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Iyman Faris Iyman Faris al-Qaeda Home Front American In Jug 20031028  
    Ohio truck driver who is now serving 20 years in prison for supporting terrorism. Faris was studying how to destroy New York City suspension bridges.

Home Front: WoT
Obama appointed Judge rules against stripping convicted terrorist of US citizenship
2018-07-22
[FOX] A federal judge ruled against stripping away the U.S. citizenship of a convicted terrorist tied to a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, citing a lack of evidence to prove that the status had been granted based on misrepresentations.

Iyman Faris, 49, was sentenced in 2003 for aiding and abetting al-Qaida by scoping out the iconic New York bridge as a part of a plot to cut through the cables supporting the structure. He had met with Osam bin Laden in Afghanistan and worked with 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Faris is set to be released on Dec. 23, 2020, but a court filing last year in a U.S. District Court argued that Faris lied on immigration papers and that his terrorist affiliations demonstrated a lack of commitment to the Constitution.

Originally born in Pakistan, Faris became a citizen in 1999. He worked as a truck driver in Ohio and was married to an American woman.

Federal Judge Staci Yanle ruled this month in favor of Faris, saying that there was not enough evidence to prove that any misrepresentations influenced the decision to grant him citizenship.

"American citizenship is precious, and the government carries a heavy burden of proof when attempting to divest a naturalized citizen of his or her citizenship," she wrote on July 11.
Staci Yandle is openly gay. She is the first openly gay judge in the 7th Circuit, which covers Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.[5] She also is the first African-American District Judge ever to sit on the federal bench in the Southern District of Illinois.
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Home Front: WoT
Brooklyn Bridge plot: Judge rejects bid to strip terrorist of citizenship
2018-07-22
[ENGLISH.ALARABIYA.NET] The government can’t strip a terrorist of his US citizenship, a federal judge ruled this month in a decision siding with a Pakistain-born man serving the last few years of a 20-year prison sentence for his guilty plea to plotting to destroy New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.

The case involves Iyman Faris, who was sentenced in 2003 for aiding and abetting al-Qaeda by scoping out the bridge as part of a plot to cut through cables that support it. His case was among the first and highest-profile terrorism cases after the September 11 attacks.

Faris met with the late Osama bin Laden
... who was laid out deader than a mackerel, right next to the mackerel...
 in Afghanistan and worked with September 11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, although some critics questioned how realistic the plot was, given post-September 11 security in New York.

A court filing last year in US District Court in southern Illinois argued that Faris lied on immigration papers before becoming a naturalized US citizen in 1999 and that his terrorist affiliations demonstrated a lack of commitment to the US Constitution.
The government can appeal it all the way to the Supreme Court, so that's ok.
"The US government is dedicated to ... preventing the exploitation of our nation’s immigration system by those who would do harm to our country," Chad Readler, acting assistant attorney of the Department of Justice’s civil division, said in a statement at the time.

The government filed in Illinois because Faris was imprisoned there then. He has since been moved to federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Faris, who’s 49, was known as Mohammad Rauf before becoming a US citizen, worked as a truck driver in Columbus and was married to an American woman for a while. He is scheduled for release Dec. 23, 2020, according to the US Bureau of Prisons.

Federal Judge Staci Yanle said this month there’s not enough evidence to prove Faris’ misrepresentations influenced the decision to grant him citizenship.

"American citizenship is precious, and the government carries a heavy burden of proof when attempting to divest a naturalized citizen of his or her citizenship," she wrote on July 11. The Department of Justice declined to comment.

One of many objections raised by Faris’ attorney is that the government’s action violated the terms of his 2003 plea agreement, which never included the possibility of denaturalization or deportation.

"We look forward to defending this case," reliably Democrat Chicago, aka The Windy City or Mobtown
... home of Al Capone, a succession of Daleys, Barak Obama, and Rahm Emmanuel,...
 defense attorney Thomas Durkin said. "It’s a wrongheaded decision by the government to proceed in this fashion."
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Home Front: WoT
About time. DoJ seeks to strip convicted terrorist of citizenship
2017-03-23
[Hot Air] Back in 2003 Iyman Faris was convicted of a rather scatterbrained plot to take down the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting the structure’s support cables. He was planning to do this in collusion with Al Qaeda as part of a possible second wave of attacks against the United States. He was given a rather lengthy jail term but he’s due to be released in December 2020. So what happens then? He’s a naturalized citizen of Pakistani birth, but the Justice Department is now looking to change that situation by stripping him of said citizenship and ejecting him from the country. [AP]

The Department of Justice has taken the rare step of seeking to strip a convicted terrorist of his U.S. citizenship as he serves the last several years of a 20-year prison sentence for plotting to destroy New York’s Brooklyn Bridge.

Some national security experts suggested Tuesday the move might signal a new, tougher line under President Donald Trump.

The case involves Iyman Faris, 47 and born in Pakistan, who was sentenced in 2003 for aiding and abetting the al-Qaida terrorist group with his plan to cut through cables that support the iconic bridge. At the time, it was among the highest profile terrorism cases in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Can we really do this? I certainly hope so, and all signs point to there being precedent for such an action. You can’t take away the citizenship of a natural born American citizen, but we have revoked that status for naturalized citizens in the past, including Nazis who were discovered living here after having fled Europe following World War II.

Amazingly, there are already people raising a fuss over this and saying that it would set a bad precedent. Really? Faris had worked briefly as a double agent for the FBI but confessed to being part of the infamous terrorist network and plotting one of the more devastating attacks we would have ever seen on American soil had he succeeded. Critics of this proposal seem to be implying that taking away his citizenship would constitute extra punishment not provided for under the law. Perhaps that’s true, but terror attacks seem to fall into a rather unique niche of the American justice system.
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Home Front: WoT
DOJ Sues to Revoke the Citizenship of Convicted al Qaeda Operative Iyman Faris (A Naturalized Citizen)
2017-03-22
[LAWFAREBLOG] DOJ has just issued a blurb announcing that it is suing to revoke the US citizenship of Iyman Faris,
A naturalized citizen originally from Pak Kashmir.
who was convicted in 2003 of providing material support to al Qaeda (Faris was an al Qaeda operative working with KSM, and had considered an attempt to take down the Brooklyn Bridge). Faris received a twenty-year sentence in that case, and is in the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois currently.
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Home Front: WoT
Central Ohio becomes front line in Hamas-linked CAIR's fight for popular support
2016-11-18
[Jihad Watch] The Columbus, Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is soliciting the public for any perceived instances of Islamic hate, with assurances of support from the local media and city lawmakers.

The appeal comes on the heels of a landslide electoral victory for Donald Trump, whose administration CAIR believes will be "packed with anti-Muslim bigots."
"Anti-Moslem" is CAIR-speak for "non-Moslem."
CAIR Columbus has stated that verbal assaults against Muslims have risen exponentially since Trump became the president-elect.

The allegations of Trump-inspired hate, coordinated and reported directly by CAIR and often without any corresponding police reporting, come as Trump indicates support for a bill that will ostensibly name the Muslim Brotherhood, with which CAIR has been linked, as a terrorist group.

CAIR enjoys the complicity of the city of Columbus in its campaign to highlight Islamophobia. City council members did CAIR’s bidding by passing a resolution condemning Islamophobia.

Even Ohio State University, the pride of Columbus and a huge influence on local politics, has bowed to prevailing trends and added its support to CAIR. When CAIR complained of two incidents in which women wearing head scarves were allegedly threatened on campus, Ohio State President Michael Drake responded by publishing an open letter condemning such assaults. Yet criminal charges were not filed in either case, and it appears that only one of the victims was an actual student at the university.

A virtual immigration nexus exists between Columbus and Somalia that has led to the fact that now the Midwestern town houses the country’s second largest concentration of Somalis. Since then, Columbus has been no stranger to terrorist activity.

CAIR Columbus supporters have expressed outrage over the conviction and imprisonment of local Muslims who in 2002 plotted to bomb a Columbus-area mall. Nuradin Abdi, Iyman Faris, and Christopher Paul are known al-Qaeda operatives who each served time for their participation in plots that targeted a variety of public gathering places around the country and in Ohio.

On February 11, 2016, local Somali Mohamed Barry attacked four people at a Columbus establishment, the Nazareth Restaurant. CBS News and many other media outlets were quick to call the assault a "lone wolf terrorist attack" in an attempt to distinguish Barry from other violent Islamic jihadists. Journalists refused to name a motive for the attacks, even though Barry returned to the restaurant and began attacking customers with a machete after he was told, upon inquiring, that the owner hailed from Israel.

CAIR has been extremely successful in Ohio and elsewhere at dissuading the public from associating Islam with terror attacks. Barry was given the benefit of the doubt by the media regarding his intentions, though the same cannot be said of allegations of attacks initiated by Muslims. These receive the weakest attention and scrutiny from not just the mainstream media, but also from the the highest political office in the land. President Barack Obama urged the nation to show restraint to Muslims following the San Bernardino massacre that killed 14 Americans in December of 2015.
Con't.
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Home Front: WoT
Timeline of Islamicist attacks for New York, 2001 to date
2013-04-19
Barry Rubin, posting over at Yid with Lid, posts an interesting timeline of attacks, planned and foiled, for the New York area since 9/11. When people ask "why would Chechnyan youths come to America and plan terror attacks?", the answer is that of the scorpion to the frog: it's what they do.

Full credit to Barry for the list and a big thank you to the Yid. Barry, in case you're wondering, is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.
Since September 11, 2001, there have been 18 known terrorist attacks planned in New York City and they all have something in common: the worldview of the perpetrators. In some cases, they were called off by al-Qaeda:

  • In 2002, Iyman Faris, a U.S.-based al-Qaeda operative, planned to cut the Brooklyn Bridge's support cables at the direction of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

  • In 2003, al-Qaeda had planned to release cyanide gas in New York City's subway system and attack other public places.

  • In 2006, Uzair Paracha, a Brooklyn resident, was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison after he was convicted of attempting to help al-Qaeda operative Majid Khan enter the United States to attack gas tanks. Paracha's father worked with al-Qaida to smuggle explosives - including possibly nuclear weapons - into the United States using the New York office of Paracha's import-export business.

  • Dhiren Barot (aka Issa al-Hindi) was sentenced to life in prison by a United Kingdom court in 2006 after pleading guilty to planning to attack several targets both in the UK and the U.S., including the New York Stock Exchange, Citigroup's headquarters in Midtown Manhattan, and the Prudential Building in Newark, NJ.

  • Shahawar Matin Siraj and James Elshafay plotted in 2004 to place explosive devices in the Herald Square subway station in Manhattan.

  • In July 2006, the FBI revealed it had uncovered a plot involving an attack on a PATH commuter train tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey by Islamists, the placement of suicide bombers on trains, and the destruction of the retaining wall separating the Hudson River from the World Trade Center site in the hopes of causing massive flooding in the city's Financial District.

  • Beginning in 2006, four Islamists plotted to detonate the jet-fuel storage tanks and supply lines for John F. Kennedy Airport in order to cause wide-scale destruction and economic disruption in an attack they intended to dwarf 9/11.

  • In a series of three trials spanning 2008 to 2010, eight Muslims were convicted in Britain of attempting to simultaneously detonate explosives in seven airliners traveling from London to several North American metropolises, including New York.

  • Bryant Neal Vinas, of Long Island, New York, traveled to Pakistan with an intent to die fighting against American forces in Afghanistan. In summer of 2008, Vinas spoke to al-Qaeda about targeting the Long Island Railroad using a suitcase bomb that would be left in a car and set to detonate.

  • In May 2009, four Islamists placed what they believed were functioning bombs outside of Jewish targets in the Bronx neighborhood of Riverdale and additionally constructed plans to fire missiles at military transport planes at Stewart International Airport near Newburgh, NY.

  • In September 2009, the New York City subway system was targeted for attack by three individuals supporting al-Qaeda who planned to set off bombs in the subway during rush hour shortly after the eighth anniversary of 9/11.

  • Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American residing in Connecticut, attempted to detonate a car bomb in Times Square on May 1, 2010.

  • Ahmed Ferhani, an Queens resident born in Algeria, along with Mohammad Mamdouh, a Moroccan immigrant, were arrested in May 2011 in an NYPD operation in which Ferhani purchased a hand grenade, three semi-automatic pistols and ammunition from an undercover detective. NYPD's investigation into the pair revealed their desire to attack a synagogue in New York City.

  • Jose Pimentel, a native of the Dominican Republic and convert to Islam, was charged with plotting to detonate bombs in and around New York City in November 2011.

  • Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis, a 21-year-old native of Bangladesh residing in the U.S. on a student visa, was arrested in October 2012 as he attempted to remotely detonate what he believed was a bomb in front of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in lower Manhattan.

  • Raees Alam Qazi and Sheheryar Alam Qazi, Pakistan-born brothers, were arrested by federal authorities in Florida in November 2012 for charges relating to a plan to bomb popular New York City landmarks including Times Square, Wall Street and city theaters.

  • Jesse Morton, a New York City-based Muslim convert, was apprehended in Morocco and pleaded guilty in February 2012 to conspiring to solicit murder, making threatening communications, and using the Internet to place others in fear, most notably through his website Revolution Muslim.

  • Alessa and Carlos Almonte, both of New Jersey, pleaded guilty in March 2011 to conspiring to murder persons outside of the United States on behalf of al-Shabaab, the Somalia-based, al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group.

  • And even this list doesn't include the 2007 plot to attack nearby Fort Dix by a half-dozen Islamists since that was handled by the New Jersey authorities.
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Home Front: WoT
Gene Healy: Clowns or killers in al Qaeda
2010-07-21
Last week, federal jurors in Brooklyn heard tapes from an undercover informant in what one prosecutor called one of "the most chilling plots imaginable," a 2007 Islamist plan to detonate underground fuel tanks at JFK International Airport.

On the tapes, defendant Russell Defreitas promised "high-tech," "ninja-style" tactics that included releasing rats in the main terminal to distract security. "We got to come up with supernatural things," he told the informant.

Despite his bluster, Defreitas seemed unaware of the technical difficulties involved in igniting hardened underground pipelines, and he never secured explosives.

The JFK plotters' trial follows May's attempted Times Square bombing, in which Faisal Shahzad -- trained in explosives at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan -- failed to set off a bomb made of gas cans, propane tanks, fireworks and nonflammable fertilizer.

You ever get the feeling that some of these guys aren't the sharpest scimitars in the shed?

If so, you're not alone. The notion of "savvy and sophisticated" Islamist supervillains is "wildly off the mark," Brookings' Daniel Byman and Christine Fair write in Atlantic magazine.

Many Afghan suicide bombers "never even make it out of their training camp," thanks to the jihadi tradition of the pre-martyrdom "manly embrace": "the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in suicide vests." (Theological question: Do you get fewer virgins for an own-goal?)

On the American home front, al Qaeda and its sympathizers often don't look much brighter:

" In 2006, an FBI sting rolled up the "Liberty City Seven," whose ringleader, the Washington Post reported, "wanted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which would then fall into a nearby prison, freeing Muslim prisoners who would become the core of his Moorish army. With them, he would establish his own country." Sounds like a plan!

" 2007 saw the arrest of six Islamists who planned to launch an armed attack on New Jersey's Fort Dix, but were rounded up after they "asked a store clerk to copy a video of them firing assault weapons and screaming about jihad."

" In 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed associate Iyman Faris went to jail on charges involving a plan to topple the Brooklyn Bridge by severing its suspension cables with a blowtorch.

" The 2005 Jose Padilla indictment revealed that some Islamic terrorists haven't quite mastered speaking in code. One of Padilla's co-defendants insisted he was just talking about sporting goods on the surveillance tapes, but couldn't explain why he'd asked his co-conspirator if he had enough "soccer equipment" to "launch an attack on the enemy."

Lest you think I'm just cherry-picking particularly incompetent jihadis, recall that the Bush administration once considered Padilla, an American citizen, too dangerous for a civilian trial, and cited Faris' capture as the crown jewel of successes with its warrantless wiretapping program.

The fact that many terrorists are morons doesn't mean all are, and even morons get lucky sometimes, so vigilance remains essential.

But the myth that al Qaeda is 100 feet tall has fed dramatic government growth since 9/11. The Washington Post's new series on "Top Secret America" shows that D.C. has erected vast pyramids in the name of homeland security, with some 1,200 agencies and 850,000 people trolling through e-mail and clear-cutting forests to produce mounds of useless, redundant intelligence reports.

We've given al Qaeda power over us they don't deserve. When we recognize that they're often inept and clownish, we weaken their ability to sow terror. For the sake of our liberty and security, it's prudent and patriotic to allow an occasional smirk to cross your stiff upper lip.
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Terror Networks
Connecting thread: Ohio terrorist ties to al-Qaida operative revealed
2010-04-13
It's Ay Pee, so here's the summary:

Christopher Paul, of Columbus, Ohio, had connections to

o Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohamedou Ould Salahi, Al Qaeda recruiter, met with him in Afghanistan in 1992, in Germany in 1998, and requested advice by fax in 1997 about where to send wannabe jihadis for training. Three of the men Mr. Salahi sent to Afghanistan were future 9/11 hijackers (Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, Marwan al Shehhi). The fourth was Ramzi Binalshibh, who helped coordinate the 9/11 attack.

o Mr. Paul also met with Moroccan Karim Mehdi in Germany in 1993 and in 1997 or 1998, who was also connected (how incestuous this all is!) to Binalshibh and Jarrah, sentenced to French prison for plotting a terror attack against the French island of Reunion.

o Mr. Paul, part of a cell of three men based in Columbus, was the last of them to plead guilty to charges of plotting terror attacks. He was sentenced to twenty years. Co-conspirator Nuradin Abdi pled guilty to plotting to blow up an Ohio shopping mall; co-conspirator Iyman Faris pled guilty to a plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.
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Home Front: WoT
Ohio Man Expected to Plead Guilty to Terrorism Charge
2008-06-03
COLUMBUS, Ohio-- Documents filed with the US District Court in Columbus today, indicate that Christopher Paul has agreed to plead guilty to a charge of Conspiracy to Use Weapons of Mass Destruction.

Paul, born Christopher Kenyatta Laws, grew up in Worthington, OH. He is accused of conspiring with convicted terrorists Iyman Faris and Nouradin Abdi to use Weapons of Mass Destruction against tourists in Germany.

Christopher Paul is expected to plead guilty on Tuesday at Noon. According to court documents there is no minimum penalty for the crime. The maximum penalty Paul could face is life in prison, a $250,000 alternative fine, 5 years supervised release, and a $100 special assessment.
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Home Front: WoT
Terror-Funded MSA at Ohio State
2008-04-28
By Patrick Poole

February 20, 2006 proved to be an eventful day for the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at The Ohio State University. Not only did that date mark the conclusion of their weekend-long “Leaders of Tomorrow” conference, but that was also the day that their conference sponsor, Kindhearts, was raided by federal law enforcement and closed by order of the Department of the Treasury for financing terrorism, freezing its assets.

According to the US government, Kindhearts, which was established following the closure of the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation, was not only engaged in providing millions for HAMAS in Lebanon and the West Bank, it had hired as a fundraising specialist the man identified by HAMAS head Khaled Mishal as the designated HAMAS bag man in the US, Mohammed El-Mezain. (For additional background on Kindhearts and its multiple connections to the international terrorism finance network, see Joe Kaufman’s FrontPage article, “The Black Hearts of Kindhearts”)

Kindhearts, however, was not the only terror-connected sponsor of the OSU MSA conference. Also supporting the MSA’s conference was its local parent organization, Masjid Omar Ibn El-Khattab, known affectionately in the Central Ohio area as “Masjid Al-Qaeda”. The mosque nearby the OSU campus was home to the largest known Al-Qaeda cell in the US since 9/11, with two former members – Iyman Faris and Nuradin Abdi – already convicted and serving prison terms for their participation, and another cell member – Christopher Paul – currently awaiting trial.

The third identified sponsor of the MSA conference, Ilmquest Productions, is the media arm of the Al-Maghrib Institute (profiled last year here at FrontPage, “Jihad U”). Ilmquest not only publishes and markets DVDs and CDs of Al-Maghrib “scholars”, but also a long-line of other extremist speakers, including Bilal Philips, Khalid Yasin, and Yemeni Al-Qaeda cleric Anwar Al-Aulaqi.

As noted recently here at FrontPage, the Ohio State MSA is no stranger to controversy. Three months after 9/11, the Associated Press reported that the OSU MSA was under federal investigation for its MSA News email list that regularly published news releases by a whole host of Islamic terrorist organizations, and also for encouraging readers to purchase videos from a terrorist support website:

— Ohio State University's Muslim Student Association produces and distributes MSA NEWS, which publicizes events featuring controversial speakers and has included news releases from terrorist groups such as the Algerian Armed Islamic Group, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations Americans are forbidden to support or finance, and the Islamic Salvation Front, a fundamentalist political party banned in Algeria.

— During last year's Ramadan fast, MSA-NEWS urged campus groups to purchase a videotape called The Martyrs of Bosnia and show it to Muslim-only gatherings. The video was sold by London-based Azzam Productions, which featured articles on its Web site like "Taliban: Allah's Blessing on Afghanistan," and solicited funds there for the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan. The site, and a related German site, were shut down by the British and German governments as part of their Sept. 11 response.

Two years later, the OSU MSA played a critical role in hosting the Third National Conference on Palestinian Solidarity, whose keynote speaker was none other than now-convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader and former University of South Florida professor, Sami Al-Arian.

And more recently, the OSU MSA jointly sponsored an event to counter last October’s Islamofascism Awareness Week featuring notorious wife-beating advocate and Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi, “Interfaith Relations – A Muslim Perspective”. The event was paid for by the university through student fees. As I reported here at FrontPage, “Fatwa Fraud”, Badawi was one of the featured speakers and an honored guest last July at a terrorist confab in Doha, Qatar honoring HAMAS spiritual leader Yousef Al-Qaradawi and attended by HAMAS head Khaled Mishal.

College students and administrators would do well to consider that Islamic terrorism and extremism are not phenomena distant and far removed from American college campuses (even though Ohio State professor John Mueller contends there is no threat from Islamic terrorists).

In fact, Islamic terrorism and extremism might be closer than they would ever realize – as close as the nearest Muslim Student Association.
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Home Front: WoT
Somali man gets 10-year sentence in Columbus mall plot
2007-11-28
Nuradin Abdi's plan to blow up a Columbus shopping mall was no more than an idle threat, spoken in frustration, his attorney said yesterday. But federal prosecutors said those words were a small part of the case against Abdi, who was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison for conspiring to support terrorists.

Abdi, 35, was arrested four years ago today and will receive credit for serving that time in the Franklin County jail. He will spend the remaining six years of his sentence in federal prison and then be deported to his native Somalia. The sentence, imposed by U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley in Columbus, was in keeping with a plea bargain reached in July, when Abdi pleaded guilty to one of four counts against him.

Defense lawyer Mahir Sherif told the court that Abdi, who lived on the North Side and worked at a cell-phone business, was frustrated by the U.S. military action in Afghanistan when he met with two co-conspirators at an Upper Arlington coffee shop in August 2002 and mentioned bombing a shopping mall. "He made the statement, but did he really intend to follow through? No, he did not," Sherif said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Robyn Jones Hahnert countered by saying the case against Abdi was "much bigger in scope than one isolated comment at the Caribou Coffee shop."

In his guilty plea, Abdi admitted he lied to immigration officials in 1999 to receive a travel document that he used in an unsuccessful effort to visit a camp in Ethiopia for what prosecutors called "military-style training in preparation for violent jihad."

The government said Abdi befriended Iyman Faris and Christopher Paul, both of whom met with him at the coffee shop. Faris, a Pakistani immigrant linked to a terrorist plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, pleaded guilty in May 2003 to providing material support for al-Qaida. Paul, a Worthington native, was charged in April with plotting to bomb European tourist resorts. He is scheduled for trial in January 2009. Prosecutors said Abdi admitted conspiring with Faris and Paul to support foreign terrorists, even supplying Paul with credit-card numbers stolen from cell-phone customers to help fund the activities.

Abdi's attorney said his client wanted the court to know that he "does not hate America" and that the principles of his Islamic faith include opposition to violence. He said Abdi wanted to apologize to Muslims "all over the world who may suffer indirectly from the consequences of his actions."

Fred Alverson, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office, said the government continues to investigate the possibility that the terrorist cell was larger than the three local men charged so far. "Other people are being looked at," he said.
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Home Front: WoT
Terror Suspect Claims Torture
2007-05-15
A Pakistani terrorism suspect denied any connection to al-Qaida
"No, no! Certainly not!"
and said he was tortured and his family was hounded by U.S. authorities, according to a transcript released Tuesday by the Pentagon. Majid Khan, in a lengthy written statement, said the CIA and the Defense Department tortured him after his capture in Pakistan as well as when he was transferred to the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.
Khan is Pakistani? I could have sworn he was a Canadian just last week. Or was that another member of the Kanadian Khan Klan.
``I swear to God this place in some sense worst than CIA jails. I am being mentally torture here,'' said Khan in a statement read by his personal representative about his time in Guantanamo.
"Yarr! Won't talk will you? Mongo! Bruise his mind!"
"Duh! Yeah, boss!"
"Aaaaaiiiiieeeee!"
``There is extensive torture even for the smallest of infractions.''
"Hey, you didn't finish your carrots. To the rack with him!"
Khan, who grew up in Maryland and is the only U.S. resident among 15 detainees the government considers most dangerous, also described suicide attempts where he ``chewed my artery which goes through my elbow.''
He can chew his elbow?
"Igor! He's chewing his elbow again! Rattle his subconscious!"
"Yes, Mawstah!"
"Aaaaiiiieeeeeeee!"
The CIA and Pentagon have said their interrogations practices are legal and that they do not use torture.
Well... Maybe an occasional Dutch rub. But only is special circumstances.
Khan's father, however, provided the most graphic descriptions of his son's treatment at the hands U.S. authorities, in a written statement that was also included in the hearing record. Ali Shoukat Khan said his son was kidnapped in Pakistan and that there, Americans tortured his son ``for eight hours at a time, tying him tightly in stressful positions in a small chair until his hands, feet and mind went numb ... He was often hooded and had difficulty breathing. They also beat him repeatedly, slapping him in the face, and deprived him of sleep.''
Here's a quarter, call someone who cares
Ummm... Did they kidnap Pop, too? Or did all this come to him in a dream?
The elder Khan, a retired gas station owner, said his son is not a terrorist and demanded that the government present its evidence, ``charge him with a crime and give him a fair trial in a real court.'' He also said he and his family were pressured by the FBI to speculate about his son's activities.
"Speculate about Sonny's activities, Pop, or the bunny gets it!"
"No! Not Fluffy! I'll speculate! I'll speculate!"
The FBI, he said, ``followed us everywhere we went for a long time, requiring us to tell them in advance where we were going and what we were going to do there.''
"What're you doing in there? Did you die in there? There are other people who need to use that, too, y'know!"
During the hearing, the government said Majid Khan told others that he wanted to ``martyr himself'' in a plot to assassinate Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. They quoted his father and brother saying that Khan was involved with ``a group he believed to be al-Qaida'' and was involved in transporting people across the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
And why would they think that, you might ask....
U.S. intelligence also says Khan's cousin and uncle, who were both members of al-Qaida, introduced Khan to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, who in a similar hearing at Guantanamo Bay depicted himself as al-Qaida's most prolific planner.
He's got a couple other brothers who are al-Qaida deaders or in the slammer as well, I think
Together, the government says, Kahn and Mohammed plotted to blow up American gas stations, poison U.S. reservoirs and kill the president of Pakistan.
Other than that, he's pretty harmless.
Khan also is said to have helped pick possible operatives, including Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who is now serving 20 years in prison for supporting terrorism. Faris was studying how to destroy New York City suspension bridges. Faris submitted a statement for the hearing, and said he was coerced and tricked by the FBI into make statements about Khan. ``If I don't tell them what they wanted to hear, they were gong to take me to Gitmo (Guantanamo).''
"They wuz gonna put ladies' underwear on my head and ever'thing!"
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