Defense attorneys are attacking the revelation, per court documents, that the FBI paid some $41,000 to an unnamed informant in the arrest of six Somali-Americans, who they are accusing of conspiring to try to leave the US to join ISIS.
The FBI is revealed to have had a deal with the informant to pay “based on performance,” leading the attorneys to seek to question him, to find out if there is grounds to contest the charges against their clients on the basis of government entrapment.
The informant was revealed to have lied to a federal grand jury before being hired by the FBI, and first began working for them in February. The arrests happened in April, and the evidence against the six is almost entirely based on tape-recorded conversations he provided.
FBI arrests of terror suspects in recent months have overwhelmingly been this way, with paid informants setting up the whole situation which leads to the arrest and the charges. In the past, this has damage prosecution efforts, as the FBI arrests suspects they don’t have much real evidence against.
In reporting a (now-deleted) spam comment, someone wrote:
"I am reporting the administrator is a computer and there is no review of comments. So in the future Anti-War can expect no donations from me who has given regularly in the past. Your site is clearly biased and not libertarian in any fashion."
No, the administrator is not a computer. There are several human comment moderators. There are also hundreds of legitimate, and thousands of spam, comments per day across Antiwar.com.
We DO use a "computer" — actually, an automated piece of software called IntenseDebate — to screen comments, to filter out obvious spam (which it is imperfect at doing) and to hold suspect comments for moderation (which it is also imperfect at doing). The consequences of the imperfection are:
1) Some spam gets through. When we see it, or it is reported, we delete it and block the IP it came from.
2) Some legitimate comments get caught in the moderation filters. A human being looks at each of these comments, approves the ones which do not violate our anti-spam and anti-hate/threat guidelines, and deletes the ones which do violate those guidelines (with blocking of spammers and, in some cases, of haters/threateners).
As far as the site bias is concerned, we are certainly biased against war and in favor of peace. We do NOT claim to be a "libertarian" web site. We are an anti-war site which happens to be run by libertarians and which does often display a libertarian bias. So far as I know, none of us are ashamed of that.
If you've been a donor in the past, thank you. I hope you'll reconsider and remain a donor in the future.
However, given the timing of this — the day before our quarterly fundraiser begins — I'm skeptical.
Every quarter around this time, we start getting comments from people who claim to be donors, trying to discourage others from supporting Antiwar.com. In fact, I would not be surprised if the number of such commenters exceeds the cumulative number of actual Antiwar.com donors over the entire life of the site. It is my opinion that there is an intentional, organized campaign to harm Antiwar.com's fundraising ability. Whether you are part of that campaign or not, I do not know. What I do know is that along with the anti-spam/anti-hate guidelines, we practice self-defense. You will not be allowed to use Antiwar.com as the platform of a campaign to defame and harm Antiwar.com.
I hope you can take some satisfaction in the fact that Our Dear Leaders consider your website to be a "threat".
"If you ain't been called a 'Red', you ain't done nothin yet"
-old labor song
TVLand keeps feeding us brilliant, beautiful and supercompetent heroes working for the FBI. The news media are clearly on their side in terms of supplying them a compliant coverage norm. But I don't remember ANY heroic, smart action by the FBI. Surely they'd have made the most of it. What have they done for us lately, like since the 1930s?