The Sting: How the FBI Created a Terrorist
firstlook.org
firstlook.org
I hope they've learned their lesson, and aren't working so close to the edge anymore.
See for example, http://www.comeandtakeit.com/feds-okc.html (and apologies for the tinfoil hat site, it's the most concise citation I could come up with quickly)
I hope nobody here believes that these cases are instances of the FBI diligently protecting us against legions of terrorists, eco or otherwise, who want to destroy us all. It's very clear all these cases are, if not strictly speaking entrapment, then at least manufactured by the FBI preying on vulnerable people.
The real question is, why would they do this?
I can think of a few reasons:
1. Personal gain. Everybody in the FBI benefits from a successful case. The agent gets a notch on their belt. Their boss can demand more funding and more toys to capture future "jihadists". The prosecutors get a win and bump up their stats. Even people loosely connected benefit, like the journalists that can cover a juicy story for a few weeks, politicians that can attach themselves, etc.. The only real losers are people that are already isolated and unable to defend themselves.
2. Maintaining an image of social control. If you know that the FBI is bearing down on activists and Muslims, are you going to be as willing to join an activist group, participate in an Occupy-style protest movement, or even go to a protest? You could get tear gassed, you could say something like "Yeah, the banks need to go" to an FBI agent who later testifies that you planned to blow up a bank, it's a hassle, just stay home, the new season of 24 is supposed to be great anyway.
Personally, I think both of these are primary reasons; #1 incentivizes individuals to go through this plan, and #2 makes it more likely future plans will succeed by making the system as a whole harder to disrupt. This creates a positive feedback cycle where dissent is slowly marginalized out of existence, and all political discourse is limited to what the Republicans and Democrats delineate as "moderate" ground.
And, because the system works, it is basically impossible to change. Combine this with pervasive surveillance and you have permanent techno-dystopia.
The FBI uses plenty of software to do this. I hope that if anyone writing that software is reading these comments, they take a moment to consider the consequences of their actions.
The article title claims the FBI "created a terrorist", but then presents these things as factual:
- He travelled to Saudi Arabia to get holy water,
but later claimed he actually wanted to end up
in Iraq or Afghanistan to fight American troops.
- He argued with Dabus (the Palestinian shop owner)
that Islam and democracy were incompatible.
- He physically attacked the street preachers
outside the Lady Gaga concert.
...he was doing his civic duty in reporting Osmakac
and the young man’s interest in acquiring weapons...
And personally, I think we jump too quickly to the "he's just crazy" defense [1]. I don't want to live in a world where acting out on a dream you had absolves you of personal responsibility for your actions in the real world, which is apparently what The Intercept wants to believe.
[0] http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/schizoaffectiv...
[1] I'm not a psychiatrist, but I play one on The Internet
[edit: formatting]
I believe that this quote from the article:
> Osmakac was, in the FBI’s own words, “a retarded fool” who didn’t have any capacity to plan and execute an attack on his own. That was a challenge for the FBI.
is supposed to mean that he wouldn't be able to go through the planning of doing as you suggest. If he has poor ability to plan, then your point #1 could be interpreted as another example. He wasn't able to go through the planning to get the holy water, or work around the visa issues, or manage the funding. Or figure out how to get to Afg
Point #2 is protected free speech.
As for point #3, another interpretation is that he's willing to fall into things in front of his face, so long as they don't require non-trivial planning. I know people who talk big, but can't actually pull anything off, so I wouldn't discount that possibility.
Even if he 'weaseled some guy into giving him $300', it doesn't seem that he would find a small arms dealer willing to sell him "six grenades, a fully automatic AK-47 with magazines, a handgun and an explosive belt". Checking various auction sites, the minimum price for an AK-47 is $400, and those are semi-automatic, not an illegal fully automatic. Assuming $100 for the handgun, $10/grenade and I have no idea how much for he explosive belt, the real cost is likely over $1,000. (That's a wild-ass guess; but it's certainly over $500 in hardware, plus extra to cover risk on the dealer's side.)
I don't think it's easy to find a dealer for this sort of equipment. I wouldn't know where to start and have 'no concept of what weapons cost on the black market.' I suspect that if I start asking around, someone is likely to call the cops on me.
Also, why did you mention the Patriot Act? It's only mentioned once in the article, concerning someone else. I don't see mention that Patriot Act powers were used or potentially misused.
The article goes out of its way to make this point. Namely, that Osmakac had no capacity to plan an attack, therefore he wasn't a terrorist until the FBI made him into one.
If you happen upon a gun on the sidewalk, then use it to carry out your desires to murder an old enemy, is your guilt or innocence determined by the details surrounding how the gun got to the sidewalk? That's the point I'm getting at.
> Point #2 is protected free speech.
> As for point #3, another interpretation is that he's willing to fall into things in front of his face
And? I wasn't suggesting that he be arrested for those things. I was pointing out his actions and behaviors prior to the FBI getting involved were sufficient to warrant civilians turning him in to the FBI. The FBI wasn't looking to make a terrorist out of some "retarded fool" for kicks. They were following up on assertions made to them about the danger of an individual, and they determined those assertions to be credible based on whatever they knew or were able to uncover about his past. That's just police work.
> Also, why did you mention the Patriot Act?
Mea culpa. I was using "The Patriot Act" as a stand-in for "The Over-reaching Federal Intelligence Community". I think the Patriot Act is a poorly-aimed law used to justify whatever the government wants it to. My point was that even though I do believe the US' three-letter organizations are overstepping their bounds in some areas, this doesn't smell like one of them to me.
Yes. Entrapment is a valid defense against criminal liability. The article tries hard to argue that this should be viewed as entrapment, and that information that might have swayed the court, such as background words of the investigators, wasn't available during the trial.
Your scenario is hypothetical. If the police set up the circumstances so he was convinced that his neighbors were being robbed and kidnapped right in front of him, and a planted gun were at his feet, after being invited to a half-day presentation on the moral righteousness of Florida's Stand-your-ground law, and he picked up the gun to protect his neighbors, who are actually police officers in disguise, then yes, the circumstances are very important in judging his guilt under the law.
Or, if he came across the button that would trigger a nuclear bomb to blow up NYC, he might press it. That doesn't mean he would actually be able to get access to that button, assuming such thing exists. Nor does it mean that he should be manipulated into believing that it exists, and is in front of him, so that after making a speech about destroying all the running dog capitalists on Wall Street he presses the button, and then is arrested for the attempted murder of 9 million people.
Regarding being turned into the FBI; that's a huge amount of resources spent on something where the best scenario for the FBI is that he's put into jail, where we as taxpayers have to spend even more money. Imagine if we instead spent 10% of that money on psychiatric services for him instead. Was this really the best place to spent the money?
Then again, the FBI and other places get a lot of money to track down terrorists. That's high on their mission list. I don't think of it as something they do for "kicks", but something which helps justify their jobs, or because they want to 'protect the homeland', but because there are so few terrorists, they have little experience to judge who is an actual terrorist vs. someone talking big, or the experience in how to handle these sorts of cases.
Do you believe, given the person described in the article, that Sami Osmakac is either unwilling or unable to kill someone in the name of Islam?
Do you believe that this article proves that the federal government acted in bad faith in investigating and prosecuting him?
I don't believe the first question is relevant. Rather, thousands, if not millions of Americans will kill, or send others to kill, in the name of their god. We hear this in the popular press often, when people say that we need troops active in the Middle East to fight on God's side. Or when Bush, quoted by Chirac when Bush was trying to convince France to be in the Iraq war, said "This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins".
That doesn't mean we prosecute people for being willing to do something. We do prosecute them (sometimes) for doing so, or for planning/conspiring to do so.
Yes, I believe the federal government prosecution acted in bad faith in the following:
> These transcripts were never supposed to be revealed in their entirety. The government argued that their release could harm the U.S. government by revealing “law enforcement investigative strategy and methods.” U.S. Magistrate Judge Anthony E. Porcelli not only sealed the transcripts, but also placed them under a protective order.
Based on what was given, this information did not need to be classified and contained potentially mitigating information.
Satire, meet Reality.
A terrorist group finds and grooms people who have the potential to destroy at massive scale.
The FBI says why pay the price after they have become experts, let us start our own incubator.
The FBI finds and grooms the same people before the terrorists group.
This was back when Hunt for Red October came out, and it seems that the book was so factually accurate that some of the radar engineers actually kept a copy on their desks for technically reference.
On the one hand, we constantly push for them to catch terrorists before they act via standard, good police work - which mostly involves tips and confidential informants, just like this case. We criticize them when they use over-broad mass electronic surveillance to try and find the terrorists, and we criticize them some more when they fail to catch actual terrorist before they act. I'm all for criticizing them when they screw up or overreach, but if you want them to do their job, they need some room to work. This is what that work looks like - maintaining networks of informants at the fringes of the broad movement, constantly listening and following up on any signs of anyone who might want to take action, and aggressively pursuing those who do have a desire to take action. If these guys have some genuine desire to take violent action, shouldn't we get to them before somebody else does?
On the other hand, the process of maintaining informants in a movement can be rather alienating to the movement as a whole. I've been into guns as hobby for a while, and every now and then, I've heard second-hand accounts of people who show up at various gun club events and start asking rather pointed questions about how to do illegal things. I don't know if it's true, if they're really government informants, or how often it actually happens, but the very idea and plausibility of it leaves a rather bad taste in peoples' mouths. It tends to make think the Government sees us as the enemy, to make us think of ourselves more as a group in opposition to them, then just a bunch of ordinary Americans exercising a constitutional right in a harmless way. I can't help but think that many Muslims experience the same thing and feel the same way about it.
If we really want to fix these problems long-term, shouldn't we be working to integrate Muslims into mainstream America, and send them the message that they're welcome here, and we're happy to have them as productive members of society?
I don't know that much about this particular investigation, but it sounds like it may be a touch further than we'd like to be along the lines of pursuing too aggressively. Not enough that I'd want to see things changed too drastically - this guy sounds like he's at least some level of bad actor. Maybe they should look further towards getting these guys mental help and medication, rather than multi-decade prison sentences? Or maybe he was already too far gone for that type of help even before the FBI got to him.
I would be interested to hear the opinions of some members of the area Muslim community. At least ones not coordinated by reporters trying to push an agenda, or grandstanding civil rights activists more interested in their own prominence than what the community actually feels. Not that I'm likely to get that.