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The manufactured case of Long Beach “terrorist” Marc Steven Domingo

The arrest of Marc Steven Domingo for plotting to plant bombs at rallies in southern California with the intent of “causing mass casualties” has the characteristics of an entrapment operation by the state.

On Friday police authorities arrested Domingo, for plotting to plant bombs in white supremacist rallies in Long Beach and Huntington Beach, both near Los Angeles. and other locations. Domingo, a former US soldier who fought in Afghanistan, recently became a Muslim.

At a press conference on Monday US Attorney Nicola Hanna gave a sensationalist account of the case, possibly to prejudice potential jurors. Hanna alleged that Domingo plotted to “a terror attack designed to inflict mass casualties at a political rally that took place in Long Beach this past Sunday.” Hanna went on to describe the charges that have been brought against Domingo, namely “providing, or attempting to provide, material support to terrorists.”

Hanna’s account strongly suggests that the only “material support” was provided to Domingo by the FBI itself. It was an FBI “confidential informer” who came into contact with Domingo, after he allegedly posted a statement on a social media site which said: “I feel like I should make a christians life miserable tomorrow for our fallen bros n sis in new zealand . . . maybe a jews life idk . . . they shed our blood . . . no Muslim should have to experience this, a message needs to be sent.” Domingo allegedly posted the message on March 15, the day of the attack on a mosque by a fascist terrorist in New Zealand, which killed 45 people.

In Hanna’s narrative, Domingo is “a man consumed with hatred and bent on mass murder.”

However, there appears to have been no terrorist plot until, days later, Domingo came into contact with a man whom Hanna described as “an undercover law-enforcement officer.” Hanna did not explain how this encounter took place, except to say that in Domingo’s mind the this “officer” —in reality an agent-provocateur— was a “confederate,” a fellow conspirator, who shared his goals.

This agent then put him in contact with a “bomb-maker,” an FBI agent, who provided him with a number of “pressure cooker” bombs and detonators; the agent-provocateurs also instructed Domingo on where to place the bombs at the rally site in Long Beach, a coastal city near Los Angeles, and how to detonate them. Investigators said Domingo then purchased several hundred three-inch nails to stuff inside the bombs as shrapnel, so that they would penetrate vital organs.

Hanna assured admitted that the FBI had provided the “bombs” but that these were really “inert devices.” Their only purpose was to entrap Domingo.

It is alleged that Marc Domingo had also discussed with “confidential informants” the possibility of attacks of Jews on their way to the synagogue, police officers, churches, a military facility and the Santa Mónica Pier, a tourist attraction up the coast from Long Beach. “He even wanted to murder a neighbor, which he said would serve as a ‘prelude to a much larger attack’,” declared Hanna.

Domingo was arrested on Friday night, after taking receipt of the pressure cooker “bombs” and after surveying the site of the rally in Long Beach.

The alleged target of Domingo’s “terror” was a white supremacist rally that fizzled out due to lack of attendance, except for a number of counter-protesters.

Hanna indicated that Domingo had been “under constant surveillance” as “he prepared his attack,” and that “there are no known co-conspirators”. Finally, Hanna congratulated the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) of local and federal police for having prevented this terrorist plot.

This same script of angry, possibly psychologically disturbed, individuals instigated by agent-provocateurs to join in acts that they would have never contemplated on their own has been repeated dozens of times according to material gathered by the National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms (NCPCF) particularly since 2011, and specifically against Muslims.

A 2014 detailed statistical study by the NCPCF and by Project Salam ( INVENTING TERRORISTS The Lawfare of Preemptive Prosecution ) “shows that 72.4 percent of prosecutions,” such as foiled acts of terrorism, “were based on suspicions of the defendants’ perceived ideology and not on his/her criminal activity [preemptive prosecution]. Another 21.8 percent of convictions on the DOJ list represent people who began on their own to engage in minor, non-terrorist criminal activity but whose cases were manipulated and inflated by the government to appear as though they were ‘terrorists’, [elements of preemptive prosecution].”

Overall, 94.2 percent of all the terrorism-related prosecutions on the DOJ list belong to one or the other of those two categories.

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