A startling number of the supposed terror plots broken up by US law enforcement officials since 2001 have been the result of goading by undercover cops, who’ve encouraged American Muslims — often young, often mentally unstable — to become involved in plans that had no chance of coming to fruition.
The latest example of this practice, and one of the most disturbing, comes out of Chicago, where FBI agents arresed 18-year-old Adel Daoud after he pressed the fake detonator on a fake car bomb they supplied him. According to court documents, and reporting from TPM, the FBI jihadists succeeded in getting Daoud to continue in the face of strong discouragement from his father, his former accomplice, and a local Muslim leader.
That’s right. The only “Muslims” encouraging Daoud in his ersatz plot were the phonies on the FBI payroll. Every actual Muslim in his life who got wind of the plan told him it was a lousy idea, and did their best to talk him out of it. And every time they did, the FBI was there to egg him on, rebut his concerns, and provide him with fake explosives.
And now an 18-year-old is facing decades in prison. For what?
Update: The crime the FBI talked Daoud into committing, and provided him with the means to commit, carries a life sentence. Daoud was seventeen years old when the FBI first contacted him.
studentactivism.net 
7 comments
Comments feed for this article
September 20, 2012 at 12:31 pm
lowerarchy
The FBI, like the British police, need to do this to convince folks there is a terror threat. It’s their job…
September 20, 2012 at 12:53 pm
Jeremy Ogul (@jsogul)
What all of these fake plots prove is that there are Americans in the U.S. who are vulnerable and susceptible to having their minds warped by terrorists (or people like the FBI who are pretending to be terrorists). Because the FBI got to this guy before al-Qaeda or Hezbollah did, this guy detonated a fake bomb instead of a real one. Now we can put this guy behind bars so he can’t be used by real terrorist organizations. This strategy is predicated on the idea that there are people in our society who are ticking time bombs, that at some point in the future will be instigated to commit domestic terrorism by persuasive outside forces. That’s what the point of this is: To use the FBI to fish these people out of society before a terrorist organization does. I’m not saying any of this validates the government strategy or makes it ethical or acceptable, but I think this is their rationale.
September 20, 2012 at 12:55 pm
Jeremy Ogul (@jsogul)
I meant to say incited, not instigated.
September 20, 2012 at 12:59 pm
Jeremy Ogul (@jsogul)
Sorry for the repeated comments… I just want to be clear that I’m not defending this strategy, I’m just presenting what I think is a possible rationale for why the FBI is doing this.
September 21, 2012 at 5:16 am
Jason
These people are not ticking time bombs they are vulnerable members of your society that should be cared for, not incited into acts of government sponsored violence. When there is a genuine threat the terrorists will carry it out to completion on their own. Not use the hard of thinking to do it.
September 21, 2012 at 8:01 am
A Few Friday Morning Links « Gerry Canavan
[…] * FBI successfully thwarts another FBI-led terror plot. […]
September 21, 2012 at 11:15 am
Angus Johnston
Jeremy, I’m not arguing that the FBI should have ignored this guy. To the extent that he was engaging in illegal behavior, that should (obviously?) been monitored and addressed. But this went well beyond that.
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.