*** Mr. President: I can help you whenever you're ready. MS ***
FROM: http://services.newsweek.com/id/238688?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+newsweek%2FTopNews+%28UPDATED+-+Newsweek+Top+Stories%29
The car bomb was a dud. But if Faisal Shahzad had taken just a few more hours of lessons in the art of bomb making, available on the Internet, there might still be a crater in Times Square. Law-enforcement officials are worried that the next homegrown terrorist will be a little smarter and luckier. "Somebody's going to get through," says a former undercover cop who has worked closely with counterterror operations in New York (and, like other police and intelligence officials quoted in this article, refused to speak for the record). Since the beginning of 2009, at least 25 American citizens have been arrested on federal charges related to Islamist extremism. "These cases clearly suggest that an increasing number of U.S. citizens, both native-born and naturalized citizens, appear to be getting involved in the terrorist cause," says Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. "It's not an encouraging trend."
In New York City, there is a palpable sense of impending danger, if not inevitability, among senior law-enforcement officials. In Washington, national security officials already are worrying about the overreaction that could follow a terrorist attack. Politicians will demand severe new laws—and revenge—and accuse the Obama administration of going soft on terrorism. The cycle of repression and violence will beget more violence, and the "long war" against terrorism will enter a new and darker phase, which is just what terror organizations want.
All of which raises a dilemma for Obama and his advisers: how do you aggressively fight terror at home and abroad without exacerbating the very conditions that fuel the jihadist cause? This problem is particularly acute at a time when many new jihadists are "self-recruiting." Some alienated Muslims decide to join a terrorist outfit after reading or listening to English-speaking Qaeda ideologues on the Internet, or after downloading videos showing the effects of American military actions. Yet most Muslim Americans have no interest in extremist ideology and don't want to be stereotyped. The very act of spying on them, or treating them as potential enemies, could make matters worse.
Overseas, the Obama administration clearly has no inclination to stop trying to kill Qaeda operatives in Pakistan and Afghanistan, or even in Yemen or Somalia.
During Obama's 17 months in office, the CIA and the military have launched nearly 100 drone attacks against targets in the wilds of Waziristan and other Taliban and Qaeda hideouts. The total is more than twice as many as President Bush ordered during his entire second term. Attacks on remote sites have also killed civilians: a cruise-missile strike in Yemen in December eliminated 14 terrorists but also killed 41 other people, including 14 women and 21 children, according to Amnesty International. But along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, "targeted killing" by drones has become increasingly effective. Anyone serving as the No. 3 in Al Qaeda, working under Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, has particular cause for concern. American drones have killed several of these Qaeda operations chiefs, most recently (in late May) Sheik Saeed Al-Masri, one of the founders of Al Qaeda and the terror organization's top financial officer.
Nonetheless, there is some evidence that these remote-control attacks risk what the intelligence community calls "blowback." Both Shahzad and Najibullah Zazi, an earlier American-resident terrorist who was arrested last year for plotting to bomb the New York subways, told investigators they were at least partly motivated by a desire to seek revenge for drone strikes. Any military action in a foreign country produces new incentives for the enemy. Jihadi sources in Afghanistan told NEWSWEEK's Sami Yousafzai that the Taliban had no interest in attacking America directly—until the U.S. military started taking out their leaders (and sometimes their families). "The Americans are attacking us in our country, our villages, and our houses, so why shouldn't we attack them in their country?" asks a senior Taliban intelligence officer, who did not want to be named for security reasons. Taliban chat rooms claim to be receiving hundreds of offers from Western Muslims seeking to bring jihad to America.
Revenge is only one motivation, and may not be the most important one, for jihadist wannabes in the United States. Investigators interviewed by NEWSWEEK, as well as court affidavits, suggest a familiar pattern in the evolution of a self-recruited terrorist. The process usually starts with second or third generation Americans of Muslim descent or more recent converts (rarely first-generation immigrants, who tend to be patriotic about their new country, although Shahzad is an exception). They are disaffected, usually middle-class, but often have trouble finding or holding a good job, and they're sometimes eager to show up or rebel against their more successful fathers. They encounter a charismatic Islamic fundamentalist and begin cruising the Internet, where there is no shortage of propaganda videos showing Muslims suffering at the hands of wicked Americans—and brave young jihadists fighting back. The videos are becoming slicker—and sicker. Here's one from Assadullah al-Shishini, an Internet balladeer believed to be living somewhere in Pennsylvania, delivered rap style:
When the Jew's blood reds my knife
Then my life is free of strife
Hiding behind rocks and trees
I'll find them with greatest ease
Throw them in the ovens hot
Soap and lampshades sold and bought
Made of the Jews that we shot
Mercy's something I have not.
The two New Jersey men arrested two weeks ago and charged with plotting to kill and maim people outside the United States are vivid case histories. Mohamed Alessa, 20, of Palestinian descent, and Carlos Almonte, 24, a Muslim convert from a family of Dominican immigrants, were often in trouble in high school (where Alessa, for one, talked about mutilating homosexuals, subordinating women under the name of Islam, and blowing up the school). They began collecting combat gear like night-vision goggles and training with paintball guns, while listening to the Internet raps of Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, the Alabama-born spokesman for Al-Shabab, a jihadist group in Somalia. After a tip, an undercover New York City cop befriended the men and began recording their conversations. They vowed to go to Somalia and become martyrs—or possibly to bring jihad back to America. "Only way I would come back here is if I was in the land of jihad and the leader ordered me to come back here and do something here. Ah, I love that," Alessa allegedly declared in one bugged conversation.
At the center of the debate over how to counter Islamic radicalization is a longtime intelligence mandarin, John Brennan, the president's top counterterror adviser. A former CIA station chief in Saudi Arabia, Brennan has been warning against going overboard in the war on terror by undermining the American judicial system.
After Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the underpants bomber, was read his Miranda rights and retained a lawyer, a hue and cry went up from conservatives. Not a few lawmakers are demanding that terror suspects be locked away and interrogated for a few days or weeks before getting to see their lawyers. At the urging of the White House, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. has suggested expanding an exception to reading terror suspects their rights as soon as they're detained. But other administration officials, including Brennan, are pushing back, wary of denying anyone their rights under the Constitution. "Brennan and others are keenly aware of the dilemma between aggressive offensive action and not taking steps that could create new [homegrown terrorists]," says a senior administration official, who did not want to be named discussing White House deliberations.
Of course, top officials know what will happen if a homegrown terrorist strikes inside the United States. The Obama administration will come under tremendous pressure to hit back (somehow, somewhere) while cracking down at home. The FBI may begin routinely bugging mosques. But finding self-recruited terrorists in America's scattered Islamic community is very difficult. All the experts emphasize that law enforcement needs to work with the local Muslim citizenry to head off potential terrorists.
The Obama administration is very sensitive to avoid alienating Muslims. In a draft of a report sponsored by the State and Defense departments and the RAND Corporation on dealing with the terrorist threat, the title was changed: the term "radical Islamism" became "violent extremism." Obama officials even resist having a formal public strategy for dealing with Islamic radicalization because they don't want to label the Muslim community as a security problem.
In a recent speech, Brennan all but predicted that the United States would be attacked soon. "We must be honest with ourselves," he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies on May 26. "No nation, no matter how powerful, can prevent every threat from coming to fruition." He added that the risks are greater in the U.S. because the terrorists could take advantage of America's free and open society and rely on lone wolves and self-radicalized terrorists. But if an attack comes, said Brennan, we have to "resist succumbing to overreaction." Americans have been down that road before; it will be hard for them to resist going there again.
Showing posts with label homegrown terrorism in America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homegrown terrorism in America. Show all posts
Saturday, June 12, 2010
TERROR SUSPECTS - TROUBLED TEENS
*** Counter culture syndrome? MS ***
FROM: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/nyregion/12suspects.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
NORTH BERGEN, N.J. — One was a spoiled child so prone to fits of rage — fights, screamed insults, threats — that his parents began taking him to psychiatrists at age 6 and medicating him in a vain struggle to control his moods. By their count, his short fuse and incendiary tongue forced him to change schools no fewer than 10 times.
The other was arrested three times in less than four months for petty crimes, and seemed like an aimless youth — until he developed a passion for a strict version of Islam that shocked and alienated his Dominican family. Within a few years, he was posting extremist views on the Internet and assailing the United States while predicting its downfall.
Their stories began like many others: troubled teenagers who scare and mystify their neighbors; run-ins with the police while still in high school; parents who cannot compete with the sense of belonging or purpose their boys find elsewhere.
“Of course we tried everything we could,” said Nadia Alessa, mother of Mohamed M. Alessa, the one so given to angry outbursts. “We couldn’t just keep him at home.”
The next chapter in such tales often charts a descent into drugs or gangs, but Mr. Alessa, 20, and Carlos E. Almonte, 24, who both grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, apparently had other plans. They were arrested Saturday as they prepared to fly separately to Egypt — and, the authorities say, to join a militant group in Somalia and kill non-Muslims.
How they went from troublemakers to terrorism suspects may never be understood. But conversations with many people who have known them — including the first interviews given by Mr. Alessa’s parents since the arrest — make clear that both men were struggling for years, constantly at odds with authority and their immigrant parents. Law enforcement officials had been keeping tabs on them for nearly four years.
Many of their peers dismissed them as hapless blowhards, more pathetic than perilous; friends said they liked to play Ping-Pong, or go into Manhattan and hang out at a halal restaurant. Yet there they are, in transcripts of secretly recorded conversations, talking about shooting and beheading people, and sending American troops home “sliced up in 1,000 pieces.”
Mr. Alessa’s parents, Palestinian immigrants, are Muslim, but Ms. Alessa was at a loss to explain her only son’s recent transformation. She recalled asking why he was growing a beard: “He said real men grow their beards.”
‘Now Everyone Hates Us’
After years of building a life in the United States — an apartment in North Bergen, a deli in nearby Bergen County where Mr. Alessa’s father, Mahmood, is quick to extend credit to customers, who call him “Pops” — the parents now see it all endangered by a son they do not understand.
“Sixteen years we’ve lived on that street,” Ms. Alessa said. “Everyone loved us. Now everyone hates us.”
A neighbor who has known Mohamed most of his life, Wilmer Precilla, said the young man alternated between craving confrontation and acceptance, making derogatory remarks about Hispanics in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, then trying unsuccessfully to join a Dominican gang, Patria. “He was always trying to be more gangster than everyone else,” Mr. Precilla said.
Family friends watched Mohamed scream at his mother, smash up his father’s car and, in anger, knock the food off a shelf in the deli. When his shaken parents tried to take him to therapists, he screamed, “I’m not crazy.” At times he took medication for anger management, but about three years ago, his mother said, he stopped taking it and stopped seeing therapists.
Mr. Alessa’s friends, who knew his temper, told him he needed medical help — an idea he rejected. His parents gave him the latest clothes and cellphones, friends and neighbors recalled. One said he acted like a typical “American rich kid,” even though his parents were not wealthy.
“He was a spoiled kid,” Ms. Alessa conceded. “He acted like a teenager. He thought he was a king.”
She said Mohamed attended the local public elementary school, two Catholic grade schools, a boarding school in Connecticut, a school for troubled youth, three Muslim schools and two public high schools, repeatedly getting into trouble for fighting or mouthing off.
At the two public high schools, North Bergen and KAS Prep, Mr. Alessa made an escalating series of threats against students and staff members through 2005 and 2006, saying that he would blow up the school, mutilate gays and punish women who were not subordinate to men, according to officials granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters. Both schools alerted the Department of Homeland Security.
As a 10th grader at North Bergen High, he had to receive his lessons at a local public library under the eye of a security guard, said Paul Swibinski, a school spokesman, because “administrators felt that his presence in school posed a safety threat to other students and staff.”
In those years, neighbors say, the police were called to the Alessa home several times. The North Bergen police declined to give details, noting that juvenile records were not public, but Lt. Frank Cannella said: “He was known to us, I can tell you that much.”
The Suspects Meet
Around 2005, when he was 14 or 15, Mr. Alessa met Mr. Almonte, who lived in Elmwood Park, but was spending much of his time in North Bergen, 10 miles away. The two hung out with a group of young men who called themselves the PLO. Mr. Alessa was not particularly religious then, but Mr. Almonte, a recent convert to Islam, was becoming more so.
Growing up, Carlos Almonte had a less turbulent childhood. But by the time he was 18, he, too, was running afoul of the law.
In May 2004, with a month left in his senior year at Elmwood Park Memorial High School, Mr. Almonte, a naturalized citizen, was arrested for taking a knife to campus. That August, he was arrested for punching a youth in the parking lot of a supermarket. Two weeks later, he was caught drinking beer in a park.
It was around then, family friends say, that Mr. Almonte turned to Islam. He told Priscilla Caicedo, a young woman he met last year, that his interest began when he heard someone preaching at the Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus. He visited mosques in Paterson and Union City, and called himself Omar.
Mr. Almonte’s conversion, his compulsion to proselytize, and his friendship with Mr. Alessa all alienated his family, though he continued to live with them. The friction culminated in their living room on May 23, 2009, when, according to a police report, Mr. Almonte began preaching about Islam to his younger brother, Elvin, who demurred, and “Carlos became angry and they both began fighting.”
Their mother tried to separate them and Elvin bit her arm, thinking it was his brother’s. Carlos then struck Elvin in the back of the head with a picture frame.
One young man who befriended both suspects said that Mr. Almonte was more easygoing and supportive than Mr. Alessa, and that he liked to read and use computers. Another friend, Martin Robert, said that sometimes while playing Ping-Pong and basketball, Mr. Almonte would try to turn the conversation to Islam but would not insist. “He seemed like a nice, peaceful guy,” Mr. Robert said.
Another student who knew them casually, Mostafa Higazi, said the pair were “very oriented to politics.” He called Mr. Alessa “really a talker, just bragging,” while Mr. Almonte was quiet. He said that he did not recall specific things Mr. Alessa said, but that none of it resembled the bloody talk in the criminal complaint.
Ms. Caicedo met Mr. Almonte more than a year ago when she took her computer for repairs to a store where he worked near his home. Even in the store, she recalled, he began proselytizing, and gave her a book on Islam, which she said she never read.
They talked and traded instant messages, and went out once, as friends, last December. He took her to a Spanish-language service at a mosque in Union City and then to dinner at T.G.I. Friday’s. Quiet and serious, he told her he wanted to find a wife who knew that her role was to stay home to cook and clean. “He was like one of those men that had to be the dominant one,” she said.
Recently, Ms. Caicedo said, he told her he was moving to North Carolina, and arranged for her to get his job at the computer store. Hours before he was arrested at Kennedy Airport, they were at the store, Mr. Almonte training her.
But others saw a darker side to the suspects and their friendship. In October 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received a tip that Mr. Alessa and Mr. Almonte talked about holy war and killing non-Muslims, and law enforcement agencies began keeping a watch on them. From the start, the authorities were in touch with Mr. Almonte’s family.
“I had a good rapport with the father,” said Detective Anthony DiPasquale of Elmwood Park. “I acquired information and I passed it along to the F.B.I.”
In February 2007, while Mr. Alessa was a high school senior, he and Mr. Almonte traveled to Jordan; the F.B.I. says it was in the vain hope of being recruited by a militant jihadist group.
On a Facebook page started in October 2008, Mr. Almonte posted long quotations from medieval Islamic scholars and present-day radicals like Abu Qatada, considered by many countries to be a terrorist, and the jihadist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.
Mr. Almonte was also outraged at the treatment of Muslim prisoners accused of terrorism. He posted a comment concerning Omar Khadr, a prisoner who said he was abused by American interrogators. Mr. Khadr is charged with throwing a grenade when he was 15 that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan. Mr. Almonte wrote: “We feel for our brothers unjustly locked up even afghanistan at the time didn’t pose a threat to america for them to attack them over 2 towers but the end of them will be like the end of persia, rome, n the soviet union.”
He posted a photo of himself at a Dec. 28, 2008, protest in Manhattan, holding a sign saying “DEATH TO ALL JUICE,” with the word “ZIONIST” written faintly above “JUICE.”
Mr. Almonte dismissed the religion of American Muslims, saying, “In truth, it isn’t Islam.” He showed a particular fixation on the ideas that Muslim men should be bearded, and should hold one another’s hands.
In the last two years, Mr. Alessa, too, started lecturing about God and grew a beard. A new friend, Bassem, became a frequent companion of the two men. Friends and Mr. Alessa’s parents now believe that Bassem, who offered to put the young men up at the house he said he had in Egypt, was an undercover New York police officer who is cited in the criminal complaint, and who recorded their conversations.
“He pushed them,” Mahmood Alessa said. Ms. Alessa said Bassem “wanted to be a hero, on the backs of these stupid kids.”
Recently, Mr. Alessa told his parents he planned to go to Egypt to study Arabic; he spoke the language, but did not read or write it well.
About two weeks ago, Ms. Alessa snapped a picture of her son that she keeps on her cellphone, a reminder of a serene moment in their home. It shows Mohamed lying on a floral quilt, snuggling Princess Tuna, his cat.
He wanted to take the cat with him to Egypt, but his mother said no, and they argued. When he headed to the airport, he went instead with a big bag of candy from his parents’ deli. The F.B.I. seized the candy, his mother said.
FROM: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/nyregion/12suspects.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
NORTH BERGEN, N.J. — One was a spoiled child so prone to fits of rage — fights, screamed insults, threats — that his parents began taking him to psychiatrists at age 6 and medicating him in a vain struggle to control his moods. By their count, his short fuse and incendiary tongue forced him to change schools no fewer than 10 times.
The other was arrested three times in less than four months for petty crimes, and seemed like an aimless youth — until he developed a passion for a strict version of Islam that shocked and alienated his Dominican family. Within a few years, he was posting extremist views on the Internet and assailing the United States while predicting its downfall.
Their stories began like many others: troubled teenagers who scare and mystify their neighbors; run-ins with the police while still in high school; parents who cannot compete with the sense of belonging or purpose their boys find elsewhere.
“Of course we tried everything we could,” said Nadia Alessa, mother of Mohamed M. Alessa, the one so given to angry outbursts. “We couldn’t just keep him at home.”
The next chapter in such tales often charts a descent into drugs or gangs, but Mr. Alessa, 20, and Carlos E. Almonte, 24, who both grew up in the New Jersey suburbs, apparently had other plans. They were arrested Saturday as they prepared to fly separately to Egypt — and, the authorities say, to join a militant group in Somalia and kill non-Muslims.
How they went from troublemakers to terrorism suspects may never be understood. But conversations with many people who have known them — including the first interviews given by Mr. Alessa’s parents since the arrest — make clear that both men were struggling for years, constantly at odds with authority and their immigrant parents. Law enforcement officials had been keeping tabs on them for nearly four years.
Many of their peers dismissed them as hapless blowhards, more pathetic than perilous; friends said they liked to play Ping-Pong, or go into Manhattan and hang out at a halal restaurant. Yet there they are, in transcripts of secretly recorded conversations, talking about shooting and beheading people, and sending American troops home “sliced up in 1,000 pieces.”
Mr. Alessa’s parents, Palestinian immigrants, are Muslim, but Ms. Alessa was at a loss to explain her only son’s recent transformation. She recalled asking why he was growing a beard: “He said real men grow their beards.”
‘Now Everyone Hates Us’
After years of building a life in the United States — an apartment in North Bergen, a deli in nearby Bergen County where Mr. Alessa’s father, Mahmood, is quick to extend credit to customers, who call him “Pops” — the parents now see it all endangered by a son they do not understand.
“Sixteen years we’ve lived on that street,” Ms. Alessa said. “Everyone loved us. Now everyone hates us.”
A neighbor who has known Mohamed most of his life, Wilmer Precilla, said the young man alternated between craving confrontation and acceptance, making derogatory remarks about Hispanics in a mostly Hispanic neighborhood, then trying unsuccessfully to join a Dominican gang, Patria. “He was always trying to be more gangster than everyone else,” Mr. Precilla said.
Family friends watched Mohamed scream at his mother, smash up his father’s car and, in anger, knock the food off a shelf in the deli. When his shaken parents tried to take him to therapists, he screamed, “I’m not crazy.” At times he took medication for anger management, but about three years ago, his mother said, he stopped taking it and stopped seeing therapists.
Mr. Alessa’s friends, who knew his temper, told him he needed medical help — an idea he rejected. His parents gave him the latest clothes and cellphones, friends and neighbors recalled. One said he acted like a typical “American rich kid,” even though his parents were not wealthy.
“He was a spoiled kid,” Ms. Alessa conceded. “He acted like a teenager. He thought he was a king.”
She said Mohamed attended the local public elementary school, two Catholic grade schools, a boarding school in Connecticut, a school for troubled youth, three Muslim schools and two public high schools, repeatedly getting into trouble for fighting or mouthing off.
At the two public high schools, North Bergen and KAS Prep, Mr. Alessa made an escalating series of threats against students and staff members through 2005 and 2006, saying that he would blow up the school, mutilate gays and punish women who were not subordinate to men, according to officials granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters. Both schools alerted the Department of Homeland Security.
As a 10th grader at North Bergen High, he had to receive his lessons at a local public library under the eye of a security guard, said Paul Swibinski, a school spokesman, because “administrators felt that his presence in school posed a safety threat to other students and staff.”
In those years, neighbors say, the police were called to the Alessa home several times. The North Bergen police declined to give details, noting that juvenile records were not public, but Lt. Frank Cannella said: “He was known to us, I can tell you that much.”
The Suspects Meet
Around 2005, when he was 14 or 15, Mr. Alessa met Mr. Almonte, who lived in Elmwood Park, but was spending much of his time in North Bergen, 10 miles away. The two hung out with a group of young men who called themselves the PLO. Mr. Alessa was not particularly religious then, but Mr. Almonte, a recent convert to Islam, was becoming more so.
Growing up, Carlos Almonte had a less turbulent childhood. But by the time he was 18, he, too, was running afoul of the law.
In May 2004, with a month left in his senior year at Elmwood Park Memorial High School, Mr. Almonte, a naturalized citizen, was arrested for taking a knife to campus. That August, he was arrested for punching a youth in the parking lot of a supermarket. Two weeks later, he was caught drinking beer in a park.
It was around then, family friends say, that Mr. Almonte turned to Islam. He told Priscilla Caicedo, a young woman he met last year, that his interest began when he heard someone preaching at the Garden State Plaza mall in Paramus. He visited mosques in Paterson and Union City, and called himself Omar.
Mr. Almonte’s conversion, his compulsion to proselytize, and his friendship with Mr. Alessa all alienated his family, though he continued to live with them. The friction culminated in their living room on May 23, 2009, when, according to a police report, Mr. Almonte began preaching about Islam to his younger brother, Elvin, who demurred, and “Carlos became angry and they both began fighting.”
Their mother tried to separate them and Elvin bit her arm, thinking it was his brother’s. Carlos then struck Elvin in the back of the head with a picture frame.
One young man who befriended both suspects said that Mr. Almonte was more easygoing and supportive than Mr. Alessa, and that he liked to read and use computers. Another friend, Martin Robert, said that sometimes while playing Ping-Pong and basketball, Mr. Almonte would try to turn the conversation to Islam but would not insist. “He seemed like a nice, peaceful guy,” Mr. Robert said.
Another student who knew them casually, Mostafa Higazi, said the pair were “very oriented to politics.” He called Mr. Alessa “really a talker, just bragging,” while Mr. Almonte was quiet. He said that he did not recall specific things Mr. Alessa said, but that none of it resembled the bloody talk in the criminal complaint.
Ms. Caicedo met Mr. Almonte more than a year ago when she took her computer for repairs to a store where he worked near his home. Even in the store, she recalled, he began proselytizing, and gave her a book on Islam, which she said she never read.
They talked and traded instant messages, and went out once, as friends, last December. He took her to a Spanish-language service at a mosque in Union City and then to dinner at T.G.I. Friday’s. Quiet and serious, he told her he wanted to find a wife who knew that her role was to stay home to cook and clean. “He was like one of those men that had to be the dominant one,” she said.
Recently, Ms. Caicedo said, he told her he was moving to North Carolina, and arranged for her to get his job at the computer store. Hours before he was arrested at Kennedy Airport, they were at the store, Mr. Almonte training her.
But others saw a darker side to the suspects and their friendship. In October 2006, the Federal Bureau of Investigation received a tip that Mr. Alessa and Mr. Almonte talked about holy war and killing non-Muslims, and law enforcement agencies began keeping a watch on them. From the start, the authorities were in touch with Mr. Almonte’s family.
“I had a good rapport with the father,” said Detective Anthony DiPasquale of Elmwood Park. “I acquired information and I passed it along to the F.B.I.”
In February 2007, while Mr. Alessa was a high school senior, he and Mr. Almonte traveled to Jordan; the F.B.I. says it was in the vain hope of being recruited by a militant jihadist group.
On a Facebook page started in October 2008, Mr. Almonte posted long quotations from medieval Islamic scholars and present-day radicals like Abu Qatada, considered by many countries to be a terrorist, and the jihadist cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri.
Mr. Almonte was also outraged at the treatment of Muslim prisoners accused of terrorism. He posted a comment concerning Omar Khadr, a prisoner who said he was abused by American interrogators. Mr. Khadr is charged with throwing a grenade when he was 15 that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan. Mr. Almonte wrote: “We feel for our brothers unjustly locked up even afghanistan at the time didn’t pose a threat to america for them to attack them over 2 towers but the end of them will be like the end of persia, rome, n the soviet union.”
He posted a photo of himself at a Dec. 28, 2008, protest in Manhattan, holding a sign saying “DEATH TO ALL JUICE,” with the word “ZIONIST” written faintly above “JUICE.”
Mr. Almonte dismissed the religion of American Muslims, saying, “In truth, it isn’t Islam.” He showed a particular fixation on the ideas that Muslim men should be bearded, and should hold one another’s hands.
In the last two years, Mr. Alessa, too, started lecturing about God and grew a beard. A new friend, Bassem, became a frequent companion of the two men. Friends and Mr. Alessa’s parents now believe that Bassem, who offered to put the young men up at the house he said he had in Egypt, was an undercover New York police officer who is cited in the criminal complaint, and who recorded their conversations.
“He pushed them,” Mahmood Alessa said. Ms. Alessa said Bassem “wanted to be a hero, on the backs of these stupid kids.”
Recently, Mr. Alessa told his parents he planned to go to Egypt to study Arabic; he spoke the language, but did not read or write it well.
About two weeks ago, Ms. Alessa snapped a picture of her son that she keeps on her cellphone, a reminder of a serene moment in their home. It shows Mohamed lying on a floral quilt, snuggling Princess Tuna, his cat.
He wanted to take the cat with him to Egypt, but his mother said no, and they argued. When he headed to the airport, he went instead with a big bag of candy from his parents’ deli. The F.B.I. seized the candy, his mother said.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
NJ TERROR SUSPECTS LOOKING FOR HONOR, DIGNITY
*** There is no honour (<-Canadian spelling) and dignity in terrorism only humiliation for yourself and those close to you and regret by yourself and by those close to you. Seek light, not darkness - it will guide you to what is better. MS ***
FROM: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/06/07/2010-06-07_they_were_looking_for_dignity__honor.html
They were alienated young losers when they first turned to radical Islam to feel like winners.
"What's better than sitting back here and working like a dog - being somebody's puppy, basically what I call it - than moving forward to a life of dignity, life of honor," Carlos Eduardo Almonte explained to the undercover cop taping him in March.
In Somalia, Almonte, 24, and his 20-year-old pal, Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, apparently expected to find bullets and blood and battle - an escape from their humdrum New Jersey suburban lives. Their arrests Saturday at Kennedy Airport stopped all that, officials say.
But in the years before they were nabbed, they often went to mall stores and played first-person-shooter computer games - assuming the terrorist role.
And they watched propaganda videos online, bought military gear and pumped iron to make themselves strong soldiers.
"I'm going to get a gun. I'm the type of person to use it at any time," Alessa bragged to the undercover cop recording their every word. "I'll have more bodies on it than the hairs on my beard."
Alessa, the son of Palestinian immigrants, and Almonte, the son of Dominican parents, turned against the country their parents struggled to get to.
Both had strained relationships with their fathers, who could not understand their sullen, rebellious sons.
Neighbors and classmates say they were normal, outgoing kids who liked sports and Nintendo but grew distant and hostile - and beards - when they began to see themselves as holy warriors as far back as 2006.
In high school, Alessa started hanging out with older kids and getting into trouble.
"He grew out a beard and started getting into fights all the time," said Daniel Forbes, 20. "He isolated himself. He said, 'Nobody gets me.'"
"He wasn't the most popular kid," said Kristen Fernandez, 22, another classmate.
Almonte, though older, became Alessa's follower years ago, after graduating from Elmwood Park High School in 2005.
He converted to Islam, renamed himself "Omar" and started talking about hating America.
"He was kind of a loner. He didn't have a lot going on," said James Fracione, 22, who knew both men. "Then he grew a beard and started talking like [Alessa], saying what America was doing was wrong."
Raj Merchant, 22, who once took an art class with Almonte, said he dropped his high school friends.
"Once he converted, he just disappeared and nobody heard anything from him at all. And then this happened," Merchant said.
"The kid completely changed," said neighbor Jeffrey Strickland, whose son went to school with Almonte. "He went from this fun-loving kid to a real serious, political kind of guy."
Neighbors said Alessa's father was an engineer in Jordan who came to America more than two decades ago and works at a candy store. The family has lived in the same North Bergen, N.J., apartment for 16 years.
They sometimes fought loudly with their son, neighbors said.
"He had anger-management problems," said Alessa's landlord, Hemant Shah. "He doesn't like it here. He wanted to go."
FROM: http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/06/07/2010-06-07_they_were_looking_for_dignity__honor.html
They were alienated young losers when they first turned to radical Islam to feel like winners.
"What's better than sitting back here and working like a dog - being somebody's puppy, basically what I call it - than moving forward to a life of dignity, life of honor," Carlos Eduardo Almonte explained to the undercover cop taping him in March.
In Somalia, Almonte, 24, and his 20-year-old pal, Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, apparently expected to find bullets and blood and battle - an escape from their humdrum New Jersey suburban lives. Their arrests Saturday at Kennedy Airport stopped all that, officials say.
But in the years before they were nabbed, they often went to mall stores and played first-person-shooter computer games - assuming the terrorist role.
And they watched propaganda videos online, bought military gear and pumped iron to make themselves strong soldiers.
"I'm going to get a gun. I'm the type of person to use it at any time," Alessa bragged to the undercover cop recording their every word. "I'll have more bodies on it than the hairs on my beard."
Alessa, the son of Palestinian immigrants, and Almonte, the son of Dominican parents, turned against the country their parents struggled to get to.
Both had strained relationships with their fathers, who could not understand their sullen, rebellious sons.
Neighbors and classmates say they were normal, outgoing kids who liked sports and Nintendo but grew distant and hostile - and beards - when they began to see themselves as holy warriors as far back as 2006.
In high school, Alessa started hanging out with older kids and getting into trouble.
"He grew out a beard and started getting into fights all the time," said Daniel Forbes, 20. "He isolated himself. He said, 'Nobody gets me.'"
"He wasn't the most popular kid," said Kristen Fernandez, 22, another classmate.
Almonte, though older, became Alessa's follower years ago, after graduating from Elmwood Park High School in 2005.
He converted to Islam, renamed himself "Omar" and started talking about hating America.
"He was kind of a loner. He didn't have a lot going on," said James Fracione, 22, who knew both men. "Then he grew a beard and started talking like [Alessa], saying what America was doing was wrong."
Raj Merchant, 22, who once took an art class with Almonte, said he dropped his high school friends.
"Once he converted, he just disappeared and nobody heard anything from him at all. And then this happened," Merchant said.
"The kid completely changed," said neighbor Jeffrey Strickland, whose son went to school with Almonte. "He went from this fun-loving kid to a real serious, political kind of guy."
Neighbors said Alessa's father was an engineer in Jordan who came to America more than two decades ago and works at a candy store. The family has lived in the same North Bergen, N.J., apartment for 16 years.
They sometimes fought loudly with their son, neighbors said.
"He had anger-management problems," said Alessa's landlord, Hemant Shah. "He doesn't like it here. He wanted to go."
TEXAS MAN CALLED AL QAEDA 'BROTHERS'
*** He wanted a sense of belonging and a sense of being part of something greater than his mundane existence. Just part of the equation but fully, the new trend. MS ***
FROM: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ii_ruznz1EBnYNi2cUI4BdHNCMUwD9G78JR00
HOUSTON — A Texas man accused of trying to help al-Qaida referred to members of the terrorist group as his "brothers," was eager to prove his dedication to the organization and wanted to die fighting alongside them, according to court documents.
Barry Walter Bujol was set to be in court Tuesday for arraignment on charges he tried to help al-Qaida by trying to supply the terrorist network with personnel, currency and other items. He was arrested last week after a two-year investigation by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Bujol, 29, is facing one charge of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and one charge of aggravated identity theft. Bujol, who is from Hempstead, which is located about 50 miles northwest of Houston, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
A recently unsealed FBI search warrant application described Bujol as eager to prove his dedication to al-Qaida by engaging in physical and covert communications training.
He used at least 14 e-mail addresses to hide his activities from authorities and advocated attacking U.S. facilities where military weapons were manufactured, according to the court document.
The FBI task force determined Bujol had been e-mailing Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born, al-Qaida-linked cleric believed to be hiding in Yemen.
Al-Awlaki also is believed to have exchanged e-mails with Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in last November's Fort Hood shootings. He is also accused of helping inspire the Times Square bombing attempt in May and the failed Christmas Day airline bombing.
In one of the e-mails, al-Awlaki allegedly gave Bujol a document titled "42 Ways of Supporting Jihad."
Joseph Varela, Bujol's attorney, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
According to the search warrant application, Bujol referred to al-Qaida members in the Arabian peninsula as "brothers" and that he wanted to "die with the brothers for the cause of Allah, and to be in Heaven."
Bujol made three unsuccessful attempts during February and March 2009 to travel overseas to Yemen or the Middle East. After this, an informant working for the FBI befriended Bujol in November 2009, and Bujol believed the informant was a recruiter of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.
Bujol created a secret code that he used to communicate with the informant and gave himself the Arabic moniker of "Abu Abuadah," according to the search warrant application.
The informant had Bujol retrieve items from "dead drops," pre-arranged secret locations in public places used to exchange messages and other items. In one of these dead drops, Bujol retrieved two false identification cards from a hollowed rock FBI agents placed in a park, the warrant application said.
The cards were supposedly identification cards issued by the Transportation Security Administration that Bujol used on May 30 to gain access to a secure part of a Houston-area port with the alleged intention of boarding a ship bound for the Middle East, the court documents said.
Bujol was arrested after he boarded the ship. He had been given a military-issue compass and other materials that he allegedly agreed to courier to al-Qaida operatives in a Middle Eastern country.
The informant had previously given Bujol currency, prepaid telephone calling cards, mobile telephone SIM cards, global positioning system receivers and public access-restricted U.S. military publications, according to the court documents.
Before he was arrested, Bujol told the informant during a May 3 meeting that "if he never saw 'this place' (i.e., the United States) again it would be fine with him," the warrant application said.
Neighbors at Bujol's apartment complex in Hempstead said Tuesday that he and his family kept mostly to themselves.
Esmerelda Villanueva said Bujol's wife wouldn't let her daughter talk to other kids in the complex and that Bujol didn't talk to anybody.
"I can't believe that would happen here in Hempstead," she said. "They looked like a normal American family, you would never think."
FROM: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5ii_ruznz1EBnYNi2cUI4BdHNCMUwD9G78JR00
HOUSTON — A Texas man accused of trying to help al-Qaida referred to members of the terrorist group as his "brothers," was eager to prove his dedication to the organization and wanted to die fighting alongside them, according to court documents.
Barry Walter Bujol was set to be in court Tuesday for arraignment on charges he tried to help al-Qaida by trying to supply the terrorist network with personnel, currency and other items. He was arrested last week after a two-year investigation by the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Bujol, 29, is facing one charge of attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and one charge of aggravated identity theft. Bujol, who is from Hempstead, which is located about 50 miles northwest of Houston, faces up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
A recently unsealed FBI search warrant application described Bujol as eager to prove his dedication to al-Qaida by engaging in physical and covert communications training.
He used at least 14 e-mail addresses to hide his activities from authorities and advocated attacking U.S. facilities where military weapons were manufactured, according to the court document.
The FBI task force determined Bujol had been e-mailing Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born, al-Qaida-linked cleric believed to be hiding in Yemen.
Al-Awlaki also is believed to have exchanged e-mails with Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in last November's Fort Hood shootings. He is also accused of helping inspire the Times Square bombing attempt in May and the failed Christmas Day airline bombing.
In one of the e-mails, al-Awlaki allegedly gave Bujol a document titled "42 Ways of Supporting Jihad."
Joseph Varela, Bujol's attorney, did not immediately return a telephone call seeking comment.
According to the search warrant application, Bujol referred to al-Qaida members in the Arabian peninsula as "brothers" and that he wanted to "die with the brothers for the cause of Allah, and to be in Heaven."
Bujol made three unsuccessful attempts during February and March 2009 to travel overseas to Yemen or the Middle East. After this, an informant working for the FBI befriended Bujol in November 2009, and Bujol believed the informant was a recruiter of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.
Bujol created a secret code that he used to communicate with the informant and gave himself the Arabic moniker of "Abu Abuadah," according to the search warrant application.
The informant had Bujol retrieve items from "dead drops," pre-arranged secret locations in public places used to exchange messages and other items. In one of these dead drops, Bujol retrieved two false identification cards from a hollowed rock FBI agents placed in a park, the warrant application said.
The cards were supposedly identification cards issued by the Transportation Security Administration that Bujol used on May 30 to gain access to a secure part of a Houston-area port with the alleged intention of boarding a ship bound for the Middle East, the court documents said.
Bujol was arrested after he boarded the ship. He had been given a military-issue compass and other materials that he allegedly agreed to courier to al-Qaida operatives in a Middle Eastern country.
The informant had previously given Bujol currency, prepaid telephone calling cards, mobile telephone SIM cards, global positioning system receivers and public access-restricted U.S. military publications, according to the court documents.
Before he was arrested, Bujol told the informant during a May 3 meeting that "if he never saw 'this place' (i.e., the United States) again it would be fine with him," the warrant application said.
Neighbors at Bujol's apartment complex in Hempstead said Tuesday that he and his family kept mostly to themselves.
Esmerelda Villanueva said Bujol's wife wouldn't let her daughter talk to other kids in the complex and that Bujol didn't talk to anybody.
"I can't believe that would happen here in Hempstead," she said. "They looked like a normal American family, you would never think."
Monday, May 24, 2010
PAK STUDENT ADNAN BABAR MIRZA & THE BATTLESPACE
*** In this war - it seems all venues are battlespace. I note though this is a common defense in cases like this. Lawmakers need to work this out properly. MS ***
FROM: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100524/world/us_terror_charges
HOUSTON - A Pakistani student accused of conspiring to aid the Taliban and undergoing training to fight U.S. troops never intended to commit "battlefield Jihad" or help a terrorist group, his attorney told jurors Monday.
But a prosecutor said during opening statements in the trial of Adnan Babar Mirza that the student collected money for the Taliban and went through weapons training so he could fight U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Mirza, 33, was one of four men arrested in 2006, accused by authorities of taking part in paramilitary training exercises at camp sites around the Houston area so they could engage in a holy war. He was indicted on nine counts, including conspiracy to help the Taliban and federal charges related to being an illegal immigrant in possession of a firearm.
Prosecutors said Mirza was in the country illegally because he violated his student visa by working.
If convicted, Mirza faces up to 10 years in prison. His trial was to continue through the rest of this week.
Prosecutor Jim McAlister told jurors authorities learned about what Mirza and the other men were doing when one of their friends, James Coates, decided "things were getting out of hand" and became an FBI informant.
"They were training to go overseas and fight in Afghanistan and not for the Americans," McAlister said.
David Adler, Mirza's attorney, denied his client violated his student visa by working and portrayed Mirza as a caring person who collected food for Houston's homeless and promoted Islam and Muslim culture by working with Houston police and through a public access television program.
Adler told jurors Mirza went on camping trips but denied they involved paramilitary training exercises. He accused Coates of being the one who was militant and promoted violence.
An undercover officer taped conversations with Mirza and the other men in which they allegedly talked about ambushing U.S. soldiers and triggering a bomb with a cellphone, according to court documents.
FBI Special Agent John McKinley, the prosecution's first witness, told jurors Mirza can be heard on the taped conversations talking about sending money to support Taliban families. Prosecutors have said Mirza collected about $900 for Taliban fighters and their families.
But Adler said it's not against the law to send money to the families of Taliban fighters and Mirza collected money for hospitals and other groups but not specifically for the Taliban.
He also said Mirza can be heard in these taped conversations expressing anger about injustices Muslims around the world have experienced, but his client was just expressing emotion and didn't intend to act on it.
The three other men who were arrested have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
Kobie Diallo Williams, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced in August to 4 1/2 years in prison for conspiring to join the Taliban and fight against U.S. forces.
Syed Maaz Shah, a former Pakistani engineering student at the University of Texas at Dallas, was sentenced in 2007 to 6 1/2 years in prison on federal firearms charges. Shiraz Syed Qazi, also a Pakistani student and Mirza's cousin, received a 10-month prison sentence in 2007 on a firearms charge.
FROM: http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/100524/world/us_terror_charges
HOUSTON - A Pakistani student accused of conspiring to aid the Taliban and undergoing training to fight U.S. troops never intended to commit "battlefield Jihad" or help a terrorist group, his attorney told jurors Monday.
But a prosecutor said during opening statements in the trial of Adnan Babar Mirza that the student collected money for the Taliban and went through weapons training so he could fight U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan.
Mirza, 33, was one of four men arrested in 2006, accused by authorities of taking part in paramilitary training exercises at camp sites around the Houston area so they could engage in a holy war. He was indicted on nine counts, including conspiracy to help the Taliban and federal charges related to being an illegal immigrant in possession of a firearm.
Prosecutors said Mirza was in the country illegally because he violated his student visa by working.
If convicted, Mirza faces up to 10 years in prison. His trial was to continue through the rest of this week.
Prosecutor Jim McAlister told jurors authorities learned about what Mirza and the other men were doing when one of their friends, James Coates, decided "things were getting out of hand" and became an FBI informant.
"They were training to go overseas and fight in Afghanistan and not for the Americans," McAlister said.
David Adler, Mirza's attorney, denied his client violated his student visa by working and portrayed Mirza as a caring person who collected food for Houston's homeless and promoted Islam and Muslim culture by working with Houston police and through a public access television program.
Adler told jurors Mirza went on camping trips but denied they involved paramilitary training exercises. He accused Coates of being the one who was militant and promoted violence.
An undercover officer taped conversations with Mirza and the other men in which they allegedly talked about ambushing U.S. soldiers and triggering a bomb with a cellphone, according to court documents.
FBI Special Agent John McKinley, the prosecution's first witness, told jurors Mirza can be heard on the taped conversations talking about sending money to support Taliban families. Prosecutors have said Mirza collected about $900 for Taliban fighters and their families.
But Adler said it's not against the law to send money to the families of Taliban fighters and Mirza collected money for hospitals and other groups but not specifically for the Taliban.
He also said Mirza can be heard in these taped conversations expressing anger about injustices Muslims around the world have experienced, but his client was just expressing emotion and didn't intend to act on it.
The three other men who were arrested have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
Kobie Diallo Williams, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced in August to 4 1/2 years in prison for conspiring to join the Taliban and fight against U.S. forces.
Syed Maaz Shah, a former Pakistani engineering student at the University of Texas at Dallas, was sentenced in 2007 to 6 1/2 years in prison on federal firearms charges. Shiraz Syed Qazi, also a Pakistani student and Mirza's cousin, received a 10-month prison sentence in 2007 on a firearms charge.
Friday, May 21, 2010
AMERICAN HOMEGROWN TERRORISM
*** Something is just not working: first it was brown bearded types - so they lost their beards. Then it was just the brown types - so they got white guys (some with beards some without). Then it was women - white women. Now do you still think grandma cannot be the next terrorist? Think again. They will adapt and devise new tactics, new strategies. COUNTER tactics, folks, COUNTER strategies. MS ***
FROM: http://www.newsweek.com/id/238296?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+newsweek%2FTopNews+%28UPDATED+-+Newsweek+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
In the years following the September 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials were focused primarily on tracking down terrorists abroad. But in recent years their targets have been increasingly closer to home. At least 25 American citizens—both born and naturalized—have been charged with serious federal terrorism violations since the beginning of 2009, according to information compiled by federal authorities.
The list of 25 U.S. citizens who have been charged with such offenses in the last 18 months was compiled and provided to NEWSWEEK by a U.S. law-enforcement official, who requested not to be identified because it is not an official government publication and is not meant to be exhaustive. "These cases clearly suggest that an increasing number of U.S. citizens, both native-born Americans and naturalized citizens, appear to be getting involved in the terrorist cause. It's not an encouraging trend," said a Justice Department official who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.
The official who provided the recent information said he did not have such statistics broken down by citizenship for terrorism prosecutions during the George W. Bush administration, and a search of government and academic sources did not turn up comparable figures. By one comparison, in the 18 months before Barack Obama took office, the Department of Justice prosecuted 35 terrorism cases against all suspects—both American citizens and foreign nationals—according to DOJ information released to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (PDF).
Earlier this year the Justice Department published a comprehensive listing (PDF) of more than 400 federal-court convictions on terror charges since September 11, 2001, but it did not provide the citizenship of the defendants. Over the years the Justice Department has also issued periodic summaries of terror prosecutions, such as this one and this one, which do mention earlier, well-known cases involving U.S. citizens, including those of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, the "Lackawanna Six" (a group of men from the Buffalo, N.Y., area who were arrested in 2002 for training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan before 9/11), and a Virginia imam convicted in 2005 for encouraging others to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. But at the time these cases surfaced, they appeared relatively isolated and not part of the kind of extended pattern that the latest statistics appear to show.
Counterterrorism experts from the Bush era say that the new cases represent an increased involvement by Americans in militant jihadism that began before Obama took office but has accelerated since then. The experts attribute the alarming trend both to increasing alienation among young American Muslims and to more effective enforcement and intelligence collection activities by the FBI and other U.S. government agencies.
To be sure, there are many different kinds of people, motivations, and actions represented on this list, and not every example can be attributed solely to radicalization of American Muslims. Also, the criminal cases are all at various stages, with some having pleaded not guilty. Marc Sageman, an independent terrorism expert who worked for the CIA during the 1980s, notes that some of the recent cases on the list—such as the Newburgh, N.Y., plot and the case of the man who wanted to bomb an Illinois courthouse—are less significant than others because they were the products of FBI "sting" operations and thus constitute what Sageman considers to be "entrapment," meaning a heavy government role in luring the suspects into what they thought was jihad. Also, said Sageman, a North Carolina case whose defendants are included on the list mainly involved plans to get involved in jihadist fighting overseas, not inside the U.S.
Still, the increase is troubling. The official who provided the list of 25 charged Americans emphasized that it was not necessarily comprehensive and features mainly high-profile cases involving serious charges. The list includes:
*Faisal Shahzad, the accused perpetrator of the recent failed Times Square car bombing.
*David Headley, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to charges that included helping a Pakistan-based terror group gather intelligence for November 2008 terror attacks against commercial targets in Mumbai.
*Two American women, known as "Jihad Jane" and "Jihad Jamie," who are facing charges in Philadelphia for their roles in an alleged Internet-based conspiracy to attack a Swedish artist who drew a cartoon lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.
Also on the list are Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, naturalized Americans born in Afghanistan and Bosnia, respectively, who allegedly conspired with Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born permanent resident of the U.S. in a plot to bomb the New York City subway system last September. Zazi, the alleged mastermind, is not listed as one of the 25 American citizens arrested for terrorism in the last 18 months. (Zazi and Ahmedzay have pleaded guilty in the subway bombing plot; charges against Medunjanin are still pending).
The 25 U.S. citizens on the list may be only a cross-section of a larger problem, however, officials say. The "Northern Virginia Five," a group of Americans who are currently being detained by authorities in Pakistan, are not on the list, nor is Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychologist accused—in the U.S. military-justice system—of killing 13 fellow soldiers in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, last November.
The official who provided the list noted that it does not include any of the estimated 20 Americans or U.S. residents who are alleged or reported to have traveled to Somalia to join Al Qaeda affiliates or other jihadist factions operating there. Also not on the list are a number of Americans who are believed to have gone to Yemen in recent years for suspected jihadist training. Most estimates by law-enforcement and intelligence officials put the number of Americans who may now be undergoing such training in Yemen at about a dozen, though this report (PDF) issued in January by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that "36 American ex-convicts arrived in Yemen in the past year, ostensibly to study Arabic"—a figure that other U.S. officials suggest is an overestimate.
Frances Fragos Townsend, White House counterterrorism adviser in the George W. Bush administration, says her recollection is that the involvement of American citizens or residents in terror plots actually began to grow while she still worked in government, with cases like that of the mainly Balkan expatriates (some of whom were illegal aliens) from Philadelphia's New Jersey suburbs who plotted to shoot up soldiers at the Fort Dix Army training base, and a 2007 domestically hatched plot (with alleged connections to Trinidad and possibly Iran) to blow up fuel lines leading to New York’s JFK airport. She says the raw statistics charting American citizens' involvement in serious terror plots is not just a "sudden spike" but rather a trend that has been tilting "precipitously up" for the last few years.
Sageman says there is still evidence of what he describes as a "very serious uptick" in American citizens' interest and involvement in jihadist activities in recent years. He attributes this alarming trend to three factors. First, he says, now that memories of 9/11 have faded, American Muslims are feeling more alarmed by growing manifestations of Islamophobia among non–Muslim Americans, and this is frightening and alienating Muslim-American youth. Second, Sageman agrees that a very important factor in drawing Americans into jihad is the increasing availability of radical Islamic messages in English on the Internet, particularly from Anwar al-Awlaki, a fiery imam associated with Hasan and Christmas Day "underpants bomber" Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Abdullah al-Faisal, a deeply anti-Western and anti-Semitic Jamaican-born imam who was imprisoned for a time in Britain on charges of incitement to murder. Before 2005, Sageman says, the main jihadist messages were available on the Web only in Arabic, but since that time, English-language militant Web sites, carrying messages from religiously credentialed figures like Awlaki, have proliferated.
Finally, Sageman says, some disillusioned young people have found themselves turning to violence when other, less violent forms of countercultural protest have proved ineffective. But as their estrangement from organized protest movements becomes deeper, Sageman says, such angry young people tend to withdraw into themselves or into very small groups, and pursue simple plots, rather than complex schemes like the 9/11 attacks. Eventually, Sageman hopes, unless the U.S. creates new grievances in the Muslim world through unwise foreign-policy moves, this proliferating but fragmented domestic jihadist trend might well burn itself out.
FROM: http://www.newsweek.com/id/238296?from=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+newsweek%2FTopNews+%28UPDATED+-+Newsweek+Top+Stories%29&utm_content=Google+Reader
In the years following the September 11 attacks, counterterrorism officials were focused primarily on tracking down terrorists abroad. But in recent years their targets have been increasingly closer to home. At least 25 American citizens—both born and naturalized—have been charged with serious federal terrorism violations since the beginning of 2009, according to information compiled by federal authorities.
The list of 25 U.S. citizens who have been charged with such offenses in the last 18 months was compiled and provided to NEWSWEEK by a U.S. law-enforcement official, who requested not to be identified because it is not an official government publication and is not meant to be exhaustive. "These cases clearly suggest that an increasing number of U.S. citizens, both native-born Americans and naturalized citizens, appear to be getting involved in the terrorist cause. It's not an encouraging trend," said a Justice Department official who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information.
The official who provided the recent information said he did not have such statistics broken down by citizenship for terrorism prosecutions during the George W. Bush administration, and a search of government and academic sources did not turn up comparable figures. By one comparison, in the 18 months before Barack Obama took office, the Department of Justice prosecuted 35 terrorism cases against all suspects—both American citizens and foreign nationals—according to DOJ information released to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (PDF).
Earlier this year the Justice Department published a comprehensive listing (PDF) of more than 400 federal-court convictions on terror charges since September 11, 2001, but it did not provide the citizenship of the defendants. Over the years the Justice Department has also issued periodic summaries of terror prosecutions, such as this one and this one, which do mention earlier, well-known cases involving U.S. citizens, including those of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh, the "Lackawanna Six" (a group of men from the Buffalo, N.Y., area who were arrested in 2002 for training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan before 9/11), and a Virginia imam convicted in 2005 for encouraging others to go to Pakistan for jihadist training. But at the time these cases surfaced, they appeared relatively isolated and not part of the kind of extended pattern that the latest statistics appear to show.
Counterterrorism experts from the Bush era say that the new cases represent an increased involvement by Americans in militant jihadism that began before Obama took office but has accelerated since then. The experts attribute the alarming trend both to increasing alienation among young American Muslims and to more effective enforcement and intelligence collection activities by the FBI and other U.S. government agencies.
To be sure, there are many different kinds of people, motivations, and actions represented on this list, and not every example can be attributed solely to radicalization of American Muslims. Also, the criminal cases are all at various stages, with some having pleaded not guilty. Marc Sageman, an independent terrorism expert who worked for the CIA during the 1980s, notes that some of the recent cases on the list—such as the Newburgh, N.Y., plot and the case of the man who wanted to bomb an Illinois courthouse—are less significant than others because they were the products of FBI "sting" operations and thus constitute what Sageman considers to be "entrapment," meaning a heavy government role in luring the suspects into what they thought was jihad. Also, said Sageman, a North Carolina case whose defendants are included on the list mainly involved plans to get involved in jihadist fighting overseas, not inside the U.S.
Still, the increase is troubling. The official who provided the list of 25 charged Americans emphasized that it was not necessarily comprehensive and features mainly high-profile cases involving serious charges. The list includes:
*Faisal Shahzad, the accused perpetrator of the recent failed Times Square car bombing.
*David Headley, a Chicago man who pleaded guilty to charges that included helping a Pakistan-based terror group gather intelligence for November 2008 terror attacks against commercial targets in Mumbai.
*Two American women, known as "Jihad Jane" and "Jihad Jamie," who are facing charges in Philadelphia for their roles in an alleged Internet-based conspiracy to attack a Swedish artist who drew a cartoon lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.
Also on the list are Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, naturalized Americans born in Afghanistan and Bosnia, respectively, who allegedly conspired with Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born permanent resident of the U.S. in a plot to bomb the New York City subway system last September. Zazi, the alleged mastermind, is not listed as one of the 25 American citizens arrested for terrorism in the last 18 months. (Zazi and Ahmedzay have pleaded guilty in the subway bombing plot; charges against Medunjanin are still pending).
The 25 U.S. citizens on the list may be only a cross-section of a larger problem, however, officials say. The "Northern Virginia Five," a group of Americans who are currently being detained by authorities in Pakistan, are not on the list, nor is Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Army psychologist accused—in the U.S. military-justice system—of killing 13 fellow soldiers in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, last November.
The official who provided the list noted that it does not include any of the estimated 20 Americans or U.S. residents who are alleged or reported to have traveled to Somalia to join Al Qaeda affiliates or other jihadist factions operating there. Also not on the list are a number of Americans who are believed to have gone to Yemen in recent years for suspected jihadist training. Most estimates by law-enforcement and intelligence officials put the number of Americans who may now be undergoing such training in Yemen at about a dozen, though this report (PDF) issued in January by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee suggested that "36 American ex-convicts arrived in Yemen in the past year, ostensibly to study Arabic"—a figure that other U.S. officials suggest is an overestimate.
Frances Fragos Townsend, White House counterterrorism adviser in the George W. Bush administration, says her recollection is that the involvement of American citizens or residents in terror plots actually began to grow while she still worked in government, with cases like that of the mainly Balkan expatriates (some of whom were illegal aliens) from Philadelphia's New Jersey suburbs who plotted to shoot up soldiers at the Fort Dix Army training base, and a 2007 domestically hatched plot (with alleged connections to Trinidad and possibly Iran) to blow up fuel lines leading to New York’s JFK airport. She says the raw statistics charting American citizens' involvement in serious terror plots is not just a "sudden spike" but rather a trend that has been tilting "precipitously up" for the last few years.
Sageman says there is still evidence of what he describes as a "very serious uptick" in American citizens' interest and involvement in jihadist activities in recent years. He attributes this alarming trend to three factors. First, he says, now that memories of 9/11 have faded, American Muslims are feeling more alarmed by growing manifestations of Islamophobia among non–Muslim Americans, and this is frightening and alienating Muslim-American youth. Second, Sageman agrees that a very important factor in drawing Americans into jihad is the increasing availability of radical Islamic messages in English on the Internet, particularly from Anwar al-Awlaki, a fiery imam associated with Hasan and Christmas Day "underpants bomber" Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Abdullah al-Faisal, a deeply anti-Western and anti-Semitic Jamaican-born imam who was imprisoned for a time in Britain on charges of incitement to murder. Before 2005, Sageman says, the main jihadist messages were available on the Web only in Arabic, but since that time, English-language militant Web sites, carrying messages from religiously credentialed figures like Awlaki, have proliferated.
Finally, Sageman says, some disillusioned young people have found themselves turning to violence when other, less violent forms of countercultural protest have proved ineffective. But as their estrangement from organized protest movements becomes deeper, Sageman says, such angry young people tend to withdraw into themselves or into very small groups, and pursue simple plots, rather than complex schemes like the 9/11 attacks. Eventually, Sageman hopes, unless the U.S. creates new grievances in the Muslim world through unwise foreign-policy moves, this proliferating but fragmented domestic jihadist trend might well burn itself out.
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