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NY Times: 'FBI Foils Its Own Terrorist Plots'
Fluffeh writes "Breaking up terrorist plots is one of the main goals of the FBI these days. If it can't do that, well, it seems making plots up and then valiantly stopping them is okay too — but the NY Times is calling them on it. 'The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years — or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.'"
There's a world of difference between initiating your own terrorist attack, vs infiltrating someone else's.
This would be a scandal if the FBI was making up its own attacks, recruiting people to join them, and then arresting those people.
But what it seems its doing is much more appropriate than that -- flooding the pools of potential recruits with undercover agents, flooding the supply chain for explosives etc with informers, etc so anyone who tries to get a major attack off the ground ends up running into one of the traps and ultimately arrested before the plot can come to fruition.
I'm glad they're doing it. I really hope they are doing even more along the same lines for anyone seeking experts or parts required for WMD. And shame on the NY Times for trying to make this out to be something its not.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
--H.L. Menken
Funny how it is. When a young-looking woman poses as an underage girl online and 40-year old men get arrested for trying to have sex with her, it's catching predators. But when the FBI pretends to be terrorists selling explosives, Stinger missiles or other such things, it's wrong. Ask yourself this: if a man offered you the materials and capabilities to (blow up/shoot down/shoot up) a (building/plane/event), what would you say? You'd freak out and say no at the very least, right? I know I would. I'd also call the authorities. These are people who did the opposite...who took them up on the offer. That isn't exactly the behavior of an innocent person. I don't see how it's any different from a 'young girl' who acts a little flirty in a chat room and then gets asked by a pedophile to meet for the purpose of having sex. If a young girl flirts with me, I'm going to pat her on the head kindly, and then keep walking. Her flirting isn't exactly all that tempting to me that I'm going to just casually follow her cues and commit a felony. Same thing here.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
It may or may not be entrapment, but it definitely doesn't prevent actual terror attacks.
But it's still THEATER and not real security.
I understand the need for people to break the law by attempting the criminal act because you can't really arrest people for "hating" or "feeling suicidal" they have to break some laws.
On the other hand this is EXACTLY the premise of Person of Interest. Is the FBI only going after the Terror cases and not GETTING HELP for people pushed too far? Do we really have agents out there selling weapons to boost their street cred to some upset guy who takes it and kills 5 family members? When they could have got the guy some help to not commit ANY crime?
This becomes dangerously close to what the CIA used to play at sponsoring drug dealers and smugglers often against local PD. THEN it was to get inside rebels to fight Commies.
This is the problem with "Law Enforcement" and not "Officers of the Peace" in a nutshell.
Was when the FBI encouraged a young immigrant boy in Portland, OR to try and carry out an attack on a Christmas Tree lighting ceremony. The boy by all accounts had no prior involvement in anything radical beyond browsing the internet, and seemed more angry at his parents than the US or any 'infidels', was approached by undercover FBI agents and brought into this plan as the trigger man.
While that is interesting in itself, the really telling part comes from the fact that the City of Portland refused to cooperate with the FBI after 9/11, refusing to allow agents unfettered library access and other information into the citizens of Portland. Not only this, and while it may be conjecture, Portland has never seemed to be on the top of anyones attack list as far as foreign terrorists go... Needless to say Portland quickly subscribed to the FBI's intelligence program after the attempted attack and decreed that it would fully cooperate in the future with any investigations.
This is an opinion piece in the New York Times. The views are those of David K. Shipler and not the New York Times. The NYT often runs opinion pieces that their editors do not personally agree with.
These people may (and likely are) be shitbags, but we pay the FBI to stop crime not create it.
They take some people off the street who, at the very least, have an abnormally high interest in making war against the U.S. within our borders. More important, it makes terrorists wary of trusting one another, thus disrupting their operations.
At the time of 9/11, people criticized the FBI for sitting on its ass and letting Bin Laden get away with it. Call me crazy, but I'm all for jailing and killing people who want to destroy the U.S.
BTW I think drugs should be decriminalized. Per the 10th amendment Congress has zero authority to ban them... no more authority than they have to ban alcohol.
Indeed. It took a freakin constitutional ammendment to outlaw liquor, but now the DEA can just publish a new drug schedule and tada, they've outlawed some new drug without congress even voting on it.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
yeah, it's a honeypot operation. and better the fbi catch the witless pansies before someone hardened and malintentioned puts them to bad use
If you want to lock up all the idiots in the world then that prison is going to have be really, really big.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
If Bin Laden is guilty of all crimes al-qaeda commits, then logic follows.
If this is the case then at the very least the last 3 presidents of America, the last 3 Prime Ministers of Great Britain, etc need putting behind bars.
Also who the fuck have they got at the moment who is supposedly the "mastermind behind 9/11" the 5th I recall having read about. Proof that torture works, it's found 5 people that commited the same crime so far!
you'll end up with fewer people willing or able to buy the real stuff
True in a very general sense, but it misses why these stings waste time and money. To continue with your metaphor, these fakes--though of reasonable quality--are priced so low that only boobs would be taken in by them. So you're not taking legitimate buyers off the street; you're enticing idiots who were probably never going to be buyers of the genuine item into grasping for a "bargain".
Not true. So far, all the people the FBI has arrested in these entrapment schemes have been borderline mentally handicapped. They're taking people off the street that NEVER would have had the actual means to commit the crimes they're accused of without the FBI's help, and usually don't even have the desire to. They are usually lonely men, with very low IQs that desperately want to fit in. The FBI offers them a fantasy, and they buy into it.
A person may be disappointed or disgruntled at the US without being a hostile terrorist, but if you take that person and start pushing at them to hate the US even more, suggesting plots to them, putting them in contact with suppliers, etc, then it seems to that the FBI is *creating* terrorists where none existed. Some of these people who were "caught" really seem like dupes who otherwise would never have caused a problem. This is being done in order to deceive the public into thinking that plots were uncovered and that the current policy is working.
"+5 Insightful"? Who mods this crap? Guess what, if Obama's administration kept the operation running under their watch, THEY are responsible. It doesn't matter who started it, that's a child's logic. Time machine indeed.
No one forced him to become President.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
Unless you are the Doctor. Then everyone lives! Well, he lies. Rule 1. Also people tend to die quite often when he is around, or Daleks, or Cyber Men. Sometimes they all live. Still, life insurance policies probably become temporarily suspended on any planet he visits for the duration of said visit at this point.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
It's called job security. If you don't have terrorist plots to foil you need to make some.
Except they don't just say "Anybody using cash is suspicious."
They specifically say things like (specifically in the flyer titled, "...related to Farm Supply stores."), "Purchasing large quantity of pesticides, combustibles, or fertilizers containing ammonium nitrate out of season or with cash."
OR
"Using cash for large transactions or a credit card in someone else’s name."
Both of which ARE suspicious. If some guy walks in off the street and asks for 5,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and whips out a stack of crisp hundred dollar bills and asks you to load it into his rented Uhaul, that's fucking suspicious. Farmers with legitimate use for large quantities of these chemicals are primarily dealing in checks and lines of credit, not cash. These flyers don't say "Buys a bottle of soda with cash," or "hands me a couple twenties to pay his dinner bill at Friday's."
"You're not going to be able to go to a street corner and find somebody who's already blown something up," he said. Therefore, the usual goal is not "to find somebody who's already engaged in terrorism but find somebody who would jump at the opportunity if a real terrorist showed up in town." - David Raskin, federal prosecutor.
So they admit that procedure is manufacturing terrorists out of otherwise innocent (albeit disenfranchised) people.
Nixon covered up a conspiracy that by its nature was a threat the the fabric of democracy. Namely he was using the power of the executive branch to commit crimes [felonies] in order to subvert a free and fair election.
While killing people is not a good thing, I think the threat to the democracy that Nixon posed was far greater than that posed by the ATF and their gun-running scheme.
Given that the threat to the fabric of democracy was threatened in such a way, I'd have to go with Nixon being a bigger problem than some stupid ATF people.
That absolutely should not be taken as my "giving a pass" to the ATF. It isn't. But I don't think the threat posed by the two acts is anywhere remotely equally grave in the context of the republic and its strength. [Which appears to be the point you're making - which IMO, is glue huffing territory.]
Wow, I'm almost as shocked that you have to ask if it's wrong! : (
Let's sing a song together.
"Old USA Had some towns. EIEIO. And in those towns were some terrorists. EIEIO! Here's a terrorist, there's a terrorist, everywhere there's a terrorist, terrorist. Won't somebody think of the kids? EIEIO!
Let's pass new laws like Cyber CISPA. EIEIO. And with those laws we can arrest you if you "look like a threat". EIEIO."
Oops - we made up the threats. Isn't that the entire concept of False Flags?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
"Hey, this guy is collecting a lot of AK-47s, and doesn't have any sort of legal use for those guns...
I didn't know we had to 'prove' we have a "legal" use for things we buy.
BTW, "collecting guns" is a perfectly legal use.
No, they're spreading out honeypots so that real planners have to be extra careful when planning their shit. And they're less likely to plot when they can't trust each other. In Iran, the Stuxnet led to a bunch of scientists and folks getting liquidated because the government thought they were spies. Same thing in Iraq when America embarked in the "secret killing program".
The authorities also thwarted the very real plot to bomb subways--that dude lived literally a few blocks away from me in Flushing, Queens, New York. They caught him trying to make TATP with acetone.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Not to mention you'll at most catch absolute morons who at their best would simply win a Darwin Award because the kind of bozos these "stings" catch are frankly the same gullible dipshits that fall for 419 scams and other stupidity.
It reminds me of the total waste of time a buddy at the state crime lab does all day searching PCs of social retards instead of actually catching child molesters. He says day after day he sees the same shit that has been floating around the net since the days of USENET but it would take a lot of money to have them actually hunt for child molesters, not to mention it would probably cross state lines so the prosecutor wouldn't get credit, so instead they spend their days on the net trolling for fat losers that he says always end up being some maladjusted porn addict that wouldn't know what to do with anyone, much less a kid, if you threw them into a pit of 'em.
Nope this is just another case of something the government is damned good at, and that is the appearance of doing SOMETHING even if that something actually is as useless as moving a rock from the left side of a field only to move it back to the right the next day. its pointless, a waste of money, and doesn't catch the actual threats but hey, the next time a real threat shows up and smacks them they can always say "hey we were doing something!" and CYA so they don't get fired. Our tax dollars at work ladies and gentlemen, just another complete waste of time and money. Surprised?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
This is not all the FBI is doing though. The "suspect" not presented with a plot on day one and then ignored forever if they say no thanks. These guys are softened up first and encouraged to become more radical. Then maybe a plot is suggested, and suggested over and over until their resistance is worn down. The FBI is not infiltrating existing terrorist cells or finding existing terrorists.
The real problem with this, isn't the entrapment angle. Yeah, they are finding dumb people who don't make good life choices and push them in the wrong direction, and that isn't really right. The real problem with this though, is they are wasting time and money doing this shit when they could be doing better things like building legitimate human Intel in places where the professionals might show up. But this is hard and tedious work that may or may not ever pay off, so they waste time and tax payer dollars running these sort of dog and pony show stings that they can put people in front of a federal DA and say, 'Look we are being effective.'
Quit fucking around with these dime store idiots, FBI, and get to work in preventing damage the pros will inflict. They will be much harder to catch than losers who hand around cargo vans behind the local mosque that have signs saying, 'Free Stingers'.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
They are innocent because the before the FBI came along, gave them the means and manipulated their delusions, these people were not terrorists.
The FBI didn't just make sure there was no bullets, that was exactly what the article debunks by contrasting sting operations designed to catch actual known drug dealers. The prosecutor admits there are no actual known terrorists. So security theatre demands they find a mentally unstable "suspect", gave them a gun and convince them to pull the trigger. Creating a terrorist out of thin air.
This is not all the FBI is doing though. The "suspect" not presented with a plot on day one and then ignored forever if they say no thanks. These guys are softened up first and encouraged to become more radical. Then maybe a plot is suggested, and suggested over and over until their resistance is worn down.
That's OK, because in the end Winston "realized that he had won the victory over himself, and he loved Big Brother."
A person may be disappointed or disgruntled at the US without being a hostile terrorist, but if you take that person and start pushing at them to hate the US even more, suggesting plots to them, putting them in contact with suppliers, etc, then it seems to that the FBI is *creating* terrorists where none existed. Some of these people who were "caught" really seem like dupes who otherwise would never have caused a problem. This is being done in order to deceive the public into thinking that plots were uncovered and that the current policy is working.
Isn't talking somebody into a crime illeagal? I do understand the concept of pretending an agent can supply something when specifically requested, but as soon as it turns to suggesting things or steering action I would say the agency is on pretty weak ice.
If they're not at street corners, you should be looking elsewhere if you want to find actual terrorists. Creating your own to glorify your existence should be punished by society. Come on, they just admitted they're not very good at their actual assignment so they make something up to look good. if you look long and hard enough, you'll find someone gullible and disgruntled enough to try and do something illegal. That's a fact of life. They weren't put in office to find those gullible people, but to prevent the real bad guys from finding them. No matter hard you try, the real bad guys will always find one, so you're not actually preventing anything, other than tax money being put to proper use. Stop doing the terrorists job and start doing your own, find the real criminals and terrorists. Oh what? There are so few terrorists, you can't really find any? Well maybe you should put an end to the whole charade and start working on the economy and the environment for a little while.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
As would most people whose quality of life is impacted by the placement of their medicines on those schedules.
Nothing like being treated as a heroin addict when you out of pain pills, because, I don't know, you're in pain, and day to day tasks differ? Hell, some drugs aren't even scheduled, on the federal or state level, but doesn't stop some doctors from placing them on the schedule.
And you must think I am mistaken. I had a rather wonderous phone conversation with a quite irate doctor (the on call doctor, my regular doctor didn't manage to fill the script before the weekend), who lectured me on how she didn't give out scheduled substances on weekends (after hours); the only problem is, the drug isn't scheduled (something which a pharmacist and I went through the state and federal laws to double-check). This is, of course, in a state which has a quite interesting law about doctors not leaving patients in pain. The drug in question, mind you, is being somewhat considered for placement on said schedule at some point in the remote future, when the scare factor associated with it manages to exceed common sense. Still, the effect of the doctor, claiming it was scheduled, had the same effect as it being on the schedule. Argue with her? Since people with M.D.s seems to think they are God's chosen people, you can imagine how well that would have gone.
So, on behalf of all of us out there who live in hell on a daily basis, may the DEA and friends go f*ck themselves. Take some gymnastics classes, maybe work some yoga in there, and f*ck yourselves.
I am John Hurt.
Not to mention you'll at most catch absolute morons who at their best would simply win a Darwin Award because the kind of bozos these "stings" catch are frankly the same gullible dipshits that fall for 419 scams and other stupidity.
So when the FBI uses stings to catch international arms traffickers, organized crime figures, corrupt public officials, and embezzlers, are they "morons" too, or just would-be terrorists? Your post is nonsense.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
I once saw part of an episode of NCIS where they caught a terrorist. They proudly told him (roughly paraphrasing) "you have no rights, you're a terrorist, you're going to be disappeared to Gitmo thanks to the PATRIOT act...I've heard some nasty rumors about what goes on there."
They seemed to be proud of their country's human rights abuses.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So when the FBI uses stings to catch international arms traffickers, organized crime figures, corrupt public officials, and embezzlers, are they "morons" too, or just would-be terrorists? Your post is nonsense.
The examples you cite are generally not entrapment because the persons they catch were already doing these things before they met the FBI agents. The difference between the terrorism stings and a traditional sting can be illustrated thus:
Traditional sting: send out agents to places where drugs are sold and arrest those who mistake them for drug dealers and try to buy.
New-style sting: send agents into the community to make friends and introduce them to weed. When they convince someone to try it, they will take him to a "drug dealer" who is really a cop.
The parallel is not perfect, but I think it is close enough to show that these stings are different and the concerns some have are not nonsense.