“Alexander Ciccolo to get 20 years for terror plot, assault” (Berkshire Eagle) is about a young Massachusetts man who converted to Islam and aspired to wage, but did not actually wage, jihad.
He couldn’t finish high school, but supposedly he was going to accomplish his terrorist goals: “he dropped out of school in the 11th grade and worked fast-food and roofing jobs after that, had once been a peace advocate, having taken part in a peace walk around Lake Ontario, organized by the Grafton Peace Pagoda, located off Route 2 in Petersburgh, N.Y., in July and August 2012.”
He only got close to his goals because the U.S. govenrment helped him: “On July 4, 2015, he accepted a small cache of weapons from an informant cooperating with the FBI and who had been in contact with Ciccolo beginning in June 2015”
He did not grow up in a two-parent home: “He came to the attention of authorities after his estranged father, a Boston Police captain, alerted them to his son’s stated interest in supporting the work of the terror group. … Ciccolo’s mother and stepfather attended the hearing…” (The child was the subject of significant litigation in Massachusetts family court. From ABC News:
Ciccolo had missed so many days of school the Wareham School Department filed what is known in Massachusetts as a CHINS – or Child In Need of Services – complaint to the Department of Social Services which opened an investigation into his mother, who had full custody.
The entire time his father, who was rising in the ranks of the Boston Police Department, desperately petitioned the court to let Alexander live with him, his new wife, and his stepchildren in Needham, an upscale Boston suburb, rather than with his ex-wife, Shelley Reardon, who refused, he claimed in court records, to have Alexander evaluated by mental health professionals.
“He [Robert] seeks this change because the child’s mother…who presently has primary physical custody of the child has in the past verbally agreed to allow the child to be evaluated but without exception has subsequently refused to allow such evaluations to proceed,” Ciccolo’s lawyer wrote in an emergency motion that petitioned a court to give him full custody of Alexander. “At present mother… has threatened legal action against father if initiates” psychological treatment.
The contentious divorce between Robert Ciccolo and Reardon, who split after 10 years of marriage when Alexander was five, are a glimpse into their only son’s long history of behavioral problems and mental illness that culminated with him coming “under the sway of ISIS,” as a young adult, prosecutors said at his first court appearance on July 14. He changed his name to Abu Ali al Amriki 18 months ago and opened a Facebook account where he posted a picture of a dead American soldier along with “Thank you Islamic State! Now we don’t have to deal with these kafir [non believer] back in America.”
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He doesn’t seem like great neighbor, but does it make sense to put him away for 20 years given that he didn’t do much besides dream? What else could we have done with this troubled young person that would have kept us safe in case he did ever become capable enough to realize his dreams (without government assistance)?
Did they prosecute him because they needed to show some results from the informant?
An unkind person might think he was prosecuted as a way of relieving the tedium of American counter-terrorism work. Officers in countries with “proper” terrorist networks have better ways to spend their time. There seem to have been many such prosecutions in the US; over here, we generally expect terrorists to be a little more self-reliant in their preparations.
This is what happens when you unleash Drug War tactics against your own citizenry. Left to his own devices, Ciccolo was harmless. Informants are paid on a “no indictment-no reward” basis. The financial incentives are enormous–informants routinely get paid six-figure payouts which for the most part are off the books because an informant’s identity remains secret. This has given rise to the phenomenon of freelance informants: there is simply too much money to be made. Here are a few articles on the subject:
ISIS and the Lizard People: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/isis-lizard-people-michael-okane/
How to Spot the Informant at your Local Mosque https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-spot-informant-your-local-mosque-michael-okane/