Government provocateurs

The Bush administration has gone to great lengths to conflate activists with terrorism. They invented narco-terrorists and like the concept so much, they have taken to calling the vandals that compromise such groups as ELF or Greenpeace as eco-terrorists. I don't know that they have a appelation for political dissidents yet, but certainly they investigate groups such as the anti-war Quakers under terrorism statutes.

This makes this news from Raw Story all the more troubling. Undercover CIA agents inflitrate anarchist organizations and actually provoke violence themselves when none might have occurred. Using the time honored methodology employed in drug stings, they send in an attractive young women who becomes emotionally involved with the "suspects" and then she goads them into violent acts in order to prove their worth to her. It's a good ploy for a setting up some starry eyed kid who fancys himself an revolutionary to take a hard fall but it hardly seems to be in the public interest to foster violence that is more than likely to hurt innocent Americans.

You have to ask yourself, who are the real criminals here? Young people experimenting with political ideology or trained government operatives who incite them into acts they likely would not have undertaken without having been put under the additional pressure of facing down a dare to do something extreme. When it's the agents who are teaching them to make the bombs, it seems to me it's the agents who should take the blame.