The nominee for FBI director should be questioned about his stance on entrapment program like the one described in Rolling Stone.You can generate good numbers on halting terrorism when you provide the means for the terrorism.

The nuclear plant invasion is even more difficult. The vulnerability of the plant was exposed. Security did not stop the group. The charges increased because the hole in the nuclear security was put on full display. The focus could be shifted to the invasion of the plant rather than the fact that real terrorists could now imagine breaching a nuclear facility to do real harm. In one sense, the breach of the plant by the nun and her allies was a public service and a warning.

The story is striking but doesn't hit me in the way it hits you, not like Lulu's pacifiists story. It's more like this: if no one else will get the mentally ill with violent fantasies off the streets, the FBI idiot terrorist task force might be able to do it. Excerpt, my bold:

"It's just so hard to sleep outside," Baxter complained to his friends. He was loath to return to Lakewood, the site of his traumatic childhood, where a restraining order barred him from his mother's house. Such a constant font of positivity was Baxter that few realized he had grown up in a household his sister Rachael Garcia calls violent. "He was very fragile as a child," she says. "He was so sensitive. He'd come to me every day, crying," given to nervous tics, doodles of people hanging in nooses and writing violent poetry. "In my deepest darkest fantasys [sic] I see myself as evil," he wrote, "lacking all reason and empathy spilling the blood of the innocent."

When Baxter was 17, the stress had reached an apex. Believing his stepfather had beaten his mother, Baxter pulled a kitchen knife. "Cut me if you're going to cut me!" the stepdad urged, before Baxter sliced the knife across his chest. Baxter did a stint in a psych ward, says Garcia, after which he was legally forbidden from coming within 500 feet of his stepdad, and maintained little contact with his mom. Instead, he'd moved in with his biological father, a tense, out-of-work roofer whom he barely knew.

Occupy had been Baxter's escape hatch. Now he reluctantly returned to his father's home, which the bank was trying to foreclose on. Dad was scraping payments together by selling Native American handicrafts online. Baxter continued to faithfully walk or bike the seven miles into Cleveland for Occupy's meetings. Late one February night, furious with himself at his inability to somehow repair a broken world – or even his own broken life – Baxter had what he called a "mental break." He leapt in front of a moving car, shouting, "Kill me!" Police responding to the driver's 911 call found Baxter standing on the railing of the Hilliard Bridge, looking down onto the lanes of traffic below and screaming incoherently. The cops talked Baxter into coming down, then tackled him as he tried to flee. He had a 10-and-a-half-inch knife in his coat and a smaller one in his pants pocket. Charged with carrying a concealed weapon, he was sent to Lakewood Hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. On his way out of the police station, Baxter gave officers the finger, yelling, "Fascists!"

Days later, Wright and Azir picked Baxter up from his dad's house and took him to lunch at a Lakewood restaurant. They wanted to talk about fucking shit up – for Occupy's sake. Baxter was in.

They brainstormed and discussed possible targets [.....]

Take the FBI out of this story, replace them with local authorities locking up kids in mental institutions for forced treatment, and you've still got a civil libertarian vs. safety of the public story Complaining that the FBI are idiots ends up basically being a distraction from a difficult problem. This kid sounds as harmless as the Unibomber was before he sent his first bomb. The FBI's terrorist task force is obviously not the way to deal with it, but that doesn't make the violent mental illness vs. civil liberties problem go away. Jobs program? More like occupational therapy program for years and years....or society could try the cheaper solution of forcing the ever increasingly popular pyscho pharmaceutical guinea pig method.