I love "This American Life" but …
Sometimes they are, well, too dang liberal. I know. You are thinking, "Hello! They are on public radio! They are hosted by a gay fella named Ira! C’mon, what do you expect?"
I really do love the show and, in their defense, many times they have great human interest stories about people caught in strange situations or funny circumstances. The narrators are very good at drawing you into the characters so that you feel sympathy, empathy or pity for the folks the stories are about and the situations they find themselves in.
Tonight’s show was, I am guessing, supposed to make us feel sympathy (or perhaps indignation) about the way Hemant Lakhani was treated. You see, Hemant was convicted of trying to sell shoulder-launched missiles to what he believed was a terrorist group, by a New Jersey court in April of this year.
The way TAL framed the story, Hemant was simply an inept real-life Willie Loman who was incapable of being a real threat to our country’s security. He was a clothing salesman who would promise a prospective client anything, even missiles (or plutonium!), but who was, in reality, unable to actually deliver any of these items on his own. It wasn’t until he was set up by our government (the word "entrapment" was used several times through the story) that anyone was able to build a case against him.
Perhaps he was truly inept at being an arms dealer and I suspect he was. Maybe he really is just a clown. But he was convicted, not because he was a good arms dealer, but that he was a willing arms dealer, even though the purchasers wanted to the missile for the expressed purpose of blowing a commercial airline out of the sky, on our own soil.
I feel no sympathy for this guy. Even though he is 70+ years old, he cannot be trusted to be loose in our country and should spend the rest of his life locked up. If you are willing to betray our country, then you have no business being free in it.
And don’t even get me started about the juror TAL interviewed. Hey lady, you are a librarian, not a "liberry-an".
I don’t think the point was to evoke sympathy for Lakhani, who is clearly an amoral clown at best, but to wonder whether there might be some better use of FBI (and other) resources. Locking Lakhani up may feel good, but it doesn’t do anything to make us safer, as a sting of real terrorists or real arms smugglers would. Yet we spent untold agent-years of time and amounts of money on getting him, and those could have been used for something else.
You make a valid point, perhaps the amount of effort that went into this guy’s arrest and conviction outweighed his value as a target. But at the same time, I do see him as a valid target for some amount of action.
I also understand that sometimes going into a project, you don’t know just how much effort it is going to take to finish it, especially when you don’t know at the front end that the target isn’t as valuable as once thought.
It just sounds a lot like Monday morning quarterbacking. To quote John Elway, "I woulda double-bagged it."