FBI and Terrorism-related cases

From The Brothers:  The Road to an American Tragedy by Masha Gessen

page 245 and part of 246:  (I'm not using quotation marks for what she's written, just for those she's quoting.

Since September 2001, U.S. courts have taken up an average of forty terrorism-related cases a year.  More than five hundred people have been charged, and virtually all of them have been convicted and sentenced.  Dozens of bombing plots have been revealed.  In 2014, Human Rights Watch released a report that analyzed many of those cases.  The researchers concluded that "all of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots of the last decade, with four exceptions, were actually FBI sting operations--plots conducted with the direct involvement of law enforcement informants or agents, including plots that were proposed or led by informants."

Since 9/11, the bulk of the FBI's efforts have centered on fighting terrorism, which becme its top institutional priority and consumes forty percent of the agency's operating budget.  Between 2001 and 2013, the number of terrorist attacks carried out on American soil by people connected to Islamic organizations numbered zero, but trumped-up terrorist plots numbered in the dozens, and Human Righs Watch report describes teh work of the FBI (initially quoting from a former FBI agent, Michael German):

"Today's terrorism sting operations reflect a significant departure from past practice.  When the FBI undercover agent or informant is the only purported link to a real terrorist group, supplies the motive, designs the plot and provides all the weapons, one has to question whether they are combatting terrorism or creating it..."  In many of the sting operations we examined, informants and undercover agents carefully laid out an ideological basis for a proposed terrorist attack, and then provided investigative targets with a range of options and the weapons necessary to carry out the attack.