I spy

FBI Trained an Agent Provocateur

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A New Jersey blogger facing charges in two states for allegedly making threats against lawmakers and judges was trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative, his attorney said Tuesday.
Hal Turner worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an "agent provocateur" and was taught by the agency "what he could say that wouldn't be crossing the line," defense attorney Michael Orozco said.

A couple comments on this story. I'm not sure who Hal Turner is, but it doesn't matter. The federal government has long been known to have spies and plants and informants who infiltrate groups and incite them to do things they normally wouldn't.

Saul Landau writes:

Worse, FBI “informants” often doubled as “agents provocateurs.” In the 1960s, anti war and civil rights activists learned to suspect those proposing violence and labeling skeptics “chickenshit.” Such advocates regularly turned out to be FBI infiltrators. I recall a meeting during which one man screamed: “Let’s kill a pig. That’ll wake people up and show ‘em, we mean business.” Inevitably, such statements gained the support of a few nuts and indeed some violent scenarios actually took shape.

By placing such characters inside the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements, the Bureau hoped to provoke violence so as to show the public that anti-war and civil rights activists were dangerous. Most citizens opposed the war and sympathized with anti-war protests, but drew a sharp line at violence.

I recall at an anti-Vietnam War meeting someone insisted on violent action as the only means to bring about radical transformation. Later, I learned the cops had busted the person on drug charges and turned him over to the FBI, who offered to drop the charges in return for his inciting groups to commit mayhem.

Often the inciting has darker implications, when the agents supply weapons that are normally unobtainable to fringe groups, then "busts them". The news media covers the bust, and stirs public outrage about the "availability" of weapons, leading to more restrictive laws, without ever mentioning that it was the government that supplied the weapons in the first place.

Robert Dreyfuss writes:

By the now, it's maddeningly familiar. A scary terrorist plot is announced. Then it's revealed that the suspects are a hapless bunch of ne'er-do-wells or run-of-the-mill thugs without the slightest connection to any terrorists at all, never mind to Al Qaeda. Finally, the last piece of the puzzle: the entire plot is revealed to have been cooked up by a scummy government agent-provocateur.

...

Preying on these losers, none of whom were apparently actual Muslims, the "confidential informant" orchestrated the acquisition of a disabled Stinger missile to shoot down military planes and cooked up a wild scheme about attacking a Jewish center in the Bronx.

There's a moral here folks. It's not hard to spot the federal agent. He'll be the one at the Tea Party or the abortion protest or the gun show with the big mouth, wanting some action.