BOOK REVIEW
The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism
by Trevor Aaronson 2013
Author’s website trevoraaronson.com
About the Author
Trevor Aaronson is a contributing writer at The Intercept and executive director of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. He is currently an ASU Future Security Fellow at New America and was previously a fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley.
About the Book
The book starts with an introduction followed by 7 chapters.
Three excerpts are available at trevoraaronson.com/book. Each excerpt is a 20 to 30 minute read.
Here’s a short from Trevor Aaronson’s article dated January 16, 2013 titled “Most Terrorist Plots in the US Aren’t Invented by Al Qaeda — They’re Manufactured by the FBI” at.www.alternet.org.
“Antonio Martinez was a punk. The twenty-two-year-old from Baltimore was chunky, with a wide nose and jet-black hair pulled back close to his scalp and tied into long braids that hung past his shoulders. He preferred to be called Muhammad Hussain, the name he gave himself following his conversion to Islam. But his mother still called him Tony, and she couldn’t understand her son’s burning desire to be the Maryland Mujahideen.
As a young man, Martinez had been angry and lost. He’d dropped out of Laurel High School, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and spent his teens as a small-time thief in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.
When the FBI discovered him, Martinez was an angry extremist mouthing off on Facebook about violence, with misspelled posts…continuing further on…Based on the Facebook postings alone, an FBI agent gave an informant the “green light” to get to know Martinez and determine if he had a propensity for violence. In other words, to see if he was dangerous.
The government was setting the trap.”
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Endorsements
Former FBI Supervisory Agent, James J. Wedick says, “Aaronson explains just how misguided and often deceptive FBI terrorism sting operations have become. In case after case, he demonstrates how the money being spent is more about producing theater than about federal agents arresting suspected terrorists.”
Pulitzer Prize-winning Professor of Investigative Reporting, Lowell Bergman says, “This is investigative reporting at its best. This is a story that the major media has been afraid to look at, much less commit the resources to report it out. Now Trevor Aaronson has done it. For the first time a documented investigation into the domestic terrorism program is available to the general public. And the story this dogged reporter tells has been garnering growing attention. Is it possible that we have in fact created the very threat we fear? Are we in danger of destroying the fabric of our freedom in our panic to preserve it? Read Aaronson’s groundbreaking report and make up your own mind.”
Editor at Mother Jones Magazine says, “Trevor Aaronson’s new book documenting how the Federal Bureau of Investigation has built a vast network of informants to infiltrate Muslim communities and, in some cases, cultivate phony terrorist plots. The book grew from Aaronson’s award-winning Mother Jones cover story The Informants and his research in the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley.”
This book’s popularity is demonstrated in the fact that its Amazon rank is #65 in the “Privacy & Surveillance” category. There, Customer Reviews rate it 4 out of 5 stars.
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