Australian Police Go Full FBI, Radicalize Autistic Teen Officers Told Parents They Were Trying To Help
from the how-do-you-sleep dept
The FBI has done some heinous things in its pursuit of its counter-terrorism objectives. While it’s true the FBI has occasionally nabbed actual terrorists, it seems to prefer creating terrorists to going after those that are already avowed terrorists.
The FBI utilizes informants and undercover agents to perform this highly questionable work. Investigations border on entrapment. Internet loudmouths, petty criminals, or people with mental health issues are pushed and prodded to make their words a reality. In most cases, the targets of these investigations can’t. They don’t have the money, the expertise, or even the will to follow through with violent acts. Informants provide the tools, weapons, plans, and constant pressure needed to turn often otherwise harmless people into so-called terrorists the FBI can swoop in and arrest them the moment they start turning the plans the informants concocted into reality.
Apparently, the FBI is not alone in its willingness to radicalize people just so it can arrest them and hit them with charges that could result in decades of imprisonment. The counter-terrorist wing of Australian law enforcement does the same thing. This truly horrific story at least has a (partially) happy ending. But the events leading up to this conclusion are cruel and inhumane.
Thomas Carrick (the pseudonym given to him by the court) is a 13-year-old with autism. Thomas has an IQ of 71 and is a recipient of national disability insurance. He became fixated on the Islamic State, spending a lot of time watching ISIS videos and, apparently, asking his parents to purchase bomb-making ingredients for him. His parents, who are not native English speakers, asked the local police for help deterring his fascination with Islamic extremism.
They provided officers with access to Thomas, his home, his phone, his mother’s phone, his room, and to personal information gathered by his school and psychologist. At the start, the police actually did what they said they’d do: they sought help for Thomas. He was assigned to a case manager and met regularly with a psychologist. An officer who accessed the contents of Thomas’ phone noted he had downloaded a lot of stuff related to China and the Communist Party, but very little related to the Islamic State. They also set him up with an imam to discuss the religion of Islam in a more peaceful context.
Had things stayed this way, there would be nothing to report. But three months after this helpful path was opened up for Thomas, the country’s War on Terror wing decided to insert itself into the mix. The Joint Counter-Terrorism Team [JCTT] (a mix of Australian federal officers, Victoria police, and Asio members) opened up a parallel investigation that actively worked to undo and undermine all the help Thomas was receiving from other law enforcement officers.
An online covert operative was tasked with communicating to Thomas using two personae: a 24-year-old Muslim man from NSW, and a more extreme person located overseas.
[…]
The operative chatted with Thomas on 55 of the next 71 days, including during breaks at school and late at night.
[…]
The first persona introduced Thomas to the second, more extreme, persona, who encouraged him to make a bomb or kill an AFP member.
But the operative gave evidence that Thomas was naive, and living a “fantasy life online”, including by asking questions like whether he could join the kids’ section of Islamic State.
On 8 August 2021, Thomas sent a photo to the operative which showed him wearing his school uniform, a hoodie and a face mask and holding a knife with “ISIS” written on it in marker.
His house was searched within days, and he was charged less than two months later.
The JCTT was well-aware the therapeutic efforts authorized by police were still underway when it decided to turn this 13-year-old into a terrorist. When seeking authorization to arrest Thomas, the detective superintendent (apparently deliberately) failed to inform his supervisors that he had evidence the JCTT’s undercover work was having a negative impact on the rehabilitation of Thomas. And, of course, that’s the point: the JCTT only wins when it arrests terrorists. If it has to do all the dirty work itself, it apparently will.
And that’s not the worst of it. There’s also this:
[Magistrate Lesley] Fleming found the JCTT also deliberately delayed charging Thomas with offences until after he turned 14, as it made it harder for him to use the defence of doli incapax, which refers to the concept that a child is not criminally responsible for their actions.
The JCTT also performed another search of Thomas’ room for criminal evidence while maintaining the pretense they were part of the parallel police effort to dissuade Thomas from fixating on the Islamic State.
Fortunately, Thomas has been freed and is no longer facing charges. Magistrate Fleming’s order rips the JCTT to shreds for its abominable actions.
“The community would not expect law enforcement officers to encourage a 13-14 year old child towards racial hatred, distrust of police and violent extremism, encouraging the child’s fixation on ISIS,” magistrate Lesley Fleming said in the decision.
“The community would not expect law enforcement to use the guise of a rehabilitation service to entice the parents of a troubled child to engage in a process that results in potential harm to the child.
“The conduct engaged in by the JCTT and the AFP falls so profoundly short of the minimum standards expected of law enforcement offices [sic] that to refuse this [stay] application would be to condone and encourage further instances of such conduct.”
Thomas had a chance to be rehabilitated. But the JCTT deliberately harmed a minor to serve its own ends.
“The rehabilitation of TC was doomed once the [operator] connected online…befriended TC and fed his fixation, providing him with a new terminology, new boundaries and an outlet for him to express, what was in part, his fantasy world.”
This is truly disgusting. One wonders how the operatives involved with the deliberate destruction of a child (and their childhood) live with themselves. What possibly justifiable ends could they have been serving with this effort? Thomas was already being closely observed by law enforcement, but in the hopes that such close supervision would encourage him to find more healthy outlets for expression.
What happened here was evil. There’s no other word for it. And the added cruelty of waiting a few months to deprive the minor of a courtroom defense is symptomatic of the sickness that seems to pervade counter-terrorist agencies. The need to win subsumes the need to serve the public’s interests. And no one’s interests were served here other than the pitiable counter-terrorists cops who can’t get through the day without the brief ego boost of an unearned “win.”
Filed Under: australia, entrapment, isis, jctt, own plot, terrorism, thomas carrick, victoria police
Comments on “Australian Police Go Full FBI, Radicalize Autistic Teen Officers Told Parents They Were Trying To Help”
We need to radicalize terrorists over here so they don’t radicalize over there.
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Hey now, you didn’t need to leak the theme for the next CPAC this early.
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Too late, the FBI got there before you.
Not just entrapment
This is child abuse under any reasonable definition.
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Hello, my conservative (non)friends – This right here is the grooming and unethical behavior towards children you should be railing against!
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Why didn’t social media stop them?!
(Gimme an /s.)
“The community would not expect”
The community should wake the hell up.
You cheer their wins & feel safer but they turned a 13 yr old into a ‘terrorist’ so they could score a cheap and easy layup at the expense of a disabled child.
This isn’t going to be the first time or the last time they do this, just looking at the results encourages them to do it again and again to show more wins.
They were willing to do this… how can you feel safer?
They spent more time creating a perpetrator, under the guise of helping him refocus on other things, rather than looking for actual terrorists. Can they find an actual terrorist or do they need to keep throwing the disabled into prison for imaginary invented plots they created?
It seems that Unz Review is an FBI informant site that attempts to radicalize people to commit crime so that they will ve arrested. Kevin Barrett was demanding that people support Hamas, not Palestinians in general, but specifically and solely Hamas, which could have people placed on no fly lists or under surveillance, expelled in some cases, and prevented from obtaining gainful employment. Kevin Barrett was a UW professor so he has the understanding of what his unwitting followers could be subjected to for following his advice. Kevin Barrett simply does not care what happens to them or whose life is destroyed by following his advice. Most of the contributing authors on that site also intentionally misinform people and actively encourage anti-Semiticism, misogyny, racism, openly and hostily discriminating against lgbtq, and anyone that does not fit their narrow definition of acceptability, even though they are idiots themselves whose arguments are factually incorrect, biased, filled with half truths, and blatant lies. It is very dangerous when there is a website owned and operated by a Jew with Jewish contributors telling Christians, Muslims, and anyone else that all Jews hate everyone that is not Jewish and intend to harm them, especially if someone is a teen that does not have much kbowledge of life and the world, They are hurting people that they claim to be supporting the most – white Christian boys and young men. The Burning Platform is another site that falls into the same category. Elon Musk is also actively encouraging that type of behavior, which is surprising behavior for a multi-corporare CEO and the now second richest man in the world. It is totally reckless careless disregard for the well veing of others and is hostile, inciteful, and insane. They act like borderline, juvenile delinquents themselves, but expect to be respected as men. Emotionally immature, narcissistic, spoiled rotten brats.
Like grooming for terrorism
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At least in America, we can stop paying the public employees at the federal, state, county, and local level since they have engaged in insurrection and rebellion against the United States with the faked 9/11 plane attacks and the fske covid-19 virus. Section three of the fourteenth amendment prohibits them from being paid. That goes for the healthcare and mental healthcare workers too. The government is not allowed to pay them because there is no such thing as covid-19. When covid-19 was first reported to exist, they claimed that it was a SARS virus, cleaved with an AIDS virus, inserted into an Ebloa envelpoe. Nobody has had any virus of that sort. The CDC has stated that they do not have any sample of covid-19. All RT-PCRs are mini bioweapons labs incapable of diagnosing any virus. All RT -PCRs were contaminated with 3 strains of the Neuraminidaise enzyme prevalent in flu strains. They claimed that the contaminants were tailings. They were not tailings. Peoples’ serums were added to the RT-PCRs and were reverse transcribed 50 times at the onset of the fake pandemic. All RT-PCRs reverse transcribe RNA into DNA and all corona viruses are RNA viruses and do not have any DNA at all, which also means that the AIDS epidemic was a hoax, and Hepatitis C which both used RT-PCRs to diagnose both viruses. AIDS weight loss and sickness was caused by whip its and the drug cocktail for AIDS caused Kaposis Sarcoma. Hepatitis C is caused by incompatible blood transfusions, incomaptability of blood types in preganancy, and needle sharing. RH positive blood transusions, or pregnancy of an RH negative woman with an RH positive fetus can cause this to happen. It has been scientifically documented, and it can even lead to death of the mother or baby.
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…said no human, ever.
Where are all the conservatives who squawk about grooming? They seem oddly silent regarding this actual case of grooming someone into terrorism…
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“Grooming” only means what we want it to mean, shut up!
If hell existed there's certainly a few promising candidates...
Well that’s certainly one of the most abhorrent examples of ‘ensuring job security’ I’ve read about in a long while.
Can’t find any actual terrorists because you suck at your job or it’s not as necessary as you want people to think it is? Just trick an autistic kid into dressing up as one and wait until you can charge him as an adult before doing so.
Not only do you get to brag about the ‘terrorist’ you just caught but you just demolished the trust people have towards law enforcement, drastically reducing their willingness to contact those in positions of authority if they think someone needs help and in turn increasing the odds that someone will go without the help they need until they snap and cause some real damage that could have been prevented.
It’s certainly nice that the judge pulled no punches when it came to ripping into the disgusting government agents who ran the whole scam but the fact that it even reached the point that it required a judge to step in and shut it down paints the agency in question in a horrifying light.
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Eventually there will be a significant terrorist attack while some “security” agencies are touting their win over a 10 year-old who once said something in school that got wildly and willfully misinterpreted.
Given that conspiring to plan a terrorist attack is just as illegal as carrying one out, how exactly do these “undercover” agents get away with planning, supplying and recruiting for a terrorist attack that would not – COULD NOT – happen without their aid?
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Oh that’s easy, when it comes to the law ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others’.
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So an aspiring terrorist is held accountable and prevented from carrying out his deranged, evil plans (to which he’d hoped to recruit his family as accomplices, btw), and of course this author is upset about it.
Madness.
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No, that’s not what happened. Read the article again
An autistic child got fixated on ISIS (he never stood a chance of enacting anything, seeing as he asked his parents for supplies). His parents put him in therapy to help this, and help it did.
UNTIL
the anti terrorism cops came in, and decided that, rather than help this kid, they’re going to push him FURTHER TOWARDS being a terrorist.
The only mad one here is you. The rest of us are justifiably horrified at the cops
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At which point he should’ve been terminated. Unfortunately, the JCTT couldn’t kill him extrajudicially, so they took him off the board via a more time and labor intensive means.
I support Australian law enforcement and colleagues throughout the English-speaking world who fight the scourge of Islam.
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You’re literally advocating killing a child for crimes they have not committed.
That’s not how any of this works.
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You’ll have to forgive that poster—they’re an edgelord troll who thinks espousing violently extremist right-wing rhetoric and sounding like a bigoted Joker makes them “cool”. I know I’m the last guy to be saying this, but it’s best to refuse engagement, flag their posts, and move on. Same goes for their “I’m so left-wing, I want to kill all the cishets!” sockpuppet.
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…said no human, ever.
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You’re bloody mental.
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Ok, groomer.
How can Americans deradicalize LEOs, the military, government, political parties, religious groups, academia, healthcare, mental healthcare, tech, the financial sector, and the media? None of them seem to be willing to face rality and admit that they have a problem, even though they are terrorists committing high crimes, treason, organized crime, medical fraud, scientific fraud, academic fraud, tech fraud, media fraud, financial fraud, economic fraud, national security fraud, and crimes against humanity. I realize that that group encomoasses most of adult society, Nazi Germany had the same problem. They said it could never happen here, It happened here. That is why I do not want to live in this country anymore. That is just not good enough for me. I guess that it must be my outrageously high standards of expecting people not to be serial criminal psychopath that commit predatory crime and organized crime as a survival tactic.
Joint Counter-Terrorism Team vs autistic 13 year-old is the kind of thing that used to be absurdist fiction social commentary.
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You don’t think developmentally disabled teenagers can be terrorists?
Only a couple of days ago 14 year-old Wadee’ Oweisat carried out a knife attack on police and wounded one officer.
No mercy for the terrorist scum, regardless of their age or mental capacity!
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You’re either lying or stupid.
According to the new agency Wafa, an Israeli news outlet claims that the child was shot for attempting to stab Israeli military personnel, but there were no injuries. There’s no way to confirm that the child was actually trying to stab them.
And trying to stab someone isn’t automatically terrorism.
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There’s literally surveillance footage that shows the 14 year-old terrorist approach the officers while carrying a concealed knife in his back pants pocket. As the lead officer begins a routine pat-down of the subject during a lawful stop, Wadee’ Oweisat deploys the knife and stabs the officer at least four times.
Per Haaretz, where you can easily find the video and reporting on the story, the officer was wounded by the terrorist but thankfully he and a colleague neutralized the threat.
Israeli police 1 – Palestinian scum 0.
Maybe they are Keystone Cops for no reason, or maybe they have a reason? What could it be?
The real question everyone tip-toes around here is this. Why is there such a huge push for these agencies to find anyone even if they aren’t a serious threat? And additionally who benefits from these cases?
First off we must have a baseline understanding of how government instructions work. An institution is in the business of self preservation and expansion of resources to accomplish whatever mission they were founded for and when they have solved it the ever problematic mission creep occurs. Mission creep being the expansion of agency agendas outside of the original institution goals. That’s in an all equal world similar to basic economic supply and demand equations all things being equal in an ideal world. In the real world we never face such a scenario.
So in this case why are they expanding to persecute targets so hungrily? So hungrily that it is almost like their livelihood or promotional potentials depend on it. So it’s pressure from the top. Now why would the top pressure the employees to do this? Well usually it’s politics or profit. I suspect a well oiled machine like we have today has tied both together.
Once this and any individual is subject to the “system” they are now unpersoned. They can be treated as less than the others. I know you might say they did X or Y and these are against the law but you might want to be careful have you looked at the ever increasing list of laws you’re subject to? But back to the importance of un person status for agendas. A person who is deemed not worthy or bad for any absurd reason (see witches, Japanese Americans, Muslim Americans, black people, poor people, etc) they can be subjected to any horrible thing and it can be legitimized that these are unworthy people (burning witches, American internment of Japanese, Muslim abuse after 9/11, list of black and poor oppression is endless).
So now what would be down the road possibly for these unpersoned individuals? Especially in light of the increasing numbers of them due to ever expanding laws and over enthusiastic enforcement to the point of caricature.
Well generally you look at horrible atrocities in the past to unpersoned people to find out for trends and apply it to today’s climate. The witches had fire, Japanese had camps, Muslims had enhanced interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, blacks and the poor have had too many to tell in this relatively short response so what is the flavor of the oppression in the rapidly changing science and engineering field demonstrate? It certainly could usher in or encourage the use of invasive surveillance technologies, at first uniquely tailored or designed for only the unpersoned. The limits to this technological innovation for the new “bad” people of society? Well read up some science and engineering. I mean this is a Tech website. The industry needs more guinea pigs essentially and these unpersoned people are being shoveled in at a frenzied pace due well, greed and politics ofcourse.
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Just a long-winded way of saying you support terrorists and malcontents and hate police.
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Either a bot or a troll. Wonderful. By that logic those who are anti witch burning because they don’t trust the witch interrogation techniques simply “hate” the King, the Church and God itself(enforcers of the time and its hierarchy in case you’re a little slow).
If you actually read my point you would understand.
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Why do you characterize aspiring ISIS terrorists as victims?
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How to create an aspiring terrorist:
Bomb their house killing innocent people like family and friends with no recourse for justice. Survivors will then try to seek revenge any way they can, like joining a terrorist organization that promises to give them the means to strike back.
The sad truth is that Israel’s actions will create thousands of new terrorists hell-bent on revenge because many of them will have been victims at the hands of IDF at some point. IDF is through their actions radicalizing a whole generation of people, and that means that Israel will never see any lasting peace for the foreseeable future.
And that is what you don’t seem to get, terrorists aren’t born, they are created – many from being victimized and powerless. And what is even worse, some anti-terrorist organizations are trying to create terrorists to get cheap “victories” as this article show and it isn’t the first time they have tried grooming people into becoming terrorists.
I’m afraid that even you will sooner or later experience loss in some way due to what is happening in Gaza, many people will, because if you think the new generation of terrorists being created will just attack Israel you are sadly mistaken.
If I were you I would be absolutely furious that organizations that were created to keep you safe are making your life objectively less safe by victimizing people to fill a quota or whatever. That you are hung up on people criticizing such behavior from these organizations speak volumes of your priorities which are severely fucked up.
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The only fury I feel is because the IDF hasn’t killed more Palestinians.
I wish there was a hyper-targeted biological weapon the IDF could deploy that would wipe-out every living Palestinian–man, woman and child!
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bait
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^
Projection
When did the Australian JCTT bomb “Thomas Carrick’s” house, scumbag?
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I see you didn’t bother read any further before your immature emotional impulses took over your mental faculties and made you abjectly stupid.
I’ll leave it up to your abject stupidity to find me addressing what JCTT did within the context of “creating aspiring terrorists”, perhaps pigs can fly after all.
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^
More projection
Still hard
Once again, these cases will always be difficult. Contrary to Tim’s statement; not only do they have the interest but clearly the will. Give them the means and they will act.
And here is the problem. You can claim they won’t do anything because they can’t. But clearly they will when they can. As evidenced in their actions leading to arrest.
And the question, then, is what if a real terrorist got in contact with them.
How would it be any different than a ‘pretend’ terrorist played by an officer?
Part of me agrees, this is clearly entrapment. But, part of me says they are intent on doing, when doing can be done.
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But they were clearly being rehabilitated and the rehabilitation was clearly showing progress. They were speaking to mental health professionals and could’ve probably turned out fine. The police’s job should be to prevent them from getting into contact with a terrorist and getting them rehabilitated. They have a lot of hope left, especially at that age.
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I agree in part. They were apparently getting better. Why the parents called the police and not a service is my confusion. Police enforce laws, they don’t do psychological evaluations and treatment.
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But he was receiving help, and was being monitored.
The actions of JCTT are akin to the DEA sending undercover agents to NA meetings to hand out free samples.