Why is the FBI Manufacturing Reasons to Arrest Occupy Protesters While Ignoring White Supremacist Violence?

A sign in Foley Square at the Community/Labor
march in suport of Occupy Wall Street

A recent Rolling Stone article raises troubling questions about FBI entrapment schemes and their targets

May 18, 2012

This story originally appeared in Salon.

Writing in Rolling Stone this week, Rick Perlstein looks at how the FBI regularly entraps and creates “terrorists” out of anarchists and activists, while comparatively ignoring violent white supremacist groups.

Using some recent examples, Perlstein paints a startling picture. He notes the arrest this month of a small group of self-identified anarchists, participating in Occupy Cleveland, who — strung along in an FBI sting — planned to blow up a large Ohio bridge. The target was suggested and (fake) C-4 explosives were provided by an FBI infiltrator. As Perlstein put it, the episode was one among numerous law enforcement schemes since 2001 in which “the alleged terrorist masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage.”

Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.  READ MORE