| It'd be interesting to see breakdowns by race/religion (Muslims in mosques vs NRA gun collectors who are in local militias). There have been cases where mosques have contacted the FBI to inform them of people they found disturbing (trying to recruit people) only to discover later those people were FBI agents sent to root out extremists. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fbi-plant-b... If one of these people, released from prison in exchange for this work, feels pressured to convert/indoctrinate a person who would normally not give a damn about any type of revolution, how is that not entrapment? Other disturbing trends: some people are arrested for giving money to a mosque in some far of region they grew up in. If you gave money to a church or a lobby origination that ends up doing highly illegal stuff, are you now liable? The greater speech issue: if Americans start to gather and think America should be split or states should succeed (won't happen today; there's less then 3% support even in places like Texas/Cascades--but in the future?), even if they work on peaceful means, could this be marked at terrorism? What if peaceful organizations for revolution have a few violent members? Will the leaders of peaceful originations be arrested for giving monetary support to members of a militia who do something violent? |
Just to add to what you said - that's not at all exclusive to the FBI or the USA. Up here in Canada, the RCMP spent huge amounts of money trying to catch two "terrorists" that they basically created. These two people lacked the means and motive to carry out any kind of attack, but our federal police service wasn't deterred. A team of 240 officers worked to groom them and provide them with fake explosives. They found two naive, isolated drug addicts, then isolated them even further and tried to plant extremist ideology into their heads. Even then, at several points, they asked their undercover handler for any kind of moral justification for why they SHOULD NOT go through with the attack, and the undercover officer did the exact opposite. In the end, they still wanted to back out but were afraid that the undercover officer would kill them in retaliation.
Their case was so egregious that our Supreme Court overturned the conviction on the grounds that if the RCMP had done nothing, the two wouldn't have done anything worthy of criminal charges. To make matters even worse, the RCMP billed for almost a million dollars worth of overtime alone manufacturing a fake terrorist plot.
http://www.ctvnews.ca/w5/terror-plotters-claim-they-were-gro...