Before
Fake Bowling Green Massacre, There Was Fake Bowling Green Terror Plot Created
by FBI
February 3, 2017 by Sue Udry
You heard about the fake “Bowling Green Massacre”
from Trump advisor Kelleyanne Conway. When she was challenged about the
nonexistent massacre, she pointed to a supposed terrorist plot, which was about
as fake as her massacre.
What happened in Bowling Green in
2010-2011 was one of a long string of FBI sting operations designed to lure
Muslims into fake terror plots created, led, and facilitated by the FBI. We’ve
outlined many of these cases, but hadn’t written about
the Bowling Green incident, so we appreciate this write up in Reason from Elizabeth Nolan Brown, excerpted
here:
1. It was concocted entirely by the FBI.
The young men involved, Waad Ramadan Alwan
and Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, had come to the U.S. in 2009 as part of a program
for displaced Iraqis. Once settled in Kentucky, the men were solicited by
undercover FBI agents to help them send money and weapons to militants back in
Iraq.
In August 2010, a confidential FBI
informant first met with Alwan and “represented to Alwan that he was working
with a group to ship money and weapons to Mujahadeen in Iraq,” according to an FBI statement.
From that fall through the following spring, the FBI informant invited Alwan to
participate in 10 operations to send weapons or money to Iraq. Hammadi joined
in the efforts, recruited by Alwan, in January 2011. Throughout the operations,
the FBI supplied all materials and took care of all logistics for the imaginary
operation, with Alwan and Hammadi merely offering manpower.
Despite the FBI’s then-assertion that
Alwan and Hammadi were just the tip of the terrorist-cell iceberg in small-town
Kentucky, the agency never found additional terrorist agents in the area.
2. It did not involve plans to attack in
the U.S.
Back in Iraq, Alwan and Hammadi had been
involved efforts to fight off invading U.S. soldiers during the early days of
the Iraq war, according to what they told undercover officials. But throughout
their interactions with undercover FBI agents in 2010 and 2011, Alwan and
Hammadi never discussed plans to attack anyone or cause destruction on U.S.
soil. And while they were found guilty of attempting to provide material
support to al Queda militants back in Iraq, the men never indicated that they
were personally in contact with any militants, attempted to procure weapons for
such individuals, or attempted to provide any of their own money to such
individuals. Rather, they showed up when and where the FBI informant told them
to and helped physically load decoy supplies into whatever they were allegedly
being shipped from. (For more on the FBI’s history of manufacturing terrorists
like this, see here.)
3. It’s in rare company.
According to the nonpartisan Migration
Policy Institute, only three of the 784,000 refugees
cleared for U.S. resettlement since 2001—the two Bowling Green men
and a male refugee from Uzbekistan—have been arrested for terrorism or plotting
terrorist acts. The Uzbek man, Fazliddin Kurbanov, had come here with his
parents as Christian refugees who were being persecuted for
their religion in Uzbekistan. But once in the U.S. for a few years, Kurbanov
converted to Islam. He was convicted in 2015 for possessing unregistered
explosives and attempting to provide money and computer support to the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan. Kurbanov was sentenced to 25 years in federal prison.
Hammadi was sentenced to life in prison, and Alwan to 40 years.
As Ronald Bailey noted here
in 2015, there have been several other terrorism arrests attributed to
refugees, such as the Tsarnaev brothers, better known as the Boston Marathon
bombers. But the Tsarnaev brothers weren’t admitted to the U.S. as refugees but
as the minor children of adults granted asylum. “The distinction between refugees and asylees is not just a legal
technicality,” explains Bailey. “Aslyees are self-selected—they show up at or
within the border and apply for asylum. As long as the asylum application is
pending, they cannot be thrown out of the country. In contrast, refugees are
generally designated as such by U.N. officials, and they usually live in
refugee camps. They go through a vetting process that takes up to two or three
years.”
There may be slightly more rogue refugees
than the Migration Policy Institute estimates. There was also Mohamed Osman
Mohamud, “the would-be Portland Christmas bomber” of 2010, who came
to the U.S. as a 5-year-old with parents who were either refugees or asylees;
he was turned in to the FBI by his father. And Ramiz and Sedina Hodzic, two of
six Bosnian immigrants indicted in 2015 for allegedly sending money to ISIS,
wre also admitted as refugees when they were children. Yet as Bailey notes,
Kurbanov, Mohamud, and the Hodzics were all radicalized after coming
to America. “None of these people, be they refugees or anything else, were
sleeper agents who intentionally remained inactive for a long period,
established a secure position, and then struck. None, in other words, fit the
scenario being bandied about to justify keeping the Syrians out.”
4. It’s been used to support anti-refugee
sentiment ever since.
Following news of Alwan and Hammadi’s
arrests, the Obama-administration State Department slowed the processing of
Iraqi refugee visa applications to a near-halt for several months. Since then,
this “Bowling Green terror plot” has resurfaced several times when politically
convenient. In 2015, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) used it as fodder for why we
needed to block Obama from allowing in additional Syrian refugees. Now it’s
being used by the Trump administration to justify the president’s recent
executive order temporarily banning immigration from seven countries.
#####
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to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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