Richard Clarke: "A Lot of the Cases After 9/11 Were Manufactured or Enormously Exaggerated and Were Announced with Great Trumpets by the" Government

Many of us have written for years that the evidence against most of those arrested post-9/11 as being "terrorists" was either faked or blown out of all proportion, and that most of the so-called terrorists are either semi-retarded or were enticed by money offered by undercover agents.

As I wrote in March 2008:

We've all seen it on television. The defense attorney argues his client was "entrapped". That is, that it wasn't the defendant's idea to commit the crime, but that the police planted the idea and urged him to do it.

Many of us have heard allegations that post-9/11 arrests of suspected Al Qaeda members were based on very thin information. Did you realize that all or virtually all of these arrests occurred due to entrapment? For example:

• PBS' Frontline ran a special report focusing on the the alleged Al Qaeda plot in Lodi, California, which showed -- based upon interviews with top law enforcement officials involved in the case -- that the bust amounted to little more than entrapment and coerced and fabricated confessions from two men who, in fact, had nothing to do with the terrorist group

• The Washington Post ran a story about one alleged threat entitled "Was it a terror sting or entrapment?", showing that the U.S. government lent material support to the wanna-be terrorists, and put violent ideas in their heads

• Raw Story reports that the alleged terrorist group that is alleged to have planned to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower was non-violent before a government informant infiltrated the group and planted violent ideas in their heads

There are numerous other instances of entrapment of peaceful or mentally incompetent people who are then arrested as "terrorists" (see this, this and this)

I also previously pointed out that the "mastermind" of the New York City synagogue bombing plot was a self-confessed "pothead" , another participant was a crackhead, and all of the supposed terrorists in the plot were semi-retarded.

Now, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke is himself saying pretty much the same thing:

A lot of the cases after 9/11 were manufactured or enormously exaggerated and were announced with great trumpets by the attorney general and the FBI director so that we felt that they were doing something when, in fact, what they were doing was not helpful, not relevant, not needed.

It is interesting to note, in this context, that the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham; and see this Newsweek article).

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