American Jihadist Christopher Paul Arrested

Update: more here

A North Side man joined al-Qaida and tried to help the terrorist group blow up U.S. government buildings abroad and European resorts frequented by Americans, a federal indictment released yesterday in Columbus says.

Christopher Paul, 43, who shared an apartment with convicted terrorist Iyman Faris, is charged with conspiring to support terrorists, conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction and providing support to terrorists.

An American convert who taught martial arts at a mosque in Ohio went to quite a bit of trouble to join and support al Qaeda if the charges stick. He has had a few names:

Paul was born Paul Kenyatta Laws. He legally changed his name to Abdulmalek Kenyatta in 1989, then to Christopher Paul in 1994, according to the indictment.

The allegations aren't garden variety - he was looking into everything from remote controlled aircraft to WMD and spent time overseas training al Qaeda members. They've been on him for four years. This is the third arrest of someone from Columbus for links to al Qaeda.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A federal grand jury indicted a U.S. citizen on charges of joining al-Qaida and conspiring to bomb European tourist resorts and U.S. government facilities and military bases overseas, officials said Thursday.

The investigation of Christopher Paul, 43, spanned four years, three continents and at least eight countries, FBI agent Tim Murphy said shortly before the Columbus man appeared before a federal judge.

Paul trained with al-Qaida in the early 1990s and told al-Qaida members in Pakistan and Afghanistan that he was dedicated to committing violent jihad, according to the indictment.

"The indictment of Christopher Paul paints a disturbing picture of an American who traveled overseas to train as a violent jihadist, joined the ranks of al-Qaida and provided military instruction and support to radial cohorts both here and abroad," Assistant U.S. Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein said in a statement.

Paul, who was arrested Wednesday outside his apartment, is charged with providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to provide support to terrorists and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.

In court Thursday, Magistrate Judge Terence Kemp asked Paul if he understood the charges. "Yes, sir," Paul replied

Comments

[Zifnab]

Wha- wha- what?!
Grand Jury? FBI? Investigation? Indictment?
What the crap is this, Dan? He didn't spend 8 minutes in Gitmo. Where's the torture? The black googles? Did anyone smear menstrual fluid on his face, cause if not, how can we trust he was properly handled?

The way this man was handled just goes to show that while he may actually be successfully convicted of plotting terrorism and sentenced to potentially well more than 9-months in an Australian resort prison, America has been coddling terrorists like him for too long.

Is... is that a lawyer representing him? The humanity! The horror! Truly, the death of our legal system harkens near.

[bloodrage bob]

the reason he's not at gitmo - dumbass - is because, as the story you read-but-failed-to-comprehend points out, he's a US citizen.

US citizens got rights. non-uniformed foreigners firing upon US troops, or plotting to bravely murder conveniently unarmed civilians..... don't. see the difference?

have someone smart draw you a picture if this is all too complex for ya.

[bloodrage bob]

and while we're on the subject, illegal aliens in this country have no rights either.

(waits patiently for the flood of liberal 'reductio-ad-absurdum' arguments about "so i guess that means we can murder them, huh?!?")

(oh crud: liberals don't know what reductio ad absurdum MEANS. *sigh* like arguing with 8-year-olds.)

[nowinger]

Tell it to Padilla, buddy.

[nowinger]

He was arrested in Chicago on May 8, 2002, and was detained as a material witness until June 9, 2002, when President Bush designated him an illegal enemy combatant and transferred him to a military prison, arguing that he was thereby not entitled to the protection of United States law.

A little refresher course for you. The salient points are that he's a US citizen, arrested in the US and Bush argued that he was NOT ENTITLED TO PROTECTION UNDER US LAW.

I would love to hear the wingers rationalization for that one, it ought to be laugh out loud funny.

[bloodrage bob]

ok, nowinger, you're up. "padilla". that's...let's see now.....that's ONE.

beloved liberal FDR imprisoned tens of THOUSANDS of american citizens he didn't like for MUCH less reason than the reason padilla's currently rotting away in a cell. (a good thing, BTW)

never hear liberals complain about THAT, do we? why was it ok for FDR to do - on a much more massive scale - what bush is doing? why is that? FDR's imprisoned 50,000 merit not one whimper of complaint from liberals, but bush's ONE does? wtf?

[nowinger]

OMG you truly are INSANE. What the fuck are you talking about? I don't know anyone, other than the wingers on this blog, that has ever done anything but condemn the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII as completely racist, unconstitutional and crazy to boot.

It only takes ONE to set a precedent. If the supreme court had agreed with the decider, then the government could have designated ANYONE an enemy combatant for ANY reason, thrown them in a military prison forever with no access to a lawyer, trial or any kind of due process. If Bush had gotten his way, nobody would be safe from government thugs showing up in the middle of the night and taking you away to a secret prison for the rest of your life.

[bloodrage bob]

THOUGHT you'd dodge the issue, nowinger. OMG, are you INSANE?????

did you not understand the question? lemme try it in graphic form - a picture if you will - for you. you bozos don't read so good, but (maybe) pictures, you can puzzle out. ok:

beloved liberal democrat icon FDR unjustly imprisons:
50,000 american citizens.
liberal complaints about this: 0

evil nazibushitler unjustly imprisons: 1 american citizen.
liberal complaints about this: 300,000,000

discuss.

[nowinger]

I didn't dodge the issue, fool. I said that as far as I knew EVERYONE agrees that the incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII was wrong. But not to worry, when the day comes, and believe me, it WILL come, when the government wants to round up Arab Americans and put them in camps, for the good of all, the wingers will be using FDR as the precedent.

[Zifnab]

That's the generic winger response, "OMG! Issue dodger!" Then, if you respond they proceed to make about a dozen posts claiming you have no life because you answer all their bullshit claims.

You can't win. Either you didn't answer, or you didn't answer enough, or you answered too much and you're a DNC plant (because, after all, who would sit on a forum Googling answers to crazy claims and stupid non-issues except someone getting paid minimum wage down at Howard Dean's office? Cause, you know, no one at the DNC has anything better to do with their time.)

That BB has been spamming this board for the last half-hour with this ignorance boggles the mind.

[southdakotaboy]

First: Nonwinger is rifgt when he said the left has spoken out about this issue. That explains all the reperations were paid to the survivors. Padilla as an American citizen should be given his day in court.
Second: Non citizens captured on the battle field out of uniform need to be either shot on the field or at least interrogated and then hung/shot.
Now as far as going and rounding everyone up and putting them into detention camps same basic idea citizens (no) and non citizens (yes). If we are in a situation where there is a common threat to the vast majority of Americans from a certain group lock them up until the threat goes away.

[bloodrage bob]

really, nowinger? "everyone's mad at FDR for being mean"? then i supose you can point to several instances of *liberal* *democrats* standing up for the jap-ams; denouncing FDR; criticizing FDR's actions for the next 50 years.

*I* can't....and i've looked pretty hard. maybe they were just "silently" outraged at FDR? so! why is it we have to follow the beloved FDR's example on....oh....way too many government agencies and the national ponzi scheme, but we SHOULDN"T follow his example on home-grown possible bad guys? why is that? hmmm?

has hillary ever publicly denounced FDR's actions? has obama? bubba? pelosi? sharpton? streisand? ANY major democrat?

no?? THEN IT MUST BE THEY THINK IT'S OK FOR DEMOCRATS TO DO IT, huh? "just not bush!"

[bloodrage bob]

ziffy! dude! not going to class again TODAY, huh? go figure.

[bloodrage bob]

ziffy! dude! not going to class again TODAY, huh? go figure.

[nowinger]

What if the non citizen who was captured isn't a combatant. What if he happened to be in the area of the battle but didn't participate? Let me guess, more collateral damage, war is hell, you gotta break a few eggs to make an omlette, he should have stayed home and our soldiers don't make mistakes so its a non issue. You understand that our military has paid MILLIONS of dollars to Iraqis that were killed by mistake, don't you? Innocent people killed by mistake. Doesn't that mean that 'shoot first/ask questions later' might be a poor policy when dealing with an enemy that looks, acts and dresses exactly the same as a civilian?

[southdakotaboy]

Just stop paying them. I mean what is the point of paying dead people. It isn't like they go and do anything with it.

[rtoe]

OMG,you guys need to get a life!!!

[Buzzy]

I view this whole situation as thorny. As a conservative the last thing in the world I want is an enemy combatant who has never set foot on American soil being given his day in a civilian criminal court but in the cases of Padilla, Paul, Lind etal. they are American citizens and certainly have that right. I could even go so far as to say that even non citizens should have that right as long as they are in this country by legal means while a non citizen of the "death to America" brigade is just an enemy invader if he entered the country illegally or overstayed his visa etc.

I'm not entirely happy with the Bush administrations handling of this problem but honestly I think it's better than the solution the left keeps bring up, wanting to grant noncitizens US rights in foreign countries. That's clearly as insane as Bush's position. We're in a completely new type of warfare, one that we aren't prepared to deal with as a nation but we had better come to some consensus soon.

I keep thinking about the scenerio, maybe it's a bit over the top but it serves to define exactly how far we are willing to protect ourselves. Understand that protection in time of war always equals some reduction of freedoms or ignoring long standing moral objections.

If we (the US) caught a terrorist who has (no doubt about it for this purpose) planted a large nuclear devide somewhere in the US, exactly how far should our government be able to go to get him to tell where he planted it? We'll also assume that with that information we could prevent tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of innocent casualties. Since this question deals with treatment of this prisoner let's also assume that if given legal representation that lawyer would tell him to keep his mouth shut and not talk with us.

To me this is a defining question about ourselves on many levels. I've made it over the top in regards to the consequences that will be suffered if we don't get the information on purpose and of course time is of the essence.

I'll go first, that's only fair. Personally there is no limit to what I would do to this terrorist to find out the location of the bomb. Waterboarding and being stripped naked in a cold wet cell would be nothing compared to what I would be prepared to do to prevent his attack. Needless to say he shouldn't be waiting for his lawyer to show up anytime soon.

To our liberals, this isn't a trick on my part. My answer isn't something I had to wrestle with and I really want to know how your mind wraps around a scenerio in which torture is the only answer. Where do you draw the line given an admittedly worst of the worst case scenerio.

Who wants to play?

[Zifnab]

"As a conservative the last thing in the world I want is an enemy combatant who has never set foot on American soil being given his day in a civilian criminal court"

Why? The very purpose of civilian court is to make sure that the right people are convicted of the right crimes. If a guy is swept up in a midnight raid because marines invaded the wrong house (which, so I've heard, is very easy to do when houses in Afganistan don't come with door numbers), he's not a soldier, and he's thrown into a jail, onto a plane, and then off to an island prison on the other side of the world, wouldn't you want the legal system that is the pride of the western hemisphere on hand to figure out whether you've got Osama Bin Laden's right-hand man or just another goat farmer?

Seriously, either you've got absolutely no faith in our current legal system or you just don't care about doing a good job determining if the guy is guilty. But I would think you'd at least want to know if he actually committed any crimes.

[bloodrage bob]

in re padilla: better yet, let's simplify it.

you've got hannibal lecter locked up. although you didn't see him kill nobody; and he ate all the evidence; you're no fool: you saw the movie, and you KNOW this guy is *mohammed frickin' lecter*. you have every reason to believe that if you release him, he'll go right back to eating garden-variety manic-depressives and power-mad doctors. you KNOW he'll do this.

do you disregard common sense and public safety, and let him go? are you willing to sacrifice the lives of sure-to-be-killed innocents so you can pompously intone your fealty to the oh-so-sacred tenets of "the law"?

now suppose *I* am the guy who lets lecter out, so i can sleep well at night. ("i vas only followink orders!") and suppose lecter kills and eats YOUR loved one. kills your entire family, in fact. just like i knew he would, but hey! my hands were tied, right?

are you caring law-abiding liberals going to shrug and tell me it's not my fault? or will you squeal like hell and cry and moan and sue me? will my mindless obedience to the letter of the law not be comfort enough for you? hmmm?

[nowinger]

We do it every day. Every day known criminals, sexual deviants are let back out on the street, they commit more crimes. What does this have to do with anything? The 'ticking time bomb' case has never happened in the anals of modern history and it has zero to do with abusing and torturing run of the mill prisoners who haven't been charged or convicted of any crimes and who just MIGHT be innocent of any crime. Its called the slippery slope argument. We all agree that if there is a 100% certainty that someone knows where the nuke is or that they just, say, raped and burried alive a year old girl they kidnapped out of her bedroom, that there is virtually no limit to what they would deserve. But then we go on from there down the list from 100% to "I think he's guilty" and we end up beating to death, raping and torturing INNOCENT people.

[bloodrage bob]

wow. do you even READ the stuff you type in, nowinger?

if i understand your "argument", we have to let padilla go because we let murderers and rapists go; never mind that that's a really stupid thing to do because they just...go back to doing what they do.

it's a bad idea; it's profoundly stupid; and you yourself admitted that the freed criminals "commit more crimes". (say, which political party is associated with advocating letting convicted felons out early? and then having their voting rights returned to them? is it the democrats? why do they do that? is it to help society?)

wow. like i say, your thoughts are downright surreal. so then....if i understand you correctly....society has no right to defend itself from dangerous situations? and we have to give typhoid mary her job back? you know: the one she works at the food processing plant? we wouldn't want to be UNFAIR, right? that'd lead to a 'slippery slope', right?

[Buzzy]

No, honestly I don't have any huge amount of faith in our jury system. The same system that let OJ go. The same system where the doubts of one person trumps surefire belief of 11 others. That in itself isn't always a bad thing but let one person with loyalties that lie with the enemy and you'll never get a conviction. They'll never let us exclude Muslims from the jury pool and I don't trust people who blow themselves up not to lie to get on a jury. The problems of applying US criminal law to people taken prisoner on a battlefield makes it a sorry suggestion. Take the long drawn out process of Moussaoui's trial, include the fact that all the witnesses may very well be still in Iraq or Afghanistan, injured and hospitalized, or perhaps dead. Add to that the fact that already overburdened and endangered soldiers would have to correctly and to legal standards collect and maintain a chain of custody of physical evidence then be physically available for hearings, trail etc. in the US before and during the trial as well as any appeals that would result from the verdict. Then there is the matter that unless the person on trial was charged with an attack on US property or territory (ie: an Embassy etc.) no US criminal court has jurisdiction in durka durka Iraq or wherever the hell the guy was captured in. In addition the "defendant" will also always fight to have himself tried by a jury of his peers and 100% of his peers are non US citizens who haven't ever been to the US and 100% of them believe in "death to America".

Long ago some of the people who were calling for US criminal trials for war prisoners admitted that this would make our going to war impossible and that that was the reason they were pushing for it. That agenda would, of course, be fine with the anti Iraq / Afghanistan war people and the Bush haters but then again it would have been used to stop Clinton's war in Bosnia and they would certainly stop any military action anywhere and by any and every administration.

Actually what would most likely happen would be that OUR (citizens of the US) rights at criminal trial would be forever changed and weakened if we let this happen. We could well lose our right to face our accusers and witnesses against us because the court would be forced to allow testimony by affidavit without the right of cross examination. Rules of evidence could well be weakened the moment even one judge allowed poorly maintained evidence in due to battlefield conditions.

Personally I'm happy with military tribunals but we could allow Pelosi, Murtha, and Kerry to make the decisions as to what terrorists they want to let free knowing that they'll carry those decisions with them the rest of their lives and political careers.

[nowinger]

I think you are stupid on purpose. I never said we should let Padilla go, or let anyone at Gitmo go, or let terrorists go. Everyone deserves due process. Everyone deserves to be charged for their crimes within a reasonable amount of time, and that is NOT FIVE YEARS on, everyone deserves access to a lawyer, everyone deserves to see the evidence against them so they can contest it, everyone deserves access to the legal system. The 'system' that has been set up for the Gitmo detainees is outside the bounds of even military law, its a kanagaroo court, no better than Stalin's show trials. Who ever said enemy combatants should be tired in US criminal courts? Try them in a military court, but make it conform to the military code of justice, which the current kangaroo court does not.

[Hard Right]

No nobrain, NOT EVERYONE deserves their day in court. Some bad people deserve only immediate death. You lefties will never understand because you avoid reality at all costs to make yourselves feel good.

As usual you resort to hysterically comparing the trials at Gitmo to that of an evil dictator (which you see Bush as) simply because you don't like them. Sorry, but they do not deserve even the same rights as our soldiers. The SC ruled and Congress passed legislation for the trials. So, too bad so sad. Take your whining elsewhere. BTW, all the inmates currently held at Gitmo WERE CAPTURED IN AFGHANISTAN.

So tell us Nobrain, what should we do if we have hundreds or even 1000's of Americans that are actively engaGed in terrorism? She we let them clog our courts? Or should we do what Lincoln and FDR did? I say they both had the right idea.