Word: Orlando

Institute for Public Accuracy

COLEEN ROWLEY, rowleyclan[at]earthlink.net, @ColeenRowley

Coleen Rowley, a former FBI special agent and division counsel whose May 2002 memo to the FBI Director exposed some of the FBI’s pre-9/11 failures was named one of Time magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002.

She said: “The shooting in Orlando is tied to the ‘war on terror,’ but not in the way Trump has been arguing. Most Americans still do not connect the dots that the increasing violence occurring domestically: mass shootings, ‘active shooters,’ hate crimes and acts of terror (which frankly all blur together) are not only blowback from but the natural result of a war culture that glorifies war and war violence in the form of violent movies, video games, and military culture. I warned the FBI Director in February 2003 that this would happen and that he and the FBI would be helpless to stop it, if the U.S. went ahead and launched war on Iraq. Now, both Trump and Clinton claim that military actions are the solutions to our problems, but a serious assessment of these various attacks shows the opposite.”

Ivan Eland, director of the Center on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute-  "According to a recent investigation by the New York Times, in two-thirds of prosecutions of ISIS-related terrorism cases, the FBI is using once rare undercover sting operations, such as going on the Internet and encouraging bloviating and bragging individuals to do illegal things so that they can be arrested. Unbelievably, the reason for such a high percentage is that such intrusive undercover operations can be done without approval of a judge, which is needed for searches and wiretaps. Thus, the Congress and the public are largely in the dark about such stings.

“According to Michael German, a former undercover agent with the FBI, who was quoted in the Times, ‘They’re manufacturing terrorism cases."