from ZeroHedge:
Earlier this month, the FBI announced the arrest of 18-year-old Mateo Ventura of Wakefield, Massachusetts, over allegations that he provided financial support to ISIS. According to the DOJ’s press release, Ventura was indicted for “knowingly concealing the source of material support or resources that he intended to go to a foreign terrorist organization.”
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Yet, according to the government’s own criminal complaint, Ventura never gave a dime to any terrorist groups, while the only “terrorist” he actually had any contact with was an undercover FBI agent who befriended him when he was 16-years-old and convinced him to produce gift cards with small amounts of cash on them. The FBI agent told Ventura not to tell anyone about their ‘intimate online relationship,’ including his family, according to The Intercept.
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. -The Intercept
Whats more, Ventura’s father, Paul, told the outlet that his son suffered from childhood developmental issues which were so bad that he was forced to leave school due to constant 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,” said Ventura. “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.”
In short, instead of an actual terrorist – or terrorist adjacent, Ventura’s case is yet another example of the FBI grooming a mentally unfit young man to commit a crime that would not have other wise occurred.
“There is still significant use of informants and undercover agents in FBI investigations who aren’t just gathering information about potential crimes but are actively suggesting ideas for crimes or making it easier for people to do the things that they claim they want to do,” said Naz Ahmad, acting director of the Creating Law Enforcement Accountability and Responsibility, or CLEAR, project at the City University of New York School of Law. “There are documented cases where the government has provided people everything that they needed to execute a plot. Informants and undercover agents have often been used as a tool in these investigations to prod things along.”
