There is a lot of upset over this picture of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula being hauled in by the Sheriff’s Deputies, ostensibly over parole violations, but really so the FBI can grill him over his little short film project insulting Mohammed.
I’m not sure the upset is actually warranted, though. You have an Arab (albeit Coptic Christian, if reports can be believed), who was so broke and disorganized that he was kiting checks to get by. All of a sudden he is flush enough to hire actors, cameramen, props like Humvees, and a set, as well as video editors. He has the money and organization to put together a whole short film, which has no real purpose at all, other than to piss off the Muslim Street. He even does it while posing as an Israeli citizen living in the US, named Sam Bacile. How does that happen?
If I were a suspicious type of guy (and I am), I would assume this guy was approached by somebody associated with a Middle Eastern intelligence agency who wanted to piss off the Arab Street at Israel and the US. He’d make the perfect cutout, given his criminal past and his need for money. Give him some money, and a little direction, and then let the film generate anti-American and anti-Israel sentiments back at home.
It would not surprise me if there were many such projects run by intelligence agencies all throughout the Middle East, all of which generate a minor nationalistic psychology in the targeted populace, but none of which ever pop up on the international radar. The bottom line is the citizens over there seem to need something to burn in effigy, and if it isn’t Americans and Israelis, it would probably be the local leaders. So I would not be surprised if a large part of maintaining a stable government in that part of the world isn’t running a myriad of little psyops, each igniting hatred for something outside the regime. If it works, people will focus on their hatred for the outsiders. Which means they won’t notice that they have no working sewer systems, their electricity is spotty at best, they only have a first grade education, nobody has taught them what toilet paper is, and they really have nothing productive to do with their time beyond protest the injustice of it all and kill a few infidels for spite.
In the case of this film, everything got screwed up, because Al Qaida used this little film project as a cover for their massing of forces to assault our embassy compound in Libya, and their assassination of our Ambassador. Suddenly everybody noticed the film, whereas most other minor intelligence operations like this drift below the radar, igniting a demonstration here and there, spreading by word of mouth in the locals, and generating localized hatred towards Israel and the US, but little more.
Of course, there is also the possibility that a state like Iran or Syria is beginning to get the hang of using a combination of false flagged movies like this and social media manipulation to gin up a proxy force of Arab Street types and produce an attack out of thin air. The end result of such an operation is exactly the same as sending the former Imad Mugniah to deliver a car bomb on an embassy, only this type of operation can be done without attaching any return address, for us to send missiles to. If that were the case, we would have a real problem on our hands.
If any of this is so, it is not surprising FBI counter-intel would have no choice but to find out if this guy was being run by somebody, how he was being run, and by who. Of course it would have been best to do that quietly, but then again, if this guy was brought in quietly, and suddenly his family reported him missing, it could have been a much bigger mess. “Film Maker Who Produced Mohammed Video Snatched up In Secretive Raid By US Agents” would have been the first headline, followed by, “FBI Releases Kidnapped Film Maker in Response to Pressure from Blogosphere.” Clearly if the Blogospere objected like this to his mere questioning, it would have responded much worse to his quiet disappearance. Better to just publicly bring him in on the parole violation, let the FBI grill him, and take the hit. Best case scenario, you learn something which leads to a bigger fish, exposes a network, and maybe even plugs up a hole somewhere else which may save US military lives in the future. Worst case scenario, Instapundit tears you a new one.
Of course, if some leftist bureaucrat did do all this out of vindictive spite, then we are a step closer to tyranny, but at this point, I think it’s much more likely the FBI just wanted to know if any Foreign Intelligence agencies are running agents on our soil, and figure out if this is going to become a more common tactic in the future.
If only Obama’s foreign policy was as competent as our hardworking counter-intel types.
