FBI entraps Massachusetts teen with mental disabilities
An 18-year-old from Massachusetts has been arrested by corrupt FBI
“Does the government work for us or do we work for the government? Can the federal government take credit for saving us from a plot of its own creation? Has the federal government kept us safe or does it just want us to think that it has kept us safe?”—Judge Andrew Napolitano
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced earlier this month that it had arrested Mateo Ventura, an 18-year-old with brain development issues from Wakefield, Massachusetts, for allegedly providing aid to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).
A DOJ press release stated Ventura was charged with “one count of knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” The accusation is he gave “multiple gift cards to an individual he believed was an ISIS supporter, with the intention that the gift cards be sold on the dark web for a little less than face value and resulting profits be used to support ISIS,” and he intended to travel overseas to join ISIS.
Over the course of two years, while still a minor, Ventura provided $965 worth of gift cards and another $705 after turning 18, according to the DOJ.
That’s the extent of the information provided by the DOJ in the release which led to positive headlines for the DOJ and Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) by the mainstream narrative media. But when you look at the details in the criminal complaint, you find out how disgraceful and disgusting the FBI truly is.
What’s buried in the narrative media’s stories, or outright ignored and unreported, is that an undercover FBI agent groomed and entrapped Ventura when the two first began communicating when he was just 16. At one point, Ventura attempted to turn in the FBI agent, whom he thought to be a member of ISIS, to the FBI, but the FBI allowed the entrapment to continue.
John Whitehead wrote for The Rutherford Institute:
“We’re not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people, protect their liberties and ensure their happiness.
Rather, we are the unfortunate victims of the diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and profitably) employed.
Case in point: the FBI.
The government’s henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation’s most notorious lawbreakers.
Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work.
Clearly, this is not a government agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the limits of the Constitution.
Indeed, this same government agency has a pattern and practice of entrapment that involves targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda, know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism sting.
Basically, it works like this: in order to justify their crime-fighting superpowers, the FBI manufactures criminals by targeting vulnerable individuals and feeding them anti-government propaganda; then, undercover agents and informants equip the targeted individuals with the training and resources to challenge what they’ve been indoctrinated into believing is government corruption; and finally, the FBI arrests the targeted individuals for engaging in anti-government, terrorist activities.
This is what passes for the government’s perverse idea of being tough on crime.”
The Intercept broke the story, at least the story of the FBI’s corrupt tactics. The Intercept reported that “according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura had never actually funded any terrorist group.” It continued:
“The only ‘terrorist’ he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old, solicited small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and directed him not to tell anyone else about their intimate online relationship, including his family.”
Ventura’s single father, Paul Ventura, spoke to The Intercept and said of his son:
“He was born prematurely, he had brain development issues. I had the school do a neurosurgery evaluation on him and they said his brain was underdeveloped. He was suffering endless bullying at school with other kids taking food off his plate, tripping him in the hallway, humiliating him, laughing at him.”
Paul Ventura said his son was “manipulated by the FBI” and adamantly defended him as not a terrorist nor sympathizer with terrorists.
As The Intercept reported on the government’s own documents, they showed that Mateo Ventura had been offered several chances to travel overseas by the FBI agent, but “Ventura balked” each time. And by “the time the investigation was winding down, he appeared ready to turn in his purported ISIS contact — an FBI agent — to the FBI.”
According to what Ventura’s father told the New York Post, the fact Mateo was planning to turn the FBI agent in makes sense. The Post reported:
“Paul Ventura, Mateo’s dad, argued that his son, who he said is good with computers, was trying to help the FBI ‘and work with them’ by showing them how easily Americans can connect with terrorists online.
‘[He is] one hundred percent a loyal American. One hundred percent,’ the single dad said. ‘He don’t like terrorism. He don’t like it. He likes to learn about it.’”
By the way, the Post piece was much like that of CBS Boston, ABC News and CNN as well as countless others putting the focus on the allegations rather than the FBI’s tactics.
As The Intercept reported:
“Yet based on the government’s own account of what led to Ventura’s arrest, there is reason to believe that his case is less a serious terrorism bust than one of the many instances in which a troubled or mentally unfit young man was groomed by undercover FBI agents to commit a crime that would not have otherwise happened.”
This is the FBI way
The FBI, an unconstitutional agency, is like all other government agencies. They create problems, swoop in with the “solution” and then take a bow and tell us they’ve saved us from themselves. They justify their existence with these criminal and corrupt schemes.
Judge Andrew Napolitano went into detail of this back in 2011.
Napolitano said:
“Since the tragedy of 9/11, numerous crazies and low-level copy-cats have engaged in criminal behavior which they hoped would result in the deaths of innocent Americans and somehow advance the cause of jihad. If you ask the leadership of the FBI… it will tell you that it has foiled about 17 plots to kill Americans during the past ten years. What it will not tell you is that there have been 20 foiled plots; and of them, three were interrupted by members of the public. The 17 that were interrupted by the feds were created by the feds.
We all remember the three that were foiled by diligent Americans: The shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, and the Times Square bomber. In all of these cases, the crimes charged were those of attempting to kill and conspiring with others to do so. In all three of those cases, alert Americans on transcontinental flights on or the streets of New York told authorities of bizarre behavior, or actually subdued the threats themselves. There was no foiling by the FBI. The plotters were – thankfully – bumbling fools who had poorly planned their criminal behavior, and who ended up harming no one. All three are serving life terms.
But the more curious cases are the remaining 17 for which the federal government has taken credit. They all have a common and reprehensible thread. They were planned, plotted, controlled, and carried out by the federal government itself. In all of these seventeen cases – from the Ft. Dix Six to the Lackawanna Seven to the Portland Parade Bomber – the feds found young men of Muslim backgrounds; loners who were bitter at America. They befriended them, cajoled them, and persuaded them that they could change the world by killing Americans. In all these cases, agents worked undercover and portrayed themselves to the targets as Arabs of like un-American mind. In some cases, the federal agents used third parties to act as middlemen. The third parties are typically persons who have been convicted of crimes and who, in return for leniency at their sentencings, were willing to work with the same feds who prosecuted them in order to help entrap whomever else those feds are pursuing.
Thus, in all 17 of these cases, because of the command and control of federal agents, no one was ever in danger, no one was harmed, no bomb went off, and no property was damaged. But in all those cases, the losers whom the feds targeted each believed that they were interacting with real plotters who would really bring them cash and bombs. As we know, sometimes the cash arrived, but the bombs never did. The defendants were essentially charged and convicted for playing a game with federal agents.
The most recent of those government-generated plots was revealed yesterday. It has a new twist as it allegedly involves agents of the intelligence apparatus of the government of Iran. It, too, was destined to go nowhere, as the feds monitored and taped every move made by the target as he interacted with federal agents whom he stupidly believed to be drug dealers and co-conspirators. Today, the feds themselves revealed that high officials of Iran’s government knew nothing of this. Of course, the neocons have demanded bombs on Tehran, no matter what the government there knew. And this plot came to light the day before the Attorney General himself was subpoenaed by Congress in the Fast and Furious case.
You get the picture. Is any of this criminal? Can the government just pick and choose whom to seduce and then lower the boom at the right time and arrest its would-be confederates? Is this a proper use of law enforcement resources? The answers to these questions are obvious, and they are not good. The courts have made this legal so long as the target had a mental pre-disposition to cause harm. But none of this keeps us safe, all of it makes us less free as any of us can be entrapped, and we are fools if we praise the government for exposing a plot of its own creation and saving us from a danger that never existed.
Can the government break the law in order to enforce it? When it does, it becomes a law unto itself, and the rule of law dies, as the feds decide whom to target and whom to trap. Think about it: Are we really safe in a false sense of security? Why do we pay the government to trick us into believing it is keeping us safe? When no one is harmed, and the government controls the plot, aren’t we just punishing someone for his thoughts? And in a free society, aren’t people free to think as we wish? This must be so; for if the government can punish thoughts, there is no limit to its power.”
Matthew Ehret wrote for Strategic-Culture:
“Before it was revealed that ISIS was being supported by a network of Anglo-American intelligence agencies and their allies in a failed effort to overthrow Bashar al Assad, an exhaustive 2012 study was conducted by the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School….
In this course of its investigation, researchers at Fordham discovered that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 138 terrorist incidents recorded in the USA between 2001-2012 involved FBI informants who played leading roles in planning out, supplying weapons, instructions and even recruiting Islamic terrorists to carry out terrorist acts on U.S. soil. Reporting on the Fordham study, The Nation reported on this scandal stating:
‘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.’
Of course, this trend preceded 9/11 itself as we see in the case of FBI informant Emad Salem (formerly associated with the Egyptian Military) who recorded hundreds of hours of conversation between himself and his FBI handlers which were reported publicly by the New York times on October 28, 1993. Why is this important? Because Emad Salem was the figure who rented the van, hotel rooms, provided bomb-making instruction, tested out explosives on behalf of Mohammed Salamah and 15 other terrorists who carried out the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing which injured 1000 and killed 6 people.
Even though several large-scale military war game scenarios were conducted between October 2000 and July 2001 featuring planes flying into both the World Trade Center buildings and Pentagon, the incoming Neocon administration were somehow caught with their pants down when the events of 9/11 finally took place (conveniently at a moment that NORAD had suffered a total breakdown of their continental warning and response systems). When all flights were grounded over the coming several days, Cheney and his PNAC cohorts ensured that the only flights permitted to leave the USA was crammed with high level Saudi royals- including the Bin Laden family.”
ISIS: An American Creation?
As Ehret noted, ISIS has long been supported by Western intelligence agencies. Well, why wouldn’t it have been considering the CIA may very well have created it?
That what Stephen Lendman states for Global Research. As the bipartisan clowns called presidents bluster and squawk out “bald-faced lies” about being tough on ISIS and “terrorists” in general, they help aid these organizations. Why? To keep control over us.
“It’s one of the dirtiest of dirty open secrets.
US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) documents prove it – obtained by Judicial Watch through an FOIA lawsuit.
They show ISIS, al-Qaeda and like-minded terrorist groups are the ‘major forces’ used as US foot soldiers in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere.
The myth of so-called ‘moderate rebels’ was long ago discredited. Yet claiming they exist persists.
The DIA documents show America, NATO, Saudi Arabia and other regional rogue states support an Islamic caliphate to challenge, topple and replace Bashar al-Assad with an imperial puppet.
Longstanding US/Israeli plans call for redrawing the Middle East map by color revolutions and wars, replacing independent governments with pro-Western puppet regimes, balkanizing Iraq, Syria, Iran and other regional countries for easier control, looting their resources, and exploiting their people.
A 2012 DIA document states the West will facilitate the rise of ISIS ‘to isolate the Syrian regime.’
ISIS fighters are recruited from scores of countries, including Western ones.
In Washington, ISIS is commonly called ‘John McCain’s Army’…(one of) the earliest advocates of (regional) military action” on the phony pretext of combating ISIS.
Washington uses ISIS and like-minded groups as instruments for regional ‘proxy war…’
ISIS, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra (ISIS in Syria) and like-minded groups are US creations.
They’re used as foot soldiers to advance its imperium – responsible for aiding Washington rape and destroy one country after another.
Most Americans are unaware of Washington’s diabolical agenda in the Middle East, Central Asia, North Africa and elsewhere in their name – a bipartisan conspiracy against world peace, stability and security no matter the human cost.”