I’m reviewing some of the videos from the Aspen Security Forum. This one features DOJ Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Carlin and CIA General Counsel Caroline Krass.

I’m including it here so you can review Carlin’s complaints in the first part of the video. He explains to Ken Dilanian that ISIL’s recruiting strategy is different from Al Qaeda’s in that they recruit the young and mentally ill. He calls them children, repeatedly, but points to just one that involved a minor. 80% are 40 and under, 40% are 21 and under. In other words, he’s mostly complaining that ISIL is targeting young men who are in their early 20s. He even uses the stereotype of a guy in his parents’ basement, interacting on social media without them knowing.

Carlin, of course, has just described FBI’s targeting strategy for terrorist stings, where they reach out to young men — many with mental disabilities — over social media, only then to throw an informant or undercover officer at the target, to convince him to press the button that (the target believes) will detonate a bomb — though of course the bomb is an FBI-supplied inert bomb. He should know this, because before the end of the panel, he invokes Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the Portland youth convicted for pressing a button who was first targeted by FBI’s informant when he was 16 or so (and whose father asked FBI for help, only to have them target his son).

I’m not contesting the truth of Carlin’s claims. But if this is a new strategy — essentially adopting the strategy the FBI has used since 9/11 (and especially since 2009) — one that Carlin deems especially outrageous, then it ought to reflect back on FBI’s practice. If it is outrageous for ISIL to target young and in some cases mentally unstable men because they are so vulnerable because they’re not yet old enough to resist, then it should also be considered outrageous for FBI to do the same to fluff their terrorism conviction rates. Plus, Carlin’s depiction of this as a new strategy suggests all those earlier targeted young men may not have been recruited by core al Qaeda.

Not to mention, the vulnerability of this population ought to point to a different way of combatting terrorism (and domestic terrorism, which has been a bigger problem in recent weeks): to make this community less vulnerable.