FBI groomed a 16-year-old with “brain development issues” to become a terrorist | Hacker News Reader

FBI groomed a 16-year-old with “brain development issues” to become a terrorist

theintercept.com

288 pointsJimmc41498 comments

Reminds me that I've yet to see Chris Morris' 2019 film The Day Shall Come which satirizes the FBI's pathological shoehorning of hapless individuals into a paranoid narrative of terrorist cells plotting violence against the state, based on many instances (the number 100 is mentioned) researched by Morris.

Morris writes[1]:

> The US Attorney General is announcing the sensational arrest of an army based in Miami, about to launch a full ground war on America. The FBI had saved the Nation [...]

> Two years later in Washington DC I met a witness from the resulting trial and discovered this terrifying coup would have been pulled off by seven construction workers riding into Chicago on horses. The idea was a fantasy, spun to make money. They had no guns – and no horses. An FBI informant had offered them $50,000 to attack America [...]

> The government presented it as an Al Qaeda plot bigger than 9/11. These guys weren’t even Muslims, they were Haitian Catholics. It took three trials to find them guilty. They were all jailed as terrorists.

> “I discovered this was not a freakish one off. Since 9/11 it has become Standard Operating Procedure. Informants encourage a Person of Interest to break the law and when they do, the FBI arrest them. Each plan is put together with the federal attorney. Arrest is delayed until the case will play in court. So the conviction rate is 98 per cent. The typical sentence is 25 years.

1: https://lwlies.com/articles/the-day-shall-come-trailer-chris...

How does this stuff get past a prosecutors office? I get law enforcement being idiots but there's whole teams of lawyers putting these cases together too. Are they really that desperate for work?

They are playing on the same team. The definition of entrapment is narrow enough and they both know it very well so they can dance around it just enough to pad each others stats: "Look how many terrorists Joe discovered, give him a promotion!" and "Look how many terrorists Jenny has successfully prosecuted. She should be running the department!".

I agree it’s not “entrapment”. But there’s another concept at play here that I don’t have a good name for which still makes these things mostly bullshit. There’s definitely a theme but there may be a couple different categories here. In the majority of cases it’s clear nothing would have happened without the enticement from undercover law enforcement. Some but not all/most cases are like the one posted, where it’s clear that the person prosecuted needed health services to prevent a possible attack, not prosecution.

It may not fit the legal definition of "entrapment" but it definitely fits the common-sense definition of "entrapment".

> I agree it’s not “entrapment”. But there’s another concept at play here that I don’t have a good name for which still makes these things mostly bullshit.

I have one: solicitation to commit a felony. I think we’d be a little better off if the congress made it clear via statute that this sort of conduct falls under the existing solicitation statutes.

We’d be a lot better off if there was a permanent special prosecutor charged with identifying and prosecuting these crimes.

Any prosecutor prosecuting corrupt cops is going to lead a short and lonely life. Law enforcement needs to be forcibly rebuilt by civilian led institutions embedded into their communities in partnership with the plethora of organizations offering a cornucopia of types of support. Cops first priority after safety should be diversion to community resources for support and integration. Trying to maintain the classist shithole that is America will continue to see bullshit like this and doomed to fail policies.

OP proposed a position that isn't just some random prosecutor trying to fight the cops they work for?

To reiterate what they said:

>> We’d be a lot better off if there was a permanent special prosecutor charged with identifying and prosecuting these crimes.

---

> Law enforcement needs to be forcibly rebuilt by civilian led institutions embedded into their communities in partnership with the plethora of organizations offering a cornucopia of types of support.

What does this mean in practice specifically? Which specific non-government/tax-payer funded organizations should have this responsibility?

Law enforcement agencies are civilian institutions. The only non-civilian entities in the United States are the uniformed service branches of the Department of Defense and the state National Guard units. This isn’t minor grammatical nit-picking, and is central to the point I was making: police officers are civil servants. They should be held to account under the civil and criminal code the rest of us have to abide by when they commit wrong-doing. We should not carve out exceptions for them, real or imagined [0], that the rest of us do not enjoy.

That said, if you don’t believe we can amend one law and appoint a special prosecutors office, what makes you think we can successfully rebuild these institutions from the ground up?

0 - You can read the federal solicitation to commit a crime of violence statute, 18 USC § 373, for yourself and decide if the statute permits this kind of behavior from the FBI. I’d argue such behavior as in the OP violates the statute already, but I have no doubt the courts have accepted all manner of excuses regarding ‘intent’ that would not be given the time of day with a non-government defendant. In any case, I stand with my original point: amend these laws to make absolutely clear this conduct is illegal. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/373

Prosecutors are not necessarily paragons of integrity. Defendants in these cases often can't afford good legal representation, and depending on the location, it can be very easy to find a jury willing to hand down a life sentence to someone on the thinnest of evidence. Don't underestimate the role of plain old sadism in the criminal justice system.

Usually because it’s political. See the recent case where they egged on some disgruntled idiots with the Whitmer kidnapping case. Its taking a very long time to hold the FBI accountable because its not politically expedient but even left leaning publications are starting to acknowledge it.

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/19/michigan-gov...

Are they really that desperate for WINS?

Yes. Your record in winning cases influences your career.

They'd have to be either greedy or racist. What are the odds?

The odds are that's a pithy convenient dichotomy. The (more nuanced) reality is what concerns me. Maybe I have a rose coloured view of their jobs but these well educated lawyers should know better and push back. They don't have the excuse of being beat cops who decided to get a college degree and apply for the FBI at 23, or whatever typical trajectory these guys take, before recruiting agents to push belligerent-tier forced arrests.

Terrorism cases help prosecutors' careers. Prosecutors and agents collude 24x7. This collusion is legally sanctioned.

Don’t forget the kickbacks from prison corporations for providing livestock.

These guys were dumb and pissed off the wrong people and were made examples of. Most never are.

https://www.npr.org/2022/08/18/1118108084/michael-conahan-ma...

I mean, how close do you have to get to be _the_ _lead_ conspirator?

It's one thing to infiltrate a group and then use that information to decide to tail them or arrest them or whatever. But I think there is a line somewhere where this kind of encouragement should anull/vacate a conviction. It's not too far from handing a loaded weapon to a toddler and then being surprised they sometimes go and fire the weapon. I'm almost willing to have this practice abolished just because the system can't police itself to do the right thing.

Almost willing?

It's a perversion of the ideals this country is supposed to stand for.

The FBI should be in prison. It was originally founded by Hoover as a US version of Stasi (that predates it!) to persecute people who challenge government corruption.

this reminds me somewhat of the plot of the Umberto Eco novel "Foucault's pendulum". A fantastic read.

We’d be foolish to assume they stopped all of a sudden.

The people involved are total idiots and even crazy, but the FBI are to blame as well in the Whitmer kidnapping plot. As more comes to light, it seems they created the plot and egged the participants on. They werent just implanted to see what’s going on.

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/19/michigan-gov...

The article which you linked, says the arrested people are accused of conducted scouting trips of the governor's house.

The furthest that the guardian went, was saying their claims of an FBI setup were "not entirely outlandish".

But then you introduced the story here as if the FBI "created the plot". That's not what your link said

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Whitmer_kidnapping_...

Of the 13 people involved the FBI has admitted to 5 of them being directly or indirectly working on behalf of the FBI including the group leader. There is significant evidence pointing to the fact that if the FBI had not been involved the plot would've never happened.

>There is significant evidence pointing to the fact that if the FBI had

At the risk of true scotmanning, no, I didn't come away from either the guardian nor wiki links thinking the evidence was "significant".

Actually I didn't see any evidence in either link, that without the FBI, no attack would have happened.

What evidence do you think could lead you to conclude, that no attack would happen if not for the FBI?

> After becoming an informant, Chappel became the group's "XO", or executive officer, the second-highest rank in the group,[99] and then its highest-ranked officer after Morrison departed the group due to marital problems.[99] Chappel taught the group tactical skills he had learned in the U.S. Army,[99] offered the group use of a credit card (paid for by the FBI) to buy ammunition and supplies,[100] and in summer 2020 spent hours on the phone with Fox planning the kidnapping.[99]

So the leader of the group who was supplying the group was also being supplied by the FBI and was an informant for the FBI and acting under the FBI's direction. I don't know how you can get much more convincing then the lead dude who is spending hours planning it and who will got all the supplies was 100% of the FBI's pocket and then come to the belief that the FBI didn't directly instigate it.

Sorry but I still don't agre with you - actually from what you described here, it sounds like Chappel and the FBI are doing their job properly in infiltrating terror groups

The definition for a entrapment is that the crime would not have happened given that the government did not get involved.

Do you think with all of those facts that the crimes they are accused of would have happened without Chappel in the lead?

Nobody has pointed me towards evidence to that effect. So no

The FBI plants group leaders. It's always the same pattern. The Proud Boys leader also was a FBI informant.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-proudboys-leader-excl...

> The FBI plants group leaders.

I don’t think your example supports that. “Group leader was formerly an informant for both the FBI and local law enforcement” does not indicate “FBI planted him as group leader”.

White supremacy is one deranged belief system that does not require entrapment to secure convictions.

What kind of white supremacist group has Jewish chapters in Israel?

in fact it may be so deranged that it just might turn out that it barely exists—if at all—in a meaningful way, at least, beyond the confines of intelligence agency-backed crimes!

awwww god!! if it weren't for the fbi posing as a 11-year old girl, i would've never shown up to have sex with a minor.

Not the first time the FBI has done this unfortunately.

https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-the-fbi-spie...

Also a curious question is whether they FBI have any experience in grooming people and then letting the plot go to completion.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr has been doing the rounds and it really begs the question. The FBI has no problem with grooming people and entrapping them. If it is willing to plot half-measure attacks and destroy lives, where would the confidence come from that they don't also sometimes plot full-measure attacks and destroy lives?

An excellent question, and I believe the most likely scenario (and most common one) is that they simply fail to prevent the plots they orchestrated out of sheer negligence every once in a while.

Or due to attrition.

Some agent is grooming someone, leaves/gets promoted, the new handler doesn't quite understand what was going on and then all of a sudden they have a "situation" on their hands.

>the most likely scenario (and most common on

What evidence led you to think this is MOST likely - or in fact has ever happened in history?

From what I understood from the OP link, the FBI are working closely with US attorneys on how to structure and sequence their cases.

I really don't understand why you have theorised that a US attorney would allow attacks to take place.

Obviously an attorney is seeking closed prosecutions, and the article is about closing prosecutorial cases against people "plotting" attacks, and, therefore, no additional steps are required in order to obtain prosecution.

Maybe Google operation north woods?

The FBI has a bunch of professionals learning how to convince mentally unstable people to commit to doing criminal acts. They have a long history of weird political interference [0]. How are we verifying that they are only doing morally offensive but legal things? What is the safety valve if they slip into morally offensive illegal things? The Snowden approach didn't work, he just ended up hiding in Russia and the security state shrugged hard. And that was just spying, if they're assassinating people, who is going to take the fall? It looks like the people on the ground are already self-selected thugs so probably not them.

It is possible that they don't always using their skills legally and under supervision. It is like computer security researchers - some are law abiding, some are a bit dodgy and do things that aren't legal. With FISA in the mix we can't even be completely sure what is legal in this area anyway.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI%E2%80%93King_suicide_lette...

> I really don't understand why you have theorised that a US attorney would allow attacks to take place.

They have a tactic they could employ in this case, commonly called "lying". Remember how FBI lawyer lied to FISA court? How long was his prison sentence after he got caught, what do you think? Trick question, because he didn't get any prison time at all. He also haven't lost his law license, because lying to the court where there's no adversarial process and that wholly relies on honesty of the lawyers to suspend human rights of citizens - is not grounds for disbarment.

This is what happens if you get caught red-handed lying in the probably hottest case in the history of the nation. In smaller cases, there's usually not even an indictment, people just shrug and move on. Testilying is routine enough to have its own word. The practice is routine enough to have a long Wikipedia article [1] (actually, two articles). Practically never prosecuted. Of course, when and if and comes out, the US Attorney who was on the receiving end probably would be pissed. So what. If the goal worth it, it will be done. They'd just present it as a routine operation, lie in the sensitive parts, and nobody will know it until it'd be too late. Or maybe long after.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_perjury

If the bullying at school wasn't enough, even the government bullied him. Wow.

Sadly, in the US, this is far from abnormal. For example, school resource officers often target special needs kids, and a disproportionate amount of them end up with arrests. They're easy to manipulate, and are a prime target for the personality types of American cops.

The bullies need careers when they grow up too I guess.

The RCMP in Canada are also not above using disadvantaged people to manufacture terrorism cases: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/new-podcast-exposes-sta...

I was looking for this. I find it deeply disturbing that Canadians don’t really care about this.

I knew both of these people in my late teens and it couldn’t have been clearer that they were mentally unstable. They couldn’t conspire to do much at all, let alone the sophisticated things they were accused of.

The work that would have gone into framing them is so difficult to overstate. They would have undermined the RCMP at every turn, either through incompetence or lack of interest in the big plan.

Not through any fault of their own. Korody was nicknamed “potato” as a teen because she was about as intelligent as one. Which is awful, don’t get me wrong. I have a lot of sympathy for these two.

This case made me extremely apprehensive about the RCMP, in any case. The recent Fairy Creek debacle on Vancouver Island wasn’t as bad, but clearly exposed the rotten underbelly of the organization once again.

It’s rough because most Canadians will assume you’re some kind of conspiracy theorist or shit disturber if you hold these opinions. Our police and military possess a strange kind of innocence in our national narrative that the US counterparts don’t appear to have.

>Our police and military possess a strange kind of innocence in our national narrative that the US counterparts don’t appear to have.

I think the USians you run into on the internet are a more well read and skeptical bunch than average. Most Americans I know in person aren’t even aware of past actions of the FBI that even the current FBI denounces, such as their abhorrent treatment of Martin Luther King Jr.

Honestly every time the FBI is in the news I get confirmation they're a bunch of lying incompent sleaze bags backed and protected by the state.

Even back to J Edgar Hoover days...

They tried to blackmail MLK to get him to kill himself. A department created originally to fight the mob started acting exactly like it. There's no way a reasonable person's faith in an organization like that could ever be restored.

Imagine the information that isn't public about their misdeeds.

The FBI repeatedly denied that the Mob existed for over a decade, until a patrol cop stumbled accidentally on a meeting of Mob bosses from across America.

J Edger Hoover's Wikipedia:

> From the mid-1940s through the mid-50s, he paid little attention to criminal vice rackets such as illegal drugs, prostitution, extortion, and flatly denied the existence of the Mafia in the United States. In the 1950s, evidence of the FBI's unwillingness to investigate the Mafia became a topic of public criticism.

Story of 1957 Mafia meeting:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1957-meeting-forced-f...

FBI is only good at solving crimes they have engineered

The red team, offence, manufactures crimes, the blue team, defence, solves them. Crime plots that happen to be completely staffed by agents dont get reported.

Must be fun, ha? Turns out the world is not as filled with crimes, waiting for you to solve them all, as it seemed in your childhood agent movies, then what are you going to do? Make up your own crimes and solve ‘em!

Ohh there is plenty of crime out there, but the FBI only creates the crimes they want to solve that align with political goals they want to achieve.

To be extra clear given recent events, this is not commentary on the case around Trump;s actions. This is about terrorism cases, drugs cases, and various other crimes (like the attempted kidnapping of Witmer in MI).

It all about political objectives of either the individual agents (in the case of Witmer is was for the personal advancement of the agent) , or the the agency has a whole, while they ignore wide spread crime such as insider trading of congress, interstate crimes by large corporations, abuse by local police dept's, etc etc etc etc

Middle-aged government worker sought to get promoted by abusing a mentally handicapped teen—probably the same age as his own kids if he had any.

Many school shooters were mentally handicapped teens. That’s the exact demographic the law enforcements need to pay a special attention to.

By encouraging them to act on an ideation, really? It seems pretty counterintuitive to me.

Nice to see bigotry is alive and well

Have you considered a career in law enforcement?

Do you not understand that being singled out like that is what leads people to become school shooters in the first place? This is some malevolent big-brother bullshit.

> exact demographic the law enforcements need to pay a special attention to

But perhaps a different kind of attention?

I bet many of them were groomed by special agents the same way.

The FBI is essentially the same as the KGB, but more polite and with better taste.

Think of it as an east-coast, old-money KGB.

The reason you are getting downvoted is because we have been told we are the good guys and the other side are the bad guys. American exceptionalism to the fore.

Every group in power acts exactly the same way as they want to keep the power. It is just human nature.

The KGB at the very least did not concern itself with provoking children to ruin their lives. That's more of a Stasi thing, who were far worse. Not a good thing for the FBI to be comparable to either group, of course.

> The KGB at the very least did not concern itself with provoking children to ruin their lives.

Directly? Probably no.

This article is pretty biased, but even so, there is an interesting point where the father admits that 2 years ago the FBI seized the kid’s computer. Later, the kid kept talking to the FBI, and the father complains that the FBI should have just warned him (the father) rather than arresting the kid.

I mean, the FBI showed up at his house and seized a computer. How many warnings did he expect to get?

The FBI baited his child into a crime. Most people probably expect their government not to lure their children to danger, but to guide them to safety. Your response makes it sound like the kid's behaviour is what the father didn't expect, but no. It's the FBI that did the unexpected, and arguably abhorrent thing.

Conspiracy to get someone to commit a crime.

To frame them.

If it is their modus operandi to enhance their power and prestige with false flag operations written small, it's more credible that they would be willing to do so at scale. You can find any number of conspiracy theories that the FBI created the circumstances that empowered themselves, for pretty much any attack you can name. The behavior described here makes those accusations less incredible.

Based off the title, I thought this might be about Ted Kaczynski.

I thought the same thing.

Patriot Front, Ray Epps, Gov. Whitmer, etc.

The English language lacks a word to properly capture the genuine evil and depravity of the FBI.

Subjugation maybe? That seems to be the essence of their approach.

Don't be hyperbolic. They do also stop crimes.

It feels like almost a certainty that an intelligence agency that also has law enforcement powers is going to develop an unhealthy culture. That isn't really hyperbole.

That their power is sometimes pointed at actual criminals doesn't change that much. For example, their relationship with Whitey Bulger did end up putting some bad people in prison. It also had some less desirable outcomes.

The fact that they stop crimes is just a "broken clock's right twice a day" things. Of course the tyrants stop crime, they have to.

Not only do they stop crimes, is it really evil to arrest someone who continued sending money to (what he thought was) ISIS as an adult after the FBI had literally shown up to his house and told his parents that they needed to monitor their son’s internet access?

Incompetence, maybe, unnecessary, yes. Evil is a stretch

It is really grimly hilarious how often this shitpost quote is appropriate on HN but:

"drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,"

Responding to a post asking for a reduction in hyperbole with even worse hyperbole is also “grimly hilarious”, I guess.

There are just as many criminals in law enforcement VS normal citizens... The difference is that law enforcement rarely face consequences to their actions... /R/bad_cop_no_donut

It seems like it should be self explanatory why the FBI would ever do such a thing... (and seemingly on a regular basis) but I don't get it. Could someone please ELI5?

There should be a Constitutional amendment restricting entrapment.

In intent, this seems like entrapment.

Another dimmer view: The FBI agents themselves are getting in practice for sedition, by persuading others (for now) via entrapment.

Fucking piece of shit you are Mr. Agent and the ones who had let it possible. But it is ok I guess. They have it worse in China.

The story has "Brother Eric" vibes from Hasan Minhaj's "The King's Jester."

A government organisation with more than 10 Billion USD budget spent valuable time radicalising some poor kid and then arrested him because he was immature enough to be radicalised... It would be funny if it weren't real. ...Actually it is still very funny.

Last week one of the FBI whistleblowers stated that the demand for terror threats exceeds the supply.

Gotta say, I wish they'd used a term other than "groomed". As-is, this article headline (and to some extent the content, given its adjacency to the idea of the "deep state") could be seen as an alt-right/QAnon dog whistle...

Wow isn't the FBI just the best. Thank goodness they still exist!

There is some good that the FBI does but it is tarnished by this case and other cases like this.

Surprised to see this on here. HN is usually very pro-FBI and would be quick to dismiss things like this with the C word

Unlike everything else labeled with the C word, the fact that the FBI has entrapped people for terrorism is well-documented, which is what we expect to see if there is a large group of people doing this. On the other hand, if you claim a large group of government workers are doing something illegal and have no evidence to support your claim, of course it will be labeled a conspiracy theory.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/fbi-sting-operati...

Something I read like a day or two ago:

> “The FBI and other 3 letter agencies contact these unhinged mentally ill kids and convince them to do mass shootings,” Airman Teixeira wrote in an online chat group, sharing a debunked conspiracy theory after a gunman killed three people at a mall in Indiana last summer. The gunman, he claimed, was one of many mass shooters groomed by the government as part of a secret plot “to make people vote for” gun control.

Kind of strange to see the NYT prematurely assert something as "debunked" without evidence. And not even in an opinion article, but in a regular article? It seems like when the US govt is involved, any sort of journalistic standard gets thrown out

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/18/us/politics/airman-jack-t...

They saw Alex Jones get smacked with a billion $ lawsuit and thought maybe they better tow the line?

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