Attorney General Eric Holder spoke at the annual dinner of Muslim Advocates, a Muslim advocacy group in California and defended the FBI’s sting operations:
Mr. Holder was given a standing ovation as he took the stage, and many applauded during his speech. But the room fell silent for several minutes while Mr. Holder defended the sting operation in an Oregon bombing case last month, calling it a “successful undercover operation” and not a case of entrapment.
Those who think otherwise, he said, “simply do not have their facts straight.”
Mr. Hooper said the outreach on Friday had been long overdue. Muslims in the United States, he said, have been disappointed with what they consider lukewarm efforts on the part of the Obama administration to follow talk with action — on subjects like closing the detainee prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and policies toward Israel, for example. Mr. Obama has also been less willing to show support for Muslims domestically, he said, never making a public visit to a mosque.
Holder deserves credit for making defending the FBI’s approach to terrorism to a Muslim audience, particularly in California, where prosecutors inexplicably pursued a case against an individual who reported an FBI informant whom he believed was a terrorist. On the merits, Holder is right that most of these cases do not constitute entrapment in a legal sense.
But I think the question of entrapment is less important than asking whether there’s other ways to neutralize the people the FBI is targeting without the use of a sensational fake plot that can stoke public backlashes against Muslims and make them afraid of cooperating or alerting law enforcement in the future. I’m sure there’s a solution here that doesn’t hamper the FBI’s ability to neutralize threats and also doesn’t make American Muslims feel like they’re under siege by their own government.
