Were five Virginia men traveling to Pakistan to take in the panoramic beauty of Lahore? Not exactly, according to Pakistani officials. The five Americans came to receive training for jihad and to fight US forces in the region. If proven, the five could potentially face charges of treason, but US officials remain cautious in accepting the conclusion of Pakistani security forces:
Five men from Northern Virginia who were arrested Tuesday in Pakistan traveled abroad hoping to work with jihadist groups and battle U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said Thursday.
The men contacted extremist organizations, including two with links to al-Qaeda, and proudly told their Pakistani interrogators, “We are here for jihad,” said Usman Anwar, the local Pakistani police chief whose officers interrogated the men, all Muslims from the Alexandria area.
Anwar said police recovered jihadist literature, laptop computers and maps of parts of Pakistan when the men were arrested near Lahore. The maps included areas where the Taliban train. The men first made contact with the two extremist organizations by e-mail in August, officials said, but the groups apparently rejected their overtures because they couldn’t find people to vouch for them. …
The men, who range in age from 19 to 25, were identified by Pakistani officials and sources close to the case as Umar Chaudhry, Waqar Khan, Ahmad A. Minni, Aman Hassan Yemer and Ramy Zamzam. Chaudhry’s father, Khalid, was also arrested in Pakistan and was being questioned, authorities said. The young men all are U.S. citizens, and some were born in the United States.
Their families had no idea what had happened to them, with the obvious exception of Chaudhry, whose father apparently accompanied them. This sounds familiar to those of us in the Twin Cities. A local mosque apparently radicalized Somali teenage and young-adult immigrants, and over 20 of them went missing without their families having any idea what happened to them — until one of them conducted a suicide bombing back in Somalia.
While the US has to remain cautious about reaching conclusions, the pattern here seems fairly obvious. Five of them disappeared without a word to their families (who contacted the FBI about it), and reappeared near Lahore for no particular reason. One of them made a videotape with Koranic references, war footage, and complaints about Western treatment of Muslims and Muslim nations. Most people would recognize that as a valediction from someone prepared to conduct a suicide attack. One US official noted that the men were not “just hikers lost in the woods,” a reference to Americans captured by Iran when they mistakenly crossed the border from Iraqi’s Kurdistan area.
Interestingly, the Post reports that CAIR acted as an intermediary for the families and informed the FBI themselves of the disappearances. The AP also reports that the five men are now cooperating with the FBI, in the video hosted by the Post.
If the allegations are true, would this be treason? Certainly in the moral sense, but in the legal sense, that may be difficult to prove unless Pakistan has hard evidence of plotting against American targets. The most likely charge would be that of lending material support to terrorist organizations, which is a lot easier to prove. Technically, that could net a life sentence if prosecutors could link that support to any loss of life. Practically speaking, it could mean sentences between 28 months, the sentence Lynne Stewart got before an appeals court rejected it as too lenient, and 30 years. The Lackawanna Six, who trained at a terrorist camp and bragged about their connections to Osama bin Laden, got six to nine years in federal prison.
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