A Somali-born teenager has been arrested on suspicion of trying to detonate a car bomb in the United States.
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, was charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction after he tried yesterday to blow up what he thought was an explosives-laden van at an annual Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon, the justice department said.
But the bomb was a fake and had been provided to Mohamud as part of a long-term sting by undercover FBI agents...
One gets the impression much of the world as we know it is a long-term sting. Stephan Salisbury:
Informers have by now become our first line of defense in our battles with the evildoers, the go-to guys in the never-ending domestic war on terror. They regularly do the dirty work -- suggesting and encouraging the plots, laboring as bag men to move the money, fashioning the bombs, and eliciting the flamboyant dialogue, even while following the scripts of their handlers to the letter. They have attended to all the little details that make for the successful and now familiar arrests, criminal complaints, trials, and (for the most part) convictions in the ever-distracting war against... what? Al-Qaeda? Terror? Muslims? The inept? The poor?
The Liberty City Seven, the Fort Dix Six, the Detroit Ummah Conspiracy, the Newburgh Four -- each has had their fear-filled day in the sun. None of these plots ever came close to happening. How could they? All were bogus from the get-go: money to buy missiles or cell phones or shoes and fancy duds -- provided by the authorities; plans for how to use the missiles and bombs and cell phones -- provided by authorities; cars for transport and demolition -- issued by the authorities; facilities for carrying out the transactions -- leased by those same authorities. Played out on landscapes manufactured by federal imagineers, the climax of each drama was foreordained. The failure of the plots would then be touted as the success of the investigations and prosecutions.
A band of virtually homeless and penniless men in Florida, we were told, were planning to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. They just needed the right combat boots to pull it off, and a little free money.
A cell of New Jersey roofers, handymen, and cab drivers was scheming to use a laminated pizza delivery map to guide them through a devastating attack on Fort Dix, the enormous military base in Burlington County, south of Trenton.
Ex-cons in Detroit, mostly known for patronizing a weekly soup kitchen to stave off hunger, were also planning to set up their own country in Michigan under Islamic law.
And a band of Orange County New York parolees and former drug peddlers placed bombs at two Bronx synagogues and was preparing to launch missile attacks on military cargo planes at Stewart National Guard Air Base in Newburgh.
In the Liberty City Seven case, which revolved around two informants paid in excess of $130,000 for their services, the government tried the hapless defendants three times before finally wresting a conviction from a jury. One defendant was acquitted at the first trial, another in the third, and five were eventually convicted of at least some terrorism-related charges. In the Fort Dix case, jurors were shown horrific films said to be on a computer owned by one of the defendants, who claimed an FBI informant demanded more and more videos for viewing.
Another defendant actually called the Philadelphia police, mid-plot, and said he was being pressured to commit radical acts by what turned out to be an FBI informer. Prosecutors dismissed this as an obvious decoy maneuver. The key informer in that case -- the FBI eventually paid two people to spy on the group -- an Egyptian on probation, received $236,000 for his services.
Most recently, this duplicitous landscape of war-on-terror "success" has been illuminated yet again by the case of four alleged Newburgh, New York, conspirators -- the Newburgh Four -- and in the botched arrest and fatal shooting (a first for federal authorities) of an African American imam in Detroit, leader of the so-called Ummah Conspiracy. As the details have slowly emerged, these two cases offer vivid examples of how government-scripted many of the terror plots "uncovered" in the U.S. in recent years have turned out to be. Each case, in fact, offers a window onto a stark world in which nothing is what it seems to be...
Kind of makes you wonder about the sophisticated parcel-bombs regularly showing up and being intercepted on airplanes that don't normally screen for such things, doesn't it?
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