How government works
FBI thwarts terror plot. Only, they didn’t:
However, the supposed explosive was a dummy that FBI operatives supplied to him, according to an affidavit in support of a criminal complaint signed Friday night by U.S. Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta.
If you create the scenario, you really didn’t “thwart” anything.
November 29th, 2010 at 10:49 am
So. The FBI gets him to plant the bomb, only it’s not a bomb. Then after the fake doesn’t go off, they arrest him. What happens if they convince someone to plant a bomb that really IS a bomb? That person is no longer alive (if it’s a suicide bomb) to negate the facts that the fedgov presents. What a way to cow the citizenry into fear and let them know that the FBI is on it and it was only one bombing they failed to prevent.
November 29th, 2010 at 11:08 am
I wonder why they didn’t arrest him when they handed him the fake explosives? Hand him real explosives & then arrest him once he takes possession of them (I’m pretty sure we have laws against the unlicensed acquisition of solid explosives). Better that than hoping he doesn’t glom onto the fact they are fake and gets himself real ones.
November 29th, 2010 at 11:08 am
I actually won (kind of) a case something like this. My client initiated a fraudulent scheme, but the police caught on and helped him complete it. The judge reduced the charge to misdemeanor attempt.
Still, this guy, in this case, does not look like a good boy who would have stopped if he did not have FBI help.
November 29th, 2010 at 11:13 am
Approximately when would you like the FBI to pick this guy up, if not when he actually tried to go through with a bombing? They aren’t allowed to nab him for wanting to murder people, not for planning to murder people, not for buying supplies intended to murder people.
I’m done with giving them the first 3000 Americans lives for free.
November 29th, 2010 at 11:15 am
i’m guessing little johnnie jihad wannabe would never have done it without the FBI prodding him into it.
November 29th, 2010 at 11:50 am
What is really funny is how he came to the fbi’s attention. He had sent an email to rural pakistan. The fbi says they did not know what was on the email so they sent reply emails saying they were friends of the guy he was emailing. They they offered several times to put him in contact with a bomb maker in his area… I wonder what the kids original email actually said.. Probably a wassup to his friend. I also wonder just how many other people they have sent similar emails to before this dummy bit… He should have traced the emails to their source.
November 29th, 2010 at 11:51 am
So, um, this would make the FBI a terrorist organization?
November 29th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
How else do you justify “homeland security” except by allowing these people into the country & then have a circus act chasing/ assisting them ??? No “terrorists” to chase? Import/create some!!!!
November 29th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Another entrapment angle is the implicit threat of violence to the target of the sting. You think a terrorist group is going to let you live after you turn down a role in a bomb plot? These things work with drugs and prostitutes because the customer isn’t going to buy if hes not interested. With terrorism, the undercover agents posing as a terror cell carry with them an implicit threat, perhaps even an explicit threat, that the target of the investigation will be killed if he does not help the plot. You don’t say “no thanks” to zealots. They’ll kill you and ask the next Muslim teenager in the area to help them.
On the other hand, this guy did drive a truck of what he thought were explosives in a willful attempt to commit an act of mass murder. He shouldn’t walk away, but we’ll never know how dangerous he really would have been without the FBI holding his hand the whole way.
November 29th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
I’m not brokenhearted that this clown got caught up by the FBI “entrapment”. Works for me.
I’m not amused by the FBI setting up this “dummy” bomb. What would have happened if the terrorist wannabe had figured out that this bomb wouldn’t work and substituted working components. The FBI would have looked as stupid as they are.
November 29th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Not “thwart” anything?
Silly rabbit, you “thwart” budget cuts.
November 29th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
He wanted to kill people. There is no reason to let him do it, and every reason to put him where he will be harmless. I agree the government can be bumbling and incompetent, but they don’t seem to have been so here.
We simply cannot wait until the bomb goes off to do something about the bomber, nor the victim murdered to do something about the murderer.
November 29th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Living in rural Oregon, I can understand completely why they did it this way.
Remember that Portland is the *ONLY* major city to opt-out of the Anti-Terrorism Task Force. There are so many liberal people there it’s not funny. Very much the “It could never happen here” crowd. You can’t swing a dead cat (they’ll arrest you) without hitting a Subaru with “Coexist” and “Keep Portland Weird” bumper stickers on it.
No jury in Portland would ever convict someone of a terrorist act unless they went ALL THE WAY. For Pete’s sake, we had a bank bombing two years ago, and the trial is just now going on, and despite concrete evidence, it’s taking a monumental effort to nail those guys.
The FBI guys were saying the whole time to this kid, “Are you sure you want to do this?” over and over again. They gave him every chance to back out. They did NOT “Manufacture” the situation nor entrap him. He wanted explosives. He wanted remote detonation. He parked the truck. He dialed the cellphone detonator. Twice.
People not from around here can armchair quarterback all they want – you’ll be wrong, as you have *NO* idea what the culture is like around here.
I’m very disappointed, but not surprised, we don’t have the death penalty here. The worst he can get is life imprisonment.
November 29th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
We simply cannot wait until the bomb goes off to do something about the bomber, nor the victim murdered to do something about the murderer.
That sounds remarkably like the rationale behind gun control laws.
This story sounds like the FBI wised up after botching OKC.
November 29th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Second Dave’s thoughts completely.
Mohamed went to Westview High School, which is the next school over from us. Our kids and Mohamed have mutual friends.
Mohamed actively sought out an opportunity to commit violent jihad (pardon the redundancy) (and please ignore the Muslim community’s lame-ass explanations of “big jihad vs small jihad”). He reveled in the idea of murdering as many Americans as possible. His own words are that he “hates Americans”. The FBI gave him many opportunities to back out, and he rebuffed them with glee and violence in his stated intentions. He thought it was “awesome” when New Yorkers were diving to their deaths to escape the fires in the twin towers in NYC.
Even out here in suburban Portland, where folks work for Intel and Nike, the lunacy of the uber-left permeates the political environment in ways that the rest of you simply cannot comprehend. If you live in regions typified by Blue Dog Democrats, please don’t believe for a second that your liberals are in any manner equivalent to our liberals. Ours truly, deeply, viscerally hate America and want her destroyed.
Unfortunately, some dipshit has arsoned the mosque where Mohamed sometimes “worshiped”. This is all the excuse that a Portland jury will need to let him off scot-free.
The fundamental problem is not Muslims, but Islam. Query how we’re gonna deal with THAT…
November 29th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
Don’t trust the press completely on this one. The press wants you to believe that the young Jihadi drove the “bomb truck” to a position near the Christmas Tree lighting ceremony, parked it, then tried to detonate it.
He didn’t do that, and the disconnect makes a hole in the FeeBee’s case a mile wide, and the FeeBees won’t talk about said hole, but the guy might just walk because of it.
The Jihadi parked his “bomb truck” in a parking lot about 3/4 mile from said ceremony, and had it kaboomed, it would have damaged/destroyed the Amtrak train depot and the intercity bus depot, threatening/killing travelers, but would not even have tossed dust onto the tree ceremony.
Yes, the tree ceremony WAS his target, but he didn’t plan well, and with his tactic of parking the vehicle, couldn’t have gotten close enough to target the ceremony attendees. He would have had to use a parking garage, and they were either all full by the time he got there, or they won’t take a full-size maxi-van. He would have had to drive by on a street, but for some reason he didn’t want to do that, either.
His detonation tactics failed, but that failure offers him somewhat of an out.
When Eric Holder talked about the case this morning, his body language gave him away: our USAG wishes HE could be defending the Jihadi.
November 29th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
Uncle you’re wrong on this -he was going to attack civilians either way, so they ‘managed’ his planning vs him doing it himself. He was an engineering student at OSU so he probably could have figured out how to make it or would have carried out a more simple attack such as mass-shooting.
It was an attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction on civilians. They said he attempted to detonate the bomb.
November 29th, 2010 at 11:13 pm
Reading the article, it looks like the FBI went to some length to avoid this guy being able to claim the defense of entrapment. That’s the part where they give him multiple opportunities to back out, and he goes forward with it regardless. I’d rather the FBI deal with terrorism this way, than by watching how much fertilizer people buy.
November 30th, 2010 at 12:55 am
Well they did give him 3000 dollars for some odd reason…
November 30th, 2010 at 12:57 am
No, not the TSA. This time. Your Honor, for the defense ……. “if the evidence leaves a reasonable doubt whether the person had any intent to commit the crime except for inducement or persuasion on the part of some Government officer or agent, then the person is not guilty.” It’s “entrapment” (http://www.lectlaw.com/def/e024.htm) when government initiates it. Unless the defendant is a foreign operative; then it’s an “offensive counter-intel” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counter-intelligence#Offensive_counterintelligence_operations) op. In this case, Judge, we need to see the original email, which I’m sure the FBI has obtained by now, and, by the way, all the follow-on communications, too. How can we fulfill our legal duty to provide a full defense? Else how will we know? Our government does have an established pattern of making up the evidence as they go. How do we know, if we let them do this unchallenged, that we won’t be their next target of opportunity?
November 30th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
I can’t say I’m terribly upset about this kid. He played a stupid game and is going to win a stupid prize. In the end, he pushed the button on what he believed was a bomb large enough to kill a large amount of people.
As sebastian said, druther the FBI do this than come after me for buying fertilizer.
November 30th, 2010 at 9:41 pm
actually, if this Seattle Slimes story (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2013555462_apusterrorismstings.html) can be believed, the Feebs did not prod him into it, but actually tried to talk him out of it. I’m guessing they anticipated the “When does a sting become entrapment?” argument.