In the dozen years since the 9/11 attacks, we’ve watched as a classified new legal regime for government surveillance has been hashed out, local police forces have become heavily armed military-type units and a whole new layer of bureaucracy has hatched to provide us with an abundance of “homeland security.”

Proponents of this build-up argue that it’s made us safer. They point to hundreds of foiled plots to make their case. But Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, dug into these supposedly dastardly plots and found that they are much less than meets the eye.

Aaronson recently appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Joshua Holland: Trevor, the raw statistical data say that Americans have a significantly better chance of being struck dead by lightning than of being killed in a terrorist attack here at home. It’s obviously different for people in some other countries.

I got that from the official terrorism statistics put out by the FBI and other related agencies. And they also track foiled attacks. These law enforcement agencies say that these foiled attacks prove that they are saving American lives. How would you respond to that?

Trevor Aaronson: I’d say that the majority of the foiled attacks that they cite are really only foiled attacks because the FBI made the attack possible, and most of the people who are caught in these so-called foiled attacks are caught through sting operations that use either an undercover FBI agent or informant posing as some sort of Al-Qaeda operative.

In all of these cases, the defendants, or the would-be terrorists, are people who at best have a vague idea that they want to commit some sort of violent act or some sort of act of terrorism but have no means on their own. They don’t have weapons. They don’t have connections with any international terrorist groups.

In many cases they’re mentally ill or they’re economically desperate. An undercover informant or agent posing as an Al-Qaeda operative gives them everything they need… gives them the transportation, gives them the money if they need it, and then gives them the bomb and even the idea for the terrorist attack. And then when that person pushes a button to detonate the bomb that they believe will explode—a bomb that was provided to them in whole by the FBI—agents rush in, arrest them and charge them with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and then parade that person out to the public saying, “Look at us. We caught a terrorist. This is us keeping you safe.”

If you look at the record of prosecutions in the decade after 911, there has yet to be a case of some Al-Qaeda operative providing the means for a wannabe terrorist to do an act of terrorism. It’s only the FBI that’s providing the means through these sting operations. What this has done is really inflate the threat of terrorism within the United States—particularly from Muslim terrorists—because in almost all of these cases sting operations target men on the fringes of Muslim communities who might be mentally ill, economically desperate or otherwise very easily manipulated by an informant who can make a lot of money in these sting operations.

JH: The thing that I find eye-opening about this is—I’ve certainly known that many of these supposed plots were basically inventions of the FBI, but I didn’t know it was that consistent. You’re saying that this is the case with all of the suspects we’ve heard of in the post-911 era?

TA: For the purposes of my book, I used the 10 years after 9/11 as the area that I was going to analyze data in, and what we know is that in the 10 years after 9/11, there were a little more than 500 defendants who were charged with federal crimes involving international terrorism. About 250 involved people who were charged with things like immigration violations or lying to the FBI and who are somehow linked to terrorism.

Their charges did not involve any sort of terrorist plot. Of the 500, you have about 150 who were caught in sting operations; these operations that were solely the creation of the FBI through an FBI informant or undercover agent providing the means and the opportunity, the bomb, the idea and so on.

Then if you’re really being generous, you can find only about five people of the 500 charged with international terrorism who were involved in some sort of plot that either had weapons of their creation or their acquisition or were connected to international terrorists in some way. These include Najibullah Zazi who came close to bombing the New York City subway system, Faisal Shahzad, who delivered a bomb to Times Square that fortunately didn’t go off, and then you have Jose Padilla—the dirty bomber—the underwear bomber and the shoe bomber, for example.

Being generous, those are the five that you can point to in the decade after 9/11 who seemed to pose a significant threat. Fortunately, none of them were successful. That’s a handful compared to the more than 150 who were caught in these sting operations, and in these sting operations the men never had access to weapons; it was only the FBI that provided it as part of the sting operation that they were controlling from beginning to end.

JH: I’m no attorney, but this sounds like it gets close to entrapment. Have defense attorneys raised that?

TA: Yeah, and this is an interesting area of this story. Obviously, a layman like you or me looking at this thinks this is definitely entrapment. Unfortunately, the legal definition of entrapment is very different, and what we know is that 11 defendants have formally argued entrapment in these cases and none have been successful.

A large reason for that is the government is able to argue against entrapment in two ways; one is to say the person was predisposed to commit the crime. That he had done something that suggested he was interested in committing a crime before the introduction of the government agent.

Traditionally speaking, if this was a bank robbery plot, the government would have to prove that the defendant was researching bank robberies or casing banks prior to the FBI informant getting involved. The FBI and the Department of Justice are able to do this very easily in these terrorism cases in part because they are able to introduce evidence that is really sketchy to prove that there was predisposition.

For example, often the government will cite the fact that someone watched a jihad video and they’ll put on the stand a government expert who will testify that, “Hey, you know, because he watched the jihad video and this is one of Al-Qaeda’s classics,” that meant he was becoming a terrorist and the government line essentially, rather an absurd one, is that if you watch a Jihad video then, trance-like, you become a terrorist. It’s absurd on its face because I’ve watched those videos. You’ve watched those videos and I don’t think either of us are going to become terrorists.

At the same time, how the government is able to argue against entrapment is to really weight the jury in its favor and it does that by – in these sting operations, the government controls every aspect of the plot so they could have a guy who wants to commit violence and they say to him, “Okay, here’s a nine millimeter handgun. Go to the mall and shoot a couple people in the knee.”

That would be awful but it wouldn’t be something that would necessarily shatter the security of the United States of America. Instead, in these sting operations, they give the defendants these bombs that are so enormous and so big that even a sophisticated criminal organization would have trouble obtaining them. Then they have them unleash those bombs at subway stations or downtown skyscrapers and it makes the jury think, You know what? I ride that subway system. I have a son who works at that skyscraper. What that does is effectively erode any empathy that the jury might have for the defendant and that empathy is necessary for a jury to say, You know what? That person was entrapped.

What we’ve seen is a very effective role by the government in battling against this entrapment defense and now that we have 11 cases where entrapment has been formally argued, none being successful. I’m among those who say if you’re a Muslim charged with terrorism in the United States there really is no such thing as entrapment today.