Month: August 2014

Citizens, Use that Mobile TV Studio In Your Pocket For Fun and Profit!  by Spocko

 

Things have really changed now that we have gotten beyond using stone knives and bearskins to make mnemonic memory circuits.

But some things haven’t.

Even though it’s totally legal to record the police there are still things to remember, like this 1963 quote from Houston vice squad captain, J.F. Willis “You may beat the rap, but you won’t beat the ride.”

What Willis knew then was that the power dynamic is always in play over time. We need to be prepared for this before during and after clashes. It helps to understand the media, your opponent, the law and your technology tools in order to come out on top, even if you are in the back of a cop car.

 Eventually the Ferguron story will drop off the twitter. Just like the Bundy Ranch story. But there will be another event.

We can get stuck in the same cycle or learn from past events. After the smoke bombs have been swept up and sonic cannons are parked let’s do some thinking and acting.

 Lately I’ve been talking to people about making their own news worthy actions, flipping someone else’s media event, inserting a different narrative in a breaking media event or revising a previous event for a new angle.

 One of the things I’ve found is that on the left many groups don’t have the right “personality” to do this kind of work. Sure my friends at New York Communities for Change do, but there is so much more aggressive work challenging powerful groups that people could be doing.

I’ve developed ideas groups love, but they get nervous during the implementation. So sometimes people have to pick up the ball themselves, and when they do I want them to know the rules, tips and tricks. I want to teach them how to anticipate responses and next steps.  Luckily on the video rules side I’ve got guidelines for you.

• My friends at the Electronic Frontier Foundation put together an updated guide for people in the US who want to use their phones to record police and other actions at a protest.
• The ACLU has a guide,  Know Your Rights: Photographers. I’ll direct you to the “special considerations when videotaping” section. Different states have different laws about consent when it comes to the audio portion of video.
• The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press have a state by state guideline about audio taping  if your state is a single or multiple party consent state, criminal penalties rules about hidden cameras and penalties for publishing or disclosing information.

Finally, my friends at Boing Boing have a podcast on what gadgets to use to gather your photos, video and audio.

This is all good in helping people going to current protests, but I also want people to look at previous protests to see both what we can learn and how we can use them for change at a deeper level. Plus prepare for future actions.

Let’s look at history and then predict the future.

How can video be used to make changes in police actions and policies? 

Did you see this? Occupy protester wounded by Oakland police gets $4.5 million

I noted what this story didn’t say. The officer who shot the bean bag was never identified. Why not? Does the city know, but just not say? Was there no video or just no one to look at all the video and say, “There’s the guy who shot the beanbag point blank at Olsen!” Was the officer following procedure? If not, what actions should be taken?  Maybe the procedure should be changed. Has it been?

Interestingly the officer who lobbed the tear-gas canister into the crowd trying to help the wounded protester was identified as Oakland police Officer Robert Roche.

Although Henry Lee of the Chronicle reported the footage was caught by a “TV news camera.” I’m pretty sure that my friend Matt Kresling’s reviewing the video and then highlighting the event was critical.

I watched the KTVU footage when it first ran, they didn’t point out the blatant disconnect between what the police told them and what they had on the footage.

The media today don’t want to get “in the middle” of a conflict even when they are. It is our review, analysis and action based on the information that leads to change.

What is important to remember is that even though the city suffered “international embarrassment” it is follow up actions like the lawsuits that can lead to leadership and legislation change. And that change can be the gift for citizens that keeps on giving. 


You want to de-escalate the violence? De-militarize the police? Great! How are you going to do that?

Take away our tanks and big guns? You and what army?

 Let’s think about the tools we have to help change things. Video. Photos. Blog posts and social media. Let’s not forget good ol’ telephone, email and search engine optimization!

And spreadsheets! Numbers people, help us out here! What is the ROI on those tanks? Sure it is “free” but what is the cost of upkeep? Wouldn’t you rather have some hazmat suits for when the oil pipeline spills or the ebola pandemic?

I’ll bet the city’s insurance carrier would be happier with fewer “attractive nuances” and lawsuits just waiting to happen. What is the insurance cost for keeping these military weapons?

What’s the PR cost for bad news?

Once people have power, and powerful tools, it takes other kinds of power and powerful tools to remove them.

Look to the tools we have for change.  One tool is a different perspective.

What the city and the police think are assets are really liabilities. Help them see it.

The whole world isn’t watching this part of the process, but it needs to be done. And you are just the people to do it.

LLAP
Spocko

Saturday Night at the Movies


All good soldiers crack like boulders: The Kill Team

 By Dennis Hartley

If you ladies leave my island, if you survive recruit training, you will be a weapon. You will be a minister of death, praying for war.”– Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.

In an ideal world, no one should ever have to “go to war”. But it’s not an ideal world. If history has taught us anything, as long as humans have existed, there has been conflict. And always with the hitting, and the stoning, and the clubbing, and then later with the skewering and the slicing and stabbing…and then eventually with the shooting and the bombing and the vaporizing. So if we absolutely have to have a military in this great nation of ours, one would hope and like to assume that the majority of the men and women who serve in our armed forces at least “go to war” as fearless, disciplined, highly-trained professionals, instilled with a sense of honor and integrity. In an ideal world. Which again, this is not. And according to an eye-opening new documentary called The Kill Team, there is an insidious culture of lizard-brain savagery within the U.S. military that is not far evolved from the old days with all the hitting, the stoning and the clubbing.

Artfully blending intimate interviews with moody composition (strongly recalling the films of Errol Morris), director Dan Krauss coaxes extraordinary confessionals from several key participants and witnesses involved in a series of 2010 Afghanistan War incidents usually referred to as the “Maywand District murders“. In 2011, five soldiers from the Fifth Stryker Brigade, Second Infantry Division (stationed near Kandahar) were officially accused of murdering three innocent Afghan civilians. Led by an apparently sociopathic squad leader, a Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the men were all members of the 3rd Platoon, which subsequently became known as “The Kill Team”. Gibbs is alleged to have encouraged his men to score as many “kills” as they could get away with (legitimate or not), devising a system based on windows of opportunity and keeping “drop” weapons on hand to implicate victims as combatants. As if that weren’t evil enough, participants memorialized the kills with photographs and videos depicting the cheerful perpetrators clowning around with the bodies. It gets worse…victim’s fingers were cut off as trophies.

Krauss puts his primary focus on Specialist Adam Winfield, a soft-spoken, slightly-built young man. While Winfield admits participating in one of the killings (he maintains that he was bullied into involvement, and purposefully aimed high and away from the victim) he was the de facto “conscience” of the squad. Krauss suggests this through a recreation of Facebook chats between Adam and his ex-Marine dad, in which he expresses shock and dismay over the troubling culture of inhumanity within the platoon, and his growing personal disillusionment with the overall mission. “The army really let me down here…I find out it’s all a lie,” he notes, later offering this ominous assessment: “There are no good men here.” The full implications of Adam’s moral dilemma obviously did not sink in right away with his father, who asks during one exchange, “Can’t you just ask for a transfer?” to which Adam replies that the infantry doesn’t work that way-especially when you’re on a deployment (eventually, his father did try to reach out to authorities…but was stonewalled). Winfield alleges that once word reached Staff Sgt. Gibbs that he had been expressing concerns to fellow soldiers, there were strong indications that Gibbs and his co-conspirators began entertaining scenarios on how they might take him out….if need be.

While the director does seem to be taking pains to put him in the most sympathetic light possible amongst all his interviewees, it should be noted that Specialist Winfield was in fact not the “official” whistleblower. That was Specialist Justin Stoner (who also appears in the film). Ironically, while he was well aware of the Kill Team’s murderous behavior (he was not directly involved in any of the incidents), Stoner’s initial complaint to superiors involved the squad’s insistence on repeatedly crashing his room to get baked on hash (despite his surname, he did not partake, but worried that the lingering smell would unfairly get him into trouble). When Staff Sgt. Gibbs found out Stoner was the nark, he gathered up his goon squad and gave him a late night beat down in his room (as Stoner philosophically offers with a shrug, “Snitches get stitches.”). It was only during a subsequent inquiry regarding his injuries that Stoner spilled the beans about the murders.

This is really quite a story (sadly, an old one), and because it can be analyzed in many contexts (first person, historical, political, sociological, and psychological), some may find Krauss’ film frustrating, incomplete, or even slanted. But judging purely on the context he has chosen to use (first person) I think it works quite well. At the time of filming, Specialist Winfield was involved in his trial (he was charged with involuntary manslaughter). Krauss lets us quietly observe the emotional toll on Winfield and his loving parents. Granted, the nature of the actions that took place begs a number of larger questions, regarding ultimate accountability. Were these men merely aberrations, as the military’s official line would have us believe? Or is there indeed a culture of barbarism built in to the military psyche? After all, infantry soldiers are trained to kill, armed to the teeth, and generally thrown into combat situations at a biological stage of life where testosterone levels are running rampant…so what do we expect, right? Then there’s that time-honored military tradition of scapegoating. As someone brings up in the film, why is it that no one above the rank of Staff Sergeant went to trial in this case? And historically, (aside from Lt. Calley in the My Lai Massacre case) when have any brass ever been held accountable? I guess it’ll always be with the hitting, and the stoning, and the clubbing…

Previous posts with related themes:

Standard Operating Procedure
Stop-Loss
The Messenger
Lions for Lambs
Zero Dark Thirty
Waltz with Bashir
The Act of Killing
City of Life and Death
Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today

Saturday Night at the Movies review archives

Let’s talk about freedom and liberty some more, shall we?

by digby

Many of us have been appalled by the idea that we can keep so-called “enemy combatants” locked up in Guantanamo for years on end without due process. But we should probably be aware that this is happening here too:

In 1977, a Texas man named Jerry Hartfield was convicted of murder. His conviction was tossed out three years later because the process used to select his jury was unconstitutional. Yet Hartfield was neither freed from prison nor given a new trial. Last April, a Texas trial judge held that he must remain in prison, despite the fact that the sole legal basis for his detention was overturned nearly 34 years ago, because Hartfield did not actively seek a new trial.

Hartfield is intellectually disabled. His IQ is estimated to be only 51.

On Thursday, Hartfield’s case grew even more similar to a Franz Kafka novel with a Texas Court of Appeals decision refusing to grant him relief.

The holding of the appeals court’s decision is that Hartfield erred by filing what is known as a “pretrial habeas” petition, when the appropriate remedy “for an alleged violation of one’s constitutional right to a speedy trial” is “a pretrial motion to set aside the charging instrument on speedy-trial grounds.” The reason why this highly legalistic distinction matters is that, while a denial of a pretrial habeas petition can sometimes be appealed immediately, “the denial of a speedy-trial pretrial motion to quash an indictment may be appealed only after conviction and sentencing.”

So, in case all of that is not clear. Hartfield asked a court to order him freed because his speedy trial rights were violated by the fact that Texas imprisoned him for more than three decades without trial. Yet a Texas appeals court just told him that it is powerless to help him until after his criminal trial for an offense Texas refused to try him on for over 30 years.

Jesus H. Christ. 

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Confederate States of mind

by Tom Sullivan

Dave Neiwert linked the other day to this Doug Muder piece that traces the origins of some of our current rhetoric. He begins, “Tea Partiers say you don’t understand them because you don’t understand American history. That’s probably true, but not in the way they want you to think.” Muder contends that while the North won the Civil War, the planter aristocrats won Reconstruction, effectively nullifying the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, thereby preserving the social order and power structures God himself intended — to make and keep the planter aristocrats wealthy.
“[I]n the Confederate mind, no democratic process could legitimate such a change in the social order. It simply could not be allowed to stand, and it did not stand,” writes Muder. So, perhaps, it is with obstructionism in Congress today.

When in the majority, Confederates protect the established order through democracy. If they are not in the majority, but have power, they protect it through the authority of law. If the law is against them, but they have social standing, they create shams of law, which are kept in place through the power of social disapproval. If disapproval is not enough, they keep the wrong people from claiming their legal rights by the threat of ostracism and economic retribution. If that is not intimidating enough, there are physical threats, then beatings and fires, and, if that fails, murder.

What was old is new again. The South may be a place, writes Muder, “but the Confederacy is a worldview.” One not unique to the South. Gadsden flags appeared after Barack Obama was elected. Talk of tyranny was in the air and ammunition shelves emptied. There were implied threats of violence. Open carry advocates now strut through downtowns with AR-15s. (No threat implied, of course.) Echoes of the Reconstruction-era “rifle clubs,” perhaps.

One book Muder does not reference is Stephen Budiansky’s The Bloody Shirt, which covers the same period, the same cries of tyranny, and the rifle clubs mentioned above. In the Prologue, he writes,

A bald fact: Generations would hear how the South suffered “tyranny” under Reconstruction. Conveniently forgotten was the way that word was universally defined by white Southerners at the time: as a synonym for letting black men vote at all. A “remonstrance” issued by South Carolina’s Democratic Central Committee in 1868, personally signed by the leading native white political figures of the state, declared that there was no greater outrage, no greater despotism, than the provision for universal male suffrage just enacted in the state’s new constitution. There was but one possible consequence: “A superior race is put under the rule of an inferior race.” They offered a stark warning: “We do not mean to threaten resistance by arms. But the white people of our State will never quietly submit to negro rule. This is a duty we owe to the proud Caucasian race, whose sovereignty on earth God has ordained.”

That’s not an argument for slavery or for re-enslavement, but a demand for the continuation of superior privilege by people convinced they are entitled to wield power and fearful of sharing it. That is, it’s about power. Tribal power and racially tinged, but about power nonetheless.

The re-imposition of restrictive — and targeted — voting laws half a century after passage of the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts seems eerily reminiscent of the post-Civil War resistance described above. It was then and is now a denial of the equality among men which the Founders considered (in theory, anyway) self-evident and the foundation of democracy.

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“Seeing a dark figure approaching him, he fired”

by digby

And this guy is allegedly trained:

A Virginia sheriff’s deputy mistook his 16-year-old daughter for an intruder early Tuesday and shot her as she sneaked back into their home, authorities say.

After alerting 911, the deputy then crashed his car while racing her to the hospital, and emergency responders finished transporting her for treatment at Winchester Medical Center, the Frederick County Sheriff’s Office told WHAG-TV.

The teen was shot once in her torso and was listed in stable condition Thursday. She suffered no additional injuries when her father, Loudoun County Sheriff’s Deputy Easton McDonald, hit a barricade.

The shooting happened about 3:30 a.m. Tuesday while McDonald, a 13-year veteran, was getting ready for work, said Frederick County Sheriff’s Capt. Donnie Lang. The home’s alarm system indicated a door of the attached garage had been opened, and McDonald grabbed his personal handgun to investigate.

Seeing a dark figure approaching him, he fired.

I guess that’ll teach her to sneak out at night.

This happens more often than people realize:

A Colorado Springs father fatally shot his teenage step-daughter Monday, saying he thought she was a burglar. Prior to the incident, police received a call about a burglary in progress. But when they got there, they found the 14-year-old with a gunshot wound. She was taken to the hospital and died soon after, according to CBS Denver.

The incident is the latest tragedy involving the use of deadly force to protect the home. And it is one of several incidents in which a parent has killed their own child after they mistook them for a burglar. Last September a Connecticut teacher shot and killed his 15-year-old son after his neighbor called to say she thought she saw a robber in the front yard. Just a few weeks after that, a retired Chicago police officer shot and killed his 48-year-old son after he came in the back door late one night. And an off-duty police officer killed his son last July while the two were on vacation in upstate New York, after he told police he believed him to be an intruder.

I think this says it all:

Although Colorado does not have a Stand Your Ground law, it does have its own version of what is known as the Castle Doctrine, which allows homeowners to use deadly force to protect their dwelling without a duty to retreat. The law was dubbed the “Make My Day,” law after the 1983 Clint Eastwood film ”Sudden Impact,” in which Detective Harry Callahan — “Dirty Harry” — aims a gun at a criminal suspect and says, ”Go ahead, make my day.”

These people think they’re Clint Eastwood:

And they’re really Clint Howard.

Tom Cruise in a jetpackby Tom SullivanIMDB describes Minority Report thusly:

In the year 2054 A.D. crime is virtually eliminated from Washington D.C. thanks to an elite law enforcing squad “Precrime”. They use three gifted humans (called “Pre-Cogs”) with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand.

Meanwhile, here in the past an elite research team at N.C. State University is at work on a top secret project, Future States Processing (announced a year ago yesterday):

RALEIGH — As the field of “big data” continues to grow in importance, N.C. State University has landed a big coup – a major lab for the study of data analysis, funded by the National Security Agency.

This is from the project’s Executive Summary [emphasis mine]:

Broadly, Future States Processing (FSP) is “a mechanism that conceives of the state of an entity (e.g., person, place, or thing) at some point in the future based on a current collection of information.” One challenge is to decompose the broad aim of FSP into a set of key research areas. The group has identified five areas: narrative processing (addressed in another research theme), which allows the identification of emerging topics and narratives from structured and unstructured data; state description, which includes entity, feature, and attribute identification; state modeling, which identifies relationships and dependencies and creates a formal representation; process and prediction models, which infers subsequent states given the current description and a context; and uncertainty quantification, which addresses the precision with which the predictions can be made. Predictions must be made within a context, and an unaddressed issue is context generation. As the group identifies example problems, the preference is to focus on people as entities and to predict behavior or motivation.

Some people are paid to lose sleep over those unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know. For that, there’s “big data.” And now that No Such Agency has a place to store it (Bluffdale, UT), N.C. State just needs to develop the right set of algorithms to predict people’s future behaviors.But there’s still the unaddressed problem of “context generation.”Describe your most paranoid fantasy and — with the right data “corpus” — No Such Agency will tell you who’s most likely working on turning that threat into a reality.So you can arrest or kill them.What could go worng?What could go worng?

Sarah Palin, True Blue Republican

by digby

This is the usual Palin babble but it accurately expresses how the Republican mind works in these matters:

Now, as a military mom, I am always loathe to see a deployment of our troops…

Trust me, I mean some days, okay, some days I wake up thinkin’ maybe I’m the conservative version of Cindy Sheehan. Once in a while I’ve thought that…

Under this commander-in-chief, Barack Obama, I really thought, you know, no, no boots on the ground…

But times are different today since this utter chaos has ensued, it’s been on President Obama’s watch…

I sincerely don’t want to see us have to go back to Iraq…

It’s imperative that we put a stop once and for all to ISIS. It must be the goal here…

They’re far, far too dangerous to leave unchecked…

Who could do this? If not God’s hand of protection that we ask for, the only force that can accomplish this, President Obama, is the United States military.

Don’t ever think that given the chance they won’t wrap themselves in the flag and send in the troops. That’s one of the pillars of their philosophy — you can fix everything if you just apply enough violence. If you combine that with the liberal impulse to try to fix everything with good intentions, you get a majority that will almost always endorse American intervention.

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 Of course some predicting is easy.  When ProPublica did a story on Move America Forward I said this:

Bookmark my words, they will circle the wagons because of the “hit piece” by the liberal media and then they will use it to raise money. All accusations will be denied, and they look forward to their, “day in court” where they will be proved right. 

Sure enough Red State runs Move America Forward Responds to ProPublica Allegations filled with denials as well as some serious name calling and accusations of defamation.  I contacted ProPublica to see if Red State called them to respond to MAFs comment.  Red State didn’t but ProPublica responded to MAFs comments and accusations anyway.

In my piece I pointed out how incredibly smart MAF’s people were to not respond to ProPublica’s request for comments.   This enabled them to later go to their own media and explain everything and classify it all as a liberal ‘hit piece.’

Their one mistake was not responding quickly enough to their own media who wondered if the allegations might be true.

However when someone on their side asked for facts, their true loyalties were questioned. In between the, “All charities are rackets” and “I do my research before giving.” Ed Morrissey at Hot Air is accused of working for George Soros. (The ultimate insult!) Even after he runs the full MAF reply later that day. But he gets the message and backs off.

When people talk about “getting money out of politics” it becomes this abstract discussion about how it will be done. There aren’t lot of “on the ground” stories about how the people who are GETTING this money will react to any attempts to slow down or stop the money.

My work alerting the advertisers of right wing radio shows showed me how people and organizations react when you get between them and their revenue stream.  In that case the advertisers were being hurt. Their brands were tainted by the close association with the vicious, horrific comments of the hosts.

In this case I wondered, “Who is being hurt by the actions of Move America Forward?”  The troops were getting care packages, maybe not a many or as big as they could be because of all the overhead, but so what?

The people being hurt are all the charities of any strip who DO follow the rules.  If people see that only suckers follow the rules, why follow them at all?

To be honorable? Honor is important in the military and for many people on the right and left.

I also said these groups are extremely savvy legally, financially, politically and in the media and that opinion or reports from anyone except their own investigators would be discounted.

What I didn’t understand is that even thoughtful people on the right who understand the benefit of investigations from their own side to “see the facts resolved” offer little hope of anything happening.

As “Ace of Spades” says

The right-leaning media has a weakness, which is that it is tiny, and furthermore, that the actual reportorial arm of that media is disproportionately small, even within the small universe of the right-wing media. We’re very heavy with commentators, and very light with reporters. 

So reportorial resources are very limited, and any right-leaning paper has to choose, for example, whether to put one of its few reporters on this story for a couple of weeks, or keep that reporter on a story more likely to produce well-received stories on Obama’s scandals. 

The net result is often that exposés like this are never proven, nor disproven, to the satisfaction of anyone on the right.

Now while I’d debate how small the “right-leaning media” is I agree with the point that reportorial resources from a right-leaning paper will go to producing Obama scandal stories rather than in a case like this.

What is to be done?

The Government is hamstrung by successful mau-mauing from the right (btw did you know that there is a moratorium on all IRS investigations?) and no media is to be trusted, what are the people who were harmed to do? What about the people who were mislead?

Organizations like Charity Navigator, that do look into compliance in various areas, build on information from the IRS as well as some of their own suggested guidelines.  (BTW, Move America Forward got zero stars.) But Charity Navigator has  no compelling authority for any change, people are free to ignore them.

A few solutions.

1) Suggest to the organizations harmed they request compensation from the group that didn’t follow the rules.  There is no legal compulsion for the offending organization to comply, but it is the honorable thing to do.

2) Look into legal remedies, copyright law comes to mind when it comes to the use of photos without permission.

3) The donors who feel they were misled, and don’t fell the explanations given are enough could ask for their money back and give it to a group they have more confidence in.

4) People who don’t like to confront, prosecute or require anyone to follow any rules can find better groups and give them money with the hope that the good groups will drive out the bad.

So specifically on this topic I suggest that the people at Operation Gratitude, Adopt a Platoon, and Operation Oreo, a project of Alpharetta Methodist Church in Georgia look to Move America Forward for compensation. I doubt they will tell you how much they took in, but they will tell you how strapped they are and why they had to use your photos for free.)

I would like them to keep in mind when MAF talks about how broke they are their Administrative and Fundraising expenses are 46.6%. Compare to Operation Gratitude’s Administrative and fundraising expenses of only 1.34% of their budget:  98.16% of all donations are devoted to Program Services.

Everyone should check things out for themselves, especially if you don’t trust anyone, but when all means of oversight are destroyed or devalued we are all harmed.

8-16-2014 UPDATED HEADLINE, named Hot Air writer as Ed Morrissey

Tucker Carlson’s nasty little protege

by digby

In case you are even slightly tempted to take this ridiculous screed by Patrick Howley about the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly at Tucker Carlson’s online rag seriously, keep this in mind:

A conservative reporter and his high-profile boss extended an apology to Buzzfeed’s Rosie Gray on Wednesday night for a pair of crude and sexist tweets that immediately set off an uproar. 

The tweets came from The Daily Caller’s Patrick Howley, who pulled the offensive content shortly after it was published. But the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly spotted the tweets before they were deleted and let The Daily Caller’s editor-in-chief Tucker Carlson know that he had a copy. 

Several journalists soon asked Reilly what Howley said, but Reilly initially indicated that he didn’t intend to republish the tweets. Howley subsequently taunted Reilly on Twitter.
Then, after receiving permission from Gray, Reilly shared screencaps of the tweets he said “will hopefully haunt” Howley for a long time.

How pathetic that Tucker Carlson allows this sexist twit to work out his little vendetta by accusing Reilly of shaming the journalism profession. But frankly, it was probably Carlson’s idea. He’s the snottiest creep in media, always has been. Looks like he has a protege.

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Making up crimes so you can solve them

by digby

I wish I understood what the point of this is:

FBI and federal prosecutors … have successfully targeted suspected terrorists using sting operations, typically ending with the defendants about to embark on what they believe is a terrorist attack with fake weapons or bombs supplied by the bureau. Guilty verdicts and long prison sentences follow.

According to a recent report by Human Rights Watch, nearly 50 percent of the more than 500 federal counterterrorism convictions since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have “resulted from informant-based cases; almost 30 percent of those cases were sting operations in which the informant played an active role in the underlying plot.”

Among the more prominent prosecutions, a Moroccan man was convicted for planning a suicide bombing at the Capitol. Amine Mohamed El Khalifi, an illegal immigrant who lived in Alexandria, was arrested wearing a suicide vest that he believed to be real and had been provided by undercover FBI agents. In Portland, a Somali-American was convicted of planning to remotely detonate an 1,800 pound bomb at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony. The device was, in fact, inert and had been supplied by the bureau. In one 2009 case, the FBI arrested a group of men in New York state — the “Newburgh Four” — and charged them with plotting to blow up a pair of synagogues in the Bronx with fake bombs provided by an informant.

I’ve never understood why authorities do this (other than a sort of masturbatory technique to up their arrest statistics.) Creating phony crimes so you can arrest some dumb schmuck who falls for your scam just doesn’t seem like serious police work to me.