In this Sundance award-winning documentary, (T)error, filmmakers Lyric Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe follow a local professional informant as he collects information about his target for his FBI handlers. The New York Times Magazine, which published “The Informant and the Filmmakers” today, describes the film as follows:
“By some counts, nearly half of the 500-plus terrorism-related convictions in federal court since the Sept. 11 attacks have involved informants. Before ‘‘(T)error,’’ most of what was known of their work came from indictments and snippets of wiretapped dialogue, served up by prosecutors and neatly presented for the courtroom. Filmed without the F.B.I.’s cooperation and apparently without its knowledge, ‘‘(T)error’’ shows how an informant puts a case together from its raw ingredients.”
The article relies on Trevor Aaronson’s book “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism,” which criticizes the phenomenon of terrorism informants more broadly. Interested readers should also take a look at Wadie Said’s recent book “Crimes of Terror: The Legal and Political Implications of Federal Terrorism Prosecutions,” which argues that the federal legal system has become distorted in response to terrorism prosecutions in general, and the use of informants in particular. Click here for links to both books.