When it came time to do the deed, the kid did it. Is there no such thing as strict liability in US law? It doesn’t matter that the bomb was fake or that the FBI strung him along. The fact is, when this kid was given a chance to blow up a crowd of people he tried his hardest to do it. The FBI even let him try the detonator twice before arresting him. If that had been a real bomb, there would be guts all over Portland right now. And people think this is a dog and pony show? This kid meant to do some serious harm to American citizens. It is just happy circumstance that he tumbled into an FBI sting instead of hooking up with real jihadis. While it’s true that a smarter criminal/terrorist wannabe would have done things differently, I don’t see how that makes the FBI worthy of criticism for catching a dumb criminal.
Sure he did, but how emboldened was he by the fact that he had people supporting him, people who were, in this case, the FBI? If he hadn’t been told that his plan was good, hadn’t been given moral support, hadn’t been given the material aid of being introduced to a “bomb maker” of great reputed skill, would he have gone so far? They found him online; would he have escalated to actually blowing something up (or trying) if he’d been met with stony silence online and had to become the Lone Jihadist of Portland, his own cheering section, his own bombmaker (yay internet), no one telling him that his ideas were good?
He had murderous intent, that’s for sure. But would he have had the capacity to turn intent into action without being propped up? We’ll never know how much of his state of mind was dependent on having what he thought of as his own terror cell, who all just happened to be federal law enforcement.
Yes, it was all a big conspiracy, man.
I keep imagining they gave the kid a bomb made out of used pinball machine parts.
The world is full of stupid, frustrated teenagers. In fact, some of them are smart, but that just gets buried under heaps of frustration and feeling insecure and hormones. Militant Islam is the culture in our times that uses them systematically. These boys are the people that normally do the suicide attacks. The attacker really needs to have some stupidity, because he must not ask the guy who provided the bomb, why doesn’t he explode it himself and get to heaven with the virgins. Also, frustration of the current life seems to be important. If the kid is in a team building the Grand Unified Theory at MIT, he is unlikely to be frustrated.
So the necessary stupidity of the people ready for suicide missions is a constant in the fight and an important reason why there have been so few attacks despite there being millions of Muslims in the West. The task of removing all stupid, frustrated teenagers is hopeless (and sad, because they really are just misguided kids), but as long as there are people giving them bombs, when you see one, bust him. In other words, if FBI finds a suicide bomber because his young and stupid, I call that good profiling.
There is more than just this kid to consider.
You have to wonder if others are thinking, or are in the process, of setting bombs.
The knowledge that the people who are ‘helping’ you and supporting you may not be what they seem, that appears to me to be a disincentive for others.
It can run deeper than that, because they had to latch on to him in the first place, and that would mean intelligence gathering, one email isn’t likely to be enough.That surely has to mean human resources, perhaps he was flagged up, and further investigations revealed more.
What none of us know, is how many others have been examined in this way and cleared, and how many others may be worth keeping an eye on, you can bet that various messages will be circulating the interwebs, and this alone will provide some new leads or information.
It’s not as if this is the first time the FBI has groomed, trained, and snookered some dark-skinned person with a grudge.
Yes, it’s good that he didn’t set off a real bomb. But if the FBI hadn’t hooked him, maybe he would have turned in another direction in the meantime.
We’ve all known young people who could easily have been turned to terrorism under the right circumstances.
We have? That doesn’t sound right at all…
Except that most stupid teenagers DO NOT plot the murder of hundreds of innocent people, just because they are Christians.
This little bastard needs to get the death penalty, and fast.
Several times a year local people launch explosives into the air! I cower in my basement because of terror.
Well, maybe I’m just speaking for everybody who has attended public or private school in the United States, who has known a potential Luke Helder, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Adam Gadahn, Asa Coon, Matthew Smith, Ross McKnight, Todd Cameron Smith, Alvaro Castillo, and so on, ad infinitum.
True. These things come out as releases to the press months after they happen, not days. Its fair game to view the timing of the release of this story as suspicious and we wouldn’t be doing our due diligence if we did not remain skeptical of that portion of the event until it [the timing of the story’s release] is explained more fully by the agency involved.
Hey, I’m not a Truther or anything. I just doubt that this war is somehow the first one since the Egyptians and the Hittites went at it that’s free from manipulation by people making their own careers.
My modest proposal: hack all the Allah-bellowing websites and load them with links to free HD porn; the this great nation can produce, if the danger is frustrated teenage boys.
The sting involved a large number of law enforcement agencies. I would suspect that it would have been leaked to the press fairly soon after it played out, and the FBI needs all the good publicity they can get.
A dog and pony show, I don’t think so. I’m sure the FBI investigated this kid to find links to other jihobbyist. Those people are a real danger to American security. My hope is the jihobbyist community becomes sufficiently paranoid when planning future attacks. Also, that boy is real pretty he better hope they keep him outa genpop.
Aside from Harris and Klebold, I haven’t heard of any of those names on your list. I assume they’re all school shooters?
That being said, while I met a number of kids in my high school days who were a little “off,” I never would have thought any of them were capable of shooting up the school. Hell, I fit the school shooter profile to a T and, last I checked, I didn’t shoot up my high school either.
Again he didn’t actually kill or even injure anybody.
I considered hopping on the train and going down to this event myself (only briefly…too wet and chilly and me too lazy;))
I find myself trying to visualize exactly where “near” Pioneer Courthouse Square a van could have been parked. 
There are train/Max tracks on 3 sides which preclude curbside parking next to the square and the other side is well away and on the other side of a Starbucks and a large brick structure from where the crowds gather. (plus, I’m pretty sure it has no curbside parking allowed either).
Maybe he thought his “bomb” was powerful enough to do significant damage from across the street (where I’m not even sure there is parking either) or half a block away.
I am GLAD they “stung” this punk…he made no bones about his INTENT and setting him up to actually DO (or try to do) something enabled them to charge him with more serious crimes than just plotting or emailing about a possible action.
The timing of its release? That is directly linked to the time of the event the accused had targeted for his crime…the annual lighting of the Christmas tree in the square, which was scheduled by whomever is responsible for scheduling such things. That’s when the sting went down and the story was released after they’d stung him. What’s to “explain”?
Should they have released the story BEFORE the sting? Or waited a while AFTER for some reason? Sheez.
I’m not so sure I buy that.
I’d never say any agency/office can’t keep a secret (past practice seems to indicate that they certainly can: pizza delivery idiots vs Maguire AFB), so why would they imply that? Unless they aren’t implying that at all. Which leads back to the timing of the release, which leads back to the holidays and the recent criticism of Homeland Security/TSA pat-downs.
But I’m willing to give the agencies involved the benefit of the doubt pending that agency’s release of specific information on why it was safe to dump that investigations details to the press w/i days rather than months after the arrest, which again seems standard practice.