At first, the details about how accused Portland, Ore. attempted-bomber Mohamed Osman Mohamud was arrested gave me pause. This was not an operation that was stopped at the last-minute, skin of teeth, 24 Jack Bauer style. Rather, it was essentially a manufactured fake, with the FBI in on the “planning and execution” from the very beginning. Mohamud’s accomplices were undercover FBI agents. Even the bomb was a hoax. There was never anything real about it, other than one test bomb in a forest, and Mohamud’s very real determination to strike.

What bothered me about the sting, as the Fox article notes, and as Glenn Greenwald writes extensively about, is the possibility that Mohamud could have been lured into committing the act. That, somehow, the undercover FBI agents had an already radicalized young man convinced that he could successfully cause much destruction, if only he agreed to the bombing.

I believe I have now settled my qualms about this sting with two words that are beautiful in their simplicity: personal responsibility.

According to folks like Greenwald, the FBI’s actions convinced Mohamud that he was doing the right thing:

In June, he attempted to fly to Alaska in order to work on a fishing job he obtained through a friend, but he was on the Government’s no-fly list.  That caused the FBI to question him at the airport and then bar him from flying to Alaska, and thus prevented him from earning income with this job (para. 25).  Having prevented him from working, the money the FBI then pumped him with — including almost $3,000 in cash for him to rent his own apartment (para. 61) — surely helped make him receptive to their suggestions and influence.

The fact is that Mohamud always had an opportunity to say “no.” Whatever his politico-religious inclinations, and however he felt about the United States, and whatever the FBI may have provided in assistance, he always had a chance to back down. He didn’t.

What Greenwald, and other liberals, don’t seem to understand is that there are words, and then there are actions. One can say they wish to kill someone, or wish they were dead. This is how hate groups like the Westboro Baptist Church work. The operate by hateful words, not hateful actions. So, even though they’re despised, what they do is considered free speech. However, you cross a line when you actively try to carry out those words. And that’s what Mohamud did.

In this post-9/11 world, the FBI needs the ability to discover plots before they’re executed. Even Greenwald agrees with that. In the case of Mohamud, the sting against him seems to be everything that entrapment is not, namely:

…there is no entrapment where a person is ready and willing to break the law and the government agents merely provide what appears to be a favorable opportunity for the person to commit the crime. For example, it is not entrapment for a government agent to pretend to be someone else and to offer, either directly or through an informant or other decoy, to engage in an unlawful transaction with the person (see sting operation). So, a person would not be a victim of entrapment if the person was ready, willing and able to commit the crime charged in the indictment whenever opportunity was afforded, and that Government officers or their agents did no more than offer an opportunity.

–Wikipedia

Mohamud is a man who was already radicalized, and who, by the FBI’s account, was ready to act if he found the chance. He was offered the chance and took it. It doesn’t always turn out that way, of course. An article Greenwald linked to in order to support his argument, recounted the story of another Muslim man given a chance to carry out a bombing. He refused. He chose another path, and so he is currently not in custody, as Mohamud is.

In the end, Mohamud is man who, seeing actions by his country that he didn’t like, opted to take revenge when he didn’t have to. Nothing the FBI did was unethical, and was in fact necessary to stop a real plot from taking place.