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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
They trained with al-Qaida and met with Osama. All but one member of the so-called Lackawanna Six have pleaded guilty to lesser charges -- but insist they never meant anyone any harm.
May 19, 2003 | For many Americans, one of the few, true, uncomplicated success stories of the war on terrorism would be the FBI's arrest last fall of a "sleeper cell": six young Yemeni-Americans from just south of Buffalo, N.Y., who had trained with al-Qaida and had even heard a lecture by Osama bin Laden himself. President Bush gave the arrests key billing in his January State of the Union speech, when he bragged about "al-Qaida cells" that had been "broken in Hamburg, Milan, Madrid, London, Paris, as well as Buffalo, New York."
The providence of that bust seems only to have grown over time, as five of the six, one after the other, have accepted guilty pleas with the U.S. government. Just last Monday, Yasein Taher -- voted "friendliest" of Lackawanna High School's class of '96 -- entered into his agreement, pleading "guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda, a designated foreign terrorist organization," according to the Justice Department, and prompting some chest thumping from Attorney General John Ashcroft. "With today's conviction, the Department of Justice continues to build on its strong record of prosecuting those who provide material support to our terrorist enemies," Ashcroft said. "The cooperation we secure from defendants who trained side by side with our enemies in Afghanistan and elsewhere is valuable as we continue to wage the war on terrorism."
Were the Lackawanna Six really a "sleeper cell"? Maybe. But even though the White House describes them as such, there is no direct evidence to support the charge; an FBI source points out that no one from his office has said such a thing in public.
Not only has the FBI not officially called them a sleeper cell, the U.S. attorney's office hasn't even charged them with conspiring to hurt anyone -- the evidence shows they attended an al-Qaida training camp in the late spring or early summer of 2001 -- but not with anything indicating that they were a definite threat: no orders received, no plans to strike. But all will be behind bars for the foreseeable future. All six insist that they love America and mean it no harm, but the government has threatened other charges -- even the capital offense of treason.
They have all felt pressure from the Department of Justice to plead to charges. Otherwise, prosecutors can't promise that they won't add weapons charges to the mix or -- even worse -- that the Pentagon won't designate them "enemy combatants," like Jose Padilla, and ship them to Guatánamo Bay forever.
The six are the subjects of the Justice Department's aggressive new policy to make arrests -- and process convictions -- even before hard evidence of terrorist plans are uncovered. It's a shift from prosecuting crimes to anticipating and preventing them, and it has as a clear drawback: Suspects will go to prison despite an irreconcilable ambiguity about whether they are actually enemies of the United States.
That's certainly the case with the five alleged terrorists from Lackawanna who have pleaded guilty. And all eyes are on the last one, Mukhtar al-Bakri. A former co-captain of Lackawanna High's soccer team, al-Bakri was arrested in September 2002 at the age of 22, just hours after his wedding, and his admissions to law enforcement set the stage for the arrests of the other five. The government deems him a terrorist threat. None of that quite squares with what the citizens of Lackawanna's Yemeni-American community -- numbering approximately 1,100 -- know of him: a nice guy who earned $300 a week as a deliveryman for Lackawanna's Unity Wholesale and who cheered for the National Hockey League's Buffalo Sabres.
Al-Bakri now sits in his cell at the Niagara County Jail. His family insists he wouldn't hurt a fly, yet the government has ensured that he remains isolated from the other prisoners. Indeed, the Six are deemed such a threat to the nation they've been housed in three separate prisons. Today at 2 p.m., al-Bakri -- who like the others faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, or both -- is scheduled to appear before U.S. District Judge William Skretny to enter into a plea agreement with the government, according to prosecutors. If all goes according to plan, the murky, complicated story of the Lackawanna Six -- and a mysterious cast of characters who have yet to be captured by federal authorities -- may never get a public court airing.
