from the be-the-crime-you-want-to-see-in-the-world dept

The FBI is currently flying at half-staff. A bunch of its field agents are now just immigration officers, thanks to this administration’s desire to eject as many brown people from countries south of our border from the US as possible.

But there are enough people left in the FBI to go after the brown people (from the east of us) that every president since the 9/11 attacks has felt comfortable treating as presumptively criminal.

The FBI’s legacy in these cases frankly sucks. Far too many cases involve undercover agents or paid informants doing everything they can to radicalize misguided people into planning terrorist attacks. These efforts have included agents doing everything from purchasing everything needed to carry out an attack to planning the attacks themselves. It’s entrapment but so far no court has been willing to call it that.

This latest case involves a handful of Michigan teenagers. And while the criminal complaint filed against the person the DOJ thinks presents the best case for conviction does include disturbing details like target practice, the purchasing of weapons and ammo, and drone flights over the target, it also includes details that make you wonder what the fuck we’re even doing here.

The lead suspect apparently did nothing worth noting by law enforcement for several years. It was only after he left the Michigan National Guard and started talking about not particularly liking America (an unsurprising turn of events in early 2025). At that point, the suspect was just kind of leaning towards radical Islam.

Rather than approach the person and tell them what they were thinking of doing was not only a federal crime but would destroy the rest of their life, the FBI did what it did best: infiltrate chats and personal messages and provide all the encouragement they could for his unfocused plans for an act of terrorism.

All of that can be read in the lengthy criminal complaint [PDF] filed by the FBI. At almost all times, the only people the suspect was talking to were FBI agents and one of their informants. And, at any point, someone could have tried to steer his disillusionment with America into something more productive and less dangerous. But they didn’t. And the only reason they didn’t is because doing so would have meant one less terrorism-related arrest on the record.

Or, rather, five less arrests, as CNN breathlessly reported on October 31st, utilizing nothing but stuff the feds said about people who are still presumed innocent.

A group of people who allegedly chatted online about an ISIS-inspired attack went to a shooting range with AK-47s, practiced high-speed reloads and made a reference to “pumpkin day,” authorities said. That’s when investigators jumped into action.

Multiple people were arrested Friday when the FBI averted a possible terrorist attack planned for Halloween weekend, Director Kash Patel said.

“Averting” means catching it before it happens and preventing it from happening. It definitively does not mean “spending weeks encouraging someone to do something and then arresting them when they try to do the thing you spent weeks encouraging them to do.” At no point was any terrorist attack in any danger of taking place. The suspect’s primary contacts all worked for the FBI. This is like paying your internet bill and claiming you “averted” a network outage.

But it’s even stupider than this. Subsequent reporting made it clear NOT A GODDAMN THING was on the verge of happening, much less in need of a last-minute All Hallow’s Eve avertment. (It’s a word now. Deal with it.)

Let’s lead off the way CBS News does, because it’s oh so damning. And that’s before it gets to the FBI admitting there’s really nothing to see here. (It also makes it clear the FBI rounded up a handful of teens, who will undoubtedly be tried as adults.)

*Five people between the ages of 16 and 20 were arrested Friday, CBS News has learned. Authorities say they were inspired by a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard who was arrested in May for allegedly planning an ISIS-inspired attack against a U.S. Army site in suburban Detroit. Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said, 19, was accused of providing support for a planned attack on the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command facility at the Detroit Arsenal. *

One or more members of the group of five young people arrested Friday may have known Said, law enforcement sources told CBS News.

You all see that, right? The charging document for Said contains a lot of conversations he held with people with names like UCE-1, UCE-2, and CHS. (For those not in the know, UCE = Undercover Employee and CHS = Confidential Human Source.) But it contains almost no discussion of his conversations with the other four people who were arrested and have been somewhat cleared of involvement with Said with the FBI’s use of the word “may.”

Here’s more:

The plot, however, was not well formed, and the FBI was monitoring an online discussion about the plot for a period of time. There was no concrete plan for an attack.

To translate FBI speak: “some dude talked a bunch of shit online and we got all heated up about it.”

*“Through swift action and close coordination with our local partners, a potential act of terror was stopped before it could unfold,” Patel said… *

Translated: we pushed someone into doing something we could actually use to bring federal charges against them. At no point was any attack actually going to take place, much less with the sort of alacrity that might require “swift action.”

Here’s another inadvertently damning statement from the cop shop:

The law enforcement source said an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force member had apparently uncovered two teenagers on an online ISIS chat room in some kind of discussion, but that* no real plot materialized**.*

All of this should severely undercut the FBI’s case against Said and the other teens arrested/detained/questioned during this debacle. It probably won’t, given the courts’ deference to anyone saying hysterical things about terrorism in court. BUT IT SHOULD.

As should absolutely be the fucking case, the zealous legal representation of one of teens arrested is stating that no crime was committed, much less planned — at least not without a ton of law enforcement assistance. The lawyer obviously doesn’t represent Said (who has already been charged) but it definitely tracks with what the FBI and other law enforcement have already admitted about this case: that there was no definite plan of attack and no discernible effort to make sure it was carried out.

Finally, while there are apparently recordings of Said flying a drone over a military armory, the attack would have presumably relied on this hand-drawn map provided by the suspect:

I’m no master criminal, but this visual aid would get me lost far faster than it would get me near my target.

But artistic skill aside, here’s the real problem with FBI “investigations” like these. It’s perhaps overly hopeful to think that FBI agents and employees might just want to have a voluntary, non-threatening conversation about the federal charge/mandatory sentence endpoint of these actions. I will admit that for some people, a law enforcement intervention might just drive them underground and make them more dangerous.

But I cannot see the purpose of FBI agents and informants doing what they can to aid and abet the planning of terrorist attacks. If you have access to these conversations, what’s wrong with simply doing as much lurking as possible and only moving in when they — and they alone — decide they’re done talking and ready to take action?

Sadly, the answer is contained in the news coverage above. If you handle things like adults and don’t engage in entrapment, you don’t make headlines and you can’t argue that you need billions of dollars a year to stay on top of terrorism. But it’s nothing more than blood money — sacrificing other people’s lives and liberty just so you can keep taking home a paycheck.

Filed Under: entrapment, fbi, kash patel, own plot, own terrorists, terrorism, war on terror