Description: "A groundbreaking work of investigative journalism into the FBI's questionable counterterroism tactics, The Terror Factory exposes how the Bureau built a network of more than 15,000 informants after 9/11 whose primary purpose was to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the Bureau could then claim it was winning the war on terror."--Provided by publisher.
Brief description:
Trevor Aaronson is a contributing writer for The Intercept and a 2020 ASU Future Security Fellow at New America. He is also author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism and creator and host of the documentary podcasts American ISIS and Chameleon: High Rollers.
His 2015 TED Talk, "How this FBI strategy is actually creating U.S.-based terrorists," has been viewed more than 1 million times and translated into 23 languages. "Informants, a documentary he reported and produced, screened at the London Investigative Film Festival and was broadcast worldwide in three languages.
A two-time finalist for the Livingston Awards, Aaronson has won dozens of national and regional journalism awards for investigative reporting, feature writing and data journalism, including the Molly National Journalism Prize and the Data Journalism Award. Aaronson has discussed his reporting on national programs including CBS This Morning, NPR's All Things Considered, This American Life and On the Media.
Aaronson co-founded the nonprofit Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Investigations he edited spurred changes to law and policy and won honors from the National Headliner Awards, the National Awards for Education Reporting, Investigative Reporters and Editors, and the Green Eyeshade Awards.
Review Quotes: "In an analysis of five hundred terrorism-related cases brought since September 11th, the journalist Trevor Aaronson found that nearly half of them involved a confidential informant. In some cases, the threat posed by the target was remote."-- Evan Osnos, The New Yorker
"The Terror Factory is a well-researched and fast-paced exposé of the dubious tactics the FBI has used in targeting Muslim Americans with sting operations since 2001."-- Michael German, Reason