In July 2013 the RCMP announced it had foiled a Canada Day bomb attack on the B.C. legislature, which was supposedly masterminded by two “self-radicalized” individuals inspired by “al Qaeda ideology.” The announcement elicited portentous statements from politicians about the menace of terrorism.

“They hate the values that make B.C. and Canada unique in the world,” said provincial premier Christy Clark. “We will not let them win. We will not let them strike fear in our hearts.”

The “arrests demonstrate that terrorism continues to be a threat to Canada,” said then-Public Safety Minister Vic Toews — apparently confirming Public Safety Canada’s assessment that “violent Islamist extremism is the leading threat to Canada’s national security.”

But this ostensibly explosive case was, in reality, a police-engineered dud. John Nuttall and Amanda Korody were formerly homeless recovering heroin addicts who were, according to the judgment of B.C. Supreme Court Justice Catherine Bruce, “manipulated into participating in an act of terrorism that was planned almost entirely by the police and which could not have been executed without overwhelming assistance from the police.”

Nuttall was likely “developmentally delayed,” and the couple was “impoverished” and “socially isolated.” Police deliberately exacerbated their social isolation, rendering them so psychologically dependent on the operation’s primary undercover officer that Nuttall could not decide whether to call 911 after ingesting ant poison without asking the officer’s opinion.

On a government-funded “reconnaissance mission” to Victoria, “Nuttall continued to lose track of important items such as his grandfather’s binoculars [and] his cellular telephone”; he “decided that they needed aliases on the recon, and curiously chose their own Christian names.” The RCMP spent $900,000 paying at least 200 people to work overtime on this “investigation,” which was considered a “national priority.”

“The spectre of the defendants serving a life sentence for a crime that the police manufactured by exploiting their vulnerabilities, by instilling fear that they would be killed if they backed out, and by quashing all doubts they had in the religious justifications for the crime, is offensive to our concept of fundamental justice,” Bruce declaimed, overturning the couple’s terrorism conviction because they had been “entrapped.”

“We do not need the police to create more [terrorists] out of marginalized people who have neither the capacity nor sufficient motivation to do it themselves,” Bruce added.

The entrapment of Nuttall and Korody resembles the disturbing pattern of counterterrorism sting operations conducted against the vulnerable and the marginalized in the United States.

As Human Rights Watch’s 2014 report Illusion of Justice noted, almost 30 per cent of federal terrorism convictions in the U.S. since 9-11 have arisen from stings in which an informant played an active role in developing the plot. Many of these operations targeted people struggling with mental disabilities and poverty.

In the case of the Newburgh Four, for example, a paid informant convinced four destitute men to commit an attack by offering them $250,000; one of the four had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and upon his arrest police found his apartment strewn with bottles of urine. This was a case in which “the government came up with the crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles,” the judge in the case acknowledged.

Last month, police arrested 18-year-old Mahin Khan on terrorism charges in Arizona, after he had been in contact with a government informant for years. “Mahin is 18 but mentally he is like a child,” his father told The Intercept. “We didn’t let him have a phone because we didn’t trust him with one, but now we have found out that he had been using a phone given to him by the FBI.”

One wonders why the state needs to “manufacture” its own plots to thwart, if terrorism really is as naturally abundant here as we are regularly warned. In fact, empirical analyses cut the bogeyman of “violent Islamist extremism” down to size: journalist Jonathan Kay has pointed out that one is more likely to die in Canada from slipping in the bathtub than from Muslim terrorism.

But as former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes observed, defending the Bureau’s conduct in the Newburgh Four case, “If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cuz the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half. You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’ — it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’”

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Fear is stoked by making the vulnerable into villains, by framing those disproportionately susceptible to society’s violence as the violent terrorists society needs saving from. That is the real sting of such operations.