David K. Shipler, former NY Times reporter and author of Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America, discusses his article “Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I.;” the convicted felons used as FBI informants to ensnare the lowest-hanging fruit among potential terrorists; why an “entrapment” legal defense hardly ever works; the media’s failure to attribute domestic terrorism arrests to government sting operations; how the FBI could “entrap” terrorism suspects into working in an Islamic soup kitchen instead of pretending to blow up a bridge; the massive imbalance between surveillance data and the human analysts and investigators tasked with reading it all; and the strange story of “underbomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
Update: Your host was wrong. The Detroit News took Kennedy out of context. The video makes it clear he was speaking generally, not specifically about the Underbomber.
MP3 here. (30:06)
David K. Shipler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former foreign correspondent of The New York Times. He is the author of The Working Poor: Invisible in America and Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America.