Keeping Fear Alive

(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)

The FBI helps fabricate and then thwart a terrorist plot to blow up a van at the Christmas Tree lighting in Portland, OR. You can’t make this stuff up but apparently the FBI can. The suspect, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a naturalized United States citizen living in Corvallis, Ore., is the only person arrested and other than the FBI agents, the only one involved in this so-called plot. For over a year the FBI prompted a gullible and angry teenager and led him into believing that he was participating in a jihadist plot. The more details that the FBI reveal the more it seems that it was the FBI who targeted Mohamud and radicalized him into believing that he could pull this off. It appears almost impossible that a high school student even with terrorist contacts would have been allowed to be privy to the details of the plans, let alone help formulate it.  

Teddy Partridge who has been following this story at FDL said it best in is first article:

Clearly, the Pacific Northwest has been too complacent about terror brewing in our midst. Thank goodness for the heroic FBI that allowed one silly young man trying to impress older, more senior “terrorists” with an operational plan. And thank goodness they saved us from this attack, moments before it didn’t occur.

How long are we going to let the cowboys shoot up our country with their false terror plots and operations that would go nowhere without their instigation, planning, and coercion? How long will we allow our own federal constabulary to justify its own recklessly inflated budget by permitting actions like this to develop, fester, and grow operational in our midst?

This is terror, pure and simple. State-sponsored terror. Big-splash terror designed to make people compliant and fearful, and grateful to their federal government – in a city which has not yet installed the Rapiscan porno-scanners at our airport.

Someone needs to put an end to it.

Exactly.

Glenn Greenwald expounds on this further:

It may very well be that the FBI successfully and within legal limits arrested a dangerous criminal intent on carrying out a serious Terrorist plot that would have killed many innocent people, in which case they deserve praise.  Court-approved surveillance and use of undercover agents to infiltrate terrorist plots are legitimate tactics when used in accordance with the law.

But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI — as they’ve done many times in the past — found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a “Terrorist plot” which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI’s own concoction.  Having stopped a plot which it itself manufactured, the FBI then publicly touts — and an uncritical media amplifies — its “success” to the world, thus proving both that domestic Terrorism from Muslims is a serious threat and the Government’s vast surveillance powers — current and future new ones — are necessary.

Greenwald goes further, examining the evidence already put out by the FBI and shredding their case against Mohamud with numerous violation of his Constitutional rights that will never hold up in a court of law. The prosecution must also be able to show that this was not entrapment by the FBI by showing that the defendant “was independently predisposed to commit the crime for which he was arrested.”. They must also prove that they did not manipulate the accused by him from traveling domestically for employment.

I would think that there are bigger fish to fry out there that don’t need the help of the FBI to plan and carry out their attacks. A little less time and money spent on manipulating a lone teenager and a little more effort into catching real bad guys would go a long way into protecting the US, and the world, from criminals.