First rule of terrorist attack: Don’t partner with the FBI. They’re terrible at follow through.
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Oh, they thought of it. But the guy was planning on using one of those magic backdoors that only law enforcement can use. They’re still working on using the process of creating those physical backdoors as a model for a digital version to let them get emails and other information on a phone without all that pesky “due process.”
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They’ve still yet to arrest his weighted companion cube.
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That’s 'cuz, when it comes to America, we Brits got in on the ground floor.
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Because of what he did to Jodie Foster.
Well the man is question is a potential murderer. It’d be nice to help him change his ways but his potential victims (not just POTUS) might prefer a more direct approach.
He will praise himself, blame “fake media”, say the FBI did…then didn’t do a good job, and then to praise himself again. And the wall would have taken care of all of this in the first place.
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Well, so are we all.
Taking your point less pedantically, the point people are making is that security services of all stripes are infamous for taking people engaging in disaffected muttering and by means of ‘undercover’ operatives (often equally disaffected mutterers who differ from the first guy only in having a nice line in income from the security services for being an informant), encouraging and exhorting the first disaffected mutterer to go further and further until they can spring and say - “See, here is an attempted terrorist”.
Whether that happened here, we don’t know. But it does happen (frequently) and every time it does, it means people with doubts are more likely to look sceptically at the next ‘terrorist’ who is caught before allegedly plotting to blow something up.
It is a difficult balance but the idea that maybe it might be better to spend more money and effort on trying to shift disaffected mutterers away from violence rather than escalating them is logically sound.
It just doesn’t run well at election time.
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Some of his coats are pretty cool. I don’t think I could deal with the pants though. And yeah, Faffenreffer is right, we definitely need to bring bicornes back as a style; I’m in.
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“Hand drawn map” yeah, that screams “serious threat” and not kook /s
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I share a lot of people’s feelings about the entrapment angle here. I’ve certainly seen arrests of people with developmental disabilities that would have made it impossible for them to carry out a plot on their own.
At the same time I’m thinking about whether this is really an FBI problem or a bigger problem with the system. When FBI agents identified this person who wanted to carry out “jihadist” attacks it would have been nice if they could have somehow deradicalized instead of entrapping them, but:
- That’s not what the FBI does
- I don’t think that’s what any agency of the federal government does
From the perspective of the FBI agent, if the agent can easily get the person to walk what they think is a bomb to the white house, that means that an actual terrorist organization could also easily get the person to walk a real bomb to the white house. There needs to be more social workers and fewer cops. But there aren’t, and the FBI isn’t in charge of that structure.
So they take an approach of victimizing the vulnerable person before someone else can victimize them in an even worse way. What a disaster.
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It’s a warning. Never trust Tom Skerritt.
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Which is why I’m curious about how the FBI got the tip off… was this someone who knew the guy and had heard him do more than just mutter, or was it someone who didn’t know him, and saw him and thought “Oh, it’s a jihadist!”. Plus, if the guy was already making plans, that’s one thing, if he was just muttering to him about the infidels, that’s quite another.
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It also sounded as if the gentleman might possibly be dumb as a stump with a dash of batshit nuts tossed into the mixture. Might have been worthwhile to check out his tinfoil hat collection before deciding how much of a menace he poses.
I’ve tried to find the affidavit and the complaint but no luck, the best I could do was three pages which are up on The Smoking Gun. Given that the affidavit is apparently 50 odd pages, it’s hardly surprising the three I can find don’t go into that part at all.
And wow, that site’s changed.
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I’m sure it’s almost entirely under wraps, because national security. I think the original article said that it was a tip off to local law enforcement, not directly to the FBI, too.
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Oddly enough it doesn’t seem to be.
Plenty of places quoting/paraphrasing huge chunks of the affidavit so they’ve obviously seen it.
It seems to just be the usual “mustn’t link to the actual document because people might leave our site and never come back” school of journalism at work.
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They gave him an inert AT-4? LOL - what? I just want to know how they said they got one of those.
I don’t think they did. He does appear to have asked for one.
Are they not easily purchasable in US supermarkets? Buy three cans of pringles and get your shoulder fired anti-tank weapon free? 
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I can find you a spent tube… but that’s about it.
