Creating and Foiling Terrorist Plots

[T]he FBI isn’t always nabbing would-be terrorists so much as setting up mentally ill or economically desperate people to commit crimes they could never have accomplished on their own.

At least in [mentally disturbed, destitute Sami] Osmakac’s [martyrdom video] case, FBI agents seem to agree with that criticism, though they never intended for that admission to become public. In the Osmakac sting, the undercover FBI agent went by the pseudonym “Amir Jones.” He’s the guy behind the camera in Osmakac’s martyrdom video. Amir, posing as a dealer who could provide weapons, wore a hidden recording device throughout the sting.

The device picked up conversations, including, apparently, back at the FBI’s Tampa Field Office, a gated compound beneath the flight path of Tampa International Airport, among agents and employees who assumed their words were private and protected.

  The Intercept

Well, now they know. Thank you Edward Snowden.

In other recorded conservations, Richard Worms, the FBI squad supervisor, describes Osmakac as a “retarded fool” who doesn’t have “a pot to piss in.” The agents talk about the prosecutors’ eagerness for a “Hollywood ending” for their sting. They refer to Osmakac’s targets as “wishy-washy,” and his terrorist ambitions as a “pipe-dream scenario.” The transcripts show FBI agents struggled to put $500 in Osmakac’s hands so he could make a down payment on the weapons — something the Justice Department insisted on to demonstrate Osmakac’s capacity for and commitment to terrorism.

“The money represents he’s willing to do it, because if we can’t show him killing, we can show him giving money,” FBI Special Agent Taylor Reed explains in one conversation.

[...]

Neither the FBI Tampa Field Office nor FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. responded to requests from The Intercept for comment on the Osmakac case or the remarks made by FBI agents and employees about the sting.

The Intercept article goes into detail about how the FBI set up Sami Osmakac, something that cost the FBI many, many man hours over several months, and tens of thousands of dollars.

Informant-led sting operations are central to the FBI’s counterterrorism program. Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations. Of those cases, an informant or FBI undercover operative led 49 defendants in their terrorism plots, similar to the way Osmakac was led in his.

Maybe that money could have been better spent elsewhere on real, viable targets?

And, if they’re also actually foiling real plots, why do they need to create fake ones? Budget considerations? If we don’t spend this year’s budget, next year we’ll be given less – is that the problem? Or, are the real ones not giving them their “Hollywood ending”?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

2014 report from Human Rights Watch:  Illusion of Justice: Human Rights Abuses in US Terrorism Prosecutions

According to multiple studies, nearly 50 percent of the more than 500 federal counterterrorism convictions resulted from informant-based cases; almost 30 percent of those cases were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot. In the case of the “Newburgh Four,” for example, a judge said the government “came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” and had, in the process, made a terrorist out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”

  HRW Report

So, if you add together all the non-Islamic extremists, the Islamic extremists fall to the very bottom of the list.  Put all the whites together, and the Islamic extremists are only higher than the black power groups.  People of color are dangerous, huh?