Abdella Ahmad Tounisi, 18, made a brief court appearance Tuesday in federal court in Chicago.
The American-born man from the Chicago suburb of Aurora is accused of seeking to join al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, which is fighting Syria's government in a civil war.
He tried to join the group through a website, constructed by the FBI, which urged readers to "join your lion brothers... fighting under the true banner of Islam".
Critics have said the use of such sites raises questions about whether authorities are overreaching, wooing impressionable youth to contemplate crimes that otherwise wouldn't cross their minds.
"These sites can end up creating crimes," said Phil Turner, a former federal prosecutor turned defence attorney in Chicago.
"Real terrorists don't need to go to a website for contacts. They have real contacts."
Federal investigators, he added, sometimes favour internet stings because they are less costly and labour intensive than traditional stakeouts.
http://www.aljazeera.com/news/americas/2013/04/201342482439318188.html
[WS:] It looks like this kind of "jihadists" are the only ones that the FBI is capable of catching. The real ones are not intercepted until after they do their deeds.
Another observation - juvenile fantasies of running away from home and joining some romanticized underground movement or guerilla group are quite common. I certainly had them, and I was not alone. I even drew elaborate plans about it when I was bored in school. One of such plans was intercepted by the teacher who then shared it with my parents. But this was the end of it. Poland might have been labeled a "police state" but had that teacher called the police about my "plans," she would have been laughed out of the stage.
It seems, however, that the US is becoming more and more lost in its own sick imagination - capable of solving only those problems it can itself manufacture and increasingly incapable of dealing with real ones.
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."