Was FBI grooming Portland suspect for terror?

[2Design]

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2013552536_portland30m.html

But Mohamud's attorneys and some local Muslims are raising questions about whether the operatives who posed as co-conspirators played their role too well.

Defense attorney Steve Sady questioned whether the operatives were "basically grooming" Mohamud to try to commit a terrorist attack.

[Warren DeMontague]

1. Someone forced him to say this stuff?

"You know there's going to be a lot of children there?" an FBI operative asked Mohamud. "You know there are gonna be a lot of children there?"

Mohamud allegedly responded he was looking for a "huge mass that will ... be attacked in their own element with their families celebrating the holidays."

On the drive back to Corvalis, FBI operatives quizzed Mohamud about whether he was capable of looking at the bodies of those who would be killed in his planned Portland attack.

"I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured," Mohamud reportedly told the FBI operatives, the affidavit says.

At one point Mohamud told the agents he was not worried about looking at the carnage after the blast. “Do you remember when 9/11 happened when those people were jumping from skyscrapers.… I thought that was awesome,”

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. You could fill the jails with nitwit high school misfits on the basis

of remarks like that.

[Warren DeMontague]

3. Really? High School Nitwits who press a button they fully believe is set to blow up a large crowd?

Despite all the hyperbole about "entrapment" (which, sadly, seems to be the only aspect of this anyone here wants to discuss) It was not "entrapment". Law Enforcement uses stings all the time. Most of us would agree that when those stings are catching would be child abusers trolling the internet, they're probably a good thing. Maybe when they set up pot smoking cancer grannies to haul them off to prison for scoring an ounce, not so much.

In this case, however, it looks from all appearances that they got one right. Sure, High School students say all kinds of shit. But some of them act on it, and some of them have a frightening capacity for violence. Probably in the case of Klebold and Harris, someone should have paid a little more attention to the "nitwit remarks".

Had the FBI pulled this kind of a sting on Tim McVeigh, a lot of lives would have been saved, including a lot of kids. I'm sorry, but I'm just not feeling the outrage at this dude's arrest. And he will have a trial, this is terrorism treated as a crime and a law enforcement issue, which is what a lot of us have been saying for a long time.