Alarmed, intelligence shared the information; even the Oval Office was briefed. Now cooperating with the government, Lindh said that at al-Farooq he'd heard talk about a group from Buffalo. Some in the FBI wanted more time to build their case, but, using post-9/11 reasoning, Ashcroft pressured the feds to take action before it was too late.

Al-Bakri had been married only a matter of hours when Bahraini authorities -- acting on a request from Washington -- arrested him. They "kicked in the door, ran him to the ground, beat him and threw him in prison," his attorney later complained. His new wife burst into tears.

One day later, officials from the FBI's Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, legal attache arrived at al-Bakri's Bahrain prison. They asked about his e-mail alluding to "the big meal"; he said that he was just passing on remarks he'd heard during a trip to Saudi Arabia.

And the phone call about dropping out of sight forever? He was just submerging himself into the world of a married man, he insisted.

But though he at first denied having gone to Afghanistan in 2001, al-Bakri soon broke, admitting their trip to al-Farooq, their training with al-Qaida. At the camp he'd been assigned a code name -- "Abu Omar Alyafei" -- and was trained in the use of handguns, long-range rifles and Kalashnikov assault rifles.

At once, back in Buffalo, FBI Agent Ed Needham -- one of about 70 agents in the local office -- paid a visit to Sahim Alwan, whom he knew from the investigation and from Alwan's call before leaving for Mecca. Once he'd heard what al-Bakri had said, Alwan admitted the trip as well. With that, the FBI and local police began making arrests. It was a huge story. Al-Bakri was flown home and charged within hours.

Prosecutors were confident they could convict the Lackawanna Six of violating a 1996 law against providing material support to a terrorist group, but they wanted to build a stronger case. Searches of the suspects' homes yielded audiotapes containing anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli rhetoric, an unlicensed .22-caliber handgun, a stun gun, evidence of the use of aliases. Mosed had told police that he only had around a thousand dollars to his name, but at his home cops found $6,400. At Nicole Frick's apartment was a nine-page document about suicide operations, stating that "the objective is to kill as many of the enemy as possible, and he will almost certainly die." Suicide bombing is the preferred method to fight infidels, the booklet stated: "No other technique7strikes as much terror into their hearts."

Defense attorneys argue that the tapes reference common points of Muslim culture, and in any event are legal. The $6,400 found in Mosed's house belonged to his wife, his lawyer says. Taher's nine-page document, Personius says, is simply a scholarly treatise on suicide bombing in Chechnya.

The government later acknowledged overreaching on one matter. Prosecutors removed remarks taken from the tape of "Koranic Recitations" as evidence of malicious intent. Such a charge, after all, could be made against anyone with a Koran.

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Recently, I walked around three successive Lackawanna streets -- Wilkesbarre Street, Holland Avenue and Ingham Avenue -- where five of the Six lived. Of the residents who agree to speak to me -- and many don't, claiming not to speak English (though "no comment" rolls off the tongue) -- there are two common themes. One is that the government has invented the entire case in order to persecute Muslims. "It's a scam," says Mohamed Abdul-Jabar Alshish, 16, tossing a football with his friends outside the Lackawanna Mosque. "They're really good kids," says Saleh, who won't tell me his last name. Is it persecution of Muslims? "That's what I think, yes."

The other argument you hear accepts the trip as fact, but insists the men were hoodwinked and harmless. "They attended the camp by mistake," says Abdul Noman, 40, Taher's uncle. "They went there, and then they realized it's not right, so they came back. When Yasein came back, he told me that he'd never appreciated this country more." They'd gone to learn about Islam and how to defend Islam in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Palestinian territories -- not how to kill Americans. "It's unfair," seconds Saleh Mohamed, a hospital employee. They never "had the intention of harming human beings."

Others from the area -- non-Muslims, primarily -- view it differently. "Certain things occur to you after this happened," says Judy Chmielowiec, who lives across the street from Taher, her sons' former classmate. "They always had $30,000 cars. We're working three jobs and we can't afford that." (Taher's brother owned an Infiniti, but he's facing drug-trafficking charges, which may explain suspicious income.)

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