(AP Photo/Harvey Georges)
The use of government agents and informants to instigate criminal acts to create the pretense for a crackdown is hardly new, and it is not exclusively the province of overtly totalitarian regimes.
On the night of March 21, 1965, 40-year-old Freedom Rider Viola Liuzzo and a 19-year-old Black volunteer with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (LeRoy Moton) were driving back to Selma, AL, from assisting some 3,000 civil rights marchers under the leadership of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., on their trek from Selma to Montgomery, AL, for a scheduled rally at the state capitol building. A car carrying four men pulled alongside and fired several shots into the car. Two of the rounds struck Liuzzo in the head, killing her. The car crashed. Moton lost consciousness but was covered in blood, so the shooters mistook him for dead. Eventually, four Klansmen were arrested. But there was an interesting twist. One of the Klansmen was an FBI informant. Whi