If the FBI had caught Daoud violating the law, and prosecuted him for that, fine. But what they did was to invent two mentors for him, and use those fake mentors to create a chain of events that otherwise wouldn’t have taken place. And they didn’t arrest him the first time they induced him to violate the law, or the second — they kept spinning out the fake plot until it got to the point where he’d committed an act that carried a potential life sentence, even though that act endangered nobody’s life or safety.

If the point was to keep tabs on this guy, there were other ways to do that. If the point was to get him off the streets, there were other ways to do that. But to take a seventeen-year-old and turn him into a faux jihadist just so you can lock him away for the next six or eight decades?

Like I say, I just don’t see the point.