How Western Intelligence Built the Threat It Claimed to Fight

By Malcolm Lee Kitchen III | Margin Of The Law

The Expanding Definition of Domestic Terrorism

Something significant is happening to the legal definition of terrorism in the United States.

What began as a narrowly scoped framework targeting foreign actors with demonstrable ties to organized violence has been systematically broadened. The trajectory is not subtle. Post-2001 legislation, executive orders, and internal agency reclassifications have steadily expanded the category of “domestic terrorist” to capture behaviors that, a generation ago, would have been classified as protected political dissent.

The pattern accelerated after January 6, 2021. Federal agencies issued bulletins identifying militia ideology, opposition to COVID-19 mandates, and electoral skepticism as indicators of domestic radicalization. By 2023, the Department of Homeland Security’s threat assessment documents listed “anti-government” sentiment alongside white supremacist violence as primary threat categories. In 2025, draft legislative proposals circulating in congressional committees proposed expanding surveillance authorities to include individuals whose online activity suggested “resistance to federal authority.”

This is the context in which a serious question must be asked.

If terrorism is a naturally occurring phenomenon, self-organized and ideologically driven, then expanding surveillance architecture and preemptive legal frameworks may carry some marginal justification. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but defensible in narrow terms.

But if terrorism is not naturally occurring. If the historical record shows that western intelligence agencies have repeatedly constructed, funded, equipped, and directed the very terrorist movements they claimed to be fighting, then the conclusion is different. The surveillance state is not a response to terrorism. It is an extension of the same apparatus that manufactured terrorism in the first place.

The historical record is not ambiguous on this point.

What the Fordham Study Actually Found

In 2012, the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School completed one of the most exhaustive analyses of domestic terrorism prosecutions conducted in the post-9/11 period. Researchers examined 138 terrorism-related incidents recorded inside the United States between 2001 and 2012.

The finding was not a statistical trend. It was a categorical result.

Every single one of those 138 cases involved an FBI informant in a direct, operational role. Not as an observer. Not as a passive witness who reported suspicious activity to federal handlers. In each case, informants were active participants in planning, equipping, and in many instances initiating the attacks they were simultaneously reporting on.

The Nation summarized the operational pattern with precision:

“Nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved a sting operation, at the center of which is a government informant. In these cases, the informants, who work for money or are seeking leniency on criminal charges of their own, have crossed the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself. Under the FBI’s guiding hand, the informants provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism.”

Read that carefully. The FBI’s informants were not discovering terrorism. They were scripting it. They selected targets, supplied materials, and provided the ideological framing that converted vulnerable individuals into prosecutable terror suspects. The terrorism did not exist prior to the FBI’s intervention. It was constructed by it.

This was not a minor procedural problem inside an otherwise sound counterterrorism architecture. This was the architecture.

The 1993 World Trade Center Attack: A Case Study in Managed Violence

The Fordham data covers 2001 forward. But the operational pattern it documents did not begin on September 11, 2001. The evidentiary trail runs at minimum to 1993.

Emad Salem was a former Egyptian military officer turned FBI informant. In the lead-up to the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Salem occupied the operational center of the plot. He rented the van used in the attack. He secured hotel rooms for the participants. He provided bomb-making instruction. He conducted live explosive tests. He was, functionally, the logistics coordinator for an attack that killed six people and injured approximately one thousand more.

Salem recorded his conversations with FBI handlers during this period. Hundreds of hours of recorded audio existed, capturing the relationship between a federal informant and his government supervisors in real time. The New York Times reported on these recordings on October 28, 1993.

The recordings existed. The attack happened. The FBI’s informant was integral to its execution. These three facts occupy the same historical record and must be read together.

What they indicate is that federal management of domestic terrorism did not begin with 9/11 reform efforts. It predated the attacks used to justify those reforms.

September 11, 2001: What the Official Record Does Not Explain

Several facts about September 11, 2001, are not disputed. They are simply not integrated into the standard narrative.

Between October 2000 and July 2001, U.S. military and intelligence services ran multiple large-scale war game exercises involving aircraft being flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The scenarios existed. The planning infrastructure to model these scenarios existed. The institutional knowledge that such an attack was architecturally conceivable was present at the highest levels of the national security apparatus.

On the morning of September 11, NORAD’s continental warning and response systems experienced a documented failure. Intercept protocols that had been executed hundreds of times for aircraft that deviated from flight plans without incident were not executed that morning.

In the days that followed, when all commercial aviation over the United States was grounded, a specific category of flight was authorized. Members of Saudi royal families, and members of the Bin Laden family, were permitted to board aircraft and leave the country. That authorization came from the highest levels of the executive branch.

The declassified 28 pages from the 9/11 Commission report, released in 2016 after years of congressional pressure, documented Saudi government financing of the hijackers. The principal figure identified in those pages was Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, Saudi Ambassador to the United States from 1983 to 2005. Bandar was not a peripheral figure. He was a regular presence at the Bush family’s Crawford, Texas ranch and had deep operational relationships across the U.S. intelligence community.

The official investigation did not follow those connections to a completed conclusion. It was not structured to.

What can be stated plainly is this: the official account contains internal contradictions that have not been resolved. Hundreds of credentialed architects and engineers have formally documented that the structural collapse sequence of three World Trade Center buildings does not conform to the physics of fire damage from aircraft impact. The 28 pages document foreign government financing that was not prosecuted. The war game simulations demonstrate institutional foreknowledge of the attack’s basic concept.

Two aircraft impacted two buildings. Three buildings collapsed. The official explanation for that arithmetic has not been made coherent.

Joe Biden and the Patriot Act’s Legislative Ancestry

The political response to September 11 produced the USA PATRIOT Act, signed into law October 26, 2001, forty-five days after the attacks. The speed of its passage, and the breadth of its surveillance authorities, prompted obvious questions about its origins.

Those questions have a documented answer.

Joe Biden, then serving as U.S. Senator from Delaware, publicly stated that the Patriot Act’s core surveillance architecture was drawn from legislation he had authored in 1994. His Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1994 failed to pass at the time, in part because its domestic surveillance provisions were considered too expansive for the political climate of the mid-1990s. After September 11, the political climate changed. Attorney General John Ashcroft’s legislative team used Biden’s framework as a structural template.

Biden was not a reluctant participant in what followed. He was among the most vocal Senate advocates for the invasion of Iraq, publicly and repeatedly providing institutional credibility to the case for a war built on falsified intelligence.

The Patriot Act’s domestic surveillance provisions did not arise from September 11. They existed before September 11. The attacks provided the political conditions to pass what had previously been rejected.

The FBI’s Post-9/11 Restructuring: COINTELPRO in New Architecture

In 2001, MI5’s Director General traveled to the United States to meet with incoming FBI Director Robert Mueller. The stated purpose was intelligence sharing and coordination on counterterrorism. What followed was a structural reorganization of the FBI’s domestic operations.

A 2004 Christian Science Monitor report described the transformation directly, citing a source close to the changes:

“They have done a number of things to move them in the direction of an MI5. They’ve created agents who are trained to have an intelligence function. They’re monitoring organizations within the U.S. that pose threats to national security, not with an eye toward prosecuting, but toward collecting and analyzing that information.”

The key phrase is “not with an eye toward prosecuting.” The restructured FBI was not building cases for courts. It was building dossiers for ongoing surveillance. The target was not criminal acts that had occurred. It was political orientation.

This was not a new operational concept for the FBI. It was a re-authorization of one.

J. Edgar Hoover launched the Counter-Intelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO, in 1956. Its stated targets were “subversive” organizations, a category that functionally included the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the U.S. Communist Party, and eventually every significant Black political organization operating in the 1960s. FBI informants did not merely observe these groups. They instigated internal conflict, pushed members toward radicalization, and in the case of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, provided the intelligence used to facilitate his assassination by Chicago police in 1969.

COINTELPRO’s existence became public during the 1974 Church Committee hearings. The program was officially discontinued. Its methodology was not discontinued. It was reorganized.

The post-9/11 FBI restructuring, informed by British intelligence doctrine, reactivated those methods under counterterrorism authority. The targets shifted. The operations remained structurally identical.

Documented Entrapment Operations: The Specific Cases

Investigative reporting on post-9/11 FBI operations identified a consistent pattern across multiple jurisdictions. The following cases are not allegations. They produced court records, judicial findings, and in several instances direct condemnation from federal judges.

The Newburgh Four case began in 2008 in New York. An FBI informant approached four men in a financially distressed community and offered 250,000 dollars, along with weapons and operational support, to participate in a terrorist plot. The NYU Center for Human Rights and Justice reviewed the case and found that government informants “introduced and aggressively pushed ideas about violent jihad and, moreover, actually encouraged the defendants to believe it was their duty to take action against the United States.”

Federal Judge Colleen McMahon did not equivocate in her assessment. She stated that “it was beyond question that the government created the crime here,” and criticized the FBI for sending informants “trolling among the citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will play some role, any role, in criminal activity.”

In Portland, Oregon, the trial of the so-called Christmas Tree bomber revealed that the FBI had produced its own terrorist training video, which was shown to the defendant. The video depicted armed men conducting attacks and detonating explosives using a cell phone detonator. The FBI operative then traveled with the target to a remote location where they detonated a live bomb concealed in a backpack as a practice run.

In Brooklyn, New York, in 2012, an FBI agent posing as an al-Qaeda operative provided a target with fake explosives for a one thousand pound device. The target attempted to detonate it outside the Federal Reserve building in Manhattan. The FBI supplied the materials. The FBI supplied the contact. The FBI arrested the person who used what the FBI provided.

In Irvine, California, an FBI informant was so operationally aggressive in attempting to recruit members of a local Islamic Center into violent activity that the mosque went to court and obtained a restraining order against the informant. A mosque used the American legal system to protect itself from a federal agent.

In Pittsburgh, Khalifa Ali al-Akili became suspicious of two individuals attempting to recruit him into jihadi activity and buying firearms. He contacted the London Guardian and a civil liberties organization to publicly identify them as FBI informants. A press conference was scheduled for March 16, 2012. The day before it was scheduled, the FBI arrested al-Akili, not on terrorism charges, but on a firearms possession charge.

The primary informant in the Pittsburgh operation was Shaden Hussain, who had previously organized the Newburgh case for a payment of 100,000 dollars. The same informant. Multiple cases. Confirmed federal payments.

Canada: The Same Architecture, Different Jurisdiction

The operational pattern was not confined to the United States.

In July 2016, Canadian RCMP arrested a couple for planning to bomb a public venue on Canada Day. A Canadian appeals court subsequently overturned the convictions. The reason was documented and specific: every member of the network that radicalized the couple, trained them in explosive construction, and scripted their attack was an RCMP informant. The terrorism did not exist independent of the government operation that produced it.

Earlier Canadian cases carry more serious implications. The 1985 Air India bombing killed 329 people and remained the deadliest act of aviation terrorism until September 11, 2001. CSIS had conducted surveillance of Sikh extremist networks implicated in the plot. After the bombing, thousands of hours of recorded wiretaps were destroyed. The destruction of evidence was not prosecuted. A 2005 review by the Security Intelligence Review Committee cleared CSIS of wrongdoing.

CSIS was also identified as the co-founding organization behind the Heritage Front, a white supremacist group established in 1988. CSIS agent Grant Bristol served as the operational controller and conduit for taxpayer funding to the organization until at least 1994. A Canadian federal intelligence agency financed a white supremacist organization using public funds.

The deeper history reaches back to the Front de Liberation du Quebec, the bomb-planting separatist organization that operated across the province during the 1960s. RCMP Security Services were caught directly managing FLQ cells, spreading FLQ graffiti on buildings, and supplying the group with explosives. The FLQ’s primary intellectual figure, Pierre Vallieres, edited a magazine called Cite Libre, which was also edited for a decade by Pierre Elliot Trudeau, who later served as Prime Minister during the 1970 October Crisis that saw FLQ activity used to justify months of martial law in Quebec.

When press reporting exposed the RCMP’s management of FLQ operations, Trudeau’s close associate Michael Pitfield created the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 1983, housed within the Privy Council Office. The organization changed its name and institutional address. The operational mandate did not visibly change.

For researchers interested in examining the documentary record of Trudeau’s connections to the FLQ and related intelligence networks, that record is unavailable. CSIS destroyed the complete Trudeau archive in 1989. The stated reason was that the files were “not interesting.”

The Genealogy of the Method: Camp X and Anglo-American Intelligence Integration

The operational methods used by the FBI and CSIS do not originate within those agencies. Their genealogy runs through a specific institutional origin point.

Camp X was established in December 1941 near Whitby, Ontario. It operated under the direction of William Stephenson, the station chief for Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in New York. Its mandate was to train American and Canadian intelligence personnel in what was officially described as “special operations.”

The curriculum covered psychological warfare, propaganda construction, infiltration of target organizations, counterfeiting, assassination, and counter-insurgency. The first generation of OSS officers were trained at Camp X. Many went on to foundational roles in what became the CIA and in the FBI’s internal Division 5.

Camp X also produced direct operational lineage to post-war assassination infrastructure. Major General Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, a Camp X figure, went on to operate Permindex, an organization with documented connections to networks investigated in relation to the assassination of President Kennedy.

The broader integration project that Camp X initiated included programs that are now partially declassified. MK Ultra, the CIA’s psychological experimentation program, drew from methodology developed at Britain’s Tavistock Clinic. Project Mockingbird organized the placement of CIA assets within major American media organizations. The Congress for Cultural Freedom funded and promoted specific art movements as instruments of ideological influence.

These were not separate projects. They were coordinated components of a full-spectrum influence architecture developed in the post-war period and maintained through institutional continuity into the present.

The Middle East Application and the ISIS Precedent

The same operational framework applied domestically was deployed in the Middle East with consequences that became impossible to conceal.

In 1979, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski directed the funding and arming of radical Islamic networks across Afghanistan as an asymmetric weapon against Soviet expansion. That decision, documented in Brzezinski’s own subsequent public statements where he expressed no regret, created the organizational and ideological infrastructure from which al-Qaeda emerged.

Through the 1980s and 1990s, the operation expanded with direct Saudi intelligence participation and coordination from Anglo-American handlers. The network built to fight the Soviet Union was not dismantled after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan. It was redirected.

By 2012, a classified Defense Intelligence Agency report, later obtained through FOIA requests and released in 2015, documented that western-backed rebel networks in Syria included what the report called “Salafist, Muslim Brotherhood, and AQI” elements, and that these groups were the “major forces driving the insurgency.” The report also noted that the establishment of “an Islamic State” in eastern Syria and western Iraq was anticipated, and that this outcome would be “ideal” for the objectives of certain regional powers.

The Islamic State did not emerge from regional religious grievance independent of external sponsorship. It emerged from a network of relationships, supply chains, and operational coordination that ran through multiple western intelligence architectures. The 2012 Fordham pattern, informants scripting and supplying terrorism inside the United States, had a direct international parallel.

Where the Pattern Points

The evidence across seven decades of documented operations points to a consistent structural reality.

Terrorism, as it has functioned in the western political context, is not primarily a spontaneous phenomenon that intelligence agencies attempt to detect and prevent. It is, with documented regularity, a managed phenomenon that intelligence agencies construct, direct, and prosecute for political purposes.

Those purposes have included the justification of surveillance expansion, the suppression of domestic political movements, the manufacture of public consent for foreign military operations, and the preemptive criminalization of ideological opposition.

The current expansion of domestic terrorism definitions, the movement toward preemptive surveillance of populations defined by political orientation rather than criminal conduct, is not a response to a new threat. It is the continuation of an operational tradition that has been running for decades, with the target population updated to reflect current political requirements.

The Fordham study documented 138 cases between 2001 and 2012. Federal court records documented FBI informants providing weapons, training, targets, and ideology to individuals who were then prosecuted for terrorism. Federal judges stated on the record that the government created the crimes it prosecuted.

Understanding what is currently being constructed requires understanding what was previously built. The architecture was not hidden. It was documented, in court records, congressional hearings, declassified reports, and investigative journalism spanning multiple decades and jurisdictions.

What is being proposed as new protective legislation is built on the same institutional foundation that manufactured the threat it claims to address.

That foundation should be examined before another layer is added to it.

© 2026 – MK3 Law Group

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