doubt, probably brought about by the realization that with water running out in Luganks Putin had to act.  Still it is also an absolutely brilliant move which will create a massive headache for the US and its Nazi puppets in Kiev.

PS: I heard yesterday evening that Holland has officially announced that it will not release the full info of the flight data and voice recorders of MH17.  Thus Holland has now become an official accomplice to the cover-up of this US false-flag operation and to the murder of the passengers of MH17. This is absolutely outrageous and disgusting I and sure hope that the Malaysian government will not allow this.  As for Kiev, it is also sitting on the recording of the communications between the Kiev ATC and MH17.  Finally, the USA has it all through its own signals intelligence capabilities.  So they all know and they are all covering up.  Under the circumstances, can anybody still seriously doubt "who done it"?

UPDATE: The ACLU of Massachusetts’s Kade Crockford notes this extraordinarily revealing quote from former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes, as he defends one of the worst FBI terror “sting” operations of all (the Cromitie prosecution we describe at length here): If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that “We won the war on terror and everything’s great,” cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive. That is the FBI’s terrorism strategy — keep fear alive — and it drives everything they do.

It was a stinging embarrassment for the new American president, who was scheduled to fly to Paris for a state visit the following month. To add to the insult, the coup had been triggered by de Gaulle’s efforts to bring French colonial rule in Algeria to an end — a goal that JFK himself had ardently championed.The CIA’s support for the coup was one more defiant display of contempt — a back of the hand aimed not only at de Gaulle but at Kennedy.JFK took pains to assure Paris that he strongly supported de Gaulle’s presidency, phoning Hervé Alphand, the French ambassador in Washington, to directly communicate these assurances. But, according to Alphand, Kennedy’s disavowal of official US involvement in the coup came with a disturbing addendum — the American president could not vouch for his own intelligence agency. Kennedy told Alphand that “the CIA is such a vast and poorly controlled machine that the most unlikely maneuvers might be true.”

But at eight o’clock that evening, a defiant de Gaulle went on the air, as nearly all of France gathered around the TV, and rallied his nation with the most inspiring address of his long public career. He looked exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes. But he had put on his soldier’s uniform for the occasion, and his voice was full of passion.De Gaulle began by denouncing the rebellious generals. The nation had been betrayed “by men whose duty, honor and raison d’être it was to serve and to obey.” Now it was the duty of every French citizen to protect the nation from these military traitors. “In the name of France,” de Gaulle shouted, thumping the table in front of him, “I order that all means — I repeat all means — be employed to block the road everywhere to those men!”De Gaulle’s final words were a battle cry. “Françaises, Français! Aidez moi!” And all over France, millions of people did rush to the aid of their nation. The following day, a general strike was organized to protest the putsch. Led primarily by the left, including labor unions and the Communist Party, the mass protest won broad political support.Over ten million people joined the nationwide demonstrations, with hundreds of thousands marching in the streets of Paris, carrying banners proclaiming “Peace in Algeria” and shouting, “Fascism will not pass!” Even police officers associations expressed “complete solidarity” with the protests, as did the Roman Catholic Confederation, which denounced the “criminal acts” of the coup leaders, warning that they “threaten to plunge the country into civil war.”

In the wake of the crises in Cuba and France provoked by his own security officials, Kennedy began to display a new boldness. JFK’s assertiveness surprised CIA officials, who had apparently counted on Kennedy to be sidelined during the French coup.Agency officials assured coup leaders that the president would be too “absorbed in the Cuban affair” to act decisively against the plot. But JFK did react quickly to the French crisis, putting on high alert Ambassador Gavin, a decorated paratrooper commander in World War II who could be counted on to keep NATO forces in line. The president also dispatched his French speaking press spokesman, Pierre Salinger, to Paris to communicate directly with Élysée Palace officials.As Paris officials knew, the new American president already had something of a prickly relationship with de Gaulle, but he had strong feelings for France — and they made sure to absolve JFK of personal responsibility for the coup in their leaks to the press. French press accounts referred to the CIA as a “reactionary state within a state” that operated outside of Kennedy’s control.

But it was de Gaulle himself, and the French people, who turned the tide against the coup. By Sunday, the second day of the coup, a dark foreboding had settled over Paris. “I am surprised that you are still alive,” the president of France’s National Assembly bluntly told de Gaulle that morning. “If I were Challe, I would have already swooped down on Paris; the army here will move out of the way rather than shoot…. If I were in the position Challe put himself in, as soon as I burst in, I would have you executed with a bullet in the back, here in the stairwell, and say you were trying to flee.” De Gaulle himself realized that if Challe did airlift his troops from Algiers to France, “there was not much to stop them.”

This admission of presidential impotence, which Alphand reported to Paris, was a startling moment in US foreign relations, though it remains largely unknown today. Kennedy then underlined how deeply estranged he was from his own security machinery by taking the extraordinary step of asking Alphand for the French government’s help to track down the US officials behind the coup, promising to fully punish them.“[Kennedy] would be quite ready to take all necessary measures in the interest of good Franco-American relations, whatever the rank or functions of [the] incriminated people,” Alphand cabled French foreign minister Maurice Couve de Murville.

Hundreds of people rushed to the nation’s airfields and prepared to block the runways with their vehicles if Challe’s planes tried to land. Others gathered outside government ministries in Paris to guard them against attack. André Malraux, the great novelist turned minister of culture, threaded his way through one such crowd, handing out helmets and uniforms. Meanwhile, at the huge Renault factory on the outskirts of Paris, workers took control of the sprawling complex and formed militias, demanding weapons from the government so that they could fend off rebel assaults.“In many ways, France, and particularly Paris, relived its great revolutionary past Sunday night and Monday — the past of the revolutionary barricades, of vigilance committees and of workers’ councils,” reported The New York Times.

De Gaulle’s ringing address to the nation and the massive public response had a sobering effect on the French military. Challe’s support quickly began melting away, even — humiliatingly — within the ranks of his own military branch, the air force. Pilots flew their planes out of Algeria, and others feigned mechanical troubles, depriving Challe’s troops of the air transport they needed to descend on Paris.Meanwhile, de Gaulle moved quickly to arrest military officers in France who were involved in the coup. Police swooped down on the Paris apartment of an army captain who was plotting pro-putsch street riots, and de Gaulle’s minister of the interior seized the general in charge of the rebel forces that were gathered in the forests outside Paris. Deprived of their leader, the insurrectionary units sheepishly began to disperse.By Tuesday night, Challe knew that the coup had failed. The next day, he surrendered and was flown to Paris. Challe emerged from the plane “carrying his own suitcase, looking crumpled and insignificant in civilian clothes,” according to Time. “He stumbled at the foot of the landing steps, [falling] heavily on his hands and knees.” It was an ignominious homecoming for the man who had fully believed that, with US support, he was to replace the great de Gaulle.