US Media Hype Yet Another Fake “ISIS” Plot, This Time Targeting a Teenager With History of Mental Problems

It’s 2023, how are we still doing this?

Jun 16, 2023

NBC gives the obligatory Big Scary ISIS photo.

Despite reducing in frequency since its mid-2010s peak, the FBI is still working hard to entrap and imprison mentally unwell people under the auspices of fighting the seemingly never-ending “war on terror.” And, 22 years into this war, our media appears to have learned no lessons about spotting and framing correctly this stale narrative. Instead, choosing to keep rewriting FBI press releases designed to mislead and frighten the American public.

As I’ve argued on this blog and elsewhere for years—and as (actual) journalists, lawyers and Human Rights groups have documented for much longer—the vast majority of the FBI’s splashy “terror” arrests that our media repeats are, upon further inspection, pushed, designed, and curated by the FBI themselves and almost always involve no actual terrorists or terror groups beyond the ones simulated by undercover agents and informants.

It’s one of the genuinely predictable facts of media criticism: See a headline about the FBI swooping in and “foiling” a terror plot, stopping terror financing, or thwarting a terror trip to Syria or Iraq, there’s a 99 percent chance there was no actual “terrorists” involved—but only an elaborate network of paid informants and undercover agents. And this isn’t just a number pulled out of thin air: According to one 2013 study by researcher Trevor Aaronson, less than one percent of “terror plots” foiled by the FBI are real plots, in the sense that they would have occurred whether the FBI was “monitoring” them or not.

Such is the case with a recent breaking news story, parroted last week with little-to-no criticism, involving an 18-year-old Massachusetts man allegedly attempting to send money to “ISIS” using gift cards. Fortunately, The Intercept’s Murtaza Hussain decided to do some actual reporting and followed up on the hysterical claims made by the FBI and found that the suspect had mental problems and was groomed by undercover FBI agents from the age of 16:

Ventura had never actually funded any terrorist group. The only “terrorist” he is accused of ever being in contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him online as a 16-year-old, solicited small cash donations in the form of gift cards, and directed him not to tell anyone else about their intimate online relationship, including his family…
Ventura’s father, Paul Ventura, told The Intercept that Mateo suffered from childhood developmental issues and had been forced to leave his school due to bullying from other students. “He was born prematurely, he had brain development issues. I had the school do a neurosurgery evaluation on him and they said his brain was underdeveloped,” Ventura said. “He was suffering endless bullying at school with other kids taking food off his plate, tripping him in the hallway, humiliating him, laughing at him.”
Contrary to the sensational narrative fed to the news media of terrorist financing in the U.S., the charging documents show that Ventura gave an undercover FBI agent gift cards for pitifully small amounts of cash, sometimes in $25 increments. In his initial bid to travel to the Islamic State, the teenager balked — making up an excuse, by the FBI’s own account, to explain why he did not want to go. When another opportunity to travel abroad arose, Ventura balked again, staying home on the evening of his supposed flight instead of traveling to the airport. By the time the investigation was winding down, he appeared ready to turn in his purported ISIS contact — an FBI agent — to the FBI.

In the year 2023, it’s important to note, this brand of uncritical media-curated WoT myth-making isn’t some obscure or unknown truth—it’s well-established. Since the 2010s there have been Human Rights Watch reports, best selling books, documentaries, and countless other reports in the Intercept, detailing how formulaic and obvious these Potemkin “terror” plots are. Yet, editors and producers can’t resist the cheap, scary headlines and “authorities say” framing, and keep uncritically writing down and repeating—without appropriate context or critical analysis—exactly what the federal government wants them to write down:

While some of these reports have a token paragraph quoting Ventura’s father disputing the FBI’s claim, it’s an afterthought buried down in the text of the article. The bulk of the reporting and framing is simply rewriting FBI press releases, designed to grab showy headlines. (One notable exception was local reporter for Telegram & Gazette and friend of the pod Marco Cartolano who casted doubt on the simplistic “ISIS plot” narrative in the headline.)

As former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes told the filmmakers of the excellent The Newburgh Sting documentary in 2015, the goal is to “keep fear alive”:

Twenty-two years into the “war on terror,” while this war’s central importance to our daily lives has waned, the thousands of informants and their attendant Fear Machine still churns on. And the lives these FBI entrapment regimes ruin are still real and still matter. Mateo Ventura has a history of mental illness, was targeted by the FBI when he was a minor, and, along the way, very clearly needed help and intervention, not millions of dollars spent by the federal government manufacturing an elaborate fake ISIS plot around him to dupe him into committing terror meta-crimes.

The goal, in part, is to get splashy headlines to justify our security state’s bloated funding. An obvious fact in the year 2023 with dozens of examples of bogus manufactured plots under our belt since 2001. Perhaps reporters should stop doing exactly what the FBI expects them to do, which is copy and paste scary “ISIS plot” headlines from DOJ press releases and push out the same zombie story every few months. Perhaps a bit of default skepticism, perhaps more sober and contextualized headlines, maybe a bit of follow up reporting. When the headlines of a particular genre of reporting fall apart 99 percent of the time, perhaps thinking adults working in newsrooms can stop, on cue, playing their predictable role as fear conduit—and instead try, from the outset, to question the official government narrative.

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