Sen. Dianne Feinstein, outraged over two women busted by the FBI for plotting a bomb attack, wants to ban “The Anarchist Cookbook” from the internet due to its content that teaches bomb-making skills.
There’s just one thing she neglects to mention—these women didn’t stumble on the Cookbook on the internet. An undercover FBI agent gave it to them.
“The arrests of two women in New York accused of plotting to carry out bombings remind us that the threat of terrorism inside the United States endures,” Feinstein declared Thursday. “I am particularly struck that the alleged bombers made use of online bombmaking guides like the Anarchist Cookbook and Inspire Magazine. These documents are not, in my view, protected by the First Amendment and should be removed from the Internet.”
Feinstein appears, first of all, blissfully unaware of how difficult it is to “remove” something from the internet (sorry, Kim Kardashian.) But she also may not have actually read the FBI’s case, which reveals that these two girls, Noelle Velentzas and Asia Siddiqui, were far from terrorist masterminds—they were essentially bumbling ISIS fan girls whom the FBI lured into making a “plot.”
The FBI began meeting with Velentzas in 2013, at which time she praised the 9/11 attacks and suicide bombers in general. She joked about making a bomb in her pressure cooker, but doesn’t appear to have actually had any concrete plans. In 2014, meeting with the undercover agent, the two said they’d like to be able to make bombs, but didn’t know how to and weren’t exactly good at science.
One of their initial ideas was to look up chemistry books in the library and look around at Home Depot. At one point Velentzas was reading “Chemistry: The Central Science,” but didn’t seem to be making great strides.
So what did the super-helpful undercover agent do? They downloaded “The Anarchist Cookbook” and printed it out for them! Not only that—they bookmarked it for them “by folding the corner of the page.”
Ban chemistry books? Libraries? FBI agents?
