@SpyTalker
SPY TALK
SINCE THE 9/11 ATTACKS, the feds have won more than 500 terrorism convictions. In nearly half of those cases, confidential informants played a key role in bringing down the alleged bad guys. Of course, snitches have been around since Judas flipped on Jesus. That they are crucial to making cases is beyond debate. How reliable they are is not. Beyond the scattered community of grieving parents, civil liberties lawyers and a few crusading journalists, however, little attention has been paid to the abuses of the system in which the FBI coached informants to build flimsy cases against defendants.