The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: 'There is no real hunt. It's fixed'

[kpete]

The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: 'There is no real hunt. It's fixed'
Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau's more ethically murky practices

...................

Under the supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor created a fictitious French-Syrian altar ego, called Farouk Aziz. In this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange County – the long stretch of suburbia south of LA – and pretended to convert to Islam.

He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist sympathizers.

Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County’s Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency

..........................

more:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/mar/20/fbi-informant?newsfeed=true

[gratuitous]

1. Oh come on!

If our government decides someone is very, very bad, we can and should do anything we want to them. If Monteilh leads someone into a compromising position, well, they must have been very, very bad and would have done something terroristic sooner or later. So if someone decided that person needed to be killed, we must trust our leaders who almost never make mistakes. There will be a party crowd to dance on the corpse and celebrate another victory in the war on terror.

And, when the target surprises everyone in the FBI and does the right thing trying to turn away the overbearing COINTELPRO operative by calling the FBI, they'll . . . well, what will the FBI do when its own operative is being reported to them? I'm thinking they'll have a good laugh, and try another tack to trap citizens. "It's fixed."

[freshwest]

2. Real life destroys the media frenzy, again.