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See the news stories all around. How exactly did the FBI prevent something when they sort of facilitated it from the get go? If this is how they prevent things from happening it seems to me that their actual effectiveness in preventing terrorist acts from happening is far below what is needed.
Nobody else thinks that law enforcement should engage in targeting people with actual plans rather than furnish some stupid youth with pretty much everything icluding ideas for how he could turn his vague desires for notoriety into reality?Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazir
From what I understand, it was a guy who had real plans for a terrorist attack. They did something to help him build the "bomb", but if they hadn't, he just would have found somebody else, and the "bomb" wouldn't need air-quotes around it. I don't really see what the problem is here.
What's far more concerning about this case is that the FBI went public with the operation via twitter.
Actually they even talked him into what kind of attack it should be. His original notion was a suicide attack, they talked him into a car bomb. It's very doubtful he had any real access to means to build a bomb. Basically all it tells us that the FBI can set op elaborate stings to apprehend people with nasty thoughts. It tells us nothing whatsoever about their real preparedness.Quote:
Originally Posted by Wraith
Is a link too much to ask?
Indeed. Just covered the Beeb and can't find naffink.
linkQuote:
Originally Posted by Steely Glint
Şikayetçisin. :o
Do you really think that if that FBI agent wasn't there, Nafis would have wound up just shrugging his shoulders, disbanded his cell, giving up his ambitions to terrorism and killing high-ranking government officials, and become an accountant? It sounds like he was already forming his terrorist cell when the FBI infiltrated.Quote:
The man, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, who arrived in the United States in January on a student visa, tried to make contacts and recruit people to form a terrorist cell to help him carry out an attack, according to a criminal complaint in the case. But one of these recruits was an F.B.I. informer, who later introduced him to an undercover F.B.I. agent who helped him with the plot.
On the change of plans from a suicide attack - it was probably a good idea. It'd have been easy for things to go horribly wrong if they had let him keep that as the plan.
To be fair, the people who keep on falling for these tricks are probably not the brightest terrorists. Many would have probably given up once they realized how incompetent they were. It's possible that a few might have blown up their own car in Times Square or set fire to their own car in Scotland.
I'm with Wraith here. Entrapment, what Hazir is probably thinking of, is convincing people to do an illegal act they otherwise wouldn't have done.
This guy came to the US and tried to create a terrorist cell. And thusly, entrapment flies straight out of the window.
Ploys like this are common currency in the intelligence world. After the Falklands war, MI6 was involved in an operation to supply spare parts to the the Argentine navy in defiance of the British arms embargo. Why? In order to gain access to intelligence on the current state of the Argentine military. It was felt that helping to keep their navy running was price worth paying for that information.
It's when the line between espionage/counter-espionage and law enforcement gets blurred that things start to get murky.
Yes, I can understand sting operations involving serious terrorist cells serve a purpose. But some silly 21 y.o. who gets 'organization' from an online forum and then lets himself be bossed around by his newfound cell 'mates'? Even if you take the stance that he is not innocent because he had the intention, you still have to ask yourself the question; if this counts as a success for law enforcement, then how successfull are they exactly with the real terrorists?
Does this explain why it took the US more than a decade to kill their biggest enemy of the state since Joe Stalin died?
Yeah, where was the www when we really needed it, to help our Intelligence gathering and cyber spies find the terrorist cells! Twitter and Facebook *and "Smart Phones"* to the rescue?
Most of the big successes don't get reported, for obvious reasons. On the flip side, most of the major failures don't get reported either.Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazir
Ever heard of 9-11 ?Quote:
Originally Posted by Loki
Your point being? In most of the failures, our agents or people on our payroll get killed. Or we fail but the terrorists end up failing in their mission anyway (or are caught by other intelligence services). You only see the handful of incidents where the intelligence fails at the last stage of an attack, and the terrorists are both competent and lucky.
My point being that 'we don't hear about the big failures' is utter hogwash. The big failures lead to very big tragedies in full sight of everybody. I think it took them a heartbeat and a half to tell the world Osama Bin Laden had been taken out, by whom and how. So I have some doubts about the other part of your statement too.
Even Turkish law enforcement has more to show for it's work in this field, with every now and then preventing an actual terrorist who didn't need the state to provide him with an action plan and explosives from carrying out an attack. Or our British friends who a couple of years stopped a bunch of planes from being blown up.
I'm not entirely sure what you're expecting Hazir?
There hasn't been a successful attack on US soil (touch wood) for over a decade. There have been a number of attempts that have been stopped, for which this is the latest. Yes it may not be the world's greatest criminal mastermind that's been stopped but you can only stop that which is attempted.
Every success like this (no matter how petty) also stops the risk of copy-cat attacks and encouragement from a successful attack.
We Brits may have had more success at preventing domestic terrorism over the last few decades than the US has, but we've also had more failures - caused by a large community of organised terrorists. I wouldn't wish that upon our American friends.
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7391502n
:) I am more convinced even than before that there never would have been a plot if it weren't for the FBI picking up on his 'plan' to kill Obama :)
What I am getting at is that we are being fed some stupid ass made up terrorist threath. But clearly that doesn't bother you, so I suppose the people who cooked it up must be happy, since they don't even have to do any spoon-feeding.
So the issue now isn't that the FBI is below-par, but that there was never a threat in the first place and its all an FBI conspiracy theory.
It's not a theory if there is an actual conspiracy. One that then you attribute to some dimwit that's being sold to you as a dangerous terrorist. Kudo's to the people at Homeland Security though, people eat their shit like it's a nice cake.
It's the Darker side of the USA.
Well thank you for that post Randblade, it made me remember that I have better things to do than waste my time on twats like you.
I have no problems with this. This guy wanted to kill people - why shouldn't the government go after him? This is one of the few things that I think the government SHOULD be doing.
Unlike what people seem to think I don't have such a problem with the entrapment. I have a bone with the parading this around as a big success.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lewkowski
Until you started a thread on it, it wasn't really getting discussed. Stopping a terrorist is a success.