“The bad guys”, for fuck’s sake. Can we ban that ludicrous, infantile phrase being used by anyone who isn’t five and playing cops and robbers? It boils my piss, it does.
Isn’t this standard FBI operating procedure? Haven’t they been exactly this crooked since the days of J. Edgar Hoover?
When you can compare the actions of a legitimate policing force to that of a stereotypical mobster, there’s something wrong with the world.
In other words, there’s often something wrong with the world.
I get an image of FBI agents running around in the courtyard making “pew pew” noises and using tree branches as guns.
If only.
Close, but it ain’t tree branches, and it’s your courtyard.
"Yes, yes, if it’s to get me home and I’ll happily tell you who the ‘bad guys’ are.
The biggest bad guys I’ve encountered are these idiots at the FBI who target people they know are innocent, and strand them in dangerous countries, as a leverage to get them to comply with their demands."
Of course, actually saying that is liable to just get you into more trouble.
Yes, and worse. The scandal is that they’re still that bad.
Democracy passes into despotism.
Plato
So I guess if you don’t have the goods on the “bad guys” you have to make shit up?
“But I don’t know any terrorists. Which of my friends do you think are involved in terrorism?”
“Here’s a list. They have a couple factors in common. They all somehow wound up on the No-Fly List, and they’re very angry about it. Let us know if they’re becoming irrational.”
Precisely. Relying on coercion to extract the evidence you seek works only if the informant actually has the information. Otherwise, under sufficient duress, the informant will indeed “make shit up.”
Of course, if the objective was to get the men in question to smear the Yemeni community broadly by turning in everyone until all were tarred with the FBI’s brush, it might very well succeed. And if an agent has the sort of personality that would delight in making everyone grovel before him for permission to carry out their lawful business in their own country, he might find that success very fulfilling indeed.
Indeed. If the informant makes up names, the FBI now has probable cause to do investigations and searches. Then they can screw with some of those people to make them informants, and so on. This is standard FBI practice: perjury, deprivation of rights, and harassment to turn people into informants and create chains of informants. The FBI is phenomenally corrupt and possessing an FBI badge is almost a guaranteed way to identify a real criminal.
I am still confused as to why the Feebs think they’ve got a mandate to go chasing ‘baddies’ in Yemen in the first place. Though, seeing as the agencies tasked with baddie-hunting abroad are busy stalking their exes and reading everyone in the US email, it makes a peculiarly twisted kind of sense…
Isn’t this where you cal up your senator’s office advise that you’ve been illegally put on the ‘no fly list’, the FBI acknowledges that, and want’s you to “rat out on your friends” to get off the list. Oh, and incidentially, what are the names and ages fo the directors fo the FBI, CIA and NSA?
…and the Senator’s own staff!
Nah, that might inconvenience my Senator. I’m more interested in ultimately inconveniencing the agent blackmailing me if I’m caught in that sort of a situation. Petty of me I’m sure.
Seriously, the good ole US of A is like, in the bottom third of the list of places in the world I’d like to live.
So much evil shit going on there, and it’s mostly institutionalised.
The FBI are merely practicing on the pariahs before expanding their game.
