Did an Undercover FBI Agent Seems to Have Directly Encouraged Garland, TX Jihadist Shooter to Attack "Draw Mohammad" Rally

Is this actual standard FBI undercover protocol -- encouraging a jihadist to kill someone so you can arrest him?

I don't know. At this point, though, I'm ready to believe most anything.

On the other hand: the undercover agent was posing as a jihadist himself. Obviously he's supposed to play Jihadist in his communications with this guy.

If this guy is speaking vaguely of jihad, he's supposed to agree, right? Otherwise the guy would know he's not for real.

So I don't know if this agent was doing something wrong.

He does seem to have entirely misjudged how serious his jihadist contact was, and how imminent his plan was.

But being wrong is not a crime. Except when Hillary Clinton becomes president.

Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent.

“Tear up Texas,” the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit filed in federal court Thursday.

“U know what happened in Paris,” Simpson responded. “So that goes without saying… No need to be direct.”

That revelation comes amidst a national debate about the use of undercover officers and human sources in terrorism cases. Undercover sources are used in more than half of ISIS-related terror cases, according to statistics kept by the George Washington University Program on Extremism, and civil liberties advocates say some of those charged might not have escalated their behavior without those interventions.

“It would certainly be inappropriate for an FBI undercover agent or cooperating witness to provoke or inspire or urge a person to commit an act of violence,” Michael German, a former FBI agent now at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Daily Beast. “I could imagine an undercover agent thinking it was just the hyperbolic rhetoric they are participating in, and it wasn’t an intent to go to texas and do harm.”

...

According to the court papers, [the jihadist] asked the undercover officer about the Draw Muhammad event’s security, size, and police presence, during the event, according to an affidavit filed in court.

The affidavit does not specify what the undercover responded to questions about size and security.

Well... now we're getting into a very dark area. Why don't they specify what the undercover agent answered? Did he provide accurate details or false ones? What?

posted by Ace at 11:07 AM

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