What Was the FBI Up To?

Why would the FBI be training -- and more importantly employing -- a man to write stuff as a blogger designed to get people riled up?

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) - A New Jersey blogger facing charges in two states for allegedly making threats against lawmakers and judges was trained by the FBI on how to be deliberately provocative, his attorney said Tuesday.

Hal Turner worked for the FBI from 2002 to 2007 as an "agent provocateur" and was taught by the agency "what he could say that wouldn't be crossing the line," defense attorney Michael Orozco said.

"His job was basically to publish information which would cause other parties to act in a manner which would lead to their arrest," Orozco said.

Prosecutors have acknowledged that Turner was an informant who spied on radical right-wing organizations, but the defense has said Turner was not working for the FBI when he allegedly made threats against Connecticut legislators and wrote that three federal judges in Illinois deserved to die.

"But if you compare anything that he did say when he was operating, there was no difference. No difference whatsoever," Orozco said.

Special Agent Ross Rice, a spokesman for the FBI in Chicago, said he would not comment on or even confirm Turner's relationship with the FBI.

If it is true that the FBI trained and used this man, then the wrong people are being brought up on charges. I can't think of too many things much worse than agents of the federal government conducting disinformation operations using the cover of the First Amendment to flush out "right wing extremists." Or "left wing extremists," for that matter.

How do you know the flushing operation didn't push them into extreme positions? It's sounds an awful lot like entrapment.

Increasingly it seems we have a federal government that no longer remembers the limitations placed upon it by the U.S. Constitution.