The teenaged William O’Neal in 1968 could avoid a felony charge for interstate care theft and for impersonating a federal officer if he agreed to assist in the construction of a narrative, agreed to be a reliable narrator. So the young O’Neal joins the Black Panthers in Chicago, and moves through the ranks to become Director of Chapter Security—and the bodyguard of the chapter’s chairman, Fred Hampton. O’Neal is the informant who not only drugged Hampton, but also provided the FBI with a floor plan of the apartment.

Years after the police raid on the apartment where Fred Hampton was murdered in his sleep, the 40-year old O’Neal in 1990 ran from his uncle’s apartment onto the westbound lane of the Eisenhower Express and was struck by a car. “His death was ruled a suicide” (Chicago Reader, January 25, 1990). The young nephew, his uncle told the press, witnessed the carnage in the aftermath of the police raid, the morning after, and he was shocked: “Bill just stood there in shock. He never thought it would come to all this.” He just thought he would cooperate “to reduce his own potential jail time.” But he was “way over his head… and…forever tortured by the guilt.”

Similar characters like O’Neal, from California to Pine Ridge to New York, vulnerable and petty criminals, had been useful as reliable narrators for the criminal justice system in the U.S., collaborating to fine tune the terrorist narrative of reliable protagonists among targeted antagonists.  Maybe most lived their lives tortured by guilt.

But then 9-11…

The “American public,” spectators to the arrest, the conviction, and the incarceration of antagonists, are presented a narrative of a nation in perpetual danger from homegrown terrorists—Black, Indigenous, and Latino/a resisters, anti-war activists, environmentalists, attorneys for Islamic antagonists. Be on the look out for terrorists among family members, neighbors, co-workers. Most important, in support of the current narrative, pay particular interests in members of the Islamic community. Antagonists today are young Muslim men (Fort Dix Five) on a trip to Poconos Mountain in Pennsylvania with family members, and the first “informant,” a Circuit City clerk who sees “suspicious” behavior on the family’s video tape of the trip.

In such an atmosphere, greed fuels a heightened sense of paranoia.  Rely on the machismo of successive presidents from Truman to Obama, disseminate narratives of the protagonists and antagonists for the “American public,” and let the war-minded-corporations confirm the contracts and tally the billions.

Anjali Kamat’s investigative report (“Entrapment or Foiling Terror”) for Democracy Now!, October 6, 2010, includes an interview with former FBI agent,  James Wedick. The informant, today, he states, wants to get rich, fast, and the targeted community, today, is desperate for cash:

That prize: money, apartments with big screen televisions and state-of-the-art stereo systems and cars equals devotees of the fantasy that terrorism is without, external. 

More often, today, the informants, anything but reliable, are selected from poor communities, individuals struggling to find employment in this current recession but who are not predisposed to engaging in terrorist acts—and neither are the selected antagonists.

The defense lawyer for the four young men charged with terrorism in the Newburgh case rightly painted the picture of an informant who “earned his keep by scoring mosques for easy targets.” The informant, he adds, “proposed, directed, supplied, funded and facilitated every aspect of the ‘terrorist’ plot” (New York Times,  June 15, 2010). Whatever it takes. Machismo.  Get the job done!

“Terrorist plot” is placed in quotations, and why not, when plot and terrorists are manufactured in most of these alleged attempts to terrorize and kill Americans.  The homegrown terror narrative deflects attention away from terror and killing.  Out safety is in jeopardy, so we are told. Americans are socialized to accept and to acknowledge these narratives as evidence of the truth about terrorism.

How else to continue war and spend trillions on maintaining “democracy” in the U.S. and on securing “democracy” in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan? Terrorism is profitable for corporations in the war on terrorism business. Whose narrative controls government policies and lobbies for their interests in terrorist agencies and their operatives? Ironically, the antagonists in the Newburgh case are charged with conspiracy and the attempt “to use weapons of mass destruction and antiaircraft missiles” (New York Times). This is the “American Dream” dying in a halo of confusion and agony…

…And the death of capitalism is not far behind. We simply cannot continue this way! 

Concluding his interview with Democracy Now! journalist, Kamat, Wedick argues against the informant industry in the U.S. He states,

“Desperate because of the recession,” Wedick adds, desperate because they are out of work, people—neighbors, co-workers, family members—are forced to manufacture crimes under the command of government workers who, themselves, want to hold on to jobs and careers—because, as they echo now, “because of the recession.”

Truth, as Tiokasin Ghosthorse, (WBAI, First Voices host) noted, is no longer considered a power in and of itself. 

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.