* “The focus of the article is on the danger of the government convicting somebody who isn’t much of a threat to commit terrorism. There’s another side of the coin, of course, but that goes unmentioned: the possibility of the government prodding somebody into actually committing terrorism.”
I wonder if the Bomb-Brothers were not an instance of this. Perhaps the FBI tried to recruit them for a fake bomb-plot, but did not realize that they were smart enough to initiate a real one. They (the Tsarnaev’s, I mean) might have also realized they were being played and thought it would be an amusing joke to play on the Feds. That scenario might explain what seemed to be a bunch of Craft security personnel hanging around that day, as well as the suspicious death of Ibrahim Todashev.
Regarding the federal fake terror-plot campaign, one should also not discount simple careerism. I would assume that both in the FBI and in the DoJ (so-called) making successful cases is a metric for promotion. GS-14s for everyone!
* A policy of bombing fewer Muslim countries and letting fewer Muslim potential bombers in to live in America would allow America to safely employ fewer of these agents provocateur.
That’s common sense and it’s not allowed!
* It’s a small step from this to agents deliberately cultivating losers into fanatics and then sending them on their way like missiles to their targets…or airplanes into buildings…
But that’s conspiracy, and we know that doesn’t happen.
* Some years back the Palestinian Authority claimed to have rolled up a counterfeit al-Qaeda cell being organized by the Israelis. Dupes would have thought they were being directed by AQ when in reality it would have been the Israelis pulling the strings. Ex-Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky has claimed the Achille Lauro incident was an Israeli engineered event. Quite clever and quite cynical, if true that is. One never really knows the whole story or who is doing what. There’s an awful lot of people out there with budgets to burn whose job it is to bamboozle the public.
* I was half-listening to something on NPR last week about this Buzzfeed investigation about the FBI visiting Muslims who are applying for citizenship or some other legal status to recruit them. If they don’t know or volunteer anything, the FBI puts them on a list somewhere that prevents them from becoming a citizen. Predictably, the report is all about noble family men who are here to improve us being victimized by jack-booted thugs, but it suggests there are some realists lurking in the government’s shadows who are working to protect the country.
