Nothing wrong with law enforcement monitoring people who make violent threats against the country, but why does the FBI feel they must stage manage crimes in order to stop terrorism?
It’s clearly all about justifying your budget allocation, but it’s also ridiculous and counterproductive. Aren’t there enough actual terrorists to go around without inventing new ones?
Gorilla says: “Remote controlled airplane bombs are one thing, phony remote controlled airplane bombs are something else!”
For jobs in the Administration:
Now, it’s Ryan Crocker to Afghanistan, yet another man who could not tell the truth to anyone in power and got a Medal of Freedom for it!
And it’s Mueller of the FBI, who failed America completely at 9/11, but must have another 2 years because ???
And it’s Geithner at Treasury, a corrupted and unconvincing clown apologist for Wall Street, who doesn’t give a damn about unemployed Americans?
And it’s Bernanke at the Fed, misser of the housing bubble, who’s shocked, shocked to find that his fellow Republicans are batshit crazy, but doesn’t want to rock their boat by saying they are?
Why is it not possible to find qualified people for these jobs who are not discredited Republican remnants or demonstrably incompetent?
Gorilla answers: “Because failure is a feature, not a bug, in Washington!”
George Mitchell, failed Middle East envoy, calls it quits!!!
Robert Mueller, failed FBI Director, gets another 2 years!!!
And this is what Washington’s all about these days: a lack of accountability, a recycling of the past, and a deep unwillingness to do anything serious at all about our failing country.
Gorilla says: “The reward for failure is more or less what the reward for failure has become!”
Another day, another fake terrorist plot orchestrated by the FBI!
Are there not enough real terrorists to catch?
Are there not ways in which potential terrorists might be arrested without wasting money on fake surveillance, fake wiretapping, and fake bomb construction?
Absent FBI encouragement, aren’t every single one of these “terrorists” pointless no hopers who are no threat to anyone but themselves?
Gorilla says: “Next headline: fake terrorists are rounded up in plot to blow up the FBI’s budget!”
Here’s how NASA logic works:
“We found some microbes on earth, gave ‘em some arsenic, and they thrived. Might be the way it will work for alien life forms”.
Here’s how FBI logic works:
“We can’t catch real terrorists, so we provide arms to wannabes, they dutifully consider becoming terrorists, and we arrest them. Might be the way it will work for alien Wall Street life forms, but we won’t catch them either”.
Gorilla says: “It’s all about the science of budget justification!”
Not content with altering the photos of a Spanish politician to recreate the new, aging Osama bin Laden, the FBI was also engaged in inventing nonexistent terrorist plots to justify ongoing and illegal wiretaps of American citizens.
Bottom line: the FBI isn’t really necessary and never has been. It’s record in catching criminals has been abysmal, so it’s branched out into combatting international terrorism, with predictably mediocre results.
Meanwhile, civil liberties remains under threat so long as there’s no effective check on FBI criminality.
Gorilla says: “Why, oh why do we need an FBI?”
Osama bin Laden as the FBI imagines he might look these days…
And why’s the FBI doing this? Presumably to justify their budgets, and to point out that the CIA has yet to catch America’s Most Wanted Man…
Gorilla says: “It’s all about the Trollope for these trollops!”
“There was but one thing for him;- to persevere till he got her, or till he had finally lost her. And should the latter be his fate, as he began to fear that it would be, then, he would live, but live only, like a crippled man.”
5 Americans were arrested in Pakistan, and the FBI’s suspicion is they were over there for jihad.
What’s really interesting about the story are two things:
1) The Hapless Five were turned down by every Pakistani group they approached. This says that there’s either no shortage of terrorists on the ground, or that jihadi groups want better quality recruits.
2) The FBI knew nothing about the Hapless Five until an American Muslim group called to report they were missing. So much for all that vaunted surveillance and the budget justifying foreign trips!
Gorilla says: “Surging won’t work when the terrorists are purging!”
It’s not clear whether millionaires are now being more careful, when thousands of ‘em are rapidly rejiggering their international tax evasion strategies after the US agreement with Switzerland.
2,400 frauds when millions are losing their homes seems like very small beer in the annals of crime, only slightly more as a percentage than the number of successfully prosecuted voter fraud cases. But that’s not how it’s been reported in the press or massaged by the FBI.
Let’s assume for a moment that every dime of the $2.4 billion in home value could be recovered from the fraudsters.
This would amount to less than 15% of the amount the taxpayers are currently wasting on the first time home buyers credit, wherein an additional 350,000 homes have been sold at a cost of $60,000/home in taxpayer subsidy.
Gorilla says: “It’s hard to tell a sucker from a sucker when we’re funding both sides of the lollipop!”
We’re in the midst of another terrorist roundup, today’s took place in Australia.
What’s hard to figure out about these swoops is the timing. They always seem to happen when something’s not going quite right for the incumbent administration, and result from years of watching and waiting by the security services. Obama’s been losing ground steadily on health care, then suddenly the FBI’s got a bunch of very dubious guys from North Carolina who are hot for foreign jihad.
In Australia, a 7-month investigation sprung into action, although the suspected terrorists apparently wanted but hadn’t obtained a fatwa to authorize their operation, which consisted of going to an army base and shooting anybody they saw.
Gorilla says: “What about the real terrorists, you know, like the ones who attacked us in 2001 and we still haven’t captured in Pakistan? Doubt they’ll be waiting around for a fatwa or some Holy Land BBQ”.
