I am as much against many of the new and proposed laws controlling our freedom of speech and movement as any one else on the planet but I am also against what has become the newest defense of various terrorists, nut cases and bomb throwers, that has been used successfully in fighting these laws and over zealous law enforcement.
It seems that right now every idiot who is arrested on any kind of terrorist plot has the same defense; entrapment. Okay, so how does that work? The FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, pick one; finds some schmuck yelling about how he wants to bring the government down or even some more legitimate cause, and they put him next to one of their own, who encourages him in his nuttiness; and as in a recent case even gives him a dummy bomb, which he tries to use to blow something up.
So why is the fact that this clown got a little help from the government, a defense of his attempt to kill people or blow up buildings? Well, you say, they shouldn’t be encouraging these people. Maybe not, maybe we should just leave them alone until they figure out how to build a bomb on their own. Look, nobody is ignorant of the fact that there are over zealous people working in law enforcement. Many of them get into this kind of entrapment to pump up their arrest scores, but the fact remains that the guys they trap are potential killers and as such they don’t deserve our sympathy or the demonstrations that we put together to point out their “plight.”
Something attracted law enforcement to these guys, maybe it’s what they were saying, maybe it’s their circle of friends, maybe it’s just that they appeared a little wackier than is acceptable. Now none of these things is against the law but all these guys had to say to the undercover agents who approached them was; “Thanks, I’m not interested.” But none of them did and that’s why they are now under arrest.
To me, entrapment is when you fake evidence against someone, not when they take your help and try to do something destructive. We all have free will. Obviously none of the people under arrest bothered to just say no. They were actively involved in plots to kill. Maybe the bomb was a fake but the guy who got arrested trying to set it off, didn’t know that. He was actually trying to kill innocent people. Unless you suffer from diminished capacity, and maybe some of them do, there is no excuse for what they tried to do.
Do I think law enforcement in this country is over zealous? You bet, especially in circumstances like crowd control at legitimate demonstrations, stop and frisk operations and ID requests in certain southwestern states and unfortunately that dirty brush is painting all law enforcement and that’s a bad thing.
But when I comes to the people working undercover to catch these nuts and bad guys, I think we have to step back and ask ourselves, “do we want the people they’re catching running loose on the streets or are we better off with them behind bars.
Sure there will always be people in law enforcement who are over the top, who have lost their humanity or who are acting for their own advancement rather then of the public’s safety, and their activities most definitely must be curtailed, but they must be rooted out on an individual basis, their acts must not be taken as the norm, even if, in certain circumstances, they are.
We all know that the Homeland Security apparatus is a bloated giant, enabled by a combination of our legitimate and paranoid fears and the ability of those who have learned to prey on those fears and take advantage of them to create profit. We could probably survive very nicely on about half of what we have created to keep us safe but right now we need the jobs so, hopefully, that bureaucracy will not shrink in the foreseeable future. Actually, as long as we have lobbyists bribing congressmen it will not shrink at all, but that has nothing to do with the legitimacy of the men and women who work undercover to root out terrorists and the like. They should be applauded and those they capture should be judged, not on the means of their apprehension but on the intent of their actions.