As an aside I would never engage in that sort of violence either but you and I aren't the ones charged here. The role of the police is to observe, collect evidence, not become facilitators of the crime. These people were apparently high on drugs most of the time, you, I or anyone could encourage them to say just about anything, look at this exchange from the same article:
“It’s going to take a lot of planning … a year to plan this and build this,” he said.
“A year, holy, that’s…” the corporal said, staggered.
“Starting today, oh yeah,” Nuttall continued. “By this time next year I want to be doing this … maybe sooner, the sooner the better.”
“I thought you wanted to make the pressure cookers?” the officer asked.
“I did, but as a distraction,” Nuttall replied.
You can only imagine what was said between these guys when the recorder were off. He even stated himself "as a distraction" showing that he was probably realizing that his undercover friends really were serious about this, he wanted to back out to some degree. A distraction is certainly not an intent to kill.
What is the basic standard regarding entrapment varies, I have read some very specific explanations in reading Canadian court documents. In a nutshell I look at it this way, if these officers had ZERO interaction with these suspects, would they have considered or went forward with a crime? That is the basic intention of the law. The FBI are particularly careful about this issue, it is why when I heard initially about this arrest and the FBI being involved it lead me to think that this was an absolute case; now I am not so sure. I have read of cases where the FBI themselves have dropped terrorism charges after hearing the audio of the investigation as they said their agent had crossed the line of entrapment.
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