NY Times: 'FBI Foils Its Own Terrorist Plots' 573
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.'"
Making Up vs. Facilitating (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Imaginary Hobgoblins (Score:5, Insightful)
--H.L. Menken
Odd... (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The best one... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Opinion (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Making Up vs. Facilitating (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
These people may (and likely are) be shitbags, but we pay the FBI to stop crime not create it.
Re:Making Up vs. Facilitating (Score:3, Insightful)
>>>This would be a scandal if the FBI was making up its own attacks, recruiting people to join them.....
That's exactly what the FBI is doing. They hatch the plot in their D.C. offices. Then they use undercover agents to recruit some unhappy person to help them execute the plot. It's FBI-run from start to finish.
Re:Odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Peer pressure is no excuse for enacting a terrorist plot. If you're corruptible and in a position in which your corruption gets people killed (either by your own hand or by your willful inaction), you're everyone's rightful prey.
It helps keep us safe (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Odd... (Score:4, Insightful)
>>>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.
>>>
Huge difference. The prowler was already in the underage chat room, looking for teens to exploit. What the FBI did in the case of the fake terror plot is equivalent to (1) setting-up the chat website (2) walking-around looking for people (3) giving them a laptop whose homepage is set to the chat room (4) handing them a bag of condoms and saying, "Go for it. We'll tag team her together."
(5) Then announcing on TV, "Hey we caught someone visiting the underage chat. Look here's the bag of condoms to prove it." The FBI is running the WHOLE show from start to finish.
Re:Odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
That the people involved did in fact commit crimes and prosecuting them is perfectly fine isn't the point, it's a usefullnes issue. From the article:
It can't be that hard to find someone willing to blow people up - there's plenty of crazy people around. Do we really gain anything by removing a handful of morons from the potential recruit pool? If we do then is what we gain worth the cost - both direct and the opportunity cost of the agents involved not doing other work?
Re:"these cases turn out to be witless patsies" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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".
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Odd... (Score:5, Insightful)
Your logic fails because everyone is corruptible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment [wikipedia.org]
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:4, Insightful)
"+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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:It helps keep us safe (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's called job security. If you don't have terrorist plots to foil you need to make some.
Re:Here is your citation (Score:2, Insightful)
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."
Re:Odd... (Score:4, Insightful)
Apples and oranges. Yes, the nutjob that decided to blow up the tree lighting ceremony should have been arrested. He came up with the idea and put it into action. Well done, LEOs.
The schmuck who withstood FBI pressure to do something stupid for 11 months and finally broke? Nope. That's entrapment. BAD cop, NO donut!!
Re:Of course it's not entrapment (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.]
Re:But is it wrong? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Scientology: FBI, stop arresting future members. (Score:5, Insightful)
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'.
Re:Of course it's not entrapment (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [wikipedia.org]"
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Mabye you should look elsewhere? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [chicagotribune.com], organized crime figures [eagleworldnews.com], corrupt public officials [nj.com], and embezzlers [post-gazette.com], are they "morons" too, or just would-be terrorists? Your post is nonsense.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's not Entrapment. (Score:5, Insightful)
So when the FBI uses stings to catch international arms traffickers [chicagotribune.com], organized crime figures [eagleworldnews.com], corrupt public officials [nj.com], and embezzlers [post-gazette.com], 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.