Originally published at: FBI conducts botched midnight mock raid at Boston hotel, handcuffing pilot for an hour | Boing Boing
…
4 Likes
Aren’t these mock exercises supposed to be as realistic as possible? I say mission accomplished.
15 Likes
Are they just brainstorming and coming up with new and exciting ways to abuse the citizenry?
21 Likes
That’s absurd! And not forking allowed to talk about it?! I hope he lawyered up!
7 Likes
He was probably advised that if he said anything he would be arrested for real, and then charged with obstruction of justice, resisting arrest, assaulting their fists with his face, giving false testimony during a fake interrogation, etc. etc.
I wonder if they attempted to waterboard him in the shower…hmmmm?
13 Likes
was this really training?
4 Likes
I hope he wasn’t allowed to talk about it to the tune of several hundred thousand dollars, ifyouknowhatimean.
23 Likes
Being a pilot, it may well have been his own airline who told him “We really don’t want to be a part of this.”
8 Likes
I don’t doubt they told him that but it doesn’t mean that’s legally true.
8 Likes
It may well be his employer’s corporate counsel, when informed of what happened, told him to keep quiet so that the lawsuit they file won’t be compromised.
21 Likes
Euphemism for some good ole fashioned waterboarding?
3 Likes
If it had included an attractive woman as bait, it would have been one of the oldest scams in the book.
3 Likes
Many years ago, in the frenzied days following 9/11, a close friend worked as a “red team” for terrorism interception operations. She was part of a small team that smuggled plausibly dangerous items (shovels and tripods, if I recall) into real hotels and while the city’s multi-agency law enforcement apparatus attempted to follow clues to locate them before they could deploy The Device.
It turns out you can smuggle basically anything anywhere if you are young, pretty and Southern. Would you be SO KIND to hold that door for me? Why THANK you.
Everything about this says they were running one of these and fucked it up.
12 Likes
Sounds like an episode of “You’re Stepping on my Cloak and Dagger”
1 Like
The pilot would have called his employer right away because he would have been too shaken to fly an airliner full of people. This might have had the cascading effect of not being able to find another pilot and the airline cancelling the departure, with all of the attending headaches that generates.
The airline might see this as an opportunity for a nice juicy profitable lawsuit against the FBI.
11 Likes
Holy fuck - so the “role play” they were doing was what a “department of defense employee deployed overseas could encounter.” Which means they wouldn’t have identified themselves (at least, not as who they actually were), and put the pilot in the shower because they were threatening to do (or doing) something nasty (and certainly not behaving in a way that lawful US law enforcement would). The poor pilot must have thought they were about to be killed…
I wouldn’t be surprised, given the nature of the “simulation.”
3 Likes
Ahhh yes, love my local FBI, who famously created not one but TWO psychotic terrorists as confidential informants (Whitey Bulger and Tamerlan Tsarnaev) and can’t even get a hotel room right. Really glad these guys are out there protecting me from all the local Neo-Nazis interrupting drag shows!
13 Likes
Even if they went to the right room, imagine being a guest and dealing with the ruckus of a fake FBI raid late at night. Was the hotel even aware of this?
3 Likes
So, this was an exercise in how not to do it, right? Including the consequences of doing what they wanted to on an innocent person, one hopes. Yeah, they probably didn’t think it through.
1 Like
