There are so many possibilities, but the design of the system assures that we cannot be confident of ever getting the truth. One thing that is odd, however, is that the FBI thinks that the best way to prevent al-Qaeda from recruiting Muslims in our country is for them to recruit them first. Send an undercover agent into a mosque with no particular target and see if you can convince someone to enter into a sinister plot. Then arrest them. Have a press conference.
When you do that over and over, eventually you’ll wind up creating a problem when none existed. And, if that ever happens, you can be damn sure that we’ll never find out about it. It’s this policy that should be questioned rather than making any serious attempt to assert that “Misha” was an agent or informant whose plan backfired. The problem isn’t that that is what happened, but that it could happen and we’d never know.
Setting aside things like entrapment and incitement, any policy with such potential for disaster seems misguided to me.
