Saturday - November 27, 2010

Does This One Count As “Saved” Or “Created”??

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, a Somali-born U.S. citizen, was arrested at 5:42 p.m., 18 minutes before the tree lighting was to occur, on an accusation of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. The felony charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and a $250,000 fine.

Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was arrested at 5:40 p.m. Friday just after he dialed a cell phone that he thought would set off the blast but instead brought federal agents and police swooping down on him. Yelling “Allahu Akbar!” — Arabic for “God is great!” — Mohamud tried to kick agents and police after he was taken into custody, according to prosecutors.

“The threat was very real,” said Arthur Balizan, special agent in charge of the FBI in Oregon. “Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,”

Um, except it wasn’t a bomb. And the FBI just didn’t happen upon this guy by chance. Nor were they tipped off at the last second. No, they’d been watching this guy for months. They’d been working with him. It seems that they even assembled his bomb for him, although the bomb they built was not real.

However, the supposed explosive was a dummy that FBI operatives supplied to him, according to an affidavit in support of a criminal complaint signed Friday night by U.S. Magistrate Judge John V. Acosta.
...
The arrest was the culmination of a long-term undercover operation, during which Mohamud had been monitored for months as his alleged bomb plot developed.

“The device was in fact inert, and the public was never in danger,” according to a news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

According to the FBI affidavit, the case began in August 2009 when Mohamud was in e-mail contact with an unindicted associate overseas who was believed to be involved in terrorist activities. In December 2009, while the unindicted associate was in a frontier province of Pakistan, Mohamud and the associate discussed the possibility of Mohamud traveling to Pakistan to participate in violent jihad.

The associate allegedly referred Mohamud to a second associate overseas and provided him with a name and e-mail address. In the months that followed, Mohamud made several unsuccessful attempts to contact the second associate.

Ultimately, an FBI undercover operative contacted Mohamud in a June 2010 e-mail under the guise of being an associate of the first unindicted associate.

So when this kid - who was probably about 17 at the time this started - tries and tries and tries to hook up with the real jihadis, and FAILS every single time, the FBI puts on a digital kaffiyea and makes contact with him. And then leads the kid around by the nose for the next solid year?

Mohamud and the FBI operative agreed to meet in Portland a month later. Mohamud allegedly told the FBI operative that he had written articles that were published in Jihad Recollections, an online magazine that advocated holy war.

Yes, they gave the boy a whole bunch of chances to back out.

The FBI operatives cautioned Mohamud several times about the seriousness of his plan, noting that there would be many people, including children, at the event, and that Mohamud could abandon his plans at any time with no shame.

But he wouldn’t. So they talked him into letting them build the bomb for him. And they even took him on an outing before this to set of a smaller real bomb. To prove their own bona fides?

He allegedly identified a location to place the bomb and mailed bomb components to the FBI operatives, who he believed were assembling the device. He also mailed them passport photos so he could sneak out of the country after the attack, according to the affidavit.

He provided the FBI operatives with a thumbdrive that contained detailed directions to the bomb location and operational instructions for the attack.

On Nov. 4, Mohamud and the FBI operatives traveled to a remote spot in Lincoln County, where they detonated a bomb concealed in a backpack as a trial run for the upcoming attack.

And so on and so on. But what they never did was take the kid by the scruff of his neck, ring the doorbell at his parent’s house, and say, “Look Dad, your kid wants to be a terrorist. And we’ve got the proof. You’d better straighten him out right now, because if we have to do it, he’ll either wind up in a pine box or spend the rest of his life in jail.”

Is there a line in here somewhere? A limit? I have not yet heard that this kid’s arrest has led to an entire terrorist network being rolled up, or that any great new sources of information have been gleaned by interrogating him. What I have read sounds a lot like enabling. I don’t want to say “entrapment”, but the FBI was onto this kid from the beginning. Why not just collect him then and get him some psychiatric treatment? Why bother to let him go all the way to planting a “bomb” and “pushing the button” before arresting him? In which case, why not shoot him?

Meanwhile, there’s that nutjob Serb out in California with so much explosives in his house that stepping on the grass is like jumping on a landmine. And the ONLY way he got found out is when the yard guy got blown up by accident. And notice the part of that story you really, really aren’t hearing about: he’s been back and forth to Mexico a whole bunch of times lately. Wonder if that’s where he got the explosives, and maybe even the training to use them?

So I’m kind of wondering if this was the right approach ... or the right use of resources. Yes, absolutely it’s better to have fed this Somali dingbat a line of poop the whole time, than to have had no contact or awareness of him and then come in with the dustpan and brush and absorbent paper towels when he sets off a REAL bomb. But it sure makes me wonder how many of these “naturalized citizens” from radical muslim lands are in our country plotting bad things. Maybe we shouldn’t have let them in in the first place?

Maybe I’m in one of those “root causes” moods. As a nation we spend so damn much blood and treasure trying to “win hearts and minds” overseas, so why not do it right here? Why aren’t all parents - not just muzzies - not pointing out how stupid, wasteful, and ultimately ineffective, jihad splodeydope-ism is? I don’t see that happening. I don’t see “Your daily message of peace and tolerance, brought to you by CAIR” on the TV or in the newspapers. I don’t see the American Imams on the religious channels preaching any of that Rodney King “Why can’t we all just get along” stuff.

So maybe it is better that the FBI have the “terrorist cells” so heavily infiltrated that only 1 in 1000 of them is actually real. And that all the emails over to sandland are read and perhaps redirected. So all our stupid little children, those angst ridden teens who can’t get laid or who can’t fit in, who “try to get even” and turn to jihad are really almost always just turning themselves over to the feds. We’re safer that way ... but we’d be safer, and the government would spend a whole lot less money, if somehow the parents, schools, and local churches and mosques could get involved when the “roots” have only sent up a small bud or two. And by “a small bud” and “getting involved” I don’t mean doping little kids to the gills with psych meds and expelling them from school when they make stick figure drawings of cowboys and soldiers with guns when they’re 6. That’s an asinine reaction indicative of a pendulum swung way too far the wrong way, and belies any critical reasoning. But somewhere between pulling wings off of flies, setting fire to the neighbor’s cat, and Columbine or Ground Zero there has to be a point where a bit of effort can change the river’s direction.

Links:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/11/27/feds-somali-born-teen-plotted-car-bombing-ore/
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2010/11/fbi_thwarts_terrorist_bombing.html

On the third hand, or is it the fifth or sixth one by now ... I’m sure the FBI wants everyone to believe how close they are watching, and how much of the terrorist underworld they have sewn up. And it seems like they do, as wannabe after wannabe has been caught year after year. Until the next big blast catches everyone by surprise. Like, um, where would we be if that gardener had taken the day off, or stepped onto a different patch of grass?

Posted by Drew458     on 11/27/2010 at 11:04 AM   
Filed Under: • Insanity • Stoopid-People • Terrorists •  
• Comments (7) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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