We’ve been writing a bit about Mohamed Osman Mohamud, the young Oregon man charged on WMD charges for allegedly trying to detonate an inert bomb the FBI helped him get. His attorneys are preparing an aggressive entrapment defense (those defenses almost never work, but there are some interesting factors in his case), arguing that Mohamud refused early entreaties to engage in violence yet the FBI kept pressing him to do so.

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You’ve got a long undercover investigation of a young Muslim man. It ends in the man acting to get what turns out to be an inert bomb. And there seem to be problems with the undercover work in the investigation.

At first, the government didn’t admit that “Bill Smith” worked for the government (and it remains unclear who he works for). Only after the defense confronted them with that fact did they concede he was, but they claimed these earlier contacts have no connection to this case.

Glenn Greenwald summarizes the missing media narrative in his Salon article this morning entitled “The FBI successfully thwarts its own Terrorist plot.” I recommend reading it all (ad click-through required). He brings motive to the fore: like almost every ‘terror’ suspect groomed by the FBI and then apprehended in America, 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud talked about retaliation for the United States bringing war to Muslims and his awful

Real terrorism, real arson, real hate: will the FBI be called in to investigate the real terror, or do they just do Terror Theater now?

The question remains: what scares Americans more, actual terror or state-sponsored ‘terror’ in the guise of a sting?