When I heard that an Iraqi man living in the US had recently been arrested for plotting to assassinate George W. Bush, my first thought was possible entrapment.

It didn’t used to be that way for me. Although I often did think “entrapment?”, it was way down the list of theories rather than my initial thought. I’d been familiar with the concept from law school, though, and I had been very wary of it ever since because of that exposure.

So I don’t discount this sort of article at all:

Well over 20 years into our War on Terror, so-called “terror plots thwarted by the FBI,” with rare exception, are pushed along by, funded by, and materially supported by the FBI—which, more often than not, is simply stepping in at the eleventh hour to stop Potemkin plots of its own making.

Important qualifier here, so there’s no confusion: Very often with these “terror plot” cases, whether they be “ISIS” or “domestic terror,” the person at the core of the plot very much has dangerous ideological beliefs, and their interaction with law enforcement is often preceded by threats or extremist online chatter. The degree of responsibility exists in a spectrum. Sometimes they are mentally unwell dupes who would have otherwise posed no real threat, and the plot is almost entirely of the FBI’s creation. Sometimes they play a more central role, and while the plot may not have happened without FBI assistance, it very well may have. It’s difficult to know at first blush—and without access to the actual affidavit or response from the accused legal counsel—where the latest “foiled FBI” plot falls on the spectrum. But given history and the details we do know, our media, as a rule, ought to be much more skeptical before announcing scary FBI-curated headlines about dastardly plots.

Earlier today, Forbes broke a story about the FBI stepping in to “break up” an assassination plot by Iraqi national Shihab Ahmed Shihab Shihab to take out former President George W. Bush, supposedly as revenge for the Iraq War…

Further inspection of the details, however, reveal that the “plot,” like most “ISIS/al Qaeda” plots the FBI “thwarts,” was likely moved along by and facilitated by FBI agents and well-paid FBI informants. (Forbes doesn’t say how much these informants were paid, but in some previous thwarted plots it has been as high as six figures.) The only actionable thing the suspect did other than supposedly trying to recruit people in WhatsApp was surveil George Bush’s Dallas residence. An FBI informant paid for the flight, picked up Shihab, and ushered him to the residence, according to NBC News. “After traveling to Dallas with the informant to take video of Bush’s residence,” Forbes writes,” the accused took more footage at the George W. Bush Institute.”

Please read the whole thing.

That article only deals with the “war on terror” cases connected with Islamic fanaticism. It doesn’t go near the evidence for entrapment in the Whitmer kidnapping plot in Michigan as well as the January 6th “insurrection”.

By the way, the government is re-trying the Whitmer defendants after the jury was hung in their previous trial. It doesn’t surprise me; the prosecutors will not give up on this unless the men are acquitted outright, and even then perhaps they’ll come up with some other charges against them if they can manage it.