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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.'"
It's encouragement.
Very different. For one thing, the movie stars Jessica Alba instead of Catherine Zeta-Jones.
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
Did you read the story? The guy said no like 100 times. They pushed on him for 11 months, paid him $250k and promised him no women or children would be hurt. Hard for me to call that willing. If the catch a predator people offered the perps $50k to come have sex with them, you might have a similar situation.
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
The FBI has gone to the opposite extreme. Have you seen their listed of "suspected terrorists"??? It includes people who pay with cash, cover their cellphones while chatting, have a Ron Paul or Campaign for Liberty bumper sticker, carry a pocket constitution (wow; knowing the law; horrible), and on and on. At the end of the day almost everyone is a suspected terrorist by the FBI list.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
More people died of food poisoning in any year you care to mention than died in the twin towers attack. How about we have intrusive laws surrounding food preparation. And you can pick the locality of New Yowk City for that stat and it still holds true. While more people in the world are worried about the possibility of American drone strikes, possible invasion of their country, or just the devaluation of the world reserve through quantitative easing shrinking their money supply.
Just because something makes a great show on TV does not mean it is any more important than the thousands of news stories that didn't, but we're somehow working as if this is the case, case in point the Syria issue as opposed to the Bahrain issue. Per head the regime in Bahrain has killed more people than the Syrian regime. Since Bahrain is a small nation. We hear little of Bahrain however, perhaps due to the American Naval Base in the country. Due to the propaganda you're fed you find it laughable that I suggest the two nation's states are even remotely equivalent. Yet I remind you that in relation to their populations the Bahrain regime has killed more citizens then the Syrian regime.
This would be a scandal if the FBI was making up its own attacks, recruiting people to join them, and then arresting those people.
It did. The FBI agents found "dissident" groups with no malicious intent, but possible malicious thoughts. The agent would then conceive the plans and pressure the non-violent dissidents to act, then arrest them when they did.
None of these are cases where the terrorist was trying to purchase C4 and the FBI set up a fake buy and nabbed them. The FBI agent was the one looking to buy the C4 and convinced innocents to stand next to him while he did, then arrested them.
If the FBI agent had not approached the dissidents, there would have been no crime. Thus, any actions by the FBI to create a crime is entrapment.
Learn to love Alaska
He didn't say "no" 101 times, though. When someone asks "wanna go blow up a bridge", you have to choose the correct answer EVERY SINGLE TIME. Forever.
When the DA asks you "did you do it", even after answering "no" 101 times, "you have to choose the correct answer EVERY SINGLE TIME. Forever."
And yet, just about everyone will eventually give in (usually after 20-30 hours without sleep or food) and say "yes", regardless of guilt, just to make the interrogation stop.
Peer pressure is no excuse for enacting a terrorist plot
Legally, no. Realistically, you can quite seriously get just about anyone to do just about anything, with enough pressure. Yes, even you.
The FBI, the DHS, even the local Boys in Blue, understand this, and exploit it on a daily basis and as a matter of regular procedure to guarantee they look good regardless of the truth of the situation.
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.
If you're corruptible and in a position in which your corruption gets people killed
He was never in that position, and could never be in that position. The FBI constructed a months-long distortion of reality, which could not have happened without the FBI, which created the delusion in the fool's mind that this thing was possible. Without that delusion, he never posed a credible threat. He-as-effective-terrorist was entirely a creation of the FBI.
Now, if you want to put him in jail because in his mind he believes that doing this thing is a good idea -- fine, argue that position. But don't pretend he would ever have been anything more than a thinker of foolish thoughts without the FBI fabricating the context in which he acted.
That is the fundamental question: Did the FBI prevent a credible threat? If not, then it can be nothing but theater. If no crime would have happened without the FBI's participation, then he cannot have been a harm and can hardly be considered a criminal unless you want to go down the road of thought-crime.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"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
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.