I know that not everything reported in the newspaper about terrorist sting operations is reliable information, but still this passage struck me as noteworthy:
Pakistani authorities on Saturday zeroed in on the alleged mastermind of a plot to send five Northern Virginia men to Afghanistan to kill U.S. troops,
Is that how you would allocate the five men? Yet even that was not allowed:
Saifullah was unsuccessful in convincing al-Qaeda commanders that the men were not part of a CIA plot to infiltrate the terrorist network. As a result, they were marooned for days in the eastern city of Sargodha, far from the forbidding mountains of the northwest that have become a terrorist haven.
I'm not pretending to know the real story, but "remove them from proximity to packed U.S. shopping malls, send them to Sargodha" is a strategy I can live with. Alternatively, you can take this as evidence that they really were CIA plants. In which case you can ease up about all the media stories today on homegrown U.S. terrorists, etc.
One of them was an accounting student at GMU; I wonder which one of us he had for Principles?
Is that how you would allocate the five men?
Of course not.
But you might bring them to Afghanistan for training, and to check them out, before returning them to the US to do whatever.
GMU is educating terrorists. Quick someone investigate them.
@Bill
I will venture that many of them will not actually end up pulling off anything dramatic. There’s a good chance many of them do end up spending large sums of money on training and equipment, though… a transfer from (relatively rich) middle-class American second or third generation Muslims to their third world handlers.
Compare the much better documented cult behavior in the US, where many groups ask their new converts to attend courses, during which they are pressured to turn up for more and more courses and (of course) donate more and more of their life savings.
Not only does the government of a Sargodha have a Google ad on their website, but the ad is a drawing of a woman in a bikini for a weight-loss product.
Why do terrorists have to go anywhere for training?
First, it might depend on what Al-Qaeda wants them to do.
Second, Al-Qaeda might want to subject them to indoctrination to make sure they’ll stay loyal, follow through, etc.
They don’t have to be CIA plants, just wannabe terrorists the CIA knows about that they can create the impression are plants. For that matter, I don’t understand why the CIA hasn’t quietly been making it “known” that suspects released from CIA custody have been implanted with GPS locators for easier Predator targeting. As to the value of sending them to Sargodha, you may underestimate the value of cultural understanding.
They were from Northern Virginia. Psycho villain Mel Profitt from Wiseguy refused to allow anyone with any connections in their background to Virginia into his organization, believing that people from Virginia (all of them) were Feds. Some al-Qaida commander must have watched too much ’80s era TV while at college in the US, and absorbed this bit of paranoia.
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