The Merced college student who went on a rampage may or may not have been a terrorist according to FBI Findings. I was in law enforcement for thirty years and I have worked with the FBI. In law enforcement there is the FBI and then there is everybody else. It is okay for the FBI to lie to everybody else, just as long as there no bible or judge nearby muttering things about oaths and affirmations.
If you get to be friends with an FBI agent he will look you in the eye, grin and admit he is lying to you with absolutely no shame. The FBI collects information. If you want information go to your local library. Most of the time I’m okay with that, we are both playing by the rules as we understand them.
What people fail to appreciate is the FBI is this giant monster that can reach across the country or world with resources that a local cop can only imagine. It may take a while for all the moving parts to spool up to maximum efficiency.
When a local officer tasks the FBI with a query about what he perceives as a local investigation, he is looking for answers. What he may get is the efforts of hundreds of agents working in places he knows nothing about in an effort to answer, his purely local question.
Is it inconceivable that that innocent query could lead to other questions and investigations totally unrelated to the original request? The FBI has a responsibility to relay only those cases truly related to the query and not just linked by common terms.
There is a theory called “Six degrees of separation” The theory holds that everyone and everything is six or fewer steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world, so that a chain of “a friend of a friend” statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It was originally set out by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 and popularized by a 1990 play written by John Guare. (Wikipedia). If the theory is true then it would seem almost inevitable that taken to extremes every investigation is a terrorist investigation. That conclusion does nothing to help the local officer solve his original problem.
More than four months after a black-clad loner with an Islamist-themed manifesto and a printed ISIS flag in his backpack stabbed four people on a California college campus, the FBI wrapped up its investigation Thursday by saying “it may never be possible to definitively determine” what motivated the bloody rampage.
Okay, I’ll go out on a limb, this guy is for sure a wannabe. But since the tactic is to reach out to the stupid, the crazy and the alienated and get them to radicalize themselves to action, he could be, just as easily, crazier than a shit house rat. When the suspect is dead it’s kinda hard to make a determination.
The inconclusive findings from the probe of the Nov. 4, 2015 attack at the University of California Merced campus followed months of hesitation by local and federal law enforcement to link Faisal Mohammad’s stabbing spree to terrorism.
Not everybody follows the Al Sharpton school of investigation, can you say Tawana Brawley? It is always helpful to have facts to report rather than rhetoric.
“Every indication is that Mohammad acted on his own; however, it may never be possible to definitively determine why he chose to attack people on the UC Merced campus,” the FBI’s Sacramento office said in a statement that avoided calling the attack an act of terrorism.
Okay, the FBI is getting mealy mouthed here. Give the guys in the basement at Quantico a shout, it’s location, location, location. He looked at all the places he frequented and immediately ruled out the varsity football team locker room, police station and national guard armory where the ROTC guys hung out. The left a class populated by women where he was considered one of the “pumped guys”.
Critics say it followed a pattern in which the federal government downplays domestic terrorism even when there are seemingly obvious links. The flag, the manifesto annotated with reminders to pray to Allah in between stabbings – all reported in November by FoxNews.com, yet not confirmed by the FBI until this week, pointed early on to the 18-year-old Mohammad having been radicalized, say terrorism experts. Even the stabbings themselves, which came as a wave of terrorist blade attacks occurred in Israel, were indicators of an extremist motivation, say experts.
“The Department of Justice is avoiding stating the obvious, which is that an individual who commits violence in the name of ISIS is a terrorist,” said Ryan Mauro, national security analyst for the New York-based nonprofit terrorism research institute Clarion Project. “If someone commits violence and has an ISIS flag and jihadist manifesto in their backpack, they are telling you what their motive was. It’s as iron-clad as a suicide note.”
Missed it by this much, even the FBI agreed with me, nationally self proclaimed expert on terrorism, except they left you at the altar again. By ruling the way it did the FBI left Mr. Nationally self proclaimed expert’s credibility dangling.
The suspect is dead. There are no investigative leads to indicate anybody else was involved. Any other investigative leads developed have nothing to do with the original investigation. I can live with the lie.
Prior to US involvement in WWII the British anticipated the fall of Great Britain. They moved their intelligence training efforts to Canada, but based the British Security Coordinating (BSC) the intelligence gathering, analysis and headquarters in New York City. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were determined to maintain US neutrality.
The English discovered that the Germans and German agents were very active in the United States. They decided that since they were at war with Germany they were not going to let a little thing like American neutrality interfere with the war effort. At first the British BSC went after the Germans in the traditional manner, knives, guns, garrotes and bombs. This offended the FBI. Legend has it that Ian Fleming was chased out of New York by the FBI after he shot an Axis agent at Rockefeller Center.
FBI pressure caused the British to change tactics. Gone were the gun fights and knifings. Soon German agents were falling in front of trucks, taxis, trains, off bridges and other high points. Peace between the FBI and BSC was restored.