The critical thing here (and one we will never know as far I see) is what point Mohamud begins (if at all) to actually harbour the feeling to kill innocent people.<p>Given the events in the article, <i>if</i> he had these feelings on or before the moment was contacted by FBI Special Agent Jason Dodd agent posing as the recent convert Bill Smith, then I agree the FBI had the responsibility to pursue him. However, <i>if not</i>, the FBI entrapped Mohamud. (why? read on)<p>The article goes into detail about Mohamud&#x27;s upbringing. I&#x27;m going to take a few quotes from it:
<i>- &#x27;Like many refugee children, Mohamud had to deal with cultural barriers that separated him from his parents, his American friends, and his mostly white classmates. There is little question he felt different. For an issue of the class magazine, for example, Duncan asked his students to draw cartoons of themselves and caption them. Under his portrait, Mohamud wrote, “I’m the black one.”&#x27;<p>- &#x27;Mohamud’s friends from that time acknowledged he was easy to influence&#x27;<p>- “Home was kind of a hostile environment for him,”</i> [re: his parents breakup who subsequently divorced]<p><i>- &#x27;“manipulable” and “conflicted”&#x27;</i> [the words in double quotes are those as written in an email by FBI Special Agent DeLong to other FBI agents in 2009]<p><i>- &#x27;“shy around authority figures.”&#x27;</i><p>When you take someone like that and make them the target of a sting operation...<p>I&#x27;m just not going to finish my sentence.<p>Not only that, here is another (lengthy) quote:<p><i>The public record of that meeting is incomplete. In what the FBI claimed was an honest mistake, Youssef’s tape recorder had dead batteries. Apart from the anonymous agent’s testimony, the only source for what Mohamud said that day is a summarized report prepared by Chan. At trial, Chan said he had destroyed his original notes.<p>(The defense took great issue with this at trial. Entrapment law requires prosecutors to show that a defendant was predisposed to commit the crime before the first contact with government agents. The nuances of Mohamud’s behavior and language during the first meeting, the defense argued, were vital.)</i><p>The FBI do not have a checklist that involves checking the batteries of any electronic devices to be used in an operation prior to operation.<p>Edit: spacing