Are these stunts, or are they botched "sting" operations designed to make groups of people look bad?
I posted this in the Whitmer Kidnap Thread
The Whitmer Kidnapping Case Reveals The FBI’s New Counterterrorism Target Is You
Terrorism, as it turns out, is hard. Recruiting isn’t easy, and finding the right people is difficult. A person who is willing to train, travel, keep secrets,
and face a very high chance of dying is not statically all that common.
Getting access to explosives, and knowing how to use them, is technically complicated. You can practice, but if you make a mistake, you’ll blow yourself up. Oh, there’s bomb-making manuals on the internet? Sure, there are. Feel free to try those out. I dare you.
Shooting isn’t all that easy either, and training someone to gun fight—really, seriously gun fight—takes expertise, and time, and a place where you can shoot for hundreds of hours without anyone noticing. Do you know where you could do something like that? Who would teach you how to shoot like that, or fight with knives, or drive a car so you could get away? How would you find that person? How would you vet him to make sure he’s not FBI?
You wouldn’t. Unless you’re a mercenary, you’ve trained with a militia in Africa or Asia, or you’re a SWAT officer or an elite soldier, you wouldn’t know those things, and you wouldn’t know people who know those things. Frankly, most of the people who know those things are dedicated patriots. They’re the good people, and the bad guys won’t share that information easily. They’re secretive and expensive.
So the FBI does the heavy lifting in these cases. The suspects start out by talking about jihad or revolution or overthrowing the government, and someone in their chat group decides he should tell the FBI.
The people the FBI sends in to look at the chats or communicate with the suspects aren’t just a fly on the wall. They offer to help. They
offer bombs. They
offer direction. They
suggest targets.
They tell the suspects
they need money for the cause. They
ask them when they can fly to Syria or Iraq or wherever.
The Intercept did some marvelous reporting on this in 2017. They noted, quite correctly, that in hundreds and hundreds of cases the FBI and Department of Justice had brought to trial there were no victims of violence, and the FBI informants were the primary driving characters in the fictional worlds the suspects had been caught up in.
In case after case, it’s the FBI that creates the illusion of the ability to do harm. There are no bombs, no ability to launch an attack. There is no group ready to meet and support them, no weapons smugglers, or expert marksmen. There is only the anger of a lonely person screaming into the void of the internet, and the only one who answers that screaming is the FBI.
