The FBI arrested Christopher Lee Cornell, a.k.a. Raheel Mahrus Ubaydah on Wednesday, for allegedly planning to bomb the U.S. Capitol in collaboration with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).
He is said to have tweeted about “jihad,” and planned to set off a series of pipe bombs at the Capitol building to kill lawmakers, whom he considered enemies.
The FBI and Department of Homeland security issued a bulletin to law enforcement agencies across the country, notifying them of the case.
“The alleged activities of Cornell highlight the continued interest of US-based violent extremists to support designated foreign terrorist organizations overseas, such as ISIL, by committing terrorist acts in the United States,” the bulletin read. “Terrorist group members and supporters will almost certainly continue to use social media platforms to disseminate English language violent extremist messages."
Even though the FBI hasn't provided details of the case, it's likely that Cornell was the target of a sting operation after his tweets were noticed by the Bureau.
A recent report cites that in the majority of high profile terrorism cases, the FBI “uses sting operations to entrap informants, creating terrorists out of law-abiding individuals.”
The Justice Department and the FBI have targeted American Muslims in “abusive” counterterrorism sting operations based on religious and ethnic identity, according to the report from HRW and Columbia University Law School’s Human Rights Institute.
The study found that many of the over 500 terrorism-related cases since the War on Terror began in 2001 have alienated the communities that the government should rely on to prevent terrorism.
“This is a number that sounds really big, and it makes it sound like Americans are being kept safe from terrorism attacks,” Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington director for HRW, said in a video released with the report in July, 2014. “But we found that in a lot of these cases, people were prosecuted who never would have committed a terrorist attack in the first place, if it weren’t for the involvement of the FBI.”
