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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.'"
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
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.
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.
The problem with your analysis is that it presumes there are realistic threats somewhere out there in the first place. There aren't. All of this work is for naught. How do I know? Because universally these cases turn out to be witless patsies. If they were stopping real threats there would be some seriously hardened guys in there with all the doofuses. But there aren't.
Then there is the lack of actual succesful attacks. It would be ridiculous to believe that any system would be perfect in the face of the existential threat these guys are made out to be. And yet the record for actual home-grown attacks over the last decade is basically two or three whackjobs with some guns and that one guy who flew his plane into the IRS building. I think the death toll is under 20 people all told. That level of risk just does not justify the resources that are put into these schemes not to mention the erosion of public confidence that it brings.
Meanwhile real crimes go unsolved because of the resources spent on these con-job photo-ops.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The issue isn't that these people shouldn't be in prison. They took the FBI's bait and I don't feel sympathy for them. Let them rot.
Where the FBI is doing wrong is in the way they are publicizing these busts. I keep seeing headlines that read: FBI FOILS PLOT TO BLOW LOTS OF PEOPLE UP. Which scares the hell out of people, and convinces Americans to give the FBI more taxpayer dollars (and surrender more freedoms), which the Federal Agency uses to stage more fake terrorist attacks, which gets them more funding, etc, etc, etc.
The point of terrorism isn't to kill people, it's to terrorize them for personal gain. If the FBI is staging fake acts of terrorism using people who would never be capable of pulling a terrorist attack on their own in order to foil those fake terrorist plots, then the FBI is terrorizing Americans for personal gain.
I consider that a serious problem.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
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.
It helps keep us safe
Yeah, like the TSA, the Patriot Act, free speech zones, NDAA...
The ability of law enforcement to law on a whim will inevitably be abused. In fact, it already has been. Innocent people have been hurt by this, but all you people care about is catching the "terrists!"
but I'm all for jailing and killing people who want to destroy the U.S.
I love thought crimes.
"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.
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.
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.
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