You guys are being too hard on these agencies. The crime rate is falling but their budgets are rising. You want them playing Minesweeper at their desks all day? What’s wrong with a little Orwellian police work here and there if it keeps them busy?
They’ve got bloated salaries to justify, people.
I get upset with many of these stories as well. Agreed that the individuals involved broke the law, but without the assistance of the authorities it is highly likely nothing serious would have happened.
But in a dangerous world, I reluctantly have to say the FBI is doing it’s job. It isn’t pretty, nor is it fair, but it is effective.
First, those people are in fact breaking the law. Or at least making a good attempt at it.
Second and more important to this country, these cases instill fear and paranoia in the real terrorist wannabes. Having possibly capable people questioning their contacts and paranoid that they are walking into a trap is worth a lot. It may have stopped a lot (or a few) real attacks. Of course there is no way of knowing, but I am guessing that is a real positive result.
Is it worth it? I don’t think the whole security theater thing is worth it. I would rather live in a world where we accepted the bad as well as the good. But I haven’t been a victim yet either. The country as a whole has certainly chosen another path.
Normal, non retarded people under sufficient pressure can be convinced to admit to serious crimes that they indisputably did not commit. It is conceivable to me that a similar amount of pressure might convince a vulnerable person to commit a crime that they otherwise wouldn’t have.
IMHO, there’s a difference (sympathy-wise) between the people who were offered a dumptruck full of money and those who simply had strongly held religious or political beliefs that the agents spent months manipulating. I think most people in this world hold or have at one time held some sort of belief that, if taken to the extreme conclusion, could result in some sort of violent action.
Of course, another issue is that I could imagine a situation where the government spends all this time and effort radicalizing someone, only to have them slip the noose somehow and end up launching their own attack.
Living outside of American TV and only following along with news reports, I’m always amazed at the hysteria over “terrorists” which seems to make people forget common sense. The whole Iraq war where the US went to war because of “terrorists.” The Abu Ghraib incident, where Republican Senators questioning Rumsfeld pointed out that the prisoners were “terrorists.” etc., etc.
Would the FBI be inducing blowhards to shoot abortion providers? No, because it doesn’t match the hysteria.
People are social beings, and do really, really stupid things in certain circumstances. Peer pressure can be good at times but people will do all sorts of irrational things when part of a group. The are particularly susceptible, a fact which numerous armies throughout the world have noticed.
This is why entrapment is and should be illegal. Yes, the people who were caught up in it were talking big, but without the FBI involved, they would most likely to have just fantasized about how bad assed they are. If they had be actively looking for ways of committing acts of real terror, then sure, catch and prosecute them, but to goad them into something just to make it look like you’re working, then fuck you.
And for people who don’t care that humans are acting like, well, humans, and give a pass to this horrible miscarriage of justice, then I suggest you read up on Burke.
I think an important thing to keep in mind about “The Convert” is that the undercover guy (who was a criminal) did such a sloppy job of entrapment that the people in the mosque he was spying on went straight to the FBI and reported him as suspected terrorist. In exchange for their trouble, they got the suspicion of the FBI. I believe one guy was even prosecuted when the FBI claimed that the squealer himself was the one intiiating the conversations, even though the undercover guy later admitted that is not what happened. So in at least one instance, the FBI ruined one guy’s life because he did the right thing.
In any large population, there are going to be people stupid, desperate and weak willed enough to commit crimes at the behest of others. Putting them in jail isn’t going to make us safer, because you can’t possibly put enough in jail to make a dent in the supply. The real value is in arresting the folks who would pay money to these dupes for their help in committing a crime.
My main problem with it is that it feels like the FBI is just chasing its own tail around. It creates criminals, then puts a bunch of manpower into creating fake terrorist organizations for those criminals to work with, and then devotes a bunch more manpower into arresting and trying those criminals.
I to don’t feel much sympathy for entrapped “terrorists” (assuming they actually appear to be willing to go through with the fake “plots”), but it feels like a ginormous waste of time and money. And when it goes wrong, as with the case in the above NPR story, it ends up victimizing people who weren’t going to go through with those plots and ends up alienating a bunch of Muslim’s who otherwise were happy to help the FBI by keeping an eye out for actual terrorists.
This is the real lesson we should take away from these cases. The FBI has way more resources than it really needs to track down genuine threats, and they can’t have tons of their agents just sitting on their asses all day long. These stings amount to “busy work”.
My other big problem with it is that arresting “fake” terrorists give the impression that there are more terrorists then their actually are. This in turn, get the gov’t to allocate more money to anti-terrorism, which in turn means the FBI has more resources it needs to keep busy, which leads to them to set up more stings of entrapped or marginal terrorists, and so on and so forth.
Yes, that’s true. Plus they’re career bonus points for agents and management. They artificially boost up the stats on “successful” operations to foils terrorist acts.
And for good reason.
We like to think of ourselves as beyond corruption, and maybe some of us are. I certainly remember times in my life when I didn’t really have much of a core, a center. On my own, I wouldn’t have done anything more illegal than dope smoking or traffic infractions (not at the same time, though). But I could have certainly been led into more morally dubious and illegal activities if an organized team of people had nothing better to do besides make a concerted effort to lead me into crime.
I also know about the research that has been done that has demonstrated how easy it is to get people to administer what they believe to be severe pain to other people that they can actually see apparently suffering. It doesn’t surprise me at all that it can be taken a step further, that it’s possible to get people to leave what they think is an actual bomb.
The question I think you’d have to ask is, suppose they did this to everyone? What would the prison population of the U.S. look like then? Do you think it would only increase slightly? Or do you think it would explode? IOW, do you think the FBI somehow picked on unusually weak people, or did they harness the sort of moral weakness that is to be found in many millions of normally law-abiding people?
There was a case here in Albany a few years ago that clearly was entrapment and went against the basic rules of evidence.
Arif’s named showed up on a list on a notebook found in an Iraqi encampment. It was mistranslated to indicate it meant “leader,” when the correct translation was “brother,” a term of respect. The FBI went after Aref by sending an informant to pretend to need a loan to get missiles. Aref was brought in to witness the loan, but it’s clear he didn’t know what was going on (he didn’t speak English well) and knew nothing about the purpose of the loan.
The guy giving the loan, Mohammed Mosharref Hossain, also didn’t really understand what was going on, and several times was caught on tape refusing to take part in other terrorist plans the informant put forth. The informant offered to give Hossain $50,000 in exchange for $45,000, saying the money came from selling a missile to a terrorist group. Hossain had no connection with terrorism and probably didn’t understand that exchanging the money was illegal.
There’s plenty of evidence the informant was lying and exaggerating in order to get a pardon from the FBI.
At the trial, the incorrect information about the notebook was brought up by the prosecutors in closed court, without the defense being able to see the evidence (shades of the Dreyfus Case!). The truth would probably have vindicated Aref, but without the evidence being shown to his lawyers, they couldn’t disprove it.
It’s clear that Aref was railroaded. Hossain may have been guilty of money laundering, but he was clearly entrapped by the informant.
When Aref’s case was appealed, the government filed another classified motion – that, again, the defense was not allowed to see, and the appeal was denied. This was a blatant violation of the Sixth Amendment, but Aref is still in jail. His only crime was showing up to witness a transaction he knew next to nothing about.
It’s quite interesting where this thinking is going. However, there are no “wannabe terrorists”. There are no terrorists, period. NYPD’s special unit spent years and years on finding just one in NYC and the results is ZERO! None!
The problem is, as I see it, and having lived with brainwashed people, that people in US are simply scared and brainwashed into this paradigm of a “terrorist threat” of an “unknown unknowns” variety and this paradigm has created a well-defined field of possible outcomes for any question and/or doubt that can arise.
The whole machinery is being put in motion under this understanding and belief that there’s got to be some and the fact that you cannot find one only brings about more fear and more funds and more miscarriages of justice.
Yeah, you have “democracy” and freedom of speech and Constitution and justice but all of that means nothing once a paradigm such as this is created with exceptions. So, yeah, there is democracy, freedom, Constitution and justice but not for THESE people. The best part is the chances that YOU are caught in this net are zero to none so it’s a no brainer to have no sympathies for them.
Exactly. This is well down the route of tribalism. We’re good. We get rights. You’re bad, you don’t.
I’ll call it a corruption of the Constitution, except that the Constitution formalized this thinking.
Grude, have you had anyone you love, say family or friends, join a cult? Everyone knows that cults are stupid, so why would they join one? Chances are, it’s the same reason people would join these organizations.
Does that help you find sympathy?
You know thinking on it further I have always been a big hater of entrapment, and I always felt horrible personally for those snagged for prostitution or drugs etc. Anyone could get snagged into such a situation, it wasn’t just that the methods were illegal but that I didn’t feel the “crime” itself was even a crime.
I’m also a civil liberties nutball and a big critic of terrorism mania, and you will never find me making excuses for unconstitutional laws or unconstitutional actions by police. In a lot of ways the constitution hasn’t applied in the USA for years, no matter what weasel workarounds are used to technically be in compliance.
So it was a big shock to realize I wasn’t buying the angle being sold in these articles, I was still pissed about the illegal and unconstitutional actions but if you said lets go protest for defendant X…I just didn’t have it in me.
I guess it reminds me of To Catch a Predator, a lot of that was quasi-legal and entrapment but at the same time I find it hard to care too much that a guy that came to have sex with a 13 year old found some legal trouble.
The problem, in a way, is that the way the system’s set up, the only way we can actually fight constitutional workarounds . . . is by challenging the prosecution or conviction of the people who are getting nailed through constitutional workarounds, even when we know that they are scum. Otherwise there is literally no case to make. So we end up conflicted: “Damn, that was dirty pool, this dude got set up, railroaded… but, someone who’d agree to that is either too evil or too stupid to be out in the street to begin with!”
The authorities – and the non-authority entities who see themselves as protectors of the innocent – *know this full well and of course they will *make a point of nailing people who will be entirely unsympathetic, so as to establish that these methods work against those who “deserve it”.
Yes, as mentioned upthread, there is one valid element to “security theater” in that it makes the potential casual miscreant more nervous about who to trust, but the real pro criminals and terrorists already know better than to just approach people randomly, or trust someone who approaches them randomly, to join a conspiracy.
“As defence lawyers poured through the evidence…”
This gives me the mental image of lawyers in braces holding big glass pitchers (of the iconic Kool-Aid type) filled with some sort of liquid, pouring them into boxes of documents until it runs through and seeps out the bottom.
And they try to tell you that UK people use the English language better than Americans. Examples like this one call that into question. No offense intended.
Check out “This American Life” and this episode: The Convert.
It’s all about how the FBI infiltrated a muslim community in SoCal to try to find someone willing to be a terrorist.
Upshot: One arrest, of one guy who apparently didn’t say “no” often enough to the infiltrator. Case was eventually thrown out. Entire muslim community in disarray and distrustful of FBI and any new muslim converts as a result.