The big issue that's still swirling as part of the foiled Portland bomb plot continues to be about the FBI's role in the sting and whether Mohamed Mohamud was led too closely down a path he might not have otherwise taken. Beyond that, there continues to be more news, opinion and insight on a variety of issues in the case.
>>What if, god forbid, a bomb had gone off in Pioneer Courthouse Square? How prepared is the city for such an event? Portland's auditor seems to have some questions.
City Auditor LaVonne Griffin-Valade said Tuesday that she has concerns about how officials could have managed the response.
"That's not an indictment of the various response bureaus so much as it is that, even though they may be prepared individually, the emergency management system is not yet where the public would want it to be in terms of a large-scale emergency and responding to that," she said.
>>If you didn't read Nancy Haught's story explaining Islam, and how the public is taking religious passages out of context to explain Muslim violence, you should check that out to understand the basics of the religion. In today's New York Times, Richard Bernstein writes "A defense that could be obsolete" about how an entrapment defense has fared in the courts.
Though the entrapment defense has been used in several terrorism cases since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, no juries have acquitted any defendants on the grounds that they were induced by law enforcement to undertake their criminal activities.
Still, some organizations, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Lawyers Guild among them, have raised some questions about what some people call the government’s use of “pre-emptive prosecution” as a weapon against terrorism.
>>Some think there's too much sympathy for Mohamud. Daniel Greenfield has his tongue planted firmly in cheek when he writes: "Won't you please hug a terrorist.?"
The working theory among the think-tanks, academic campuses, newsrooms and diplomatic offices is that terrorists are just like us. Except depressed and insecure about it. Filled with self-loathing and in desperate need of anger management classes. If only some kind soul could plop them down on an analyst's couch and stuff them chock full of Prozac or Paxil, hug them without letting go, while reading passages from Jonathan Livingston Seagull-- then they'd be just as right as rain. And twice as wet.
>>Seattle Weekly joins in the entrapment vs. good police work debate with "Mohamed Osman Mohamud, accused Portland bomber, had a little help from his FBI friends."
It's called a sting, not entrapment, that led to the arrest of accused would-be bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud, 19, in Portland Friday. As he pressed cellphone buttons that he thought would detonate a car bomb during a crowded tree-lighting ceremony at Pioneer Courthouse Square, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation swooped in and collared the suspect they had aided, abetted and provided materials to so he could carry out the scheme. He was "predisposed" to commit the crime, therefore not entrapped, the FBI says. But would this headline-making terrorist takedown have happened without the assistance and encouragement of the FBI?
>>KATU explores whether the Internet incited the Portland bomb plot
>>KGW talks to an expert about how to talk with children about the incident.