The zealous approach to law enforcement in this age of protest and terror has created a strange and dangerous notion that a shitload of stuff is bad, when in reality, bad is self-perpetrating.

Last night, a new ‘lone wolf’ terrorist, Jose Pimentel, was arraigned in a New York court on charges of targeting U.S. Iraq and Afghanistan servicemen, and also intended to strike U.S. postal facilities and police in New York and Bayonne, New Jersey.
Pimentel’s attorney, Joseph Zablock, begs to differ:

“As they admit, he has a very public online profile, and that flies in the face of everything that they’ve said,” Zablocki said at the hearing.
“This is not the way you go about committing terrorist attacks.”

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg: “There is no evidence he worked with anyone else…He appears to be … a lone wolf.”

(Illustration found here).

Since Sept. 11, 2001, terrorists are hiding under just about every rock in the US and all around the world.
And a lot of these so-called ‘lone wolf’ terrorists have been goaded on by the very peoples who are supposed to be watching out for such things — a situation similar to leaving keys in the car, hoping an attempt would be made to steal it, then jump the perpetrator.
Glenn Greenwald has a most-excellent overview of these FBI-inspired terror operations here.

Even the ‘lone wolf’ category was added to the infamous Patriot Act in 2004.
So scared shitless, the FBI creates terror where once there was just poverty, much injustice and unemployment — job security at its zenith.

Mother Jones magazine conducted an investigation last August on all these supposedly ‘lone wolf’ incidents and found that 10 percent of all these cases were led by an “agent provocateur,” and exposed several as weak examples of terrorism “instigated” by the FBI.
Furthermore, from The Investigative Project on Terrorism:

The FBI has nearly tripled its use of informants since 9/11, the report says.
That surge in the number of FBI informants, according to Mother Jones’ Trevor Aaronson, is worrisome.
“The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack,” a teaser atop Aaronson’s article “Informants,” which includes those statistics, reads.
“But are they busting terrorist plots-or leading them?”
…
“I think in many of these cases nothing would have happened were it not for the FBI going in and making a plot possible,” Aaronson told NPR.
But in a post 9/11 world, informants must be sent in before a plot is in the works with real bad guys.
Former FBI counter terrorism official Arthur Cummings told Aaronson why.
“We’re looking for the sympathizer who wants to become an operator, and we want to catch them when they step over that line to operator.”

Despite all this, the FBI and other agencies failed to do anything in October when a ‘lone wolf’ terrorist  threw a bottle containing volatile liquids into a crowd at an OWS gathering in Maine.
From emptywheel:

In other words, the attack in ME — even if it was as pathetic as Mohamud’s alleged attack or that of any number of aspirational Muslim terrorists — was an attempt to use a WMD, since explosives qualify as a WMD.
And even more than Mohamud’s alleged attack, this was an attempt to achieve political ends through violence.
Terrorism.
…
And yet, somehow, in the absence of a young Muslim man goaded on and provided explosives by the FBI itself, the FBI doesn’t see it as terrorism.

A point of selective action, I guess.

This over-reaching by US authorities might have a day in court.
In 2010, four poor guys from a US horror hole, Newburgh, NY, about 60 miles north of New York City — a place of drugs and crime — were arrested on charges of terrorism, and eventually three were sentenced to 25 years in prison.
According to firedoglake: US District Judge Colleen McMahon understood the men were only in her court for sentencing because the FBI “created an act of terrorism.” She understood the FBI scripted the plot from “start to finish.” But, afraid to upset superiors or government officials, she condemned the defendants’ anti-Semitism and their willingness to “kill, maim and destroy for money.”
Those guys were used as ‘counterterror lab rats.’
And these guys were apparently easy pickings by the FBI.

From UK’s The Guardian last week:

Lawyers for the so-called Newburgh Four have now launched an appeal that will be held early next year. Advocates hope the case offers the best chance of exposing the issue of FBI “entrapment” in terror cases. “We have as close to a legal entrapment case as I have ever seen,” said Susanne Brody, who represents another Newburgh defendant, Onta Williams.
Some experts agree.
“The target, the motive, the ideology and the plot were all led by the FBI,” said Karen Greenberg, a law professor at Fordham University in New York, who specialises in studying the new FBI tactics.
…
Even more shocking was that the organisation, money, weapons and motivation for this plot did not come from real Islamic terrorists.
It came from the FBI, and an informant paid to pose as a terrorist mastermind paying big bucks for help in carrying out an attack.
For McWilliams, her own government had actually cajoled and paid her beloved nephew into being a terrorist, created a fake plot and then jailed him for it.
“I feel like I am in the Twilight Zone,” she told the Guardian.
…
This year the jailed Liberty City men launched an appeal and last week judgment was handed down. They lost, and officially remain Islamic terrorists hell-bent on destroying America. Not that their supporters see it that way.
“Our country is no safer as a result of the prosecution of these seven impoverished young men from Liberty City,” said Batiste’s lawyer, Ana Jhones.
“This prosecution came at great financial cost to our government, and at a terrible emotional cost to these defendants and their families. It is my sincere belief that our country is less safe as a result of the government’s actions in this case.”

Wonder what J. Edgar would have thought — he’d most-likely be overjoyed.