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The FBI, Occupy Wall Street, and Entrapment

Axiom_Blade

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Axiom_Blade
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How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook

This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.

Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did.
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Yeah, especially that part where the FBI explicitly stated that Occupy Cleveland wasn't involved and wasn't considered a threat at all. Ooh, scary.

Oh wait, that part didn't make the Rolling Stone article because it doesn't support the claim that the FBI was trying to make the defunct and forgotten Occupy movement "look dangerous".
 
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We've had a few threads before about the FBI's recent penchant for playing the Fairy Godmother to "terrorist" Cinderellas who left to their own devices would almost certainly have remained totally harmless. The pattern is that they very carefully step around the laws intended to prevent entrapment, to achieve exactly the same goal of grooming criminals to arrest without quite falling afoul of the letter of the law.

It seems obvious to me that the laws against entrapment need to be tightened up in the USA to prevent this nonsense. Destroying the lives of a few marginal individuals to prop up the fake narrative of a terrorist threat should be a serious crime in and of itself.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
We've had a few threads before about the FBI's recent penchant for playing the Fairy Godmother to "terrorist" Cinderellas who left to their own devices would almost certainly have remained totally harmless. The pattern is that they very carefully step around the laws intended to prevent entrapment, to achieve exactly the same goal of grooming criminals to arrest without quite falling afoul of the letter of the law.

It seems obvious to me that the laws against entrapment need to be tightened up in the USA to prevent this nonsense. Destroying the lives of a few marginal individuals to prop up the fake narrative of a terrorist threat should be a serious crime in and of itself.
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Yeah I remember those threads. I remember people who peddled victimhood nonsense getting smacked down.
 
RandFan said:
Lessons from Nixon.
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So Obama = Nixon?

If you read the actual story on the Cleveland group, it becomes quite obvious that they were dangerous:

At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought they’d have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge – "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" – and won.
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The informant was #3. I am sorry, that is not entrapment. These people were quite willing to blow up a small bridge or a cargo ship; the terrorist intent was there all along. Yes, they were bumbling idiots; so were the Weathermen initially (one of their first bombs exploded as they were making it, killing three of them).

And this part made me laugh:

The contrasts are extraordinarily instructive. When federal law enforcement agencies take an affirmative role in staging the crimes, the U.S. Justice Department then prosecutes, leaving more clear-and-present dangers relatively unbothered, the State is singling out ideological enemies. Violent white supremacists are not one of these enemies, apparently – because, as David Neiwert, probably the nation’s top journalist on the subject, told me, the federal government has much less often sought to entrap them, even though they are actually the biggest home-grown terrorism threat.
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So white supremacists are not the enemies of the Obama Administration? Hilarious.
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
We've had a few threads before about the FBI's recent penchant for playing the Fairy Godmother to "terrorist" Cinderellas who left to their own devices would almost certainly have remained totally harmless.
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That's only half of the story. According to this article, the FBI is ignoring legitimately dangerous right-wing groups in order to go after left-wing ones.
 
Brainster said:
The informant was #3. I am sorry, that is not entrapment. These people were quite willing to blow up a small bridge or a cargo ship; the terrorist intent was there all along. Yes, they were bumbling idiots; so were the Weathermen initially (one of their first bombs exploded as they were making it, killing three of them).
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People are very quick to excuse the FBI's new version of entrapment on very flimsy evidence that the Cinderella's really did want to go to the ball.

Just because an idiot talks about going to the ball doesn't mean they are remotely capable of getting their own coach, ballgown and horses without getting arrested, if indeed they would ever even try left to their own devices.

It's not so easy in the real world to get remote detonators, C4, car bombs and the other miraculous gifts the Fairy FBImother showers on her grooming targets, without coming to the attention of legitimate law enforcement.

Essentially they are redefining criminality as being willing to commit a crime if a Fairy Godmother hands you everything on a platter. That is a much lower threshold than being willing and able to commit a crime if you have to do all the hard work yourself.That's why they do it, of course - there would be no point to the whole Truman Show rigmarole if it was equally easy to catch actual terrorists instead of grooming your own.
 
RandFan said:
Actually no. I don't honestly believe that Obama is behind every asinine and paranoid CIA action, you?
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CIA? I assume you mean FBI? And do you think Nixon was behind every asinine and paranoid FBI action in his era?
 
Kevin_Lowe said:
Essentially they are redefining criminality as being willing to commit a crime if a Fairy Godmother hands you everything on a platter.
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Because -- and let's face it -- who among us wouldn't try to blow up a bridge or building if they were given explosives. I know I have.


I know that's too flippant, and I do not like getting as close to entrapment as some of these programs *may* get (I don't know enough specifics to say for sure), but I think your argument goes a bit too far on that.
 
NoZed Avenger said:
I know that's too flippant, and I do not like getting as close to entrapment as some of these programs *may* get (I don't know enough specifics to say for sure), but I think your argument goes a bit too far on that.
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It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "only a Bad Person would ever try to blow up a bridge... I'm okay, I'm not a Bad Person... and anything that convicts Bad People is good!".

However the reality is that the law enforcement budget is finite, and every dollar spent grooming fake terrorists is money not spent doing something useful. Until we've convicted every person who is actually committing crimes, grooming fake criminals is straightforwardly counterproductive.

Maybe in some utopian future where all the actual criminals are locked up we could make ourselves even safer by testing people to see if they can be lured into crime, and then locking them up if they take the lure. Or would that be dystopian? You decide. Either way, we're not there yet.
 
The use of the word "entrapment" by the article is a misnomer. This was no more "entrapment" then a bait car operation.

"The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge...was an FBI informant."
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The Rolling stone article makes this claim...^


"FBI officials reject the assertion this was a setup. It was “definitely the suspects who developed the plan to fruition,” spokeswoman Vicki Anderson told TPM. “Our concern was that if we didn’t supply them they’d get it somewhere else. It was their idea.”
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While the tpmmuckraker they link to contradicts it..^ No where does it say the informant proposed the idea for the bombing.
 
Axiom_Blade said:
So why isn't the FBI targeting them, like they are the left-wing groups?
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I'm honestly not convinced that left-wing groups are being unduly or disproportionately targeted (after all most of the so-called "thwarted attacks" have been of the Islamic fundamentalist variety) nor am I convinced these people were harmless.

Also if this was a conspiracy to demonize occupiers (as the article suggest) they certainly didn't succeed considering most news reports literally don't even mention the occupy protest at all and merely paint these people as fringe anarchist.
 
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