FBI Exploits Mentally Ill in “Homegrown” Terrorism Effort

It is now an established pattern: the government seeks out mental cases and disturbed individuals and turns them into “al-Qaeda” terrorists, or wannabe al-Qaedaites.

Narseal Batiste, “the accused ringleader of a wacky terrorist cell” in Miami, as the New York Daily News puts it, “needs psychiatric help,” according to his father, Narcisse Batiste. “He was distraught after his beloved mother, Audrey, died in 2000, relatives told The News, and the next year he left Chicago and dropped out of sight.”

From all accounts, Narseal Batiste is not an over-the-top mental case like Zacarias Moussaoui, but it appears he is vulnerable enough to be exploited by the government, determined to fabricate “homegrown” terrorists.

In fact, the government more or less admits it does not have a case against Batiste and his young adult and teenage charges.

“Even as Justice Department officials trumpeted the arrests of seven Florida men accused of planning to wage a ‘full ground war against the United States,’ they acknowledged the group did not have the means to carry out the plan,” reports Knight Ridder. “The Justice Department unveiled the arrests with an orchestrated series of news conferences in two cities, but the severity of the charges compared with the seemingly amateurish nature of the group raised concerns among civil libertarians,” who noted that the group had “no weapons, no explosives” and yet the government considers the arrests and case a “major announcement.”

If not for the “confidential government informant” inserted in their midst, who convinced them to pledge allegiance to the cartoonish “al-Qaeda,” there would be no case.

After “sweeps of various locations in Miami, government agents found no explosives or weapons. Investigators also did not document any direct links to al-Qaeda.” But this complete lack of evidence did not stop the FBI. “This group was more aspirational than operational,” said John Pistole, the FBI’s deputy director. In other words, merely thinking about “al-Qaeda,” even if such a thought is planted by an agent provocateur, is illegal, a crime against the state.

George Orwell called this “thoughtcrime,” and wrote: “Thoughtcrime is the only crime that matters.”

It does not matter if the hapless victims of FBI entrapment in Miami were actually a threat, the point here is they were thinking about “al-Qaeda,” never mind this thought was planted in the mind of Narseal Batiste by the FBI.

“U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales held up the case as a good example of the Justice Department’s strategy of taking out domestic terrorists before they strike. He said the group is representative of ‘homegrown’ terrorist cells that operate without ties to a larger group such as al-Qaeda.”

Thus we have realized the world envisioned by Philip K. Dick in his 1956 short story, Minority Report, made famous by Steven Spielberg’s film by the same name. In the short story and film, it is illegal to think about crime. In the story and film, the government employs “precogs,” or “previsions,” to detect illegal thoughts. However, in Miami, no such talents were required, as the FBI simply located a man with mental problems and had an agent provocateur insert thoughts in his mind, and then the boom was lowered.

In addition to planting thoughts in the mind of Batiste, the government has characterized the group as Muslim, even though there is no evidence of this, not that evidence matters.

“Despite early reports to the contrary, the men didn’t appear to be members of mainstream Muslim communities. A close friend of one of the defendants said Batiste’s teachings came from the Moorish Science Temple of America, an early 19th-century religion that blends Christianity, Judaism and Islam with a heavy influence on self-discipline through martial arts.”

Even though Knight Ridder makes mention of the fact Batiste and his pathetic crew of impoverished kids have nothing to do with Islam, and include this fact in the second to last paragraph of a follow-up news article, no doubt many Americans, carefully indoctrinated over the last few years, believe “al-Qaeda” is alive and well in Florida, as initial news stories certainly give this impression.

In fact, convincing Americans that “al-Qaeda” sleeper cells—not necessarily Arabs, but in this instance seemingly innocuous African-American kids—may live next door, or reside in the ghetto across town, is what the Justice Department’s absurd case is all about.

“The Justice Department made it clear that it is determined to stop people from following the model of al-Qaida,” reports the Sun-Sentinel. “There is cause for concern that this ideology of hatred has the reach and tentacles that it appears to have,” Jack Riley, a “terrorism expert” at the Rand Corporation, told the newspaper.

Finally, it should not be surprising the corporate media, fully onboard with the insane neocon plan for generational war and its necessary pretexts, including manufacturing pathetic patsies, would run to the Rand Corporation for meaty quotes.

“Covert foreign policy became the standard mode of operation after World War II, which was also when Ford Foundation became a major player for the first time. The institute most involved in classified research was Rand Corporation, set up by the Air Force in 1948. The interlocks between the trustees at Rand, and the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie foundations were so numerous that the Reece Committee listed them in its report (two each for Carnegie and Rockefeller, and three for Ford). Ford gave one million dollars to Rand in 1952 alone, at a time when the chairman of Rand was simultaneously the president of Ford Foundation,” writes Daniel Brandt (Philanthropists at War).