alexandraerin:

It’s really amazing how even with all the constant terror plots to destroy America, every single one of those 16-21 year olds who are just dead set on blowing up important buildings somehow keep managing to hook up with FBI informants rather than actual Al-Qaeda operatives.

I’m at this point sure the FBI feels like a guy flipping a coin who’s managed to get it to come up heads ten times in a row. I mean, really, what are the odds?

No, but seriously, this is your daily reminder that we live in a country where our top federal law enforcement agency routinely finds disaffected young people, incites them to commit violent acts of rebellion against the state, and then arrests them when they show up to do it, all in order to prove that they’re doing something to keep us safe.

Meanwhile, the CIA (an agency that was formed to be a central clearing house and coordinating office for all the myriad intelligence agencies… you know, the sort of thing that would have allowed us to prevent the attacks of September 11, 2001 if they hadn’t interpreted their charter to mean “go be the bad guys in a James Bond movie, but you know, for us” instead of “watch the store and make sure somebody’s got their eye on the big picture”) is flying weaponized RC airplanes through the airspace of sovereign nations that are ostensibly our allies in a campaign of lethal physical and psychological terror that’s copied straight from 1984’s rocket bombs. 

This is the stuff of dystopian novels and conspiracy theories, but it’s happening and it’s happening openly. It’s being reported on in our own media, yet somehow the story is never the story. 

The FBI stopped another terrorist plot of their own devising. I wonder how many people who don’t live or work near the ostensible targets of these bomb plots even notice or care anymore. I wonder how far off the day when this becomes something we do just because it’s something we do, because it’s people’s jobs to do it and there’s a line in a budget that nobody wants to mess with because you don’t go around kicking other people’s apple carts when you should be minding your own. I wonder how long it will be before they decide that getting the suspect to agree to participate in the first place is more work than is strictly necessary. I wonder how I would even know when that point arrived.