Deporting a suicide bomber, or creating one

Madame Vega points us to this story about a typically headstrong 16 year-old, growing up in Queens since arriving from Bangladesh at 5. A few errors in judgment later and she's back in Bangladesh, after the FBI has taken her in (literally and figuratively), then spat her out, to be deported on her parents' minor immigration violations.

What's so incredibly frustrating about this story is that we just don't know; based on the contents of the story, the FBI certainly appears to have over-reacted. The point is, with the uneccessary secrecy the FBI is operating under in cases like this, are the agents caped crusaders saving us from being blown to smithereens on a daily basis, or over-reactive bumblers who are chasing phantoms, potentially missing real threats as resources are squandered?

Two former F.B.I. agents, presented with the known details of the case, declined to discuss it specifically, but spoke of the pressures and practices that shape such investigations today.

Pasquale J. D'Amuro, who headed the New York F.B.I. office until April, said that since 9/11, agents have had to err on the side of suspicion. More potential threats are being reported, he said, and every one must be thoroughly investigated through whatever avenues are legally available, including enlisting immigration authorities as soon as a noncitizen is under scrutiny.

"The alarm bells are going off," said Mr. D'Amuro, now the chief executive of Giuliani Security and Safety, a consulting company. "And we have each and every time to run those threats to the ground, whether it ends up to be a bogus threat or proceeds to some type of prosecutorial action."

Some cases are never resolved, he added. Even when suspicions prove unfounded, he said, any visa violations are already in the hands of immigration authorities, who have to bring them "to some type of closure."

But Mike German, who left the bureau a year ago after a long career chasing homegrown terror suspects, said that the agency's new emphasis on collecting intelligence rather than criminal evidence has opened the door to more investigations that go "in the wrong direction."

"If all these chat rooms are being monitored, and we're running down all these people because of what they're saying in chat rooms, then these are resources we're not using on real threats," said Mr. German, who has publicly complained that F.B.I. management problems impeded terror investigations after 9/11.

The stress on intelligence increases the agency's demands for secrecy, to protect its sources. And secrecy, he said, leads to abuses of power.

"Perhaps the government has some incredibly incriminating piece of information and saved us from a terrible act of violence; it would make everybody feel better to know it," he said. "Conversely, if they did something wrong, the public needs to know that."

At a time when we should be encouraging young muslims to enjoy the freedoms our nation offers to counter anti-American sermons from ranting clerics, instead we take advantage of their use of those freedoms to prosecute them. Free speech should not be a deporting offense.

More importantly, if the FBI had real suspicions that this girl was a potential suicide bomber, wouldn't it have made more sense to simply monitor her activities to see if she made contact with someone in a terrorist cell? Truth is, they clearly didn't find her much of a threat, but, as the man says, you have to bring these things "to closure."

So we've deported someone who says she loved America. Maybe she did. Maybe she didn't. I'm pretty sure she doesn't now.