The Pineapple Militia case is the FBI Miami entrapment prosecution in which John Kiriakou testified as a defence expert witness in July 2026, by video from Athens, over what he treats as textbook manufactured terrorism.
The defendant
“This poor guy is a mentally ill, homeless man who happens to be Muslim. He lives in an alley behind a restaurant here in Miami. And he had a small storage unit where he kept his meager belongings.”[1]
The trigger
“An employee of the storage company went into the unit, probably to rob him. And saw two things. He saw a baseball bat with some writing on it. And then he saw some childlike drawings. Remember when you were in fifth or sixth grade and you would draw battlefield pictures of people launching rockets at each other. Something the FBI later called schematics for a bomb. Oh my gosh, no, it’s a 10-year-old’s drawing of rockets.”[1][2]
The Facebook approach
“The FBI takes pictures of everything and decides to reach out to this man through Facebook. And they said ‘Hey brother, we heard that you’re Muslim, Allahu Akbar, right?’ And uh, ‘Welcome to Miami, and we heard from the restaurant that you live in the alley. Let us take you out for a pizza and a beer.’ They took him out for pizza, they bought him a pack of cigarettes.”[3]
The four refusals
“‘We have our own militia. It’s called the pineapple militia because we live in Florida, and we want to overthrow the government. Do you want to be in our militia?’ He said no four times. Finally, just to get them off his back, he’s like, ‘All right, all right, I’ll join your militia.’”[3][4]
The target escalation
“‘You know what we should do? We should blow up that synagogue over there.’ He’s like, ‘Why would we do that?’ ‘No, you know what? We need to do something bigger. We should blow up the New York Stock Exchange. Can you build us a bomb?’ He said, ‘No, I don’t know how to build a bomb.’ They said, ‘Just look at YouTube, you can learn there.’”[4]
The FBI’s own bomb
“The FBI ends up building the bomb. And then they pick him up, they hand him the bomb, he looks in the bag and they arrest him.”[5]
Kiriakou’s testimony
“I testified by Zoom from Athens. And I talked about what’s called the asset acquisition cycle, Spot, Assess, Develop, Recruit. They spotted this guy, he’s homeless, he’s mentally ill. They assessed that he could use money even if it’s just for food, maybe a roof over his head for a night or two a week. They began to develop him.”[5][6]
The rule Kiriakou draws
“Of all the terrorism cases that the FBI has investigated, only 1% are actual terrorism cases. The rest are just created out of thin air by the FBI.”[7]