“FBI warns Iran aspired to attack California with drones in retaliation for war,” was the headline that ABC News ran last week. This baseless and irresponsible reporting may seem outlandish, but it is part of a long history of lies, entrapment, and false flag operations used by U.S. security and intelligence services to advance their wars by creating crises that can be blamed on official enemies.
Whether the now-declassified “Operation Northwoods” scheme from the 1960s to hijack American civilian airliners in order to blame Cuba and create a pretense for military intervention to the many cases of FBI agents coercing or convincing an otherwise innocent person to commit a crime they were not otherwise predisposed to commit, false flags and entrapment are not novel in U.S. political culture.
Threats grow as war drags on
The illegal and unprovoked U.S.-Israeli offensive against Iran, unilaterally launched by Donald Trump on February 28th, has become a devastating regional war. This war has already claimed thousands of Iranian lives and killed or injured hundreds of U.S. personnel, all while costing American taxpayers nearly a billion dollars daily.
This expenditure on destruction—killing innocents and destroying Iranian schools, hospitals, and energy infrastructure—has already blown past the estimated under $10 billion needed to solve homelessness in the United States. As was widely anticipated, the violence has escalated into a regional war with severe global economic repercussions and no end in sight.
Despite the ongoing war and economic hardship faced by working people, capitalist politicians show no interest in peace, instead continuing to drain resources. Rather, they are exploiting this war to justify increased militarization and policing of our own communities. For example, Republican Congressman Mike Lawler of New York has demanded that Democrats “immediately drop all opposition to funding the Department of Homeland Security,” amid this war drive.
FBI’s long history of entrapment
This push for funding and expansion of DHS is fueled by baseless reports, such as headlines claiming “Iran may be activating sleeper cells outside the country,” and dubious, poorly sourced warnings that Iran supposedly sought a drone attack on California. However, this is the playbook of the U.S. capitalist state, which has routinely been caught producing lies and threats to drum up support for suspending civil liberties and democratic rights.
The FBI and DHS have a well-documented history of creating false narratives, obstructing investigations, and using misrepresentations to conceal their own wrongdoing. A notorious example is the 1968 case of Geronimo Pratt, a Vietnam Veteran, UCLA student, and Black Panther Party member, whom the FBI framed, leading to his spending eight years in solitary confinement.
The FBI was eventually compelled to admit they had withheld evidence proving his innocence, resulting in a multi-million dollar civil settlement paid to Pratt. Much of COINTELPRO, the concerted effort to destroy the revolutionary and specifically Black liberation movements of that time, relied on the distortion and weaponization of the justice system to frame the state’s targets and eliminate dissent.
But the FBI has gone further than simply hiding evidence. In 2009, in the case known as the Newburgh Four, where a federal judge in Manhattan eviscerated the government for inventing a terror plot, declaring that “the real lead conspirator was the United States.” The Second Circuit Court of Appeals found that the FBI informant, not the defendants, “inspired the crime, provoked it, planned it, financed it, equipped it, and furnished the time and targets.”
Similarly in 2010 the FBI orchestrated the framing of a mentally ill 26-year old Rezwan Ferdaus, where informants and agents conspired to entrap him into a plot to attack the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol, providing him with money and materials for the plot.
DHS is sustained on lies
The DHS in its own right has knowingly committed similarly egregious misconduct. In 2020, a top security intelligence analyst and DHS whistleblower admitted that the department lied to Congress and manipulated intelligence reports to match false statements by Trump around terrorists crossing the southern U.S.-Mexico border.
In the last year alone the DHS has been caught in many lies. Former Secretary Kristi Noem has lied about the violation of court orders by DHS and their detainment of U.S. citizens. Most obscenely, claiming that Renee Good and Alex Pretti, killed in cold blood for defending their immigrant neighbors from ICE terror, were “domestic terrorists”. The watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting has compiled a list of DHS lies in an attempt to have U.S. news media cease citing them as a reliable source.
It is worth stressing, in this moment where right-wing forces attempt to drum up fear to bolster their campaign of rolling back civil rights, that ICE’s own existence was dependent on the false premises of the “War on Terror.” In the post-September 11th era, ICE has been built up through bipartisan racist surveillance and criminalization of immigrant communities into the terroristic force in our neighborhoods we see today.
End the war at home and abroad!
At a time of increased violence in U.S. politics, Iran presents no threats to the population of the United States. DHS is the force that has killed Americans on U.S. soil, and is the true threat to our communities. U.S. imperialism fundamentally understands that its control and domination of foreign lands can only survive if it asserts domination and control of domestic working and oppressed people as well.
For the capitalist politicians in the Department of War, the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there are no borders in this war on working and oppressed people. They have no restraint in pursuing and consolidating undemocratic, fascistic control of the working class, from Iran to Minneapolis to Palestine to Los Angeles. The movements to demand ICE out of our communities and demand an end to endless wars, like in Iran, must always be linked.
