Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the government has mounted a number of investigations in which undercover FBI agents or informers have posed as co-conspirators with suspects who get charged with trying to carry out plots.

It has spawned a national debate about whether the suspects are really terrorists or just easily manipulated people who become victims of entrapment. With the arrest of Terry Lee Loewen at Wichita Mid-Continent Airport on Friday, that national debate has come to the Air Capital of the World.

Loewen, a 58-year-old avionics technician, has been charged in an alleged plot to use his airport access to try to drive a car bomb onto the tarmac to inflict maximum deaths. Two FBI employees posed as people engaging him or helping him to carry out the attack, a criminal complaint said. Loewen didn’t find out he had been fooled until he tried to carry out the attack with what was inert material, not high explosives, the court document said.

A letter to the editor in Tuesday’s Eagle typifies the entrapment argument: “The FBI has a pattern of seeking out naive, harmless, disaffected individuals and using them to orchestrate a crime. … Terry Lee Loewen has been entrapped along with others in these phony plots,” wrote Don Anderson of Winfield.

Read more at The Wichita Eagle