Gus > If McVeigh had been diagnosed as mentally ill he'd have been confined to a madhouse.
That's a matter of opinion.
> yours is a captious line of thought in that it overlooks the fact that the US is teeming with hundreds of rightwing/quasifascist militias totalling hundreds of thousands of members
And show me one that rejoices in OKC.
> Are they all FBI fronts?
How do I know? But you can be sure that the FBI are involved.
> Are all militia nuts patsies to be framed by the "evil federal government"?
To my knowledge, OKC was a single event. But since you ask, I wouldn't be at all surprised if many one-time militia members are to be found in the US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
> Finally, just because people happen to commit "foolish" crimes doesn't imply that they were tricked into committing them
It all depends on what motivated them to commit the crime? As I understand it, "terrorists" usually belong to organisations. Individuals don't operate on their own as anarchists would. In the organisation there is a hierarchy of command -- orders come from somewhere and others have to obey them. In the situation, it would not take very much for double-agents to find their way into the chain of command and issue orders which are not in the interest of the organisation although superficially they may appear to be. And most certainly a spy or double-agent in the organisation would be in a position to inform the authorities of any impending "event".
> smart people too blunder every now and then
As I have mentioned before, in general terms, I do not understand what is in the mind of a terrorist -- what he, as an individual, hopes to achieve by a dastardly act on unknown, innocent people? Sure, I can understand Palestinians who blow themselves up in a final, desperate act of frustration and revenge but not Americans who have a grievance with their government. And I can certainly understand state-sponsored terrorism because one can see the knee-jerk response of the state to it -- eg whether it is in Israel where the terrorism is used as justification to keep stolen land or in the US where the terrorism was/is the pretext to invade various countries. |
