Got paranoia? The aha moment

Vaughn Bode's The Man (1972), via Matt Seneca.

Via BooMan, a bit of very strong noticing from Walter Katz at The Week involving Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mysterious Armenian friend.

in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met Misha, a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish beard. [Tamerlan's ex-brother-in-law] Khozhugov didn't know where they'd met but believed they attended a Boston-area mosque together. Misha was an Armenian native and a convert to Islam and quickly began influencing his new friend, family members said.

Misha, apparently, was the Salafizing influence, who convinced him to give up music, go to mosque regularly, read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and become a 9/11 truther, and who knows what else?

What occurred to Katz is that all the radical-Muslim conspiracies that our government has stopped since  2001 have had a Misha-like figure, a kind of teacher who explained [jump]
the doctrine to them, who maybe came up with the idea of blowing something up, who played a big role in developing the plans, came up with money when money was needed, bought stuff, reassured, coached, listened. What he's usually called in the newspaper stories is the FBI informant, because that's what they were.

Because when you think about it every last one of those deadly conspiracies was manned by people of such an appalling loserness that they could barely be expected to tie their shoes without help, who had no idea what to do or how to do it. Without their FBI informant guiding them at every step, they would never have made it to the point where the FBI had something to arrest them for. Indeed, you could almost say the FBI created every one of those radical Muslim terrorist conspiracies, entrapping the loser Muslims into taking part, except of course that would be entrapment, which is illegal, and I can't imagine the FBI would ever do anything to break the law.

But the Tsarnaev brothers didn't have an FBI informant, did they? That's why they succeeded in their awful mission, right? There was nobody to watch them, to turn them in before it went too far. But then what if there was? What if Tamerlan and Johar were just that least little bit smarter than your average FBI-recruited terrorist gang and able to go the last mile on their own, with an Internet recipe for pressure cookers and ball bearings? What if they dumped Misha, or missed a meeting with him, and then went ahead?

What if the bombing of the Boston Marathon was one colossal fuckup on the part of Misha and the Bureau? Think anybody might go to jail over that?