Since 2002, observes investigative author Trevor Aaronson in his deeply researched book The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, the FBI has been spending roughly $3 billion a year “to hunt an enemy that is largely of its own creation.” The 30-year prison sentence imposed on a 22-year-old Ohio resident named Christopher Lee Cornell (not to be mistaken for that Chris Cornell) represents a typical return on that dubious investment.

Cornell was arrested last year in connection with what the FBI claimed was a plot to carry out a massacre in Washington, D.C. At the time Cornell possessed 600 rounds of ammunition and a single semi-automatic rifle, as well as a quantity of defective pipe bombs assembled with instructions provided by FBI undercover agents posing as terrorist recruiters.

In his charging affidavit, FBI Special Agent John Barrios insisted that the public was never in danger at any time from the agency’s false-flag operation.

Aaronson points out that since 9/11, “the FBI has built the largest network of spies ever to exist in the United States — with ten times as many informants on the streets today as there were during the infamous COINTELPRO operations under FBI director J. Edgar Hoover — with the majority of those spies focused on ferreting out terrorism in Muslim communities.” As he documents, the purpose of that enterprise is better described as manufacturing pseudo-terrorists, rather than identifying actual threats.

In a juxtaposition illustrating the public consequences of the FBI’s perverse priorities, Cornell – who was never a legitimate terrorist threat – was sentenced in Ohio just days after what appears to be an attempted terrorist attack at Ohio State University by Somali refugee Abdu Razak Ali Artan, who apparently eluded the FBI’s scrutiny.