I wrote here last week, following up on a Rolling Stone piece by Rick Perlstein, about the proliferation of FBI entrapment schemes aimed at activists and anarchists in the past decade. Following the arrest of five individuals in Chicago over the weekend who now face terrorism charges, the question of entrapment perpetrated by law enforcement seems more important than ever.

According to an exhaustive report from Firedoglake’s Kevin Gosztola,”three Occupy activists raided on May 16 and disappeared for a period of time by Chicago police were brought before a bond judge [on Saturday] and officially charged with material support for terrorism, conspiracy to commit terrorism and possession of explosives or explosive or incendiary devices.” The young men’s lawyer, Michael Deutsch of the National Lawyers Guild, described the charges as “fabricated” and “based on police informants and provocateurs which is a common pattern that we have seen against people who are protesting.”

Deutsch has gone so far as to suggest that infiltrators from the Chicago Police Department actually planted materials for making Molotov cocktails in the apartment before the police raid and that his clients did not even take the bait. Meanwhile, rumors abound, including claims that elaborate weapons like throwing stars were retrieved from the raided apartment. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit of information fueling the rumor mill is whether the three suspects have been targeted because of a candid video they shot and released the previous week, showing CPD officers searching their car and intimidating them as they entered Chicago. The video, which gleaned considerable online attention, showed one officer recommending that protesters receive “a billy club to the fucking skull.”

Meanwhile, two additional individuals were arrested and charged with planning to make explosives to use at the summit. The two reportedly stated that they possessed explosives that they intended to detonate, but no such devices were recovered when one of the arrestee’s homes was searched, and the police did not perform a search on the home of the other. Nonetheless, he was arrested for discussing the ingredients for making a pipe bomb (presumably with a police informant, but this remains unclear).

Truthout’s Steve Horn, who has been following the story closely on the ground in Chicago, noted that two undercover informants, working under the pseudonyms “Mo” and “Gloves,” appear to be “thread” linking the five activists now facing terror charges. Details of the cases continue to emerge, but Perlstein’s Rolling Stone article last week is reminder enough that accusing authorities of entrapment is unlikely to work in the defendants’ favor, even if evidence is on their side. “Not a single ‘terrorism’ indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11,” he noted.

And while the facts surrounding the five arrestees remain murky, the furor surrounding the raids, arrests and charges in the past week are enough to illustrate the immediate impact of alleging terrorist threats during mass activist mobilizations. Twitter was abuzz with unsubstantiated, nervous rumors about pending police raids and lurking, unmarked vans. And once again, the terms “anarchist” and “Occupy” have been linked to terrorism in the media and public consciousness. Even if, as the NLG argues, the charges are “fabricated,” the suggestion of terrorism stokes fear and upholds the good protester/bad protester narrative that has long haunted Occupy groups nationwide.

So while the Tribune may be right, that the NATO summit and surrounding protests did not leave a “black eye” on the city, even the worst bruises heal fast. Something more damaging may, however, remain: the ongoing persecution of anarchists and activists with entrapment, intimidation and trumped-up charges.

An orange barricade blocked off the building’s entrances, and dozens of police officers stood guard. A police boat idled in the nearby Chicago River.

Occupy Chicago contends tax breaks for the aircraft manufacturer have deprived the state of millions of dollars. The group also objects to Boeing’s role in producing military hardware for the U.S. and its NATO allies.

Illinois leaders see such tax incentives as a way to attract large companies that bring thousands of jobs.

Targeting Boeing Co.’s Chicago office makes symbolic sense: The company is a major defense contractor that makes fighter jets, bombs and missiles.

But the Chicago office is just the headquarters for a much larger operation. The company employs more than 170,000 people across the United States and in 70 countries. Illinois doesn’t even rank in the top eight states in terms of the number of Boeing employees.

Boeing’s building was largely deserted Monday because it was among many Chicago companies that told workers to stay home because of the risk of traffic snarls and more protests.

In a statement, protesters seized on that as a victory: “Our call to action shut down the Boeing war machine.”

After the Boeing demonstration, immigration-rights activists planned to go to the small village of Crete, about 35 miles south of Chicago, where federal officials are considering building an 800-bed detention facility for illegal immigrants slated for deportation.

For commuters, the threat of more large protests meant navigating numerous transportation changes and tolerating inconvenient security rules.

More than two dozen rail stations were closed along a line that normally carries 14,000 riders in from the south suburbs. Platforms were being patrolled by a large contingent of law enforcement personnel and K-9 units. The Chicago Transit Authority rerouted 24 buses through a zone that included the lakeside convention center where world leaders were gathered.

On commuter trains, passengers were prohibited from bringing food or liquids — including coffee — and could only carry one bag.

“Now I have to buy my lunch. They are making me spend money,” said Pete Dimaggio, a credit manager.

But commuters who did brave their daily trip were finding something unusual: an abundance of seats on trains and buses, a sign that many workers heeded warnings to avoid going to the office.

Sunday’s protest march was one of the city’s largest in years, with thousands of people airing grievances about war, climate change, economic inequality and a wide range of other complaints. But the diversity of opinions also sowed doubts about whether there were too many messages to be effective.

Some of the most lasting images of that march were likely to be from a clash at the end, when a small group of demonstrators tried to push beyond a line of police blocking access to the site where world leaders were discussing the war in Afghanistan, European missile defense and other security issues.

Some protesters hurled sticks and bottles at police. Officers responded by swinging their batons. The two sides were locked in a standoff for two hours.

Forty-five protesters were arrested and four officers were hurt, including one who was stabbed in the leg, police said.

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Associated Press writers Don Babwin, Ryan J. Foley, Carla K. Johnson, Robert Ray, Jim Suhr, Nomaan Merchant and Michael Tarm contributed to this report.

The mouthful of a name contains the basics of the system. It is based in Europe, will be rolled out in phases, and, compared to the Bush-era system it replaced, was sold as an adaptive approach to some of the political and technological realities of European missile defense. It is the first missile defense project to be embraced by NATO allies, who historically have been left cold by the American faith that high-speed warheads can reliably be struck by other missiles hundreds of miles above the earth. Officially, consensus-run NATO has gotten religion. In Chicago, all 28 Alliance members will stand behind the outrageous lie that the first of the system’s four phases has achieved “interim operational capability.” NATO brass will declare with a straight face that a foundation has been laid for the next three phases scheduled between now and 2020. The U.S. is so excited it couldn’t wait for Chicago, and last week Navy Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery said that Phase 1 — a triad of Aegis ships equipped with interceptor batteries, a command-and-control base in Ramstein, Germany, and a radar in Turkey — now “provides an initial capability to provide some level of defense of Europe against a threat emanating from the Middle East.”

Montgomery’s claim is one of the most expensive cons ever to grace the wires of the Armed Forces Press Service. Last month the Government Accountability Office issued a devastating reality-based report on Phase 1 of the NATO system, itemizing a litany of “performance shortfalls, unexpected cost increases, schedule delays and test problems.” The GAO report echoed a more detailed analysis released in September by the Defense Science Board, an in-house Pentagon advisory team of preeminent basic and applied scientists. The DSB report concludes that the U.S. and NATO missile defense systems share the same heel of Achilles: Rudimentary decoys and debris render them useless. This is a point the Pentagon scientists make with some force, going so far as to use a rare government-report exclamatory. “If the defense should find itself in a situation where it is shooting at missile junk or decoys,” they write, “the impact on the regional interceptor inventory would be dramatic and devastating!”

In other words, if the nation launching the missile deploys rudimentary decoys, which everyone believes it would, the U.S. and NATO systems will be neutralized, their billion-dollar bullets reduced to raging mechanical bulls charging red flags and clowns in a barrel while the theoretical warhead continues along its arc. Almost as a side note, the DSB report notes that the radars built for the NATO system, the ones touted as “operable,” are too weak to even locate the missiles in the first place.

Nothing in the GAO and DSB reports is that surprising. The Missile Defense Agency is the CitiGroup of the military-industrial complex — a corrupt Too Big To Fail institution that never should have existed in the first place but for some bad legislation from the late Clinton era. The epic levels of waste involved in missile defense is unique even by Pentagon standards. “Missile defense has been exempted from many procurement rules and is subject to much less oversight than your standard defense program,” says George Lewis, of Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. “Together with the rush to deploy rapidly this has led to buying before flying.” At the moment, three of the four types of interceptors procured for the U.S. system have been forced to suspend or delay production. According to the recent GAO report, the cost of testing interceptors for the U.S. system has shot over the last decade from less than $250 million to more than a billion dollars a shot.

But unlike other Pentagon pet projects infamous for criminal cost overruns, missile defense can never be finished. This is its beauty. It is a perpetual-motion defense sector profit machine, one that never stops chasing a dream over the horizon point in the the MDA’s logo. Missile defense exists on an endless continuum of new development contracts for next-generation radars, sensors, interceptors and lasers. A foolproof system will always be more necessary than ever, and just around the corner, almost within reach, despite what the scientists and the evidence may say. And until then, at least we’re doing our best to provide what Admiral Montgomery calls “some level of defense” against emerging missile threats.

But what does “some level of defense” mean when it comes to nuclear missiles? And how much is that fractional security worth? These questions have dogged missile defense since the early 1980s. Many billions of dollars later, the answers are the same: “not much” and “nothing.” The technology remains as far as ever from providing the mythical airtight “gas mask” that a young Richard Perle dangled before a credulous Reagan, the political godfather of Strategic Defense.

“Missile Defense proponents say an imperfect system increases uncertainty in the enemy’s mind and that’s good enough,” says Pavel Podvig, a Geneva-based nuclear weapons analyst and a columnist for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “But the uncertainty is all in the other direction. The number of warheads you have to deliver for deterrence is likely very low. The number could be one, or less than one. A certain probability that a nuclear bomb will land on your megopolis is a sufficient.”

Since the start of ground-based interceptor tests during the first Bush administration, missile defense “successes” have taken place under tightly controlled circumstances using pre-programmed flight paths and decoy-less targets that bear little relation to their likely real-world counterparts. Although rigged in plain sight, the tests are heralded as proof that the system will one day offer absolute protection from ICBM and medium-range missile attack. Those who have watched missile defense’s zombie-like march are hopeful that the Defense Science Board report may mark a turning point.

“The Defense Science Board report is an absolute killer,” says MIT’s Theodore Postol, a leading missile defense critic and a former scientific advisor to the Navy. “The boosters are ignoring it, but finally the Defense Department has acknowledged this crucial fact of physics that sensors can’t penetrate the surfaces of targets and are stymied by decoys and debris. To believe in missile defense, you have to believe in an adversary sophisticated enough to build ICBMs but not sophisticated enough to release decoy balloons around warheads. Viewed through a scientific lens, missile defense makes no sense and has never made sense. It’s an elaborate fraud.”

Richard Lehner, a spokesperson for the Missile Defense Agency, which manages contracts up and down the missile defense chain, claims that the DSB report has been grossly misrepresented. In fact, he says, the thrust of the report is that the technology is “on the right track.” Regarding the decoy problem, Lehner assured me the Missile Defense Agency’s Countermeasures Program is hard on the case. I asked him how much the Pentagon was spending on developing sensors that can tell the difference between nuclear warheads and balloons. “That’s classified,” he said.

Unclassified is the Russian response to the U.S. and NATO missile defense programs. The history of missile defense is the story of a fantasy complicating reality. Not long after Edward Teller dazzled Ronald Reagan with visions of space lasers, the president’s infatuation with SDI torpedoed a grand abolitionist deal with Gorbachev at Reykjavik. For the last 15 years, missile defense has been a reliable stumbling block in arms control negotiations and a constant irritant in relations with Moscow. It is partly because of NATO’s missile defense system that there will be no meeting of the NATO-Russia Council in Chicago.

This was not quite the plan when Europe signed on to the system. The birth of NATO missile defense was timed to Obama’s “reset” with Moscow and sold to allies as a joint system involving Russian participation. That hasn’t materialized, and despite the show of a united front in Chicago, Europe is by far the less eager partner in the system. On Friday, chairman of the Munich Security Conference Wolfgang Ischinger penned an editorial in the International Herald Tribune urging NATO to put missile defense on hold pending meaningful Russian involvement. “It would be wrong,” wrote Ischinger, “to kick the project of a joint missile defense shield into the long grass and move forward on B.M.D. [ballistic missile defense] without Russia. B.M.D. as a game changer: yes. B.M.D. as a game breaker: no.”

This is where many people ask why the Russians or anyone else even care about a profoundly flawed technology that is so easy to outsmart and defeat. “The answer is simple,” writes Yousaf Butt of the Federation of American Scientists in the National Interest:

Their military planners are hypercautious — as are the ones in the Pentagon — and must assume a worst-case scenario in which the system is highly effective. Missile defense will therefore strengthen the hands of overcautious, misinformed, opportunistic or hawkish elements within the Iranian and North Korean — as well as Russian and Chinese — political and military establishments. Both unknowable future circumstances and pressures from hawkish internal constituencies will pressure all these regimes to increase deployed nuclear stockpiles and military expenditures.

The Russian nuclear arsenal still sits on a hair-trigger and remains the most dangerous in the world. Not because the Russians are itching to launch an attack, or even because the button is guarded by human beings capable of error. What makes Russian nuclear psychology so important is their relative blindness. Russia has no satellite cover and majorly degraded radar cover. If something shows up on their screens resembling incoming missiles, they have a 15-minute decision window. Recent years have seen an increased threat of accidental nuclear war based on radar misreads and miscalculation. In Moscow bunkers, there have been close calls involving sunlight reflecting off of clouds and Norwegian weather satellite launches. Any policy that decreases trust with Moscow and makes them doubt their deterrent is a net loss for NATO’s stated mission of maintaining European peace and security.

“On the Russian side, there are easy-to-understand concerns,” says Postol. “From a military point of view, they see the U.S. building a vast radar system on its borders, and sometime in the future maybe the U.S. could put nukes on the interceptors. It creates a lot of uncertainty on the planner. On the political side, it’s another broken promise that fuels distrust. Misperceptions are destabilizing on both sides. Missile defense complicates the situation even though it doesn’t work. Politically and technically, it’s the worst of both worlds.”

Which brings us to a second irony in Chicago care of missile defense. An organization founded in response to the Russian military threat is now pursuing one of the only policies guaranteed to accelerate the reemergence of a Russian military threat, one that is no less dangerous for its radically different nature and context.

NATO’s adoption of missile defense may come as a surprise to those who remember the allies’ anger over the non-NATO European system proposed by the Bush administration in 2005. For decades, missile defense was the lonely obsession of a right-wing faction in Washington. Clinton did his best to ignore GOP calls for abrogating the ABM Treaty and committing the country to national missile defense. He was clearly hoping to run out the clock until it was Al Gore’s problem, but a 1998 “Team B” study on the missile threat chaired by Donald Rumsfeld shifted the debate, and during his last year in office Clinton reluctantly signed the Missile Defense Act. With the arrival of George W. Bush in the White House, the Act became an executive priority. September 11 next provided an unlikely opportunity for the most unctuous missile defense boosters to prey on the nation’s sense of vulnerability. I remember Frank Gaffney, director of the defense-industry sponsored American Center for Security Policy, going on television while ground zero was still on fire and making the case that the box-cutter attack proved missile defense was more urgent than ever.

In 2005, Bush proposed the system be extended to Europe to better address the still-theoretical threat from Iran. Most NATO allies wanted nothing to do with what they regarded as a destabilizing boondoggle but the Bush administration found eager partners in the “New Europe” capitals of Prague and Warsaw, which agreed to host a radar and missile battery. The Russians were outraged. In the early ’90s, NATO promised Russia it would not expand toward Russia’s eastern border; then it did and promised it wouldn’t put missile batteries on new members’ territory. Now the U.S. was doing just that. Major NATO allies were also unhappy, both about not being consulted and the growing diplomatic row with Moscow over a plan to protect the continental United States. Soon even the Czechs turned against the plan. Only Warsaw, Washington’s reliable saliva-dripping puppy, was angry when the plan began to fall apart.

Obama arrived in office and quickly scrapped Bush’s system. Republicans on the Hill laughably attacked the decision as a betrayal of Europe, even though the system was designed to protect the U.S. and the decision to kill it was fully backed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “The Republicans would have [Obama] pursue every single missile defense program that is theoretically possible, even if the new system is faster and more flexible and has a better test record,” says Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association in D.C.

Obama replaced the Bush system with the “Adaptive Approach” system being celebrated this weekend in Chicago. Intended to address the technological and geopolitical shortcomings of what came before, it has done neither. Despite the word “European” in the name and the NATO seal of approval, Obama’s system is essentially an extension of U.S. missile defense, paid for by American taxpayers. “The U.S. never really asked NATO permission, but told them what they were doing and said they could contribute if they wanted,” says Pavel Podvig, the Geneva-based analyst. “Europe joined, but for them it’s more about managing relationships among Russia, the U.S., Old and New Europe. Nobody in Europe really cares about missile defense. They just don’t want to make it confrontational or destabilizing.”

It sure is a nice thing to want. But unfortunately for the 900 million people represented by NATO countries, European missile defense without meaningful Russian participation is inherently confrontational and destabilizing. It’s also a very costly antonym for “Smart Defence.” A good number of the allied presidents and ministers arriving today at O’Hare know this. Their willingness to say so during tomorrow’s meetings and working dinners may determine much.

In a sign of the building tension, lawyers for protesters said Chicago police, with their guns drawn, raided an apartment building where activists were staying and arrested nine people on Wednesday night. The Chicago chapter of the National Lawyers Guild said officers broke down doors in the building in the South Side Bridgeport neighborhood and produced no warrants.

“The nine have absolutely no idea what they’re being charged with because they were not engaged in any criminal activity at all,” said guild attorney Sarah Gelsomino. “They’re really very confused and very frightened.”

The Chicago Police Department refused to comment. Gelsomino said a bond hearing was scheduled for noon Friday.

Chicago was originally going to host the G-8 economic summit too, and the nurses’ rally was initially intended to coincide with that. But the G-8 summit was moved to Camp David, Md. Midwest Director Jan Rodolfo said the nurses decided to go forward with the rally in the hope that their message would reach a worldwide audience.

“What we really hope for is a large, festive, hopeful, constructive tone regarding the Robin Hood tax and that everyone in attendance feels like they’re part of a moment in history,” Rodolfo said. She said the movement has much more momentum in other countries and “we’re hoping to put it on the map” in the U.S.

Early Friday, the U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command planned to hold training flights with F-16s and other military aircraft over downtown Chicago in preparation for securing the city’s airspace during the summit. Other small protests, including one targeting climate change, are planned.

Scattered protests over the past week have been relatively small, including a march through the “Magnificent Mile” shopping district that drew about 100 people Thursday.

But the much larger nurses’ rally will mark a ramp-up to Sunday’s anti-NATO march by underscoring that money spent fighting wars means less money for health care, education and other social programs, said Andy Thayer, an organizer of the anti-NATO march. His group — Coalition Against the NATO/G8 War & Poverty Agenda — has been working to draw those connections ever since President Barack Obama moved the G-8 summit, potentially dampening enthusiasm for a Chicago demonstration.

“I think it’s really going to be big … with the nurses,” Thayer said. “That is going to be the 99 percent staking itself against the 1 percent, drawing the connections between the war abroad and the war on working people here at home.

“They are the front-line caregivers … and the nurses to their credit understand the connections between NATO, G8 and the deplorable state of health care in our country and are speaking out about it.”

Estimates of how many might show up Sunday have varied widely, from a couple thousand to more than 10,000. Busloads of demonstrators from around the country have begun arriving in Chicago, though some who had planned to come, including from the Occupy movement, have said they’re staying home or going to an area near Camp David instead.

But some activists are anticipating they’ll be joined by many more people than expected.

“Chicago has a reputation for resisting,” including a 2003 demonstration against the Iraq War that flooded downtown Chicago with 10,000 people, said one of Thursday’s protesters, Salek Khalid, a 21-year-old student at Northwestern University. “I feel comfortable saying Chicago will live up to its reputation, hopefully peacefully.”

Police and the Secret Service have taken no chances, as Obama and 50 heads of state begin arriving for the NATO summit, where leaders will discuss the war in Afghanistan and European missile defense.

Security is high on trains. Barricades and fences have been erected around landmark buildings. Streets are being closed. And world-class museums are shutting down.

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said Thursday that the protesters so far “have been very well behaved.” He said he did not anticipate that the tenor of Friday’s rally would be different, but that if it is, “We are going to carry through with what we said we were going to do. We’re going to facilitate the rights of these individuals while preventing criminal actions.”

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Associated Press writer Jason Keyser contributed to this report.

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AFGHANISTAN

The summit will affirm the shift in NATO’s military mission in Afghanistan from a combat role to an advisory role next year, and on plans to help underwrite the Afghan military after the NATO-led military mission ends two years from now. NATO is pledging to maintain a multinational combat force in Afghanistan until sometime in 2014, with a firm deadline to end the mission by 2015. NATO nations, along with others such as Australia that participate in the NATO-led mission, have planned a gradual withdrawal of combat forces ahead of that deadline.

The election of Socialist President Francois Hollande in France complicates that agenda. Hollande campaigned on a promise to pull French troops out of Afghanistan by the end of this year — two years early.

Public sentiment in Europe and the United States favors a faster pullout than NATO now plans. The United States and Britain, which have the largest forces in Afghanistan, are trying to avoid a rush to the exits by other partners.

The summit will also showcase efforts to get firm financial commitments for support of Afghan forces. NATO argues that even the projected bill of about $4 billion annually is cheaper than the cost of war. But some European governments apparently have neither the budget nor the will to keep paying. The United States expects to pay much of the cost but U.S. officials say Washington cannot foot the bill alone.

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NATO MODERNIZATION

Most alliance members have endured economic reversals that make any major new defense spending unappealing or impossible. The alliance is laboring under the weight of outdated or incompatible equipment, and suffers major gaps in military capability that the better-equipped and better-funded U.S. military often has to fill. Some of those shortfalls were on display during last year’s successful NATO air mission in Libya.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates rattled NATO when he said the alliance risked falling apart if it continued to leave the hardest fighting and biggest bills to the United States.

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MISSILE DEFENSE

The alliance will declare that it has partly completed a missile defense shield for Europe. The system has achieved “interim capability,” against possible missile threats from Iran or elsewhere, NATO claims. Russia opposes the system, and has rebuffed NATO efforts to form a partnership.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is not attending the summit, largely because of the missile defense split.