This has been a problem for a while (I remember reading about FBI doing drug busts this way -- convincing an at risk but otherwise innocent to play along in a fake drug deal) -- and it is not a good thing.
Shouldn't the role of government be to better the populace? Instead people are paid a salary and told to go out into the world and create criminals.
Careers need to be made and paychecks need to be justified.
We built a multi-billion dollar and multi-department apparatus to prevent people from committing a very specific, rare crime. It's been operating for close to two decades now and needs to warrant its continued existence.
Maybe we shouldn't use boogeymen as scapegoats for expanding government power because they will create boogeymen to keep power/funding or demand more.
Obama and the atheist CIA wake each day and ask, "How can we fuck God, today? I
know! We'll make nuns perform abortions. We make homos dance naked in Russian
churches in front of old church ladies. Isn't that hilarious? We'll make a
complete mockery of marriage because, after all, niggers don't have fathers and
that's not fair. My wife, Michelle, wants there to be no cupcakes for school
birthdays because of single moms. We'll make God hated... just for pedophiles
and crazy insane sand-niggers. We'll drink fetus soup with the Queen and
celebrate the end of births. We'll make having children pedophillic. We'll
make every five year old African girl learn how to put on a condom. We'll make
churchs no longer tax exempt. <Giggle> We'll make all the conservative sons
into liberal atheist homos. <Giggle> Will bring in Mexicans to ensure
democratic votes. We made whites have no children because they covet money.
Jesus advocated capital punishment. Matthew 18:6 Mark 9:42 Luke 17:2. He said
to put a millstone around the neck of anyone who corrupts the youth and throw
them in the sea. Obama made the youth covet the money of the wealthy."
The IRA is like the NRA, but for computers. The CIA wants all code in the cloud
under their lock and key. They want to ban compilers and make people think HTML
is computer programming. They want to evaporate desktops so you have no local
computer, just massive cloud computers.
===========
No checks and balances on police state. It is unamerican. Who fights against anti-terrorism powergrab? The terrorist IRA.
This is inexcusable. In many of the mass shootings, there's typically someone with mental issues, which you may not expect to properly differentiate between right and wrong.
The FBI is basically seeking these people out, handing them all the weapons and bombs and they need, and then say "see that school over there? Go ahead and lay waste to it. Come on, you'll feel good about it. We'll even give you money to do it!"
This is the danger of having unaccountable authorities that have a profound lack of respect for the rule of law and due process, and think they can do whatever they want to further whatever they think the "mission" is. Eventually they become the enemy of the people and instead of improving public safety, they actively work to undermine it.
If they are so worried about people with mental issues, they should be seeking them out to give them help, not arm them. You'd think that should be common sense. But when civil law enforcement becomes militarized, something like that is anything but common sense.
> Karen Greenberg, for example — author of “Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State” — believes that the “tension between security and liberty” that can result from these tactics is a good thing.
> “The amount of money, time and resources that have been put into rethinking law enforcement since 9/11 has made us safer,” she told Business Insider in an interview. “And now we’re sort of trying to figure out where the lines are.”
I'd like to see some evidence for that. How many mass shootings still happen in the U.S. every year? - "But we don't count those as terrorism!" - Oh, okay. But you do when it's the government itself that trains these people and encourages them to do these acts against itself?!
> This is inexcusable. In many of the mass shootings, there's typically someone with mental issues, which you may not expect to properly differentiate between right and wrong.
Of the many mass shootings and terrorist attacks that have occurred over the last decades...
Only two of these guys strikes me as "insane", the Virginia Tech shooter and the Aurora Shooter. Everyone else were just assholes. These are just normal people who got stressed out by their peers and then attacked back.
The fact of the matter is, the vast, vast majority of crimes (and even mass-shootings and terrorist attacks) are done by 100% sane people. Assholes for sure, but people who are sound in body and mind.
An insane person rarely has the capacity to plan an attack that will successfully kill people. Seriously. This "mental health" myth needs to die, and people need to realize that NORMAL people are killing others. The big daddy of them all: 9/11 required careful collaboration between four groups of distinct people (four groups, four aircraft. Near simultaneous execution across the country). They had to get pilot training, work together, coordinate an attack at the same time.
Ditto with the Paris and Brussels attacks. This complicated planning and coordination of a large group of people can only happen if all members of the group are mentally stable. It really takes a lot of work to plan a terrorist attack.
The study of "radicalization" says that people become radicalized when they are increasingly isolated from their peers, become stressed to a breaking point to the point where they wish to lash out and attack.
Yeah. He had Asperger syndrome and sensory-integration disorder.
Last time I checked, my friend's brother with Aspergers wasn't shooting up people. To blame the shooting on the mental illness of the Sandy hook shooter is a harmful slur against the many peaceful people who struggle with various mental health issues.
What I'm saying is: mental illness seems to occur in these violent shootings about as often as they occur in average people. The mental illness does NOT seem to be a contributor to whether or not someone starts shooting people randomly.
Radicalization theory offers a stronger basis of argument. And the Sandy Hook shooter matches the basis of radicalization far stronger than his mental illness. As all of the other Radicalized people: Lanza cut off ties with his brother and father, and also stopped discussing things with his mother.
Social isolation is a major pattern seen by radicalized individuals. Perhaps this social isolation was self-inflicted, or maybe there was a family issue that occurred at some point of the guy's life.
----------------
To blame shootings on mental illness is 1: an unnecessary slur to the community of disabled. 2: Ignores that the root problem is completely separate from mental issues.
Regarding radicalization, it's a term that's only used by talking heads. In security work you assume that everyone is a motivated self-aware bad guy who can find many valid reasons to shoot you. The idea that only simpletons, who go through a "radicalization" process (usually guided by a priest), become "terrorists" is dangerously wrong. In the industry you'd be laughed at for a risk-analysis using that term or even that thought-process.
Many of those killers had a very specific reason for their attacks that was at least as good as our military uses. Not right or wrong, but as well developed and contextually reasonable.
For instance, Timothy McVeigh attacked a military installation because he felt (largely rightly) that they'd illegally and unreasonably conspired to kill his countrymen on trumped up charges. He did the equivalent of bombing an Iraqi military HQ because they'd violated international norms. It's likely that had the initial Waco attack not happened that McVeigh would have had a peaceful life - he wasn't shopping around for targets.
I say this not to forgive him but to explain how suicidally stupid our public discourse on internal dangers is. If we really want to be "safe" we have to realize that these aren't random, unguided, and unskilled, attacks. If we shoot up someone's friends we will get responses. Not from radical crazies, but from sane people who believe they're next.
Because the FBI believes its own rhetoric they're looking for radical-looking people (usually slightly crazy, as a result) and then try to work backwards to the terrorist attack they assume must be cooking in their head. This will never fail to find them funding, but will never make us one iota safer.
The main take-home is that there isn't a special terrorist type that we can find all of, thus making us safe. All of us are potentially terrorists by someone else's definition, French freedom fighters, spies behind Nazi lines, etc. (We now consider those to be "good" but the people on the ground acted from their own initiative at the time, not a comfortable societal safety net which vetted their ideas.)
The difference is radicalization. Even if the Bundy folk talk a big talk and point their guns out the window, they really don't want to be killers. And their fingers remained off of the trigger.
In contrast, Timothy McVeigh straight up wanted to kill people because of his beliefs. Neither group was mentally ill. I disagree with both severely from a political standpoint of course, but they aren't sick.
Not by the definition we use overseas. Family and business associates of terrorists are legitimate targets.
And most importantly, not innocent by the definition Timothy McVeigh was trained to use in the army. "He said he later was shocked to be ordered to execute surrendering prisoners [...]"
We don't stop to consider if workers in an Iraqi military HQ are conscripts, or have taken their children to work.
We'd have bombed the BATF office, and considered it a righteous kill, if we felt they had hurt us the way McVeigh felt they hurt his people.
> The difference is radicalization.
No, the difference is in their goals. They aren't one-issue simpletons.
Assuming they had the same goals, (which they didn't) the difference is opportunity. Different skills, background, and situations give people different tools.
> Timothy McVeigh straight up wanted to kill people because of his beliefs.
You tell him. That'll keep us safe.
But no, you're wrong. McVeigh could have killed thousands by targeting a sporting event or something. He specifically chose the office of his enemy.
I'm not defending him, I'm saying that the things you're saying are feel-good mantras that would lead us to being totally ineffective if we universally acted on them.
Your virtue signaling is getting in the way of you analyzing people and their motivations.
> Not by the definition we use overseas. Family and business associates of terrorists are legitimate targets.
Erm... right. You realize that's against the Geneva convention and is the definition of a war crime in the US Military. You literally can be court martialled if you did something like that.
When the Navy Seals stormed Bin Laden's home, how many children did they kill? Answer: Zero. Did they kill Bin Laden's wife? No. They didn't. She was let go. The entire family that was staying at Bin Laden's house, hiding with him, were kept safe by the Seals.
What's your military background where you can say this sort of stuff with confidence? Methinks you've been reading a bit too many articles and don't have enough experience on your own to create an opinion.
> You realize that's against the Geneva convention and is the definition of a war crime in the US Military. You literally can be court martialled if you did something like that.
Fwiw, I meant 'legitimate collateral targets'. As in, we don't abort a mission if it'll blow up the family of the terrorist.
We'd have dropped a bomb on an enemy government office building despite it having a nursery attached.
> When the Navy Seals stormed Bin Laden's home, [...]
When done by bomb the standards are much lower. Also, that was a mission they knew would be examined by everyone.
> Methinks you've been reading a bit too many articles and don't have enough experience on your own to create an opinion.
For what it's worth, being on the ground somewhere is not one of the best ways to see the big picture. People fighting in Vietnam were often the least informed and didn't know what went on a few miles away.
> What's your military background where you can say this sort of stuff with confidence?
Are you saying that all the torturers at Guantanamo have been found guilty? Because otherwise I'm using the same news you have access to.
I think that the most charitable interpretation (for the FBI) is that they believe their targets are some kind of "unexploded ordnance".
That is, people who haven't been radicalized, and who aren't likely to go on shooting rampages, but who could be convinced to "kill" people with some psychological distance by firing a fake missile or pushing a button.
The problem from my point of view is that these are simultaneously victims who will spend years in prison, and people capable of clearing a low bar in terms of willingness to kill strangers.
My sense is that these are people who could go the rest of their lives without harm, but of course I don't know.
It reminds me of the old ethics saw. It's a box where, if you push the button, some American you don't know dies and you get $1,000,000. The FBI is making the death roughly that abstract, and sending people to jail for pushing the button.
And as we all know, those don't count because gang members' lives aren't worth anything. It's only a real mass shooting if it was nice white children who died.
It's not about it "counting", it's about what patterns violence follows. Mental health interventions, gun control, counterterrorism operations, etc don't help gang-related shootings.
Isn't "terrorism" a source of spreading power and control both nationally and internationally, without which we wouldn't be able to justify our act? It's not an eye opener report that is telling something we already don't know. Then why bother reporting it?
You have FBI beating the Terrorism drum. You have politicians running on being tough on Terrorism. Terrorism is BIG BUSINESS. It makes people rich. It gives the Govt unprecedented POWER of us. How did people NOT see this coming!?
Some people did see it coming, and we ignored them. Hell, the politician who pushed those ridiculous TSA body scanners works for the company which made them! Cash rules everything around me, CREAM, get the money, dolla' dolla' bills, y'all.
The worse thing is how cash is not a resource, but a standard technology "regulated" by a private institution (that nontheless has the word federal in its name)
Having read too many of these stories over the past few years, I have slipped into the habit of mentally expanding FBI to Federal Bureau of Instigation.
People choose to commit violent acts or agree with those that do. Whether these people are psychologically impaired or clear-headed and bloodthirsty, they could just as easily STOP glorifying terrorism, watching execution videos, communicating with terrorists and terrorist supporters...nobody is forcing them to want to be terrorists.
Is the FBI overstepping its bounds by providing weapons to whom they will soon arrest? Maybe. But if they had simply stopped bothering with their investigations, who's to say they wouldn't commit acts of terror with more primitive means?
Someone with aims of terror could smash a container of bleach against a container of ammonia in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and kill dozens of people - with stuff you could buy at any hardware or grocery store. No permit, no license, no FBI investigator involved.
In the end, there is only one question you need to ask yourself: am I at risk of an FBI entrapment sting?
Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you.
>Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you.
Isn't that the classic "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" argument?
And maybe you do communicate with terrorist supporters: Are you absolutely sure none of the people you communicate with support terrorism?
Yes it is that argument exactly and it is a case where it works.
Nobody is contacting me on terrorist matters. Even if someone did I would ignore them and/or report them to the Bureau.
I don't see how this is a problem for anybody here. Unless you are literally planning an attack, you have done nothing wrong, you are not in the process of doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
Unless you have an anectode about being personally harassed by the FBI then I submit that you are getting worked up over something that is not and should not ever be your problem.
It sure worked well for everyone that knew the Boston marathon bombing terrorists. /s
The whole "investigate anyone who's ever been friends with anyone who's been investigated for terrorism" workflow just winds up wasting resources and screwing over people who don't deserve to be screwed over.
I supposed we could fix it by going back to a society of hunter/gatherers who have little to no contact outside their tribe, after all, it'd be in the name of "preventing terrorism."/s
I understand that one has to choose their friends and not associate with obvious terrorists and organized crime but that just builds groups that reinforce each other. Incentivizing communities to become more politically homogenous just breeds more terrorism. If radicals only hang out with radicals they become more radical. That's why we have neo Nazis and white supremacist groups. Nobody wants to hang out with them because of the social stigma so they hang out with each other and create an echo chamber.
If nobody but the kid that secretly wants to shoot up the school will hang out with the other kid that secretly wants to shoot up the school you get problems, problems that scale to white supremacist groups, Al-Queda and ISIS, heck it even scales all the way up to major religions. How many hundreds of years did it take for protestants and Catholics to stop throwing each other in jail every time their land was conquered by a king of the other religion? How are the Sunnis and Shia doing?
I'm not by any means advocating for social/political homogeny (1984, Brave New World, etc). However, when the rules of society include "do nothing wrong and you have nothing to fear" people surround themselves with people of similar belief and kick out those that believe differently because what's right and wrong are determined by consensus. That's how you get two kids that think shooting up a school is a great idea, or ten guys that think bombing some sports event is a great idea, everyone (no matter how few) around them agrees.
So if you really want to prevent terrorism become friends with that awkward quiet religious fundamentalist guy in your office (or the doomsday prepper, or the racist or some other generic example of a person that usually becomes a social outcast). Everyone seeks out a group to be a meaningful part of. The enemy sets the bar for inclusion low, anyone can wear a suicide vest and the gun doesn't care if the person pulling the trigger is socially awkward. People join those groups and surround themselves with other radicals because all you have to do is believe what they do and you're part of the team.
Shunning people that are a "little bit too extreme" because associating with those types is suspicious and not something you want to involve yourself with just provides an incentive for them to associate with each other and create a positive feedback loop.
No it's not a problem for anyone here but indirectly it's a problem for everyone here.
Do the people that were friends with Eric Harris, the Tsarniav(sp?) brothers and Jihadi John but let that friendship erode are glad they no longer associate with those people or do they wish they could have done something?
No, but I've on more than one occasion (mostly back in college) made sure that group planning (let's all go out to dinner and talk about what we did over break) included people that wouldn't have been included otherwise. It's not the sociopaths and psychopaths I'm concerned with, it's the normal people.
Person A talks to person B. Person B supports terrorism. Person B does not mention terrorism in any communication with person A. Therefore, person A knows nothing, has done nothing wrong, and has nothing to worry about.
How can you be so sure about that? Maybe the FBI thinks that A and B use some kind of code and B did mention terrorism to A. It's not about what really happened, it's about what the FBI thinks happened.
> Therefore, person A knows nothing, has done nothing wrong, and has nothing to worry about.
"knows nothing, has done nothing wrong" does not imply "has nothing to worry about".
Lest we forget, this is the same agency that -- until caught fairly recently, and for decades -- invented, practiced, and promoted to other law enforcement agencies an entire fraudulent field of "science" just so that law enforcement could pretend there was evidence linking people to crimes without any real basis. [0]
I don't know. I've been following this news, and one example is a case where the FBI hired a woman to chat with one of these guys all day and all night. The guy was suicidal, and her whole script was "You should hurt other people, not yourself"
She managed to convince this guy to say "ok" to taking guns after months of that sort of behavior.
Good points. I too am grateful for risk mitigations the alphabet agencies provide. I don't admit it enough.
I grudgingly agree with you on the last paragraph. For the majority of the population this is true. For a relative few outliers mistaken intent, misinterperetation or simply guilty of emotional outbursts(online & IRL) can and will happen. The frequency can be in the millions w/ a large enough population and pressure to over-reach/profit. That said, it seems fairly obvious to me the pressure to profit has grown too extreme. Unchecked in part due to FISA-style politics, political collusion and lobbying.
I am hopeful the pendulum of fear theater rocks back from this trend soon, as the backswing tends to mirror the former in extremity. The internet has enabled information sharing in ways previously unimaginable and in speeds hard to comprehend for most. The alphabet agencies & the mega corps(alphabet/apple/ms/etc) are the best at it and attract the majority of the talent. I theorize, perhaps the corps were the best of the best of the best at it and are a little miffed big bro is collecting it's own data good enough now the guv stopped buying data and now just demands more for free.
edit:
added 'own data' 2nd to last sentence
subbed 'it' for more in last sentence.
TLDR: Your're right. Abuses/erreors can and will always happen. Profit motive has pushed the envelope to what we have today.
> who's to say they wouldn't commit acts of terror with more primitive means?
Basic psych, backed up by statistics.
There's a critical amount of motivation needed for large plans (travel, running a business, shooting people, etc) that most people never come up with on their own.
When we look at how many dangerous people (as proven by unprompted attacks) fit into a profile the FBI would have harassed beforehand we can see how unrelated these groups are.
It's not like they're doing a bad thing but actually accomplishing something with it, such that if we just suffer some pain (the odd false arrest) we would made safer. Actually they're almost 100% misguided and we gain nothing except having built an otherwise worthless secret police who think they're infallible. (After all, they convince almost 100% of the crazies they target to push a button...)
> In the end, there is only one question you need to ask yourself: am I at risk of an FBI entrapment sting?
No, are you more likely at risk of FBI entrapment than suffering in an actual terrorist attack?
Security has to have a goal (safety) against which you measure the cost (false arrest).
The answer is that you're vastly more likely to be implicated in a sting than actually hurt by a terrorist. Why? Because the FBI's actual success rate at stopping dangerous people is close to zero but their budget is nearly unlimited.
They're federal police. They good at stopping bank robberies and kidnappings. They fail at everything more complex because they are institutionally allergic to realistic profiles. (Why, partly because most agents would get a high score on a "likely dangerous" checklist that didn't unduly focus on being muslim.)
> Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me.
If you understood the depth of data collected you'd realize you're never more than two-degrees separated. Probably less if you have a contact-list over 100 people.
> "These people are five steps away from being a danger to the United States."
I'd say they are one step away. They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means.
It seems to me there's a element of 'scale' in an entrapment defense. The cop tail-gated me so I sped up and then got ticketed for speeding -- perhaps I was entrapped to speed. It's not so hard to push someone over the edge to commit relatively minor offenses. But can you really entrap someone into launching a surface-to-surface missile at a air base? You can certainly coerce someone into that by threatening their life or their family, but that's not entrapment.
I don't see how providing any amount of weapons or money or fake explosives could entrap someone into being a jihadist.
Now, TFA raises the question of mental illness. I think if they are so mentally ill that they went along with the plot without understanding what they were doing, then they are either not competent to stand trial, or insane enough to try it as a defense.
I think it's a very low ROI approach for the FBI and mostly they are wasting their time providing the means for "nobody-wannabe-terrorists" to become actual terrorists, but my understanding is they record these guys actually pushing the detonator on their fake-bombs and they are ready to die to kill civilians, so I can't say I'm sympathetic.
With all the bashing FBI receives they are for the most part operating within the framework of the law.
In some countries just conspiring to commit a terrorist act can lead to a conviction, so in a way you can say that FBI is 'forced' to operate this way to get a conviction for a would be terrorist.
To actually get this type of conviction there has to be TONS of hard evidence to the point where in layman terms things are beyond what is typically considered 'conspiring'.
For example, this dude got convicted for 'conspiracy and other offences' after his buddies were 'firing assault rifles at security personnel and law enforcement officers' and ended up getting killed.
Both cases involved deliberate actions by the defendants classified as illegal, hence the conviction.
Not to mention things like '...20,000 hours of dialogue from 472,000 wiretapped telephone conversations on 18 tapped lines gathered from 1994 to 2003', multiple court appearances etc etc.
This just goes to demonstrate exactly why FBI is doing things the way the article describes.
there are cases where the rules are determined by the way the situation is subjectively perceived by the person involved.
their actions can later be deemed to be lawful or not depending on whether their perception is justified.
for example - the use of lethal force has to be justifiable (this applies to everyone not just the FBI obviously), one's justification after the fact can be considered valid or not depending on circumstances.
> In some countries just conspiring to commit a terrorist act can lead to a conviction
One of those countries would be the US: conspiring to commit any federal crime is, itself, a federal crime [0], and the US federal terrorism statute (which only applies to acts outside of the United States, though acts of terrorism within the United States are covered by other criminal statutes) also especially criminalizes attempts and conspiracies. [1]
I don't think any of the bashing the FBI gets is about suggesting they are breaking the law. Rather, the suggestions are that the law is limitlessly broad and allows nearly anything so it is nearly impossible for them to break the law in the first place (they can, for example, set up entire laboratories dedicated to fabricating evidence and send trained experts who lie on the stand as standard operating procedure with no repercussions).
And given that their powers are so broad and immense, we rely on them acting in good faith and morally (we must, because we have nothing else), so we criticize them when they do not do that.
Preying on mentally ill Muslims and concocting elaborate schemes which exploit their inability to function normally to trick them into "taking part" in (sometimes little more than just 'agreeing to') some sort of plot that doesn't exist and then patting themselves on the back for "getting a terrorist" and locking the mentally ill person in jail for decades is, well, sick, and not a shining example of 'acting morally', so the criticism is well-deserved.
That specific case - yes it was a stretch, although this brings a question of a mental health -related detention which is a huge can of worms in and of itself. Also there are no specific details on the mental disease he was allegedly struggling with. Dissolving ppl in acid and burning women refusing to have sex with you is a 'mental disease' in my book which is what isis is doing. Should they be exempt from prosecution?
That said : "Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations. Of those cases, an informant or FBI undercover operative led 49 defendants in their terrorism plots, similar to the way Osmakac was led in his."
So now 49 cases out of 508 were 'led' by the FBI, not clear how many of those had to do with mentally unfit individuals or if Osmakac was the only one.
Something to consider: perhaps the Bureau allows resources to be spent on "nobody-wannabe-terrorists" because it provides real-world experience for dealing with "actual-fuck-up-your-shit" terrorists, as well as a general reminder of how powerful and pervasive the FBI can be.
There is a prevailing theory that America's post-WWII habit of blasting smaller countries to smithereens (Vietnam, Iraq) is at least partially done to test out new war tech, train soldiers for real conflicts, and demonstrate the power of the American military to uppity rivals who might think twice about butting heads with the biggest military of all time.
You missed the point. It's not about proving the ability to occupy a country, it's about proving the ability to annihilate its military, which is something to keep in mind whether you're China or Kyrgyzstan.
In Vietnam, we didn't annihilate any country's military (arguably, the Viet Cong was largely crushed, but they weren't a national military; the NVA, which was a national military, wasn't crushed.)
So, even with the newly stated point, citing Vietnam as evidence of our ability to annihilate a country's military isn't really a good idea.
So without these occurrences, you're positing that countries like China and Kyrgyzstan (seriously?) would some how lose track of the fact that we spend more on our military than the entire GDP of most other countries, have shiny military tech coming out our ears, and have enough nuclear capability to make irradiated glass the only commodity left for them to barter with in their new found post-apocalyptic hell scape?
I think both situations you described are unethical and I don't want my government doing either of them.
I'd also question your use of the word prevailing, as I have never heard this theory in respectable historical circles. (I'm not an expert by any means, but I have yet to hear a respected scholar or non-conspiracy theorist advance any evidence to this concept.)
I think it's a very low ROI approach for the FBI and mostly they are wasting their time providing the means for "nobody-wannabe-terrorists" to become actual terrorists
Given that it only takes contacting the wrong person randomly some day for that wannabe terrorist to become an actual terrorist, I'm inclined to believe the FBI is providing a useful public service in rounding up these people. And not just that, the media attention here also gives the wannabe terrorist pause before reaching out for help to improve their craft ("what If I'm talking to an agent?").
Assuming the transcripts of the conversations with some of the people involved can be trusted (hey, it's the FBI), the so-called entrapped are given plenty of outs and chances to not-do that thing they're doing. There's no coercion happening.
> it only takes contacting the wrong person randomly some day for that wannabe terrorist to become an actual terrorist
I don't think that's true. It takes much more: Someone must be willing to give up their current life, career, friends and family; engage in very dangerous and socially taboo activities; train and acquire skills; kill; etc.
Most people don't have the motivation to leave a bad job or relationship. Retail sales isn't even as easy as you describe: Not every inquiry is a sale.
And so far, (again, assuming correct accounts), every person the FBI has "entrapped" this way has demonstrated that willingness. Up to and including pressing the button on a "bomb" the person believes will kill innocent people.
> can you really entrap someone into launching a surface-to-surface missile at a air base?
AFAIK these people don't commit the crimes (the FBI doesn't want the violent acts to actually occur), they just are involved in planning them.
Can you entrap a vulnerable person into participating in a plot, by making them feel important or valuable or threatened or as if their problems will be solved, or by making them feel that they are otherwise going against the group social norms? I'd say: Definitely yes.
Consider that humans are generally easily, predictably persuadable:
* Many human trafficking victims are 'entrapped' by their pimps, unwilling to leave and persuaded that the pimps love them - it's not an anomaly but standard procedure for the pimps, who seek out vulnerable young women.
* In another field, there is research that a large number of confessions, even to serious crimes, are false. People somehow break down after hours of interrogation and confess to things that never happened.
* Soldiers in large numbers are trained to kill, and often for very bad causes (look at militaries around the world and throughout history).
* Look up Stanly Milgram's famous experiments where people were persuaded to torture others.
> Consider that humans are generally easily, predictably persuadable
That may be true, but it undermines much of the legal code. A 'predictably persuadable' person can be talked into giving someone a ride, that person commits a homicide in the commission of a robbery, and then the 'predictably persuadable' person is legally responsible for the murder as well.
So, you may be correct that we need a more sophisticated understanding of mens rea into our legal code, but the premise of your objection is fairly far-reaching. We should be deliberate and thoughtful about embracing it fully, even if it is true and fair.
I agree regarding how it applies to the legal code (EDIT: though the law has allowances for these things too), but at the same time we need to be realistic; the legal code isn't reality. And we need to be responsible: We can't just say that because it's legal then it's ok.
The FBI has a choice; it doesn't need to pursue these people. Prosecutors can decline to prosecute. Juries can temper their conclusions and judges can temper their sentences. Etc.
> We can't just say that because it's legal then it's ok.
Absolutely. I say this all the time.
> Prosecutors can decline to prosecute.
But prosecutors can also choose to prosecute. When there's that much give in the legal code (giving a ride falls between 'no charge' and the death penalty), there's a lot of room for abuse and corruption. It might be worth giving up the ability to execute people for guarding (terrorist) warehouses for the assurance that we are governed by laws and not by (fickle, prejudiced, and corruptible) men.
None of GP's points would necessarily absolve a suggestible accomplice of a crime that actually occurred. The FBI's cases, on the other hand, were entirely fictitious except for the suggestible person.
It would certainly be a strong case if a suspect had actively sought the final ingredients of a self-planned act of terror, which would have killed people had the FBI not responded to the call first with fake equipment. But the objection in these cases is that when you subtract the FBI-provided motivation, plans, and equipment, all that's left are the person's own suggestibility and weak moral compass. Those don't constitute a criminal act in themselves. Experts could argue that they aren't likely to have ever resulted in one.
The religious targeting aspect is even more unfair. As far as I know, the FBI isn't spending similar time and resources to identify disaffected and suggestible non-Muslims, and then convincing them of the glory and honor awaiting them if only they would help push a button to bomb a local mosque.
Edit: In the above example, the "predictably persuadable" person isn't criminally responsible for murder if the ride was given to an FBI agent, and there was no actual robbery or murder.
> AFAIK these people don't commit the crimes (the FBI doesn't want the violent acts to actually occur), they just are involved in planning them.
In some cases they attempt to explode what they think are real bombs.
I've read that conspiracy charges do not always require an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, unless it's a government agent who suggests it. In those cases an overt act in furtherance is always required.
The cases I recall involved fake-bombs that the suspect tried to detonate. [1] Some other responses down thread include much more dubious actions by the co-conspirators which shines a much more concerning light on this FBI practice.
There are a lot of 'serious' offences that don't involve hurting people. A few high-school nerds 'plot' to blow up the moon, no big deal. A few disgruntled people 'plot' to blow up a bridge = prison.
The FBI get's away with charging people with Pre-crime for attacks that probably would not have happened.
It's an old tactic. Angry, but non violent people can challenge the system. But, add an Agent Provocateur and you can flip things around so they seem like they are the problem.
I don't think it's always so clearly a terrorism plot. The "Fort Dix Five" basically just bought illegal guns in a deal set up by an informant fearing deportation.
"In court, central FBI informant Mahmoud Omar confessed that Shain and Dritan did not know about the plan to attack Fort Dix."
I read the whole article, this is definitely a very different thing than providing a fake car bomb and recording the guy pushing the detonator.
In this case we see a long and concerted effort to implicate these brothers in a plot that they apparently knew nothing about. They were convicted, it seems, primarily based on the jihadist videos they watched (which were played for the jury, which included a parent who lost their son in Afghanistan, who later commented how one of the videos showing Americans being shot made him think it was his son being shot).
And even worse, in this case it seems like it was as much (if not primarily) about winning political points, for example, for then US Attorney Chris Christie.
So while I had read about some more clear-cut cases which seemed to involve an appropriate use of under-cover officers and informants, this case certainly seems to go far beyond that point, and exploited emotional jurists to win a very dubious conviction.
Gullible, uneducated people exist. We surround ourselves in bubbles of high education and it doesn't ever occur to us that people would go along with something like that, but they are out there.
That doesn't make it okay to exploit their ignorance.
> We surround ourselves in bubbles of high education and it doesn't ever occur to us that people would go along with something like that
I'd be surprised if it's tied to education. Highly educated people are are just as vulnerable, IMHO, and sometimes even more vulnerable due to their confidence in their own intellects. Many successful people I know are sure that every thought they sh-t out is made of gold. They are just vulnerable to different means of persuasion.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. - Feynman
I would have to agree that formal education is by no means a guarantee of intelligence and critical thinking skills. The latter are unfortunately much more rare.
"I think it's a very low ROI approach for the FBI"
Wrong. Creating these instances is extremely, hugely profitable in the form of increased funding for anti-terrorism.
I see what you are saying on the rest, and thats the response I would expect from an intelligent person that is uneducated on the subject. The fact is that they are not getting jihadists the means and then grabbing them, they are preying on poor people and promising them money through corrupt informants who usually participate in the plot up until the last minute and then get off scot-free. A good primer book on the subject, along with some of the lectures from the author:
I started my military career in anti-terrorism, back before they had to change the very definition because they realized it applied to them quite often. You want to know the terrorists I'm the most afraid of, and I think America should be? The ones in suits and ties, on Wall Street and in DC. I'm not afraid of men in thwabs doing dastardly things, and even if they did, it's such an outlier and small scope/scale it's a drop in terror bucket compared the financial terrorists.
>>Wrong. Creating these instances is extremely, hugely profitable in the form of increased funding for anti-terrorism.
Without knowing exactly how much it costs to manufacture the instances and then calculating how much funding is received per instance, how can you say they are "hugely profitable"? I can't imagine that training corrupt informants, organizing the plots, managing the activities and providing the supplies would be cheap.
Realistically, only the top-most officials in the FBI probably see a real cost-benefit analysis of the program. And, for all we know, they may be operating in the red, but continuing the program due to the intangible benefits it provides the FBI (e.g. increased authority).
Given the resources the FBI puts into each one of these cases, it's clear they're targeting people whose main crime is "being suggestible". There is effectively an unbounded supply of those in a country of 400 million. They don't seem to care about finding those who would actually be handling the hypothetical recruitment or financing, because they don't really exist - that pattern of an externally-recruited terrorist cell is extremely rare. Approximately all instances of Islamic terrorism in the US have been either true self-starters, or people who were radicalized / recruited / trained overseas and sent to the US for attacks.
> You can certainly coerce someone into that by threatening their life or their family, but that's not entrapment.
umm, is that not the very legal definition of entrapment? If an LEO threatens your life or your family to get you to commit a crime, you have a very reasonable defense to saying you would not have committed the crime had your life or family not been threatened.
I'm no expert, but I'd call that coercion, where the victim knows they are being forced to do something they don't want to do. Entrapment is about tricking the victim into doing something that they wouldn't have done on their own.
The FBI is doing the same thing that terrorist leaders do: pushing misguided and easily influenced people into performing terrorist acts. The FBI is not likely to catch any of the leaders this way, just the grunts.
Entrapment is when a LEO induces a person to commit a crime that they were previously not disposed to commit. Therefore, if the person has shown no inclination to commit a crime, then it seems that coercion could be a subtype of entrapment.
However, when criminal informants are used rather than LEO's to perform the coercion, that wouldn't be entrapment .
> However, when criminal informants are used rather than LEO's to perform the coercion, that wouldn't be entrapment .
An LEO using a "criminal informant" as an intermediary agent to coerce a target into committing a crime is still an LEO inducing the person to commit the crime.
The term I was searching for is duress. I think duress (involving a lack of consent) is distinct from entrapment. Duress requires an immediate and inescapable threat of serious bodily harm, worse than the harm caused by the crime.
While I agree duress by law enforcement may be a form of entrapment, they are distinct legal defenses with different burdens of proof.
> I'd say they are one step away. They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means.
Motive, opportunity, and means do not conclude that a crime will or must occur. Full stop. These are indicators used AFTER a crime has occurred to indicate that an individual likely perpetrated the crime in the american court system.
If someone disrespects me by shoving me or yelling at me while we are alone, and I happen to have the pocket knife I always carry, then I have motive, opportunity, and means to conduct an assault with a deadly weapon. Somehow I manage to avoid being arrested for things that I could do every single day. How do I manage this? I don't stab people.
I agree completely. In the context of having a recording of the suspect trying to detonate a fake bomb, in that case I was thinking it's like the FBI provided the means, while the target had the motive and opportunity.
What I've learned from the other responses is that in many cases there is no smoking fake-gun, but just a dubious conspiracy to commit murder which the alleged participants may not have even been fully aware of.
> But can you really entrap someone into launching a surface-to-surface missile at a air base?
Easily. If you've seen these cases you'd notice they specifically try to find and groom people who have a mental disease, are under stress or just simply seem to be easily manipulated and controlled.
You can entrap someone into launching a missile. Becoming a pink elephant. Or doing all kinds of strange things.
Heck, clerics from 3rd world countries manage to convince young men that they should blow themselves up. If they can do it without training and education, FBI can do it better.
This is not new and has been happening for a while. My favorite case is this:
FBI sends their man a mosque. He starts agitating and promoting terrorism, trying to recruit people. Congregation files a restraining order against him and reports him to the ... that's right, FBI.
Bottom line is, if your job, mission and funding depends on fighting terrorism, at some point they'd manufacture a bit of that in order to keep getting more support and funding.
TSA would do it too, if they were higher up on the ladder. But they are not. FBI is high enough to do it and get away with it. Kind of like NSA is high enough up to not have to follow laws and get away with whatever they want when it come to surveillance.
Five steps is too many for law enforcement to be involved.
How many steps does it take to become a mass murderer, which has magnitudes greater probability of happening to any one of us? Two: wanting to do it and buying a gun and bullets. That's it. Oh, maybe three: go to the mall. The FBI is not looking at every gun purchase that could result in a mass murder, nor are they supplying guns to people who (may think they) want to murder a bunch of people.
Watch "The Newburgh Sting". The lengths that the FBI went to entrap those guys was ridiculous. They had a guy who was constantly searching out suspects and badgering them into joining a plot that they never would have had any ability to pull off on their own. It took over a year of him convincing them, giving them money, providing all the means for their "atttack". They guys were angry muslims, but far less motivated or capable than the thousands of mostly white militias who have very anti-government views and lots of weapons. They were at the same anger level of a lot of right wing conspiracy theorists, except they were Muslims.
With those methods and enough time you can convince a lot of unstable people to commit a crime. Pretty much every group has some people that are unstable and can go over the top. I bet you could get some right wingers to blow up mosques or environmentalists to blow up power plants (just examples).
If you want to get potential criminals into jail then jails will soon be very crowded.
The theory is that the FBI is trying to get to these people before someone else does.
The flaw in that argument is that focussing on finding people that the FBI can go to great lengths to convince to commit a terror plot, when the FBI is providing the supplies, the plan, the timing, the intel, the guns, the bombs, everything, means they're not focussing on people who are actually out there trying to convince people to become terrorists.
So they're burning out any chance of goodwill with the muslim community because the FBI is secretly infiltrating otherwise innocent communities to try to convince them to do something illegal so they can arrest them, they're letting actual terrorists continue to act while they try to manufacture patsies to arrest instead, and they're actively creating people who are disenfranchised and hate the government out of a) the people they're turning into terrorists, and b) the people who like those people (e.g. other people at the mosque) who watch the FBI turn someone and then arrest them.
In other words, the FBI is doing more harm than good in the long term.
> They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means
This seems to be a very confused application of evidentiary requirements. Before we talk above motive, opportunity, and means, we talk about the act itself. Every time a person bumps me on the subway when I have a pocket knife, I have motive, means, and opportunity to murder them, but unless I commit the act, that is not even the least bit interesting in terms of whether I am a murderer.
At times I feel sorry for some of these agencies because they are in a constant state of catch-22.
If we had rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe and some of the Middle Eastern countries, people would be rioting in the streets to stop it.But since it only happens once so often, people are up in arms because of the methods used to prevent said acts from happening in the first place.
You then have ask yourself. Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens?
In my mind, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
> Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens?
It's not an either-or choice.
What I want is a government that does policework and investigation, not a government that sets people up to commit crimes.
> rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe
Europe has "rampant" mass shootings and bombings? They are very rare, despite the media coverage. The U.S. has many more mass shootings, AFAIK.
> do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens?
The question is whether many of these people would commit crimes if not for the instigation of law enforcement.
Yeah, the US has far, far more mass shootings. They're usually white supremacist or enraged-lone-male (practically a political faction of themselves) rather than carried out by an "organisation" of some sort.
"Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens?"
This question has been the foundation of modern justice systems for over a hundred years. We've built systems that let the guilty go free occasionally to avoid the far more greater injustice that someone innocent be persecuted by the government.
This arrangement has worked out very well, but now that we are so much safer there's no tolerance for the small price that needs to be paid. We're now tearing down this system to setup the foundation for eventual tyranny.
No, they're damned if they do because they do it almost suicidally wrongheadedly. All our security theatre does is catch the visible idiots.
No matter how many crazy people you convince to push the button on a fake surface-to-air missile, you'll never catch the potential McVeighs, and who are capable of working and planning alone, and have a "real" (ie, nuanced and long-lasting) goal that allows for many possible actions.
In fact, by swinging the discourse to "Terrorists are crazy people with scraggly beards" (Unix programmers?!) they've nerfed our actual defensive strategies. Every time someone calls in a non-existent threat because of wires and LEDs, we lose a little.
It's not a conspiracy to weaken us as that would require them to be looking beyond their next paycheck/bonus, but it functions as one.
American terrorists, while plenty, are undesired as media objects so they don't have the scaremongering effect of foreigners.
Solution: make up fake foreign-looking terrorists and sell them to the American people to scare them. It works wonders!
Solution 2: Take domestic terrorists and pretend they're foreign (see San Bernardino). Americans are too stupid to know the difference. Also works wonders.
I don't buy your logic, the terror "busts" rarely make a the news more than just a passing mention these days. So I doubt it has much psychological effect on the public. Also very few, outside of maybe conservative talk radio, said the San Bernardino shooters were "foreign." The line was always "home grown terror with possible ties to (or inspired by) ISIS."
Pretty much everyone I've seen recognizes the risk of terror is far greater among people already living inside the U.S. (or Europe), "sleepers" or otherwise, usually first or second generation immigrants.
In terms of "far right" terror groups, that's a different story entirely, and usually those groups are vocal in their communities (making them easier to track;) with the exception of "lone wolves," which are harder to track because they usually don't have international connections or travel records (or domestic ties to groups) that would raise flags.
Sleepers are agents specifically embedded with future actions in mind. There's no such thing as a second-generation sleeper agent - that's called a citizen.
And if you have teenagers, ask yourself how likely they'll follow in your crufty old plans.
Sleeper agents are movie-plots.
Essentially, if you're thinking about security and you recognize yourself thinking any terms you've heard on CNN ("Lone wolf", "sleeper", "radicalized", etc) you're doing it wrong. Those are silly TV terms and are usually after-the-fact descriptives, not warning signs.
(ie, you only catch one guy with no leads to others, so the media labels him a Lone Wolf. That's useless wrt finding him in the first place.)
I never said they'd get their instructions from their parents. My point is that first or second generation immigrants often feel neglected by the society they live in and are interested in the culture their parents/grandparents lived in. So they revert, or visit those places and become radicalized, usually with absolutely no support from the parent because that's what they were trying to escape. Then the cell will "activate" them, again, this has no barring on their parents.
There is one common aspect to most "lone wolves" and other types of terrorists is that they don't feel like they belong in their current society.
The rest of your argument is a bit of a straw man to what I was actually stating; however if you think disaffected youth aren't "radicalized" (because they feel they finally belong to something), you're wrong. And it's not just a TV term, the FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies use these terms, so I don't really see your point.
If they weren't planted, they aren't sleepers. You're spending more time shoehorning people into TV-word boxes than you are in understanding them.
I've seen this before - people fighting to justify calling someone a Lone Wolf despite their having outside assistance. Why? Because it sounds dangerous. It's a trial and judgement all in one. "There, I labelled Osama as 'crazy', I've done my part."
Maybe after the fact you can sort people by how radical they seem (it's a subjective measure), or how much outside support they had, but it's a worthless thing to think about beforehand, and anyone who does it is absolutely disconnected from making anything more secure.
> And it's not just a TV term, the FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies use these terms, so I don't really see your point.
The FBI is dangerously worthless in this regard. If they say something and someone on TV latches onto it you can be assured that it's wrongheaded. To the degree that their profiling could actually be useful, it has to ignore epithets. (Yes, you hate terrorists, you're a good citizen, I get that. But stop insulting them long enough to actually study their actions.)
Real security doesn't involve labeling people, it involves looking for flaws in defenses, etc.
This smells far more like an actual psyops strategy than simple entrapment or career advancement.
If it's publicly known that there is an N% chance that your explosives supplier is a Fed (where N > paranoia threshold), that puts a chilling effect on even attempting your extremist plot.
Victims? Were the guards at Auschwitz victims too? Someone who tries to slaughter civilians to spread terror is not a victim, they are the enemy. No one would ever call a neo-Nazi a victim. The moral double standard toward minorities in the West is ridiculous. It's the soft bigotry of lowered expectations.
This brings to mind the classic example of "rat hunting". A hundred years ago, the French Government wanted to get rid of the rats plaguing Hanoi, so they offered a bounty for each rat killed. To collect the bounty, the (presumably) dead rat's tail was turned in as proof. As might be expected, the expected then happened:
Appealing to both civic duty and to the pocketbook, a one-cent bounty was paid for each rat tail brought to the authorities (it was decided that the handing in of an entire rat corpse would create too much of a burden for the already taxed municipal health authorities). Unfortunately, this scheme backfired. Despite initial apparent success, the authorities soon discovered that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. As soon the municipal administrators publicized the reward program, Vietnamese residents began to bring in thousands of tails.
While many desk-bound administrators delighted in the numbers of apparently eliminated rats, more alert officials in the field began to notice a disturbing development. There were frequent sightings of rats without tails going about their business in the city streets. After some perplexity, the authorities realized that less-than-honest but quite resourceful characters were catching rats, but merely cutting off the tails and letting the still-living pests go free (perhaps to breed and produce more valuable tails).
Later, things became even more serious as health inspectors discovered a disturbing development in the suburbs of Hanoi. These officials found that more enterprising but equally deceptive individuals were actually raising rats to collect the bounty. One can only imagine the frustration of the municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation had actually increased the rodent population by indirectly encouraging rat-farming. Evidently, this was not what the French had in mind when they encouraged capitalist development and the entrepreneurial spirit in Vietnam. Faced with such fraudulent schemes, the colonial regime scrapped the rat bounty program.
If an organization is judged by how many "terrorists" they arrest, one should not be surprised if that organization comes up with a counterproductive means of increasing the number of terrorists arrested.
The best part is that when they removed the bounty, the people breeding rats just let them all go, causing a larger problem than they had at the start.
At the time of British rule of colonial India, cobras where a huge problem and rewards for catching cobras resulted in the locals breeding them instead.
This is weird. Humans hunt animals to extinction all the time when have economic value. Look what's happening to elephants or rhinos in Africa.
Yet creating an artificial value to killing them isn't enough? Suddenly humans come up with creative ways of breeding them artificially?
Perhaps these aren't mutually exclusive. Maybe the bounty program worked to reduce the population to the point that farming was more viable. Maybe the bounty was too high, and if they reduced it farming wouldn't be economical anymore.
Perhaps a solution would be to have the bounty in short random bursts. The bounty program only lasts for 1 year, so no one has time to start farms and breed them. Or just investigate the people bringing in lots of cobras, and see if they have a big cobra pit next to their house.
I am very curious about these systems because it seems like a very effective method of eliminating invasive species. Australia is being overrun with cane toads, and my local state is complaining about Asian carp and zebra mussels.
Yet no one is willing to put up money to see if the market can find an efficient solution to cull the population. Partially because of the infamous stories posted above about how these programs create bad incentives. But I believe they could be minimized. And I can't imagine anyone breeding asian carp or cane toads given how prevalent they are in the wild now.
Another way to think about it is an artificial value to keeping the population going. All the animals will eventually die yielding a reward, but if you can keep a population going, the reward will keep coming.
My point is that only applies once the bounty has already worked to reduce the population to a low enough level. After that you can end the bounty and try other things.
Consider the cost ch of hunting an animal vs the cost of breeding it cb.
If ch >> cb then it will be hunted to extinction. If cb >> ch, then it will be breeded. If ch ~ cb then people will pick the option best for the community.
Perhaps we should pay law enforcement based on a lack of crime. Less crime? More pay. More crime? Less pay.
Of course, how are we counting "crimes"? By those they actually arrest? They'll just stop arresting. By the number of complaints reported by citizens about crime? Perhaps?
I bet there's also some unintended consequence even with this scheme, but I'm feeling lazy just now.
How these agencies have manage to thrive for so long, and continue to do so, remains utterly baffling to me. In the US, the FBI, the NSA and the CIA (and I'm sure others) have been caught red-handed on so many occasions and ... nothing happened, and it seems nothing ever will. They'll get a slap on the wrist, sometimes, and maybe some new legislation will be devised, only to be bent again. Of course, it's far from being limited to the US, this happens the world over.
Then you get stories like this one from Adam Curtis about MI5 in the UK [1], which show that these events are not simply pervasive, they're essentially the raison d'être of these agencies and their leaders. The very fact these people think they are not accountable to the public and/or their eleted representatives should tell us right off the bat where their interests actually lie.
Those who seek and abuse power will do so regardless; it seems the least we could do as relatively civilized socities would be to not sponsor those people in the first place. By any morally acceptable standards, these people are criminals and their only legitimacy stems from the government backing they get.
The original example of this was the WTC93 bombing.
- The bombing plot started before Ramzi Yousef entered the US.
- It was initiated by Emad Salem, an FBI informant, ran by FBI agents Nancy Floyd & John Anticev.
- Salem famously recorded all his interactions with the FBI, including tapes where he says that he built the bomb that detonated.
- The FBI started him as an agent provacuter, but when he asked for more money etc, they lost faith and cut him lose. Months later the bomb went off, and the FBI re-hired him, paid him a $1 million, to setup more terrorists but this time with a fake bomb.
- The first place Ramzi Yousef went was 2 Iraqi brothers apartment in NJ.
- Allegedly the Iraqi brothers had an unlisted phone number in the name of Josie Hadaes. This is the same number the so-called "dumb terrorist" used on the truck rental, the one who went back to get his deposit.
The odd thing about WTC93 is that Yousef is considered the spiritual mastermind of 9/11 for Operation Bojinka. And his uncle, is KSM, the actual mastermind of 9/11.
Yet the neoconservatives and a CIA director tried to claim that Yousef's real identity was something else; some Iraqi agent or something.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories but it's hard to understand exactly what happened in 1993. It was certainly a failed sting operation and as one reporter said, the FBI wante to "teach the damn Muslim terrorists a lesson'. Either way, Emad Salem initiated the bombing plot, originally it was a pipe bomb against a synagoguge.
Whoever contacted Yousef, and whoever he is, he is a legitamite terrorist mastermind. Of course, he escaped and went on to commit a variety of other attacks before being arrested. I think his uncle, KSM, was even on CNN at one point (forget the story) while he was being hunted.
On 9/11, it seems pretty clear that the CIA was running a sting operation with 2 of the hijackers in CA, the ones affiliated with the alleged Saudi intelligence agent. At least 50 CIA employees knew about these 2 Al Qaeda terrorists in the US and the CIA withheld this information from the White House according to Richard Clarke-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8
The fact that that video has less than 60,000 views is unfortunate. And Zero Dark Thirty, is allegedly based on the red hair lady who worked for Rich Blee. She is lauded as the person who found Bin Laden but worked for the Alec Station who seemed to inadvertanty allow 9/11 to happen.
Of course, prior to 9/11, there were many warnings and chatter about a terrorist attack. In March 2001, the Lone Gunmen pilot premiered about a government conspiracy of flying planes into the WTC. And conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones & Bill Cooper, both warned an attack was coming. Some of this could be confirmation bias but the point is, a lot of people knew something was going to happen.
And in the WTC93, since the FBI wanted to teach the terrorists a lessons, there's some indications that they wanted a terrorist attack to happen, to motivate the public and government into acting to prevent a mass terrorist attack.
However, the reality is, government agencies like the CIA are highly beaurcratic and limited by their mandates, lawyers etc. Whatever happened on 9/11 has been so obsfucated it's hard to understand.
Wherever Rich Blee is, he needs to answer some questions. And the 28-pages need to be declassified-
https://28pages.org/
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadShouldn't the role of government be to better the populace? Instead people are paid a salary and told to go out into the world and create criminals.
We built a multi-billion dollar and multi-department apparatus to prevent people from committing a very specific, rare crime. It's been operating for close to two decades now and needs to warrant its continued existence.
Maybe we shouldn't use boogeymen as scapegoats for expanding government power because they will create boogeymen to keep power/funding or demand more.
Obama and the atheist CIA wake each day and ask, "How can we fuck God, today? I know! We'll make nuns perform abortions. We make homos dance naked in Russian churches in front of old church ladies. Isn't that hilarious? We'll make a complete mockery of marriage because, after all, niggers don't have fathers and that's not fair. My wife, Michelle, wants there to be no cupcakes for school birthdays because of single moms. We'll make God hated... just for pedophiles and crazy insane sand-niggers. We'll drink fetus soup with the Queen and celebrate the end of births. We'll make having children pedophillic. We'll make every five year old African girl learn how to put on a condom. We'll make churchs no longer tax exempt. <Giggle> We'll make all the conservative sons into liberal atheist homos. <Giggle> Will bring in Mexicans to ensure democratic votes. We made whites have no children because they covet money.
Jesus advocated capital punishment. Matthew 18:6 Mark 9:42 Luke 17:2. He said to put a millstone around the neck of anyone who corrupts the youth and throw them in the sea. Obama made the youth covet the money of the wealthy."
The IRA is like the NRA, but for computers. The CIA wants all code in the cloud under their lock and key. They want to ban compilers and make people think HTML is computer programming. They want to evaporate desktops so you have no local computer, just massive cloud computers.
===========
No checks and balances on police state. It is unamerican. Who fights against anti-terrorism powergrab? The terrorist IRA.
The FBI is basically seeking these people out, handing them all the weapons and bombs and they need, and then say "see that school over there? Go ahead and lay waste to it. Come on, you'll feel good about it. We'll even give you money to do it!"
This is the danger of having unaccountable authorities that have a profound lack of respect for the rule of law and due process, and think they can do whatever they want to further whatever they think the "mission" is. Eventually they become the enemy of the people and instead of improving public safety, they actively work to undermine it.
If they are so worried about people with mental issues, they should be seeking them out to give them help, not arm them. You'd think that should be common sense. But when civil law enforcement becomes militarized, something like that is anything but common sense.
> Karen Greenberg, for example — author of “Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State” — believes that the “tension between security and liberty” that can result from these tactics is a good thing.
> “The amount of money, time and resources that have been put into rethinking law enforcement since 9/11 has made us safer,” she told Business Insider in an interview. “And now we’re sort of trying to figure out where the lines are.”
I'd like to see some evidence for that. How many mass shootings still happen in the U.S. every year? - "But we don't count those as terrorism!" - Oh, okay. But you do when it's the government itself that trains these people and encourages them to do these acts against itself?!
Of the many mass shootings and terrorist attacks that have occurred over the last decades...
Starting with Columbine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre
To Timmothy McVeigh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh
To the Beltway Sniper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beltway_sniper_attacks
To Virginia Tech Shooter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Tech_shooting
To the Virginia on-air killing: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34090236
To the Charlestown shooting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston_church_shooting
To the Boston Marathon Bombing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Marathon_bombing
To the Aurora Shooter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Aurora_shooting
Only two of these guys strikes me as "insane", the Virginia Tech shooter and the Aurora Shooter. Everyone else were just assholes. These are just normal people who got stressed out by their peers and then attacked back.
The fact of the matter is, the vast, vast majority of crimes (and even mass-shootings and terrorist attacks) are done by 100% sane people. Assholes for sure, but people who are sound in body and mind.
An insane person rarely has the capacity to plan an attack that will successfully kill people. Seriously. This "mental health" myth needs to die, and people need to realize that NORMAL people are killing others. The big daddy of them all: 9/11 required careful collaboration between four groups of distinct people (four groups, four aircraft. Near simultaneous execution across the country). They had to get pilot training, work together, coordinate an attack at the same time.
Ditto with the Paris and Brussels attacks. This complicated planning and coordination of a large group of people can only happen if all members of the group are mentally stable. It really takes a lot of work to plan a terrorist attack.
The study of "radicalization" says that people become radicalized when they are increasingly isolated from their peers, become stressed to a breaking point to the point where they wish to lash out and attack.
Last time I checked, my friend's brother with Aspergers wasn't shooting up people. To blame the shooting on the mental illness of the Sandy hook shooter is a harmful slur against the many peaceful people who struggle with various mental health issues.
What I'm saying is: mental illness seems to occur in these violent shootings about as often as they occur in average people. The mental illness does NOT seem to be a contributor to whether or not someone starts shooting people randomly.
Radicalization theory offers a stronger basis of argument. And the Sandy Hook shooter matches the basis of radicalization far stronger than his mental illness. As all of the other Radicalized people: Lanza cut off ties with his brother and father, and also stopped discussing things with his mother.
Social isolation is a major pattern seen by radicalized individuals. Perhaps this social isolation was self-inflicted, or maybe there was a family issue that occurred at some point of the guy's life.
----------------
To blame shootings on mental illness is 1: an unnecessary slur to the community of disabled. 2: Ignores that the root problem is completely separate from mental issues.
Many of those killers had a very specific reason for their attacks that was at least as good as our military uses. Not right or wrong, but as well developed and contextually reasonable.
For instance, Timothy McVeigh attacked a military installation because he felt (largely rightly) that they'd illegally and unreasonably conspired to kill his countrymen on trumped up charges. He did the equivalent of bombing an Iraqi military HQ because they'd violated international norms. It's likely that had the initial Waco attack not happened that McVeigh would have had a peaceful life - he wasn't shopping around for targets.
I say this not to forgive him but to explain how suicidally stupid our public discourse on internal dangers is. If we really want to be "safe" we have to realize that these aren't random, unguided, and unskilled, attacks. If we shoot up someone's friends we will get responses. Not from radical crazies, but from sane people who believe they're next.
Because the FBI believes its own rhetoric they're looking for radical-looking people (usually slightly crazy, as a result) and then try to work backwards to the terrorist attack they assume must be cooking in their head. This will never fail to find them funding, but will never make us one iota safer.
The main take-home is that there isn't a special terrorist type that we can find all of, thus making us safe. All of us are potentially terrorists by someone else's definition, French freedom fighters, spies behind Nazi lines, etc. (We now consider those to be "good" but the people on the ground acted from their own initiative at the time, not a comfortable societal safety net which vetted their ideas.)
Security can't protect us from ourselves.
BOTH of these groups were citing the disastrous Waco as a point of their protest. But one of these groups decided to bomb innocent civilians.
While the other was peaceful. (with guns pointed everywhere. But ultimately, the Bundy guys remained peaceful)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundy_standoff
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Malheur_Nati...
The difference is radicalization. Even if the Bundy folk talk a big talk and point their guns out the window, they really don't want to be killers. And their fingers remained off of the trigger.
In contrast, Timothy McVeigh straight up wanted to kill people because of his beliefs. Neither group was mentally ill. I disagree with both severely from a political standpoint of course, but they aren't sick.
Not by the definition we use overseas. Family and business associates of terrorists are legitimate targets.
And most importantly, not innocent by the definition Timothy McVeigh was trained to use in the army. "He said he later was shocked to be ordered to execute surrendering prisoners [...]"
We don't stop to consider if workers in an Iraqi military HQ are conscripts, or have taken their children to work.
We'd have bombed the BATF office, and considered it a righteous kill, if we felt they had hurt us the way McVeigh felt they hurt his people.
> The difference is radicalization.
No, the difference is in their goals. They aren't one-issue simpletons.
Assuming they had the same goals, (which they didn't) the difference is opportunity. Different skills, background, and situations give people different tools.
> Timothy McVeigh straight up wanted to kill people because of his beliefs.
You tell him. That'll keep us safe.
But no, you're wrong. McVeigh could have killed thousands by targeting a sporting event or something. He specifically chose the office of his enemy.
I'm not defending him, I'm saying that the things you're saying are feel-good mantras that would lead us to being totally ineffective if we universally acted on them.
Your virtue signaling is getting in the way of you analyzing people and their motivations.
Erm... right. You realize that's against the Geneva convention and is the definition of a war crime in the US Military. You literally can be court martialled if you did something like that.
When the Navy Seals stormed Bin Laden's home, how many children did they kill? Answer: Zero. Did they kill Bin Laden's wife? No. They didn't. She was let go. The entire family that was staying at Bin Laden's house, hiding with him, were kept safe by the Seals.
What's your military background where you can say this sort of stuff with confidence? Methinks you've been reading a bit too many articles and don't have enough experience on your own to create an opinion.
> You realize that's against the Geneva convention and is the definition of a war crime in the US Military. You literally can be court martialled if you did something like that.
Fwiw, I meant 'legitimate collateral targets'. As in, we don't abort a mission if it'll blow up the family of the terrorist.
We'd have dropped a bomb on an enemy government office building despite it having a nursery attached.
> When the Navy Seals stormed Bin Laden's home, [...]
When done by bomb the standards are much lower. Also, that was a mission they knew would be examined by everyone.
> Methinks you've been reading a bit too many articles and don't have enough experience on your own to create an opinion.
For what it's worth, being on the ground somewhere is not one of the best ways to see the big picture. People fighting in Vietnam were often the least informed and didn't know what went on a few miles away.
> What's your military background where you can say this sort of stuff with confidence?
Are you saying that all the torturers at Guantanamo have been found guilty? Because otherwise I'm using the same news you have access to.
Like a lack of inhabitions, or concern.
Like a lack of inhabitions, or concern.
That is, people who haven't been radicalized, and who aren't likely to go on shooting rampages, but who could be convinced to "kill" people with some psychological distance by firing a fake missile or pushing a button.
The problem from my point of view is that these are simultaneously victims who will spend years in prison, and people capable of clearing a low bar in terms of willingness to kill strangers.
My sense is that these are people who could go the rest of their lives without harm, but of course I don't know.
It reminds me of the old ethics saw. It's a box where, if you push the button, some American you don't know dies and you get $1,000,000. The FBI is making the death roughly that abstract, and sending people to jail for pushing the button.
You have FBI beating the Terrorism drum. You have politicians running on being tough on Terrorism. Terrorism is BIG BUSINESS. It makes people rich. It gives the Govt unprecedented POWER of us. How did people NOT see this coming!?
People choose to commit violent acts or agree with those that do. Whether these people are psychologically impaired or clear-headed and bloodthirsty, they could just as easily STOP glorifying terrorism, watching execution videos, communicating with terrorists and terrorist supporters...nobody is forcing them to want to be terrorists.
Is the FBI overstepping its bounds by providing weapons to whom they will soon arrest? Maybe. But if they had simply stopped bothering with their investigations, who's to say they wouldn't commit acts of terror with more primitive means?
Someone with aims of terror could smash a container of bleach against a container of ammonia in the middle of a crowded shopping mall and kill dozens of people - with stuff you could buy at any hardware or grocery store. No permit, no license, no FBI investigator involved.
In the end, there is only one question you need to ask yourself: am I at risk of an FBI entrapment sting?
Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me. And the same, I hope, will go for you.
Isn't that the classic "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" argument?
And maybe you do communicate with terrorist supporters: Are you absolutely sure none of the people you communicate with support terrorism?
Nobody is contacting me on terrorist matters. Even if someone did I would ignore them and/or report them to the Bureau.
I don't see how this is a problem for anybody here. Unless you are literally planning an attack, you have done nothing wrong, you are not in the process of doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.
Unless you have an anectode about being personally harassed by the FBI then I submit that you are getting worked up over something that is not and should not ever be your problem.
People distrust the FBI for very good reasons.
Come up and respond under your own account, like we commies from Mother Russia do!!
The whole "investigate anyone who's ever been friends with anyone who's been investigated for terrorism" workflow just winds up wasting resources and screwing over people who don't deserve to be screwed over.
I supposed we could fix it by going back to a society of hunter/gatherers who have little to no contact outside their tribe, after all, it'd be in the name of "preventing terrorism."/s
I understand that one has to choose their friends and not associate with obvious terrorists and organized crime but that just builds groups that reinforce each other. Incentivizing communities to become more politically homogenous just breeds more terrorism. If radicals only hang out with radicals they become more radical. That's why we have neo Nazis and white supremacist groups. Nobody wants to hang out with them because of the social stigma so they hang out with each other and create an echo chamber.
If nobody but the kid that secretly wants to shoot up the school will hang out with the other kid that secretly wants to shoot up the school you get problems, problems that scale to white supremacist groups, Al-Queda and ISIS, heck it even scales all the way up to major religions. How many hundreds of years did it take for protestants and Catholics to stop throwing each other in jail every time their land was conquered by a king of the other religion? How are the Sunnis and Shia doing?
I'm not by any means advocating for social/political homogeny (1984, Brave New World, etc). However, when the rules of society include "do nothing wrong and you have nothing to fear" people surround themselves with people of similar belief and kick out those that believe differently because what's right and wrong are determined by consensus. That's how you get two kids that think shooting up a school is a great idea, or ten guys that think bombing some sports event is a great idea, everyone (no matter how few) around them agrees.
So if you really want to prevent terrorism become friends with that awkward quiet religious fundamentalist guy in your office (or the doomsday prepper, or the racist or some other generic example of a person that usually becomes a social outcast). Everyone seeks out a group to be a meaningful part of. The enemy sets the bar for inclusion low, anyone can wear a suicide vest and the gun doesn't care if the person pulling the trigger is socially awkward. People join those groups and surround themselves with other radicals because all you have to do is believe what they do and you're part of the team.
Shunning people that are a "little bit too extreme" because associating with those types is suspicious and not something you want to involve yourself with just provides an incentive for them to associate with each other and create a positive feedback loop.
No it's not a problem for anyone here but indirectly it's a problem for everyone here.
Do the people that were friends with Eric Harris, the Tsarniav(sp?) brothers and Jihadi John but let that friendship erode are glad they no longer associate with those people or do they wish they could have done something?
How do you know that?
Person A talks to person B. Person B supports terrorism. Person B does not mention terrorism in any communication with person A. Therefore, person A knows nothing, has done nothing wrong, and has nothing to worry about.
How can you be so sure about that? Maybe the FBI thinks that A and B use some kind of code and B did mention terrorism to A. It's not about what really happened, it's about what the FBI thinks happened.
"knows nothing, has done nothing wrong" does not imply "has nothing to worry about".
Lest we forget, this is the same agency that -- until caught fairly recently, and for decades -- invented, practiced, and promoted to other law enforcement agencies an entire fraudulent field of "science" just so that law enforcement could pretend there was evidence linking people to crimes without any real basis. [0]
[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
She managed to convince this guy to say "ok" to taking guns after months of that sort of behavior.
I think you're being overly credulous. You can listen to the actual recorded conversations here: https://theintercept.com/2016/04/21/listen-to-an-fbi-honeypo...
This is actually a constitutional right.
I grudgingly agree with you on the last paragraph. For the majority of the population this is true. For a relative few outliers mistaken intent, misinterperetation or simply guilty of emotional outbursts(online & IRL) can and will happen. The frequency can be in the millions w/ a large enough population and pressure to over-reach/profit. That said, it seems fairly obvious to me the pressure to profit has grown too extreme. Unchecked in part due to FISA-style politics, political collusion and lobbying.
I am hopeful the pendulum of fear theater rocks back from this trend soon, as the backswing tends to mirror the former in extremity. The internet has enabled information sharing in ways previously unimaginable and in speeds hard to comprehend for most. The alphabet agencies & the mega corps(alphabet/apple/ms/etc) are the best at it and attract the majority of the talent. I theorize, perhaps the corps were the best of the best of the best at it and are a little miffed big bro is collecting it's own data good enough now the guv stopped buying data and now just demands more for free.
edit:
added 'own data' 2nd to last sentence
subbed 'it' for more in last sentence.
TLDR: Your're right. Abuses/erreors can and will always happen. Profit motive has pushed the envelope to what we have today.
Basic psych, backed up by statistics.
There's a critical amount of motivation needed for large plans (travel, running a business, shooting people, etc) that most people never come up with on their own.
When we look at how many dangerous people (as proven by unprompted attacks) fit into a profile the FBI would have harassed beforehand we can see how unrelated these groups are.
It's not like they're doing a bad thing but actually accomplishing something with it, such that if we just suffer some pain (the odd false arrest) we would made safer. Actually they're almost 100% misguided and we gain nothing except having built an otherwise worthless secret police who think they're infallible. (After all, they convince almost 100% of the crazies they target to push a button...)
> In the end, there is only one question you need to ask yourself: am I at risk of an FBI entrapment sting?
No, are you more likely at risk of FBI entrapment than suffering in an actual terrorist attack?
Security has to have a goal (safety) against which you measure the cost (false arrest).
The answer is that you're vastly more likely to be implicated in a sting than actually hurt by a terrorist. Why? Because the FBI's actual success rate at stopping dangerous people is close to zero but their budget is nearly unlimited.
They're federal police. They good at stopping bank robberies and kidnappings. They fail at everything more complex because they are institutionally allergic to realistic profiles. (Why, partly because most agents would get a high score on a "likely dangerous" checklist that didn't unduly focus on being muslim.)
> Since I do not condone terrorism or make any effort to communicate with terrorists or terrorist supporters, the Bureau will not bother me.
If you understood the depth of data collected you'd realize you're never more than two-degrees separated. Probably less if you have a contact-list over 100 people.
I'd say they are one step away. They have the motive and opportunity but they lack the means.
It seems to me there's a element of 'scale' in an entrapment defense. The cop tail-gated me so I sped up and then got ticketed for speeding -- perhaps I was entrapped to speed. It's not so hard to push someone over the edge to commit relatively minor offenses. But can you really entrap someone into launching a surface-to-surface missile at a air base? You can certainly coerce someone into that by threatening their life or their family, but that's not entrapment.
I don't see how providing any amount of weapons or money or fake explosives could entrap someone into being a jihadist.
Now, TFA raises the question of mental illness. I think if they are so mentally ill that they went along with the plot without understanding what they were doing, then they are either not competent to stand trial, or insane enough to try it as a defense.
I think it's a very low ROI approach for the FBI and mostly they are wasting their time providing the means for "nobody-wannabe-terrorists" to become actual terrorists, but my understanding is they record these guys actually pushing the detonator on their fake-bombs and they are ready to die to kill civilians, so I can't say I'm sympathetic.
In some countries just conspiring to commit a terrorist act can lead to a conviction, so in a way you can say that FBI is 'forced' to operate this way to get a conviction for a would be terrorist.
Like the US
For example, this dude got convicted for 'conspiracy and other offences' after his buddies were 'firing assault rifles at security personnel and law enforcement officers' and ended up getting killed.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/phoenix-man-convicted-conspir...
or the Al-Arian case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sami_Al-Arian
Not to mention things like '...20,000 hours of dialogue from 472,000 wiretapped telephone conversations on 18 tapped lines gathered from 1994 to 2003', multiple court appearances etc etc.
This just goes to demonstrate exactly why FBI is doing things the way the article describes.
That's not enough. The FBI has to completely operate within the framework of the law, just like any other law enforcement agency.
their actions can later be deemed to be lawful or not depending on whether their perception is justified.
for example - the use of lethal force has to be justifiable (this applies to everyone not just the FBI obviously), one's justification after the fact can be considered valid or not depending on circumstances.
One of those countries would be the US: conspiring to commit any federal crime is, itself, a federal crime [0], and the US federal terrorism statute (which only applies to acts outside of the United States, though acts of terrorism within the United States are covered by other criminal statutes) also especially criminalizes attempts and conspiracies. [1]
[0] 18 USC Sec. 371; https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/371
[1] 18 USC Sec. 2332(b); https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2332
And given that their powers are so broad and immense, we rely on them acting in good faith and morally (we must, because we have nothing else), so we criticize them when they do not do that.
Preying on mentally ill Muslims and concocting elaborate schemes which exploit their inability to function normally to trick them into "taking part" in (sometimes little more than just 'agreeing to') some sort of plot that doesn't exist and then patting themselves on the back for "getting a terrorist" and locking the mentally ill person in jail for decades is, well, sick, and not a shining example of 'acting morally', so the criticism is well-deserved.
That said : "Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations. Of those cases, an informant or FBI undercover operative led 49 defendants in their terrorism plots, similar to the way Osmakac was led in his." So now 49 cases out of 508 were 'led' by the FBI, not clear how many of those had to do with mentally unfit individuals or if Osmakac was the only one.
There is a prevailing theory that America's post-WWII habit of blasting smaller countries to smithereens (Vietnam, Iraq) is at least partially done to test out new war tech, train soldiers for real conflicts, and demonstrate the power of the American military to uppity rivals who might think twice about butting heads with the biggest military of all time.
> demonstrate the power of the American military
Given that the first of those was a clear defeat and the second is still bogged down in guerilla warfare, I'm not sure this sends the desired message.
So, even with the newly stated point, citing Vietnam as evidence of our ability to annihilate a country's military isn't really a good idea.
I'd also question your use of the word prevailing, as I have never heard this theory in respectable historical circles. (I'm not an expert by any means, but I have yet to hear a respected scholar or non-conspiracy theorist advance any evidence to this concept.)
Given that it only takes contacting the wrong person randomly some day for that wannabe terrorist to become an actual terrorist, I'm inclined to believe the FBI is providing a useful public service in rounding up these people. And not just that, the media attention here also gives the wannabe terrorist pause before reaching out for help to improve their craft ("what If I'm talking to an agent?").
Assuming the transcripts of the conversations with some of the people involved can be trusted (hey, it's the FBI), the so-called entrapped are given plenty of outs and chances to not-do that thing they're doing. There's no coercion happening.
I don't think that's true. It takes much more: Someone must be willing to give up their current life, career, friends and family; engage in very dangerous and socially taboo activities; train and acquire skills; kill; etc.
Most people don't have the motivation to leave a bad job or relationship. Retail sales isn't even as easy as you describe: Not every inquiry is a sale.
> it only takes contacting the wrong person randomly some day for that wannabe terrorist to become an actual terrorist
AFAIK these people don't commit the crimes (the FBI doesn't want the violent acts to actually occur), they just are involved in planning them.
Can you entrap a vulnerable person into participating in a plot, by making them feel important or valuable or threatened or as if their problems will be solved, or by making them feel that they are otherwise going against the group social norms? I'd say: Definitely yes.
Consider that humans are generally easily, predictably persuadable:
* Many human trafficking victims are 'entrapped' by their pimps, unwilling to leave and persuaded that the pimps love them - it's not an anomaly but standard procedure for the pimps, who seek out vulnerable young women.
* In another field, there is research that a large number of confessions, even to serious crimes, are false. People somehow break down after hours of interrogation and confess to things that never happened.
* Soldiers in large numbers are trained to kill, and often for very bad causes (look at militaries around the world and throughout history).
* Look up Stanly Milgram's famous experiments where people were persuaded to torture others.
That may be true, but it undermines much of the legal code. A 'predictably persuadable' person can be talked into giving someone a ride, that person commits a homicide in the commission of a robbery, and then the 'predictably persuadable' person is legally responsible for the murder as well.
So, you may be correct that we need a more sophisticated understanding of mens rea into our legal code, but the premise of your objection is fairly far-reaching. We should be deliberate and thoughtful about embracing it fully, even if it is true and fair.
The FBI has a choice; it doesn't need to pursue these people. Prosecutors can decline to prosecute. Juries can temper their conclusions and judges can temper their sentences. Etc.
Absolutely. I say this all the time.
> Prosecutors can decline to prosecute.
But prosecutors can also choose to prosecute. When there's that much give in the legal code (giving a ride falls between 'no charge' and the death penalty), there's a lot of room for abuse and corruption. It might be worth giving up the ability to execute people for guarding (terrorist) warehouses for the assurance that we are governed by laws and not by (fickle, prejudiced, and corruptible) men.
well you are not doing anything to improve the laws and society then. Given than logic we'd still have slavery and sodomy laws among other things...
It would certainly be a strong case if a suspect had actively sought the final ingredients of a self-planned act of terror, which would have killed people had the FBI not responded to the call first with fake equipment. But the objection in these cases is that when you subtract the FBI-provided motivation, plans, and equipment, all that's left are the person's own suggestibility and weak moral compass. Those don't constitute a criminal act in themselves. Experts could argue that they aren't likely to have ever resulted in one.
The religious targeting aspect is even more unfair. As far as I know, the FBI isn't spending similar time and resources to identify disaffected and suggestible non-Muslims, and then convincing them of the glory and honor awaiting them if only they would help push a button to bomb a local mosque.
Edit: In the above example, the "predictably persuadable" person isn't criminally responsible for murder if the ride was given to an FBI agent, and there was no actual robbery or murder.
Without any concrete actions, how does this so called "planning" differ from bragging?
In some cases they attempt to explode what they think are real bombs.
I've read that conspiracy charges do not always require an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy, unless it's a government agent who suggests it. In those cases an overt act in furtherance is always required.
The cases I recall involved fake-bombs that the suspect tried to detonate. [1] Some other responses down thread include much more dubious actions by the co-conspirators which shines a much more concerning light on this FBI practice.
[1] - https://news.vice.com/article/isis-fake-bomb-terrorist-fbi-s...
Also,
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terroris...
The FBI get's away with charging people with Pre-crime for attacks that probably would not have happened.
It's an old tactic. Angry, but non violent people can challenge the system. But, add an Agent Provocateur and you can flip things around so they seem like they are the problem.
PS: Also, the coercion / inducement line get's tricky. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
"In court, central FBI informant Mahmoud Omar confessed that Shain and Dritan did not know about the plan to attack Fort Dix."
https://theintercept.com/2015/06/25/fort-dix-five-terror-plo...
In this case we see a long and concerted effort to implicate these brothers in a plot that they apparently knew nothing about. They were convicted, it seems, primarily based on the jihadist videos they watched (which were played for the jury, which included a parent who lost their son in Afghanistan, who later commented how one of the videos showing Americans being shot made him think it was his son being shot).
And even worse, in this case it seems like it was as much (if not primarily) about winning political points, for example, for then US Attorney Chris Christie.
So while I had read about some more clear-cut cases which seemed to involve an appropriate use of under-cover officers and informants, this case certainly seems to go far beyond that point, and exploited emotional jurists to win a very dubious conviction.
That doesn't make it okay to exploit their ignorance.
I'd be surprised if it's tied to education. Highly educated people are are just as vulnerable, IMHO, and sometimes even more vulnerable due to their confidence in their own intellects. Many successful people I know are sure that every thought they sh-t out is made of gold. They are just vulnerable to different means of persuasion.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool. - Feynman
Wrong. Creating these instances is extremely, hugely profitable in the form of increased funding for anti-terrorism.
I see what you are saying on the rest, and thats the response I would expect from an intelligent person that is uneducated on the subject. The fact is that they are not getting jihadists the means and then grabbing them, they are preying on poor people and promising them money through corrupt informants who usually participate in the plot up until the last minute and then get off scot-free. A good primer book on the subject, along with some of the lectures from the author:
https://www.amazon.com/Terror-Factory-Inside-Manufactured-Te...
I started my military career in anti-terrorism, back before they had to change the very definition because they realized it applied to them quite often. You want to know the terrorists I'm the most afraid of, and I think America should be? The ones in suits and ties, on Wall Street and in DC. I'm not afraid of men in thwabs doing dastardly things, and even if they did, it's such an outlier and small scope/scale it's a drop in terror bucket compared the financial terrorists.
Without knowing exactly how much it costs to manufacture the instances and then calculating how much funding is received per instance, how can you say they are "hugely profitable"? I can't imagine that training corrupt informants, organizing the plots, managing the activities and providing the supplies would be cheap.
Realistically, only the top-most officials in the FBI probably see a real cost-benefit analysis of the program. And, for all we know, they may be operating in the red, but continuing the program due to the intangible benefits it provides the FBI (e.g. increased authority).
umm, is that not the very legal definition of entrapment? If an LEO threatens your life or your family to get you to commit a crime, you have a very reasonable defense to saying you would not have committed the crime had your life or family not been threatened.
The FBI is doing the same thing that terrorist leaders do: pushing misguided and easily influenced people into performing terrorist acts. The FBI is not likely to catch any of the leaders this way, just the grunts.
However, when criminal informants are used rather than LEO's to perform the coercion, that wouldn't be entrapment .
An LEO using a "criminal informant" as an intermediary agent to coerce a target into committing a crime is still an LEO inducing the person to commit the crime.
All coercion by law enforcement to commit a crime is entrapment, and entrapment includes a number of things that are not, strictly, coercion.
While I agree duress by law enforcement may be a form of entrapment, they are distinct legal defenses with different burdens of proof.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patty_Hearst
Motive, opportunity, and means do not conclude that a crime will or must occur. Full stop. These are indicators used AFTER a crime has occurred to indicate that an individual likely perpetrated the crime in the american court system.
If someone disrespects me by shoving me or yelling at me while we are alone, and I happen to have the pocket knife I always carry, then I have motive, opportunity, and means to conduct an assault with a deadly weapon. Somehow I manage to avoid being arrested for things that I could do every single day. How do I manage this? I don't stab people.
What I've learned from the other responses is that in many cases there is no smoking fake-gun, but just a dubious conspiracy to commit murder which the alleged participants may not have even been fully aware of.
Easily. If you've seen these cases you'd notice they specifically try to find and groom people who have a mental disease, are under stress or just simply seem to be easily manipulated and controlled.
You can entrap someone into launching a missile. Becoming a pink elephant. Or doing all kinds of strange things.
Heck, clerics from 3rd world countries manage to convince young men that they should blow themselves up. If they can do it without training and education, FBI can do it better.
This is not new and has been happening for a while. My favorite case is this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12...
FBI sends their man a mosque. He starts agitating and promoting terrorism, trying to recruit people. Congregation files a restraining order against him and reports him to the ... that's right, FBI.
Bottom line is, if your job, mission and funding depends on fighting terrorism, at some point they'd manufacture a bit of that in order to keep getting more support and funding.
TSA would do it too, if they were higher up on the ladder. But they are not. FBI is high enough to do it and get away with it. Kind of like NSA is high enough up to not have to follow laws and get away with whatever they want when it come to surveillance.
You don't have to go to school to learn how to manipulate people.
How many steps does it take to become a mass murderer, which has magnitudes greater probability of happening to any one of us? Two: wanting to do it and buying a gun and bullets. That's it. Oh, maybe three: go to the mall. The FBI is not looking at every gun purchase that could result in a mass murder, nor are they supplying guns to people who (may think they) want to murder a bunch of people.
If you want to get potential criminals into jail then jails will soon be very crowded.
The flaw in that argument is that focussing on finding people that the FBI can go to great lengths to convince to commit a terror plot, when the FBI is providing the supplies, the plan, the timing, the intel, the guns, the bombs, everything, means they're not focussing on people who are actually out there trying to convince people to become terrorists.
So they're burning out any chance of goodwill with the muslim community because the FBI is secretly infiltrating otherwise innocent communities to try to convince them to do something illegal so they can arrest them, they're letting actual terrorists continue to act while they try to manufacture patsies to arrest instead, and they're actively creating people who are disenfranchised and hate the government out of a) the people they're turning into terrorists, and b) the people who like those people (e.g. other people at the mosque) who watch the FBI turn someone and then arrest them.
In other words, the FBI is doing more harm than good in the long term.
This seems to be a very confused application of evidentiary requirements. Before we talk above motive, opportunity, and means, we talk about the act itself. Every time a person bumps me on the subway when I have a pocket knife, I have motive, means, and opportunity to murder them, but unless I commit the act, that is not even the least bit interesting in terms of whether I am a murderer.
According to the what? Is it missing or redacted?
On a slightly different note, wasn't there an old browser that would put the link in if the text was missing?
If we had rampant mass shootings and bombings like they do in Europe and some of the Middle Eastern countries, people would be rioting in the streets to stop it.But since it only happens once so often, people are up in arms because of the methods used to prevent said acts from happening in the first place.
You then have ask yourself. Do you prefer terrorism to happen and then be reactive, or do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens?
In my mind, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.
It's not an either-or choice.
What I want is a government that does policework and investigation, not a government that sets people up to commit crimes.
Europe has "rampant" mass shootings and bombings? They are very rare, despite the media coverage. The U.S. has many more mass shootings, AFAIK.
> do you want the government to be proactive and work to flush these people out from the shadows before they commit a terrible act and murder innocent citizens?
The question is whether many of these people would commit crimes if not for the instigation of law enforcement.
All of us is my guess.
This question has been the foundation of modern justice systems for over a hundred years. We've built systems that let the guilty go free occasionally to avoid the far more greater injustice that someone innocent be persecuted by the government.
This arrangement has worked out very well, but now that we are so much safer there's no tolerance for the small price that needs to be paid. We're now tearing down this system to setup the foundation for eventual tyranny.
No matter how many crazy people you convince to push the button on a fake surface-to-air missile, you'll never catch the potential McVeighs, and who are capable of working and planning alone, and have a "real" (ie, nuanced and long-lasting) goal that allows for many possible actions.
In fact, by swinging the discourse to "Terrorists are crazy people with scraggly beards" (Unix programmers?!) they've nerfed our actual defensive strategies. Every time someone calls in a non-existent threat because of wires and LEDs, we lose a little.
It's not a conspiracy to weaken us as that would require them to be looking beyond their next paycheck/bonus, but it functions as one.
American terrorists, while plenty, are undesired as media objects so they don't have the scaremongering effect of foreigners.
Solution: make up fake foreign-looking terrorists and sell them to the American people to scare them. It works wonders!
Solution 2: Take domestic terrorists and pretend they're foreign (see San Bernardino). Americans are too stupid to know the difference. Also works wonders.
Pretty much everyone I've seen recognizes the risk of terror is far greater among people already living inside the U.S. (or Europe), "sleepers" or otherwise, usually first or second generation immigrants.
In terms of "far right" terror groups, that's a different story entirely, and usually those groups are vocal in their communities (making them easier to track;) with the exception of "lone wolves," which are harder to track because they usually don't have international connections or travel records (or domestic ties to groups) that would raise flags.
And if you have teenagers, ask yourself how likely they'll follow in your crufty old plans.
Sleeper agents are movie-plots.
Essentially, if you're thinking about security and you recognize yourself thinking any terms you've heard on CNN ("Lone wolf", "sleeper", "radicalized", etc) you're doing it wrong. Those are silly TV terms and are usually after-the-fact descriptives, not warning signs.
(ie, you only catch one guy with no leads to others, so the media labels him a Lone Wolf. That's useless wrt finding him in the first place.)
There is one common aspect to most "lone wolves" and other types of terrorists is that they don't feel like they belong in their current society.
The rest of your argument is a bit of a straw man to what I was actually stating; however if you think disaffected youth aren't "radicalized" (because they feel they finally belong to something), you're wrong. And it's not just a TV term, the FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies use these terms, so I don't really see your point.
I've seen this before - people fighting to justify calling someone a Lone Wolf despite their having outside assistance. Why? Because it sounds dangerous. It's a trial and judgement all in one. "There, I labelled Osama as 'crazy', I've done my part."
Maybe after the fact you can sort people by how radical they seem (it's a subjective measure), or how much outside support they had, but it's a worthless thing to think about beforehand, and anyone who does it is absolutely disconnected from making anything more secure.
> And it's not just a TV term, the FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies use these terms, so I don't really see your point.
The FBI is dangerously worthless in this regard. If they say something and someone on TV latches onto it you can be assured that it's wrongheaded. To the degree that their profiling could actually be useful, it has to ignore epithets. (Yes, you hate terrorists, you're a good citizen, I get that. But stop insulting them long enough to actually study their actions.)
Real security doesn't involve labeling people, it involves looking for flaws in defenses, etc.
If it's publicly known that there is an N% chance that your explosives supplier is a Fed (where N > paranoia threshold), that puts a chilling effect on even attempting your extremist plot.
Appealing to both civic duty and to the pocketbook, a one-cent bounty was paid for each rat tail brought to the authorities (it was decided that the handing in of an entire rat corpse would create too much of a burden for the already taxed municipal health authorities). Unfortunately, this scheme backfired. Despite initial apparent success, the authorities soon discovered that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry. As soon the municipal administrators publicized the reward program, Vietnamese residents began to bring in thousands of tails.
While many desk-bound administrators delighted in the numbers of apparently eliminated rats, more alert officials in the field began to notice a disturbing development. There were frequent sightings of rats without tails going about their business in the city streets. After some perplexity, the authorities realized that less-than-honest but quite resourceful characters were catching rats, but merely cutting off the tails and letting the still-living pests go free (perhaps to breed and produce more valuable tails).
Later, things became even more serious as health inspectors discovered a disturbing development in the suburbs of Hanoi. These officials found that more enterprising but equally deceptive individuals were actually raising rats to collect the bounty. One can only imagine the frustration of the municipal authorities, who realized that their best efforts at dératisation had actually increased the rodent population by indirectly encouraging rat-farming. Evidently, this was not what the French had in mind when they encouraged capitalist development and the entrepreneurial spirit in Vietnam. Faced with such fraudulent schemes, the colonial regime scrapped the rat bounty program.
http://www.freakonomics.com/media/vannrathunt.pdf
If an organization is judged by how many "terrorists" they arrest, one should not be surprised if that organization comes up with a counterproductive means of increasing the number of terrorists arrested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
At the time of British rule of colonial India, cobras where a huge problem and rewards for catching cobras resulted in the locals breeding them instead.
Yet creating an artificial value to killing them isn't enough? Suddenly humans come up with creative ways of breeding them artificially?
Perhaps these aren't mutually exclusive. Maybe the bounty program worked to reduce the population to the point that farming was more viable. Maybe the bounty was too high, and if they reduced it farming wouldn't be economical anymore.
Perhaps a solution would be to have the bounty in short random bursts. The bounty program only lasts for 1 year, so no one has time to start farms and breed them. Or just investigate the people bringing in lots of cobras, and see if they have a big cobra pit next to their house.
I am very curious about these systems because it seems like a very effective method of eliminating invasive species. Australia is being overrun with cane toads, and my local state is complaining about Asian carp and zebra mussels.
Yet no one is willing to put up money to see if the market can find an efficient solution to cull the population. Partially because of the infamous stories posted above about how these programs create bad incentives. But I believe they could be minimized. And I can't imagine anyone breeding asian carp or cane toads given how prevalent they are in the wild now.
Another way to think about it is an artificial value to keeping the population going. All the animals will eventually die yielding a reward, but if you can keep a population going, the reward will keep coming.
The "solution" for countries who wanted to remove invasive species is to embrace pretty heavy handed comprehensive enforcement. (See http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/canada-declares-wa...)
If ch >> cb then it will be hunted to extinction. If cb >> ch, then it will be breeded. If ch ~ cb then people will pick the option best for the community.
Of course, how are we counting "crimes"? By those they actually arrest? They'll just stop arresting. By the number of complaints reported by citizens about crime? Perhaps?
I bet there's also some unintended consequence even with this scheme, but I'm feeling lazy just now.
Then you get stories like this one from Adam Curtis about MI5 in the UK [1], which show that these events are not simply pervasive, they're essentially the raison d'être of these agencies and their leaders. The very fact these people think they are not accountable to the public and/or their eleted representatives should tell us right off the bat where their interests actually lie.
Those who seek and abuse power will do so regardless; it seems the least we could do as relatively civilized socities would be to not sponsor those people in the first place. By any morally acceptable standards, these people are criminals and their only legitimacy stems from the government backing they get.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-...
- The bombing plot started before Ramzi Yousef entered the US. - It was initiated by Emad Salem, an FBI informant, ran by FBI agents Nancy Floyd & John Anticev. - Salem famously recorded all his interactions with the FBI, including tapes where he says that he built the bomb that detonated. - The FBI started him as an agent provacuter, but when he asked for more money etc, they lost faith and cut him lose. Months later the bomb went off, and the FBI re-hired him, paid him a $1 million, to setup more terrorists but this time with a fake bomb.
- The first place Ramzi Yousef went was 2 Iraqi brothers apartment in NJ. - Allegedly the Iraqi brothers had an unlisted phone number in the name of Josie Hadaes. This is the same number the so-called "dumb terrorist" used on the truck rental, the one who went back to get his deposit.
The odd thing about WTC93 is that Yousef is considered the spiritual mastermind of 9/11 for Operation Bojinka. And his uncle, is KSM, the actual mastermind of 9/11.
Yet the neoconservatives and a CIA director tried to claim that Yousef's real identity was something else; some Iraqi agent or something.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories but it's hard to understand exactly what happened in 1993. It was certainly a failed sting operation and as one reporter said, the FBI wante to "teach the damn Muslim terrorists a lesson'. Either way, Emad Salem initiated the bombing plot, originally it was a pipe bomb against a synagoguge.
Whoever contacted Yousef, and whoever he is, he is a legitamite terrorist mastermind. Of course, he escaped and went on to commit a variety of other attacks before being arrested. I think his uncle, KSM, was even on CNN at one point (forget the story) while he was being hunted.
On 9/11, it seems pretty clear that the CIA was running a sting operation with 2 of the hijackers in CA, the ones affiliated with the alleged Saudi intelligence agent. At least 50 CIA employees knew about these 2 Al Qaeda terrorists in the US and the CIA withheld this information from the White House according to Richard Clarke- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bl6w1YaZdf8
The fact that that video has less than 60,000 views is unfortunate. And Zero Dark Thirty, is allegedly based on the red hair lady who worked for Rich Blee. She is lauded as the person who found Bin Laden but worked for the Alec Station who seemed to inadvertanty allow 9/11 to happen.
Then last year, Cofer Black went public, although he seems culpable too-http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/11/cia-directors...
Of course, prior to 9/11, there were many warnings and chatter about a terrorist attack. In March 2001, the Lone Gunmen pilot premiered about a government conspiracy of flying planes into the WTC. And conspiracy theorists, Alex Jones & Bill Cooper, both warned an attack was coming. Some of this could be confirmation bias but the point is, a lot of people knew something was going to happen.
And in the WTC93, since the FBI wanted to teach the terrorists a lessons, there's some indications that they wanted a terrorist attack to happen, to motivate the public and government into acting to prevent a mass terrorist attack.
However, the reality is, government agencies like the CIA are highly beaurcratic and limited by their mandates, lawyers etc. Whatever happened on 9/11 has been so obsfucated it's hard to understand.
Wherever Rich Blee is, he needs to answer some questions. And the 28-pages need to be declassified- https://28pages.org/