The mass shooting in Orlando, Florida at a gay nightclub, by a man pledging
a seemingly last-minute allegiance to the ISIS terror group, leads to questions
about whether the U.S. government has been adequately protecting its citizens.
Going back in time, the U.S. government inadvertently created al Qaeda by encouraging,
funding, and arming radical Islamist fighters against the Soviet Union in faraway
Afghanistan during the 1980s. After the 9/11 attacks by that group, the U.S.
government, by conducting an unrelated invasion of Iraq, then unintentionally
created an even more brutal group called al Qaeda in Iraq, which pledged allegiance
to the main al Qaeda group in Pakistan, and eventually morphed into the even
more vicious ISIS. ISIS then took over large parts of Iraq and Syria, but began
to attack Western targets only after a U.S.-led coalition began bombing the
group in those countries.
Directly planned attacks by ISIS have occurred in Europe, but ISIS has had
problems recruiting people in the United States to go to Syria for military
training and return to the United States to attack, because the U.S. Muslim
community has not been radicalized. Thus, the group has had to rely often on
spontaneous and crude – but nevertheless sometimes deadly – attacks
by relative amateurs “inspired” by the group, such as the incidents
in San Bernardino and Orlando.
In the Orlando attack, the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, even may have been dressing
up anti-gay bigotry by pledging allegiance to ISIS shortly after he began his
dastardly act. Although the FBI had investigated his past statements and connection
with one of the few Americans who joined an al Qaeda affiliate and went to Syria
in 2013 and 2014, respectively, they closed the investigation; Mateen’s father
and ex-wife have both dismissed religion as a cause and instead pointed to anti-gay
statements he had made. His father has even pointed out that the shooting may
have been triggered by Mateen’s outrage at his three-year-old son recently observing
two men kissing and touching.
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 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. These
people are five steps away from being a danger to the United…