This bit of propaganda was timed to catch the London bombing anniversary news cycle.

I think this is called chatter spiced with islamic jihad bravado.

The Miami 7 – ghetto kids scamming the man for pecuniary gain – a camera and new shoes.

All publicity and demagoguery by Karl Rove and Co.

Joe Sixpack ain’t buying this BS.

â€Aspirational†is the new â€-related program activities.â€

And the only problem with what Tom Maguire points out is that these bureaucrats don’t get publicity. They remain anonymous. I suppose there’s a thrill at knowing you’re the â€source†they’re talking about, but you’re not getting your name in the paper.

And that brings us to another point — the first one I ever wrote about on this blog — that there’s no reason in the world to have to quote government sources anonymously when they’re out to advance the government’s agenda.

If, as a reporter, you’re being asked to do so, you’re being asked to â€catapult the propaganda.â€

Note to self: people who are telling the truth don’t â€spin†stories.

oh, no, emptywheel, I’m sure he was tortured or otherwise coerced. I mean, he already confessed what must have been within hours of his arrest.

In a statement, the Lebanese Internal Security Directorate said that under questioning Mr. Hammoud had said he was a member of an extremist organization and had been planning a major bombing in the United States.

We should have asked Lebanon to hand him over to us directly, or the US should have been able to oversee that he was treated with some standard of fairness by Lebanon (don’t laugh — that really is what the US should be able to do. We have lost all credibility, but it’s still our job and we should not just give up on the idea it’s what the US stands for.)

Whether it’s good to prosecute chatter when it has not moved into actions, I am ambivalent about. But in this case I’d say yes, especially if it’s not just a babble of hate but specific plans with maps and the suspect is about to leave an area where you can reach him: â€The authorities said Mr. Hammoud had sent out maps and plans for an operation to other members of his group over the Internet and said he had been planning to travel to Pakistan for a four-month training mission.†But again, my feelings are contingent on him getting a fair and speedy trial of some kind. If arrest automatically means he’s getting tortured and summarily thrown in a box, one would like to be more sure of his guilt before the arrest — but I would prefer to solve that by heavy pressure for a legitimate justice system, and not more timorous arrests.

In 1988 the Feds prosecuted Dave Foreman and several of his Earth First cronies. The â€plot†was to knock down power lines. The way it worked was a FBI operative (more than just an informant) kept pestering Foreman about what a great idea it would be to knock down some transmission towers. Finally, Foreman said, in effect, â€ok, I’ll go out there with you.†The FBI instantly swooped down, arresting Foreman and three others, catcing them in the desert with a blow torch.

The F.B.I conceived of and promoted the crime, working hard to get people to agree with them. Undercover FBI agents had picked the target, driven the truck, and taught the activists to use the torch. The FBI paid informant Ron Frazier $54,000 cash in exchange for implicating the Earth Firsters, and granted him immunity from prosecution for various crimes.

I make this point because rounding up these aspirational terrorists will be easy if all it takes is for a CIA or FBI agent to go to an arab country and say, â€hey, wouldn’t it be a great idea to get back at the U.S. for blowing up your village? I’ll supply you with shoes, uniforms and a blow torch.â€

The Cheney Administration probably has a whole string of these things in the hopper, ready to pull out when they need to change a news cycle or blow something politically damaging off the front pages.

kaleidoscope, certainly government agencies could (and may already be) posing as provocateurs to entrap local groups in terror plots, who they can then catch. That was also the defense that was rejected in a recent terror trial here in NY

The defense in the case argued that Mr. Siraj had been entrapped by the paid informer, Osama Eldawoody, a 50-year-old Egyptian-born nuclear engineer who, Mr. Siraj’s lawyers contended, sought to draw their client into the plot for the money. Evidence showed he was paid about $100,000 over two years and nine months — $25,000 during the 13 months he worked as an informer and the rest in relocation and living expenses over the 20 months between the arrests and the trial.

Mr. Siraj’s lead lawyer, Martin R. Stolar, had sought to portray his client as a hapless dullard ripe for manipulation. He said Mr. Eldawoody, posing as a father figure and religious guide, had cajoled and inflamed the younger man, in part by showing him images of abuses, some of them at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Mr. Stolar said the government had manufactured the crime, noting that the informer had told Mr. Siraj and another man that he was part of a terrorist group that did not exist and that he would supply the explosives, though there never was a bomb.

In that case the defendant (another aspirational terrorist) was found guilty. Several of the jurors said later that they personally thought it had probably been a case of entrapment, but that the defense had not been able to show clear evidence of it so they had to find guilty. Presumably since in the current case all the conversations happened in online chat rooms it may be easier to document entrapment, if it exists.

I guess the other curious thing about this case is that, after all the talk in late 2001 and early 2002 about how going after terrorists by criminal procedures hasn’t worked and needs to be fundamentally changed, the government seems a lot clearer about the danger posed to us by these folks whom it caught through traditional criminal pursuit, than it is about the danger of the very very many it has locked up in secret prisons under the new system.

The leak about the FBI plot, according to Bloomberg, may have compromised ongoing surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations. The person who leaked these details is â€clearly someone who doesn’t understand the fragility of international relations†(said Mershon). I have to say this really looks like a White House leak, with the hands of a PR pro on it. I see it in the style of hyperbole in the original Daily News article. Emptywheel, what do you think?

The NDN had to get most of it accurately, lest that fine newspaper be embarrassed by, for example, the fairly conservative †rel=â€nofollowâ€>paper published across the Hudson, the Newark Star Ledger; NSL sources include the
NDN, Mark Mershon, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York Division,
FBI and state homeland security officials in New Jersey
NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly and Port Authority Police Superintendent Samuel Plumeri
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg
Michael Chertoff…at a public appearance in Boston

Newark is the place where there was a similar plot a few years ago when people were making drawings and casing buildings with nefarious intent.

I am sure a lot of people in Lebanon are glad their occupation ordeal finally tapered fairly recently; Reagan certainly helped punctuate the outset of that unfortunate era anchoring the MO off the coast and bombarding.

Given the windfall profits in petroleum products recently, financing for plots by malcontents must be more facile than it was in leaner times.

I suppose I took an interest in ew’s story here because I rode the trains commuting to school in that part of the US four years, though debarking before the tunnel. I identified with the Atocha incident that brought Zapatero into power in that European country in 2004, as well, having boarded a train there twice during a long stay in grad school.

There are a lot of stories in the article; some relate to the GWT; it is true there is an increasingly unfunded mandate in the Homeland Security area, which papers in our state have discussed. I support ew’s parallel thesis, though, that some politicians will sensationalize events for the sake of political advantage, as long as people are credulous. A complex tale throughout.

QS

I’m not sure whether this is a WH leak or someone else. I assume if it were someone else, WH would be screaming bloody murder. By the same token, I could see this being a leak from someone looking for greater Homeland Security dollars for NY and NJ. Particularly with Chertoff admitting he knew of the plot before he defunded NY, it seems like it could be a funding-related question.

they personally thought it had probably been a case of entrapment, but that the defense had not been able to show clear evidence of it so they had to find guilty.

What’s the difference between this state of affairs and ’reasonable doubt’? The defendant’s religion? National origin?

Much as it pains me to agree with Tom Maguire, are we the only ones who wondered whether the original NDN â€leak†was local (NYC-based rather than DC-based) in nature? Why resort to any other explanation when a bureaucratic battle for funding is already in progress? Get your funding doubled and you don’t care if your name is in the papers…

First of all, it’s inconceivable to me that there aren’t at least a dozen or so angry but naive young muslim men getting yanked off the street every month for planning their revenge against the great satan using government-sponsored (or just plain compromised) chatrooms. They’re obviously having trouble finding people in the US, but in Egypt and Syria and maybe Turkey and bits of Eastern Europe and the Caspian? Constantly. I wouldn’t have guessed Lebanon, but whatever. There’s gotta be plenty of these â€plots†at any given time. They aren’t generally publicized for the same reason COINTELPRO â€plots†to wreck traffic in Denver weren’t publicized, but â€terrorist plots†are a dime a dozen in the middle east (getting cheaper all the time, too) and sometimes you need a foiled terrorist plot, no?

Too, there are probably plenty of people in the NYC â€homeland security†and political hierarchy who are privy to the â€chatter†that flows out of these chatrooms and websites and whatnot. So I would tend to assume that this was part of a PR effort associated with the monstrous behind-the-scenes conflagration that resulted when federal DHS snubbed NYC. My guess is that the leaker was someone in NYC hierarchy and that the primary intended audience was Nooyawkers, to remind them that the threat is still imminent, and simultaneously reassure them that somebody is on the job. I’m certainly not disputing that it was all about PR, I’m just guessing that it wasn’t a beltway campaign so much as an NYC one. My money is on Kevin McConville

The fear aspect could boost Lieberman in the electoral campaign. That zone extending through the City, in an arc into Northern NJ is a kind of gentrified haven; although instinctively liberal, those suburbanites have a distinct distaste for uncivil disruption. In other words, if ew’s theory is right, the scare garners Liebermann votes.

I understand suggesting Lieberman would earn Republ support is a stretch, but total dem vote divided by two might equal a Republican getting elected. JBalkin wrote a humorous piece about Bush scare strategems on the recent day of the beast, q.v.