Sunday, June 27, 2021

Glenn Greenwald: Questions About the FBI’s Role in 1/6 Are Mocked Because the FBI Shapes Liberal Corporate Media

Glenn Greenwald’s take on Tucker’s claim that FBI infiltrators instigated the January 6 capitol invasion. Two passages in particular stood out to me.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/questions-about-the-fbis-role-in

“This reaction is particularly confounding given how often the FBI did exactly this during the first War on Terror, and how commonplace discussions of this tactic were in mainstream liberal circles. Over the last decade, I reported on countless cases for The Guardian and The Intercept where the FBI targeted some young American Muslims they viewed as easily manipulated — due to financial distress, emotional problems, or both — and then deployed informants and undercover agents to dupe them into agreeing to join terrorist plots that had been created, designed and funded by the FBI itself, only to then congratulate themselves for breaking up the plot which they themselves initiated. As I asked in one headline about a particularly egregious entrapment case: ‘Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?'”

“If the FBI had advanced knowledge of what was being plotted yet did nothing to stop the attack, it raises numerous possibilities about why that is. It could be that they just had yet another “intelligence failure” of the kind that they claimed caused them to miss the 9/11 attack and therefore need massive new surveillance authorities, budget increases, and new Patriot-Act-type laws to fix it. It could be that they allowed the riot to happen because they did not take it seriously enough or because some of them supported the cause behind it, or because they realized that there would be benefits to the security state if it happened. Or it could be that they were using those operatives under their control to plot with, direct, and drive the attack — as they have done so many times in the past — and allowed it to happen out of either negligence or intent.”