FBI informant promoted terrorism at mosque

Barrett Brown

I am the founder of the distributed think-tank Project PM and a regular inactive to Vanity Fair and Skeptical Inquirer. My work has also appeared in The Onion, National Lampoon, New York Press, D Magazine, Skeptic, McSweeney's, American Atheist, and a couple of newspapers in the U.S. and Mexico as well as a few policy journals. I'm the author of two books and serve as a consultant to various political entities and private clients.

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25 Responses

  1. Ken says:

    Just like we can get captured by love for our spouses, or kids, and refuse to believe they are in the wrong, agents can get captured by support for their informants. The sentiment is not love, but pride (they found the guy and built him up), friendship (some informants are charming; many are sociopaths), ambition (successfully running informants means success), etc.

    Back when I was a fed, on a number of occasions I had a very difficult time convincing an FBI or DEA agent that an informant was obviously not credible. The agents get captured by the process.Report

    • Barrett Brown in reply to Ken says:

      Thanks for weighing in. I’m interested in the concept of powerful and authoritative entities like the FBI and CIA and the unusual culture that tends to develop within such bodies. Have you ever read “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence” by that former CIA official? Or do you have any further insight into the issue that you’d be willing to give us? I’d love to ask you a few questions for another post.Report

  2. tom van dyke says:

    The Button Defense.

    Actually, I’m sort of with you here, Barrett. Although not exactly completely.Report

    • Barrett Brown in reply to tom van dyke says:

      Well good, I’m glad that we can find common ground on some question of jurisprudence – and I mean that, as I really want more conservatives to understand that there are a great deal of things they can agree on and pursue alongside non-conservatives in terms of such things as civil liberties. I’ll add that I don’t disapprove of similar programs so long as the agents/informants do not prompt residents of the U.S. to carry out what they have been told are terrorist attacks or themselves engage in false flag language of the sort we see on the most recent occasion, and especially not within a private religious entity.Report

      • Ah, do treat yourself and vidy the video, me droogie. After dimly remembering it and linking it based on your post, I just watched it twice. One could write a book on it. It’s fucking Shakespeare.

        It’s from the 1960s, I know. But we must observe the classics, lest we spend most of our time reinventing the wheel.

        It really is full of pith and vinegar, Barrett. I wouldn’t waste yr time, nor that of our gentle readers. The Button Defense is both absurdity and reality, which completely describes our current crisis.Report

        • Barrett Brown in reply to tom van dyke says:

          I’m not going to lie to you. I watched five of that clip, being enchanted by anything recorded in the mid-2oth century, but I kind of got hung up on how strange it is to see dialog that does so little over such a stretch of time. Obviously there was not anything wrong with that level of complexity and accomplishment in terms of what characters say and what it accomplishes in terms of story, but it’s hard for me to spend time watching something that we’ve since built upon unless it has some particular significance, in which I watch it over and over again. If there’s something in particular that happens later on which I should see, let me know and I’ll definitely give it another try.Report

      • Heidegger in reply to Barrett Brown says:

        Hi Barrett—have a great book to recommend to you–“The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg”. You’ll love it and certainly get a good look and taste of the inside CIA/espionage culture. Actually, Berg was in the OSS which later became the CIA. A very fascinating look at a most bizarre and brilliant man, Moe Berg. And yes, he really was a catcher for the Red Sox as well as a few other teams–also, a linguistic genius–spoke 12 languages or so—his German was so good he was sent on a mission to assassinate Heisenberg—an excellent read. Sadly, I think he died a penniless vagrant.Report

  3. tom van dyke says:

    Barrett, thx for giving it 5 min. That was cool, sporting and with good cheer.

    The punchline is that he pushes the button, gets rid of his bitch wife and nobody will know. That was the relevance to the whole thing. Monteilh pushed the button; the FBI—Jack Lemmon—tempted him into it, no doubt.

    BTW, Jack Lemmon didn’t murder his wife, as he admitted he did there. She was Virna Lisi, fer crissakes. Woof.

    http://digilander.libero.it/guido_1953/pics/hairstyle-3/hairstyle-1965-virna-lisi-1.jpgReport

  4. Monteigh probably just went way overboard. He was supposed to put out feelers and got carried with, probably out of desperation to find somebody he could snitch on when no one was immediately forthcoming. It almost reads like something out of a Coen Bros movie.

    This guy in Oregon though was a different story. He apparently had a history of making provocative statements. He even did a class lecture on how to build a bomb. He had expressed frustration at not being able to leave the country to partake in jihad. I think his own father might have been one of the people who reported him. I’m not sure how true all this is, but it will come out eventually.Report

  5. Boonton says:

    This stuff would be good to note next time yahoos assert that American Muslims are supposed to ‘do more’ to oppose terrorism. Here we see them kicking out Mosque members who talk about jihad, even reporting their own sons and in return they get the right trying to deny them freedom of religion, agitating for mass deportations, and so on.Report