art, life, imitation

In Steig Larsson's Millennium novels (The Girl Who... series), the Swedish government gives a bunch of crazy violent misogynists a free pass to abuse women and girls, because the misogynists provide useful information to the so-called "intelligence" services. I thought this was a bit over the top, as a plot point. But maybe not. Turns out, some of the informants and provocateurs the FBI has been using to entrap supposed terrorists have been in return getting away with domestic violence. E.g.,

The charges had come about because of a 23-year-old Yemeni clerk named Abbas al-Saidi, who'd been a police informant since he was 16. The fbi helped bail him out when he was in jail facing charges of assaulting his girlfriend.