When former FBI director Robert Mueller died in March, the New York Times eulogized him as a “button-down, lockjawed, rock-ribbed exemplar of a vanishing caste.” Media tributes poured in as if Mueller was the law-enforcement version of Mother Theresa.

Mueller’s abuse of power goes way back

But tell that to the Liberty City Seven, victims in a landmark case in the war on terror that should have defined Mueller’s legacy far more than his photo ops at congressional hearings. The FBI completely fabricated the Liberty City plot in Miami. But Mueller lied, telling America that the arrestees — mostly Haitian-Americans — a “homegrown terrorist cell … self-recruited, self-trained, and self-executing.” The FBI lavished money on an informant who suggested the idea of blowing up government buildings and then tape-recorded the subsequent discussions to incriminate his targets. The plotters were so knuckle-headed that they asked the FBI informant for terrorist uniforms and wanted to conduct a parade in their low-rent neighborhood. At one point, the lead plotter talked about blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago, the nation’s tallest building, “so that it would fall into Lake Michigan and create a tsunami” — thereby allowing the plotters to free all the Muslims detained in Chicago jails. The informant coached the men into reciting a goofily-worded pledge of allegiance to al Qaeda, which was secretly videotaped.

The FBI gave the plotters a digital video camera and rented them a car so they could visit downtown Miami and photograph the FBI building and other federal targets they were encouraged to attack. The videotape was one of the few pieces of concrete evidence offered at the subsequent trial.

One of the informants kept dangling the prospect of giving $50,000 to the plotters if they moved forward with their scheme. When the feds raided the warehouse that the government provided for the plotters’ headquarters (complete with a fully stocked refrigerator), they found no weapons or plans for attacks. After the arrests were announced, a local activist told Democracy Now: “Everyone in Liberty City is joking that the guys were going to kick down the FBI building with their new boots, because they didn’t have any devices which could have been used to explode” the target. One commentator suggested that the “Liberty City Seven” would be incapable of robbing a 7-Eleven, much less overthrowing the U.S. government.

The prosecution of the highest-profile domestic terrorist plot went awry from the start. The first jury refused to convict, deadlocking on charges except for one defendant found not guilty. The Justice Department claimed the verdict entitled the feds to try again, but a second jury also deadlocked. In a shameless abuse of power, the feds tried the accused again and finally got a conviction in 2009 for five of the six accused. The feds spent up to $10 million prosecuting the case. The feds happily destroyed a half-dozen lives to give a booster shot of fear for the war on terror.

After the 9/11 attacks occurred and the Bush administration worked to maximize Americans’ fears, entrapment became the easiest way for the FBI to score triumphal headlines. Trevor Aaronson, the author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent of the 500 people........

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