By The Staff at AFP

In its latest effort to panic the American public, the FBI last month fabricated an alleged al Qaeda terror plot against the U.S. Capitol Building. According to reports published by Russian news outlet RT and others, after arresting an intoxicated American-born drug dealer of Moroccan descent, FBI agents drove him to the Capitol and handed him a fake bomb before summarily rearresting him on Feb. 17.

Over the course of a year, 29-year-old Amine El Khalifi, who was clearly mentally ill and often high on cocaine and other drugs, was persuaded by an FBI informant to agree to attack the U.S. Capitol. Because El Khalifi didn’t have a gun, a bomb or a car, the FBI informant graciously offered to provide him all three—and thus El Khalifi was driven to the U.S. Capitol building by the FBI, handed a gun and a bomb, and then arrested as an “al Qaeda operative.”

Khalifi was best known for his years of selling drugs and strutting through D.C. nightclubs in designer suits, living a playboy lifestyle. But two years ago, while dating a Muslim woman of Bulgarian and Turkish descent, El Khalifi embraced Islam and became religious, friends said. After the relationship ended, the girlfriend, obviously disgruntled, contacted the FBI and suggested her ex-boyfriend might be a good target for a frame-up.

When El Khalifi had a dispute with his landlord, the landlord called the police. This allowed the FBI to enter El Khalifi’s apartment, where they then found some “Islamic literature.”

The FBI, anxious to fabricate a terror plot, met El Khalifi and determined that his mind had been fried from a decade of cocaine abuse, and that he was likely suffering from a serious mental illness. Realizing that such a mentally vulnerable person would be an easy dupe, the FBI then cultivated him as a potential “terrorist” patsy, what the FBI calls a “controlled prevention.”

As one FBI official put it: “In situations like this—a controlled prevention—the person is predisposed to act and the FBI will give him enough rope to hang himself. Courts have upheld this kind of action time after time.”

Under U.S. law, the federal government can entrap any person they believe to be “dangerous”—and most federal cases are based on such entrapments, because they are easier to prosecute than actual criminal acts.

“It was another ‘sting’ operation with a mentally deficient guy,” former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro told the online news agency Huffington Post. “He was led on by an FBI asset.”

These types of arrests are being used by the government to delude the American public and perpetuate a climate of fear that has allowed the government to seize extraordinary powers and has provided cover for the arrests of domestic political opponents as well.