An hour after Mayor Carlos Rosas publicly described the “terror” that plagued his town of Orito in the southern coca-producing province of Putumayo, he was dead. Gunmen shot the mayor at point-blank range in front of his home in broad daylight and sped away. They were never identified or caught.
In the radio address he gave just before his assassination, Rosas described the fear that the citizens feel in an area that produces most of the world’s cocaine and has felt the full force of the nation’s civil war. “Corpses are appearing, cars are being burned, and this terrifies everyone,” he said.
As Colombia stands on the brink of a major counter-narcotics campaign, most of which will be concentrated in Putumayo, the terror shows no signs of letting up.
Last month, just as the Colombian government and the guerrillas of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) were about to begin the most serious conversations of the 2-year-old peace process — the possibility of a bilateral cease-fire — the FARC froze those talks, setting the tone for a possible intensification of the civil conflict that has torn at this Andean country for more than three decades.
The FARC was angered by a meeting between a high-level representative of the Colombian government and a leading paramilitary force, the United Colombian Self Defense Leagues (known by its Spanish acronym, AUC) which the FARC has been fighting. The meeting was held ostensibly to gain release of a group of congressmen kidnapped by paramilitary forces last month. The FARC has claimed that in meeting with paramilitary leaders, the Colombian government shows a lack of interest in curbing paramilitary terrorism.
FARC spokesmen even accused the half-dozen congressmen reportedly kidnapped last month by the AUC of having staged their own kidnappings in order to facilitate the meeting between Interior Minister Humberto de la Calle and AUC head Carlos Castano.
But the FARC also places blame on U.S. policy in the region and said its decision to cut off peace negotiations was influenced by the U.S. Plan Colombia. Though the U.S. calls that absurd, it’s clear that the future of the peace process will have a serious impact on the success or failure of the counter-narcotics campaign.
The peace freeze came as the U.S. also announced it was delaying the implementation of the Plan Colombia until January and a high level State Department delegation visited Bogota to finalize points in the plan
Originally the plan was expected to start early this month. Undersecretary of Defense Brian Sheridan in Bogota said U.S. and Colombian authorities had agreed to postpone the plan until January, when 33 of 60 helicopters included in the $1.3 billion aid package approved by Congress will arrive in Colombia and will be available for the Colombian armed forces.
Fierce fighting between guerrillas and paramilitaries has raged throughout the last two months in Putumayo, where most of Plan Colombia will be concentrated. Hundreds of residents have fled for Ecuador, since all roads to central Colombia are dangerous and controlled by one side or the other. Some who haven’t left remained trapped by the rebels or the paramilitaries.
Putumayo was selected as the primary site of Plan Colombia because an estimated 216 square miles are planted with high-yield coca plantations, and over half of the entire Colombian coca production is harvested in this province. About 300,000 people are employed in jobs related to cocaine production.
“Putumayo is the FARC’s Wall Street,” said a foreign diplomat. “This is not an area of small plantations, but of heavy cultivation.”
The area has practically been a war zone since Sept. 21, when paramilitaries took over important coca producing towns, killing those citizens they knew were guerrilla collaborators. In La Dorada, a key drug-producing town, the paramilitaries had killed up to 40 people suspected of leftist sympathies as of late October. U.S. and Colombian officials say the drug traffickers who depend on the crops produced in Putumayo had grown unhappy with the guerrillas and their control over the coca production prices. “The narcos brought the paramilitary because they didn’t like the FARC controlling the market,” said a U.S. government official.
The area’s residents have been living at the mercy of the warring parties. The government has airlifted supplies, but the needs are still greater. It took 56 days after the guerrillas took over Pasto Mocoa highway for the Colombian army to reopen it. The road, an important one that connects Putumayo with the rest of the country, was littered with abandoned vehicles left after combat had stopped their owners on their routes. Even after the army asked for the vehicle owners to return, the cars remained.
Plan Colombia is expected to unleash the biggest military offensive to date in Southern Colombia. Fumigation planes protected by helicopters will spray bountiful coca plantations in the region, which is controlled by the FARC. Colombian mobile military units, trained by the U.S., will push into the territory and try to clean the area.
But how well the Colombian military will fare is not known. They have faced several military setbacks recently. The guerrilla ambush that left 53 soldiers dead and one destroyed Black Hawk helicopter last month has left foreign diplomats and Colombian military experts wondering what they can expect in the next few months, when the war is expected to get worse. “Putumayo is going to be one of the toughest areas militarily,” according to Alfredo Rangel, a respected military analyst who advises the Colombian armed forces.
“When the army goes into that area to fight the FARC and end the coca plantations it will ignite the conflict beyond anything we have seen,” he added.
Looming in the background of the decision to freeze negotiations are reports that all the fighting forces involved in this conflict have been making preparations to increase their troop size. Military experts and foreign diplomats say the FARC has been recruiting new soldiers, and expect the force to grow from 17,000 to up to 40,000. Police intelligence reports also show that the flow of weapons to the guerillas has intensified in the last few months, including the shipment of handheld missiles that could down helicopters. The Colombian army this week announced it would recruit 10,000 more men for three additional anti-guerrilla mobile brigades, but these troops won’t be available for combat until next year. Meanwhile right-wing paramilitary groups have been pushing to be given political recognition by the government.
The FARC is playing a tough game that could backfire. Last week, Colombian police released an intercepted radio address broadcast to FARC troops by Jorge Briceno, aka Mono Jojoy, the FARC’s top military strategist, in which he said he did not believe the peace process would work. Briceno told his troops that FARC was not “going to agree to peace because it doesn’t exist” and that even if the FARC was able to seize power, there would not be peace “because there will then be war with the gringos and other powers.”
The U.S. State Department in turn has said it is “ridiculous” for the FARC to use Plan Colombia as an excuse to stop all dialogue, and urged the rebels to return to the negotiation table. But the U.S. seemed to take a cautious approach too in announcing a postponement of the launching date for Plan Colombia. Some analysts say the FARC could use similar tactics as they used in 1996 to face the army. “The guerrillas have the possibility of provoking civilian uprisings and make them confront the army. What will that do for the international opinion to see a soldier facing a starving looking peasant. I think the potential in Putumayo could be terrible for us. At this moment, militarily, Plan Colombia is teetering,” said Rangel.
But a U.S. government official rejected that scenario. “Information in the press suggests that peasants in Putumayo are leaving rather than submitting to the FARC’s pressure to arm themselves against Plan Colombia.”
Nevertheless, even high military officials understand that the role of civilians will be critical to how Plan Colombia will play out. “The only way that the FARC will be convinced that they cannot win the war will be to have a strong, solid, professional army that has the support of the civilian population,” Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez said.
Note: A correction has been made to this story.
On Tuesday, a Senate Appropriations Committee vote effectively highlighted everything that is stupid about politics.
The Transportation Security Administration, a universally loathed government agency, is facing a shortfall, despite its more than $8 billion budget. Instead of having a debate over what effective airport security might actually look like and how much should reasonably be spent on the honestly rare threat of commercial-air-travel-based terrorism, there was a debate over how best to come up with the money needed for all the radioactive naked picture machines and bomb-sniffing dogs. The Democrats suggested passing on the cost of ineffective, cumbersome and intrusive security theater to citizens, via higher fees on airfares. The Republicans, even more predictably, suggested cutting spending that directly helps poor people to ensure there is enough to spend on stopping imaginary future 9/11s.
The newspaper account of the debate in The Hill just reinforced the Republican spin, highlighting the Democrats’ decision to make people spend more money on the hated TSA and downplaying the actual existing Republican alternative to the proposal, which was not “spend less on the hated TSA” but rather “raise money for the hated TSA by slashing needed aid to states.” The Democrats won, or “won,” and now they will earn the fruits of that victory: well-deserved scorn from everyone. And Ben Nelson (D-Troll Town) voted with the Republicans. (Though surely having users pay the fees for supposedly necessary security measures is perfectly conservative, isn’t it? Am I missing something here? I mean besides the fact that the two sides in this debate weren’t actually “liberal” and “conservative” but rather “people who want to come up with a way of paying for the oppressive and useless national security state” versus “people who want there to be an oppressive national security state but hate government spending on feeding and sheltering impoverished people.”)
I don’t know of anyone not employed by the TSA or some other arm of Homeland Security that believes the TSA does a good job and deserves its massive budget, but everyone in Washington apparently feels differently (and is terrified of being blamed for “voting to cut TSA funding” if there is another terrifying and deadly underwear bomber, of course). This is why everyone hates politics and Congress and Washington. This and Iraq. And the drug war.
NEW YORK (AP) — An artist who was setting up an “I Love New York”-themed public art display in Brooklyn was arrested after the wired contraption was mistaken for an explosive device.
Takeshi Miyakawa, a visual artist and furniture designer, was arrested Saturday after placing the installation in two separate areas of the same New York City neighborhood. His lawyer and employer both called the arrest a misunderstanding.
The first apparatus was found Friday morning after a caller reported a suspicious package to police. It consisted of a plastic bag that contained a battery and was suspended from a metal rod attached to a tree. The bag, which had the classic “I Love New York” logo printed on it, was connected by a wire to a plastic box that contained more wires.
The area was evacuated for two hours until a bomb squad determined that the device was not dangerous.
At about 2 a.m. Saturday, a police officer discovered Miyakawa on a ladder not far from where the first contraption was found. Police said he was tying a similar “I Love New York” bag to a public lamp post.
Miyakawa was charged with two counts of first-degree reckless endangerment, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the first degree, two counts of placing a false bomb or hazardous substance in the second degree, two counts of second-degree reckless endangerment and two counts of second-degree criminal nuisance.
A judge ordered him held pending a psychiatric evaluation. His lawyer, Deborah J. Blum, said Monday that she is filing for emergency relief to have Miyakawa released. A court date was set for June 21 to review the results of the evaluation.
“He’s still being held,” Blum said Monday. “I believe that it was a gross misunderstanding and other than that I don’t have any other comment.”
Miyakawa, who was born in Tokyo and is about 50 years old, has worked for a New York-based architect Rafael Vinoly for the last 20 years and also has an independent design practice.
Vinoly’s firm released a statement Monday praising Miyakawa for his “extraordinary brand of professionalism” and said he has been a mentor to generations of young architects.
“Takeshi is a fabulous human being and a person of extraordinary talent,” Vinoly said. “We hope this misunderstanding is cleared up as quickly as possible.”
New York Civil Liberties Union Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement that the charges sounded “like a wild overreaction.”
“It’s hard to understand why a light-up bag in a tree would be treated as an attempted terrorist act unless there’s more to the story than has been reported in the press thus far,” she said.
In 2007, an artist touched off a terror scare in Boston by placing electronic devices around the city as part of a marketing stunt for Cartoon Network. The city closed bridges, roads and public transit before authorities realized the signs were not bombs.
On an average day, the NYPD receives nearly 100 reports of a suspicious package. Last year, there were more than 4,000 such reports. The number generally rises following any word of terror threats in New York and around the world.
Another deadly plot taken down in the planning stages. This time, thanks to the work of a CIA double agent, officials were able to infiltrate a Yemen-based al-Qaida plot to destroy a U.S.-bound jetliner using a nearly undetectable underwear bomb.The moral of the story: Airport security works!Am I being facetious? Not necessarily. It depends on your definition of airport security.
In my mind, the key to keeping airplanes safe is, and always has been, stopping acts of sabotage while they are still in the planning stages. Here in the age of the TSA checkpoint, with its toothpaste confiscations and obsession with pointy objects, we tend not to think this way, preoccupied instead with a kind of airport Kabuki — the tedious, fanatical screening of passengers and their carry-ons. Real airport security takes place offstage, as it were. It is the job of the folks at the CIA and the FBI, working together with foreign authorities. And while TSA has an important role here too, we can do without the spectacle of airport guards rifling through innocent people’s bags in a pathological hunt for what are effectively harmless items.
The concourse checkpoint needs to be there. Just the same, chances are good that once an adversary has made it to the airport, he or she has engineered a way to outwit the system. And spend as we might, there will always be a way to outwit the system. ”Even if our technology is good enough to spot it,” said California Rep. Adam Schiff, commenting on the news of the latest underwear plot, “technology is still in human hands and we are inherently fallible.”
That’s one of the smartest things I’ve heard a politician utter in some time.
Getting a handle on this takes us all the way back to Sept. 11, 2001, the day that everything, and yet really nothing, changed. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Conventional wisdom holds that the 19 hijackers exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling box cutters onto four Boeing jetliners. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What the men actually exploited was a weakness in our mind-set — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings and how they were expected to unfold. (In prior years, a hijacking meant a diversion, perhaps to Havana or Beirut, with hostage negotiations and standoffs; crews were accordingly trained in the concept of “passive resistance.”) The presence of box cutters on 9/11 was merely incidental. The men could have used almost anything — a deadly sharp can be fashioned from a broken first-class dinner plate or a ballpoint pen — particularly when coupled with the bluff of having a bomb. The success of their plan relied not on hardware but on the element of surprise. It wasn’t a failure of airport security that allowed those men to hatch their takeover scheme. It was a failure of national security — a breakdown of communication and oversight at the FBI and CIA level.
To put it succinctly: The success of the 9/11 attacks had almost nothing to do with airport security at all — a great and painful irony, of course, to any passenger forced to endure the checkpoint rigmarole in 2012.
Not that frontline guards don’t play a deterrent role. And, in the opinions of some, the plot uncovered in Yemen underscores the value of full-body scanners — those controversial walk-through machines that allow guards to look beneath a passenger’s clothing. It’s a compelling argument, but the way in which these scanners have — and have not — been deployed is apt to make some of us cynical. For instance, the vast majority of body scanners are found at U.S. domestic airports. Overseas, where a bomb is far likelier to originate, they are rare. Is this really about safety, we wonder, or is it about billions of dollars going into the coffers of the companies contracted to build these machines?
And although the scanners are effective, where does the arms race end? Not long ago, the idea that passengers would be marched through body scanners and photographed naked before being allowed to board an airplane, would have seemed outrageous. Yet here we are. What might be next? The stubborn truth is, we can turn airports into fortresses if we want (in some respects we’re well along that path), yet we’ll never be entirely safe. Airport screening alone, no matter how thorough, how expensive, and how technologically advanced, will never defeat a relentless enough, resourceful enough adversary intent on downing a plane.
That isn’t capitulation, it’s reality. And acknowledging this reality would go a long way toward warding off panic and overreaction when the next successful attack occurs.
Regrettably, too, we often forget that commercial air travel has long been a target of terrorist extremists. The 1970s and 1980s in particular were, as I like to describe them, a Golden Age of Air Crimes, comparatively rife with bombings, hijackings and other deadly assaults against airplanes and airports. Over one five-year span between 1985 and 1989 we can count at least six high-profile terrorist attacks, including the horrific bombings of Pan Am 103 and UTA 772; the bombing of an Air India 747 over the North Atlantic that killed 329 people; and the incredible saga of TWA Flight 847. And let’s not forget what might have been, such as the so-called “Project Bojinka,” the 1994 scheme masterminded by Ramzi Yousef (nephew of Kalid Sheikh Mohammad), in which impossible-to-detect (at the time) liquid explosives were to be used to simultaneously destroy a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Fortunately the plot unraveled and Yousef was arrested.
While we can argue, quite persuasively, that many of the current-day security measures have done little if anything to make us safer, we’ve nevertheless introduced measures that have been useful and effective, from explosives screening of checked luggage to the sorts of trans-border partnerships that broke up the most recent plot from Yemen. Whether in spite of, or because of, the attention we’ve lavished on All Things Terrorism, the past decade has seen fewer attacks against commercial air travel than any since the 1950s.What we need to remember, though, is that our success has had more to do with the security measures we don’t see than those taking place in plain view. And if our luck is to hold, we need to better rationalize and streamline our entire approach to airport security. For instance, if we’re going to have those body scanners, let’s put them where they’re needed. If this requires negotiating with foreign authorities whose airports are beyond TSA’s jurisdiction, so be it. Meanwhile, here at home, TSA’s one-size-fits-all approach, in which every single person who flies is seen as a potential threat, is simply unsustainable in a country where close to 2 million people fly daily. Things like taking snow globes from children, haggling over tiny container sizes, or confiscating a dessert fork from a uniformed, on-duty airline pilot (it happened to me) serve no useful purpose whatsoever. On the contrary, they divert valuable time and resources away from the things that could make us safer. Let’s scale back that concourse Kabuki and retrain guards in the finer points of a more sensible, risk-based assessment of passengers and their belongings.
And lastly, if only as an aside, let’s behold for a moment the term “underwear bomb.” That was the operative phrase in literally hundreds of articles and broadcasts over the past several days, and nowhere did it raise a snicker. What does it say about our country, I wonder, that such a preposterous expression is instantly understood and effectively taken for granted?
Strange times indeed.
After a Navy SEAL team killed Osama bin Laden at his Pakistan hideout a year ago this week, it flew his body to the Arabian Sea, weighted it down, and slid it silently off an aircraft carrier into the watery depths.
For many Americans, the secret raid provided a measure of revenge and catharsis for the strikes of Sept. 11, 2001. But it didn’t provide the kind of justice and official reckoning that the country needs to gain real closure. Now the government has a chance to achieve that through a full, fair and open trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four co-defendants, so the world can finally see the evidence against him as the true architect of the attacks on New York and Washington. The trial kickoff — an arraignment for the men — is scheduled for this Saturday at the U.S.-run detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
This should be our Nuremburg, the defining trial of the 9/11 era and a fitting coda to it.
Unfortunately, the U.S. government appears to be on the verge of squandering this opportunity, and with it, the best, and perhaps only, chance for the public to understand not only how the attacks came to be, but why Mohammed waged a relentless war against America and how we might stop the next would-be terrorist mastermind.
The problems lie within the reformed military-tribunal system that the Obama administration put in place after losing its fight for a civilian trial in New York. Political compromises have resulted in a flawed military commissions process that from outward appearances is not only rigged against the defense, but hyper-choreographed, censored and hermetically sealed.
“The process is designed to achieve a conviction, and to do it with as little revelation as humanly possible, but with the veneer of due process and justice,’’ said one participant who said restrictive gag orders prohibited him from talking publicly. “You’re talking about the most heinous crime ever, and we’re going to afford them less due process, less discovery, less of everything than we would the guy who shoplifted a pack of gum from CVS.’’
Obama administration officials say their reformed military commissions system is a vast improvement over the Bush administration’s version, which Obama moved to shut down on his first day in office in 2009.
Defense lawyers disagree, and insist they have been hamstrung in their efforts to mount the kind of aggressive defense needed to do their jobs including full and unfettered access to evidence, witnesses and even the accused themselves.
Four of the five legal teams had so few of their key players in place in recent months that they did not file the “mitigation submissions’’ that the government said it needed to decide which of the five men should face the death penalty and other key issues, such as whether to try them together or individually. They recently filed motions asking that the charges be thrown out because of fatal flaws in the system, which they say make it impossible for them to defend their clients.
“It’s window dressing,’’ Mohammed’s defense lawyer, David Nevin, said of the government’s improvements. “I am not all satisfied that it is a fair process. In fact, it is not a fair process.’’
Many of the defense lawyers have quit out of frustration or for other personal reasons stemming from the many delays in the process. Only a few have been there long enough to even begin to understand their clients’ case, not to mention the convoluted military commission process.
And they say they will be unable to effectively challenge confessions obtained when their clients were coercively interrogated in the CIA’s black site prisons, if they can broach the subject at all. This is important for the four men accused of helping Mohammed with the logistics of the plot. Several claim they have been wrongly accused, tortured into confessing, or both.
It is also important with regard to Mohammed, who confessed to dozens of plots while being waterboarded 183 times, and has said he may plead guilty even before the trial begins. Few U.S. counterterrorism officials believe all of his often boastful confessions, and it is important for the public to hear what, exactly, evidence the government has with regard to what he did and didn’t do, and whom he might have been protecting.
The team of Defense and Justice Department officials overseeing the military commission process, and the presiding judge, should quickly address the defense lawyers’ complaints, or a proceeding that some call “The Trial of the Century’’ will be delayed further by legal wrangling — and forever tainted by accusations of being unfair.
A full, fair and transparent trial, above all, will benefit the public. There is much the public doesn’t know about Mohammed, including the details of how he devised the plot, convinced bin Laden to let him do it and then orchestrated it “from A to Z,’’ to use his own words. It was Mohammed who masterminded dozens of other plots and attacks, some while staying a step ahead of the largest-ever criminal manhunt.
Mohammed, not bin Laden, was the one who traveled the world as a kind of “Johnny Appleseed’’ of terrorism, establishing alliances and creating a network of cells and lieutenants that in some cases remains today. And it was Mohammed who personally recruited young jihadist prospects much like a baseball scout, many of them Westerners, tapping into their grievances to turn them to his cause.
The U.S. government has kept the details of what Mohammed did — and how and why he did it — hidden in its most classified files since his capture in Pakistan nine years ago. The government should set the record straight on that, because there is an important lesson to be learned from the largely untold tale of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: It isn’t some monolithic group like al-Qaida that poses a continuing threat, it’s the one intelligent and energetic person who can emerge from nowhere and orchestrate a 9/11 while the world focuses elsewhere.
To that end, the government should declassify as much evidence as possible, and explain how it obtained it. It should call numerous witnesses to testify, especially since the one who has been publicly identified, Majid Khan, claims he was tortured while in CIA custody overseas.
Instead of limiting access to a few closed-circuit TVs, it should consider televising the proceedings. It should ensure that censorship is minimized, and used only to protect intelligence sources and methods, not to save the government from embarrassment. And it should let Mohammed and the others testify at length on their behalf if they so desire.
By doing so, the Obama administration will be able to say it did its best to put on the kind of civilian trial it has wanted all along, and one with a similar outcome to that of the al Qaida members charged with blowing up two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
Those of us who witnessed that trial in Manhattan in 2001 saw the defendants squirm in their chairs as prosecutors introduced mountains of evidence against them. We saw eyewitnesses point the finger at the accused, and surviving victims glare at them from the pews.
We heard from the terrorists themselves, and learned a lot about why they did it, about how terrorist networks operate and about what might be done to stop people like them. And when the jury convicted them, there was no question that justice was done.
Happy May Day, fellow travelers! If you’re not currently disrupting capitalism and/or having your wrists zip-tied for exercising your right to freely assemble, you probably read about the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s latest, not-at-all suspiciously timed terror sting. The Bureau, in an inspired bit of early-20th century nostalgia, has railroaded a bunch of dangerous anarchists. (Or “dangerous” “anarchists.”) America will not waver in the face of the Galleanist threat!
Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)
The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.
In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.
(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)
(Credit: Reuters/Frank Polich) 
(Credit: http://tmiyakawadesign.com/) 
Travelers line up at a TSA checkpoint at Los Angeles International Airport.
(Credit: Reuters/Danny Moloshok) 
(Credit: Reuters//Brennan Linsley) 
U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach, left, and FBI special agent in charge Stephen Anthony walk past a map showing the location of a bridge on Ohio Rt. 82. Five men, pictured on the wall behind the map, have been arrested for conspiring to blow up the bridge. (Credit: AP/Mark Duncan) 
