For fairly obvious reasons, I've got Trevor Aaronson's The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism on my to-be-read list, notwithstanding this fairly withering review by Ali Soufan, a former FBI Special Agent and one of the primary interrogators of al Qaeda's Abu Zubaydah, among other detainees. The success that Soufan had in eliciting useful information through traditional FBI rapport-building interrogation is recounted in a number of sources, including his own book and Kurt Eichenwald's 500 Days.
Soufan's takeway:
An impartial review of the FBI's efforts to fight terrorism after 9/11 would give it high marks overall. It gets hundreds of leads daily, and it has a duty to check them all out, no matter how dismissible they appear. The Iranian regime's 2011 plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., which was uncovered thanks to a Drug Enforcement Administration informant, is a reminder of why. Unfortunately Mr. Aaronson fails to appreciate this, and instead uses most of his pages to accuse the FBI of entrapment. Tellingly, he notes toward the end that "I am frequently asked why entrapment has never been an effective defense in the terrorism cases. I've struggled with the answer to this question." The answer, of course, is that the evidence shows that these were real threats to the U.S., and we are fortunate that the FBI intercepted them.
Ouch!
In his review of my book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, former FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan does not tell Wall Street Journal readers that the only direct connection Tarik Shah had to Al Qaeda was Soufan, who posed as a terrorist during the sting (“Enemies Domestic,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 23, 2013). Soufan says a police search of Shah’s car found “evidence” of his terrorist intent. But that evidence was just a phone number of a Maryland man accused of having traveled to a training camp in Pakistan. While Soufan believes that Shah's interest in joining Al Qaeda justifies what he and the FBI did, he in turn does not seem to take issue with the facts I presented in my book. What Soufan gets wrong is his statement that I attempt to show that no threat of terrorism exists in the United States. I do no such thing. Richard Reid and Faisal Shahzad meant harm and had the means to deliver that harm without the help of an agent provocateur. They are real terrorists. In his review of my book, Soufan specifically cites these men as examples of the threat of terrorism. He doesn't mention, however, that neither terrorist was caught in an FBI sting operation. In The Terror Factory, I am critical of the FBI’s justification of elaborate, expensive undercover sting operations designed to identify people who for whatever reason hate the United States -- but who are incapable of significant violence without assistance from undercover FBI agents and informants -- as something the American people want. To be sure, Al Qaeda has attacked here at home, and there is every reason to monitor those who sympathize with terrorist organizations. But should the FBI manufacture crimes to punish people who simply have bad thoughts?
-- Trevor Aaronson
Author, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism (Ig Publishing, January 2013)
Posted by: Trevor Aaronson | January 27, 2013 at 09:26 AM