Was Crazed Cop Killer a Police Plant Whose Goal Was to Stop Anti-Police Protests?

Maybe reading passages of the CIA Torture Report did something to my psyche. But my mind no longer processes news and information in the linear fashion it once did. Maybe that's a good thing. Or then again, maybe not. Let's take for instance the tragic killing of the two New York police officers on Saturday. I doubt whether the thought would even have occurred to me last month. But it is certainly on my mind now. Did Ismaaiyl Brinsley act alone?

He was a suicidal, emotional misfit, who had alienated friends and family. So, might he have hooked up with a different caliber of associates at some point during his 19 arrests and various jail terms? Perhaps a kindly soul had stepped into his life after he had lost touch with every other shred of reality, someone whom he could tell his troubles to, someone who understood his frustrations in life, who might have lent him money, a gun, someone who could suggest "heroic" actions that he wouldn't have thought up himself? Of course this someone had a hidden agenda. It would be to manipulate this lost soul into engaging in something so heinous that it would embarrass those politicians calling for police reform and more importantly turn the public against the "I Can't Breathe" police protests sweeping across the country. The motto of such tacticians would be that two "sacrificial" deaths in war was a small price to pay for the consolidation of police power and the subordination of civil society.

Preposterous, you say. But folks were for the longest time saying the same about accusations that Americans used torture. David Shipler, author of Rights at Risk: The Limits of Liberty in Modern America (2012), notes that most men who get "entrapped" by an agent provocateur:

“seem ambivalent, incompetent and adrift, like hapless wannabes looking for a cause that the informer or undercover agent skilfully helps them find”.

The operative term these days is "entrapment." Since 9/11 dozens of such cases have come to light. An article appeared in the The Nation entitled: "Did the NYPD Entrap Ahmed Ferhani?" But this case involved entrapping a young man on a $100 arms smuggling deal, not anything so serious as the commission of homicide.