During college, I took a course with a professor who asked us to come to her house, high above Portland, for Passover. While a few of us climbed the Columbia River Valley in a rickety station wagon, one of my classmates warned the rest of us that her husband was something of a “barbarian”: “you half expect him to be ripping into a mutton chop while he’s talking to you,” he explained.

Like this.

The description turned out to be a bit overdramatic, but the husband was nonetheless a rather intense thickly-bearded figure who suddenly engaged us in a heated debate about the impending peril of Islamic terrorism in the United States. He convinced none of us, of course, but concluded his remarks with the ominous suggestion that  once someone blew up Pioneer Square in downtown Portland, we would all change our tune.


We scoffed at the notion, of course. For anyone unfamiliar with Portland, I once ate a sandwich in Pioneer Square with someone behind me playing an acoustic version of “Sexual Healing” while two teenage girls made out in front of a sign-wearing preacher shouting about the evils of homosexuality while being shadowboxed by a homeless person who was standing immediately to the left of a goth kid playing the kazoo and doing a jig. So, really, who would bother scheming to blow up a place normally trafficked by hackysack hippies and pitbull-carrying drifters?

Well, someone just did. But I’m not sure whether it was Mohamed Mohamud or the FBI.

Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali-American and Oregon State student, was arrested by the FBI on Friday for allegedly plotting to set off a car bomb at the annual Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Pioneer Square. (Which brings up the most surprising aspect of this entire story: thousands of people attend a tree lighting ceremony in the heathen Portland?). According to the feds, Mohamud had a stated desire to harm women and children and attempted to remotely detonate a car bomb during the ceremony. He was subsequently taken into custody, kicking and screaming, and shouting “Allahu akbar.” So, violent terrorist thwarted, point to the feds, right?

Well, maybe—but not so fast. Glen Greenwald suggests in Salon, I think rather convincingly, that there is cause for more skepticism regarding the facts of the case and it seems altogether possible that “the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a ‘Terrorist plot’ which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction.”

I certainly have no interest in defending Mohamud who, when given the means, legitimately thought he was detonating a bomb that would obliterate two blocks and potentially kill thousands of Portlanders. He is clearly a warped individual and an attempted terrorist. But it does seem worth asking not only whether Mohamud would have posed any kind of legitimate threat without the help and prodding of the feds, but also the extent to which the FBI simply created a terrorist out of a disaffected teenager filled only with delusional fantasies and bluster until he was given the means to carry them out by the government. The circumstances of the case, I think, bring further into question whether the methods the FBI uses are actually protecting the United States from legitimate terror threats or simply concocting them in a self-perpetuating cycle.

From news reports probing Mohamud’s background, it seems clear that he was an impressionable and disaffected—probably mentally unstable—teenager who had become emotionally troubled after the divorce of his parents. The FBI, in fact, only began to monitor Mohamud after his father, an engineer at Intel, contacted them that he was concerned about his son’s growing extremism. Mohamud was, it seems, in many ways just a troubled teen who involved himself not only in fantasies of violence, but also in sex, alcohol, and partying at Oregon State.  But if his father turned to the FBI for some sort of intervention or help, he was obviously mistaken, as it would instead result in a sting operation that further encouraged his son toward terrorism.

According to the FBI affidavit, the sting began in earnest when the feds intercepted a seemingly innocuous email exchange between Mohamud and a man living in the northwest frontier province of Pakistan, which was suspicious solely because it is a region where “Islamic militants frequently reside.” The December 3 email read: "salamz bro. it's me, i made it 2 OMRA, [praise be to god] if u wanna come, theres a bro that will contact you about the proper paperwork u need 2 come... i cant go online 4 a while,, i hope 2 see u soon"

Although “OMRA” would typically refer to a pilgrimage in Mecca, the agent concluded that they must be speaking “in code to avoid detection,” and that the above email was therefore an invitation for Mohamud to join in terrorist activities. Mohamud then replied to the email that  “yes that would be wonderful, just tell me what I need to do [God willing]. always wanted to see the ka’bah.” But Mohamud hit a dead end when his attempts to contact another party that would help him reach Mecca/Pakistan fell through. So he secured a fishing job in Alaska—but he was prevented from boarding his flight, because he had been placed on the “No Fly List.”

Instead, an undercover FBI agent contacted Mohamud and arranged a meeting where he was asked what he would be willing to do “for the cause.” Thus, at this point the FBI had been tipped off by a concerned father looking to help his unstable son filled with bluster and impotent rage, saw him discussing a visit to either Mecca or Pakistan, found him too incompetent or disengaged to follow through even with that, but now surrounded him with a “friend” who further pushed him toward jihad.

Given a variety of choices on how to help “the cause,” Mohamud expressed interest in becoming “operational” and, after being instructed to think of a target, suggested Pioneer Square in Portland. The undercover officer offered him praise, saying that “he loved his idea.” The agents then helped him plan the attack (saying that they “were impressed” with his work), gave him money to buy materials for bombs and to pay his rent, and actually built a bomb for him. After a test of an actual functioning bomb on November 4, they filmed a written statement in which explained his reasoning, and eventually helped him to detonate a fake bomb on the 26^th. As Greenwald sums: “he had no history of violence, no apparent criminal record, had never been to a training camp in Afghanistan, Pakistan or anywhere else, and -- before meeting the FBI -- had never taken a single step toward harming anyone.  Does that sound like some menacing sleeper Terrorist to you?”

Yet, the U.S. attorney in Oregon suggested that "this defendant's chilling determination is a stark reminder that there are people -- even here in Oregon -- who are determined to kill Americans,” while the FBI suggested a statement released by the Department of Justice that even though the bomb was fake “the threat was very real.” But was the threat “very real” until the FBI became involved?

The methods used by the FBI in this case closely mirror those used in numerous others, including the arrest of the “Newburgh Four” in 2009, accused of plotting to bomb New York synagogues. In that case, as Ted Conover explains in Slate, the FBI informant offered congregants of the local mosque $25,000 and other gifts if they would help him pursue jihad. The four unemployed and impoverished ex-cons, one of which was described as a paranoid schizophrenic who collected his urine in jars, were seduced in this case entirely by an offer of $250,000 and a BMW—the informant himself wrote that the men were participating “for the money. … They're not even thinking about the cause.”

Beyond legal questions of entrapment, the actual utility of invading often impoverished ethnic communities with promises of money in exchange for committing acts of terrorism seems, at best questionable. One ex-FBI agent and terrorism expert complained to Businessweek: “We’re interested in catching terrorists, not people who have mental problems and wonder what it would be like to blow up the Sears tower but they can’t get out of bed in the morning.”

In fact, the circumstances surrounding the Mohamud case immediately reminded me of the Indian-born British salesman Hemant Lakhani, who was convicted of providing material support to terrorists when he sold a stinger missile to the FBI. As Petra Bartosiewicz explained on This American Life, however, Lakhani was an “amazingly incompetent illegal arms dealer” and a “lair, shameless braggart, and a snob” who not only claimed to the FBI that he could obtain a missile, but equally improbably that he could secure a submarine and plutonium. When Lakhani proved unable to supply the FBI informant with the missile he guaranteed, the government actually provided the missile to him so that he could sell it back to the FBI. Lakhani was not so much a terrorist-in-waiting as he was an immoral liar with a pathological need to be liked who was provided by the FBI with both the means and motive to commit an act he had no philosophical commitment to.

Conover suggests this strategy is like “sending lots of little devils out into Muslim communities and getting them to sit on people's shoulders and whisper in their ears” and points out that there is no shortage of disturbed (or even seemingly normal) Americans who could be convinced to commit violent crimes given enough enticement. The government would certainly have its hands full if it conducted a sting operation of every teenage boy with violent fantasies and a willingness to act upon them if given encouragement, rewards, and means.  So it is worth asking whether the government’s tactics actually do anything to prevent actual terrorism or whether it simply allows them first to create, and then to chase, ghosts—thereby inflating the perceived risk of terror.

Meanwhile, the Corvallis mosque attended by Mohamud was firebombed by an arsonist. Greenwald concludes: "So the FBI did not stop any actual Terrorist plots, but they may have helped inspire one."