------------------------------------------------------------------------
October 5, 2002
Four in U.S. Charged in Post-9/11 Plan to Join Al Qaeda
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — Federal officials said today that they had broken up a terrorist cell in Portland, Ore., arresting four native-born citizens accused of plotting after the Sept. 11 attacks to join with Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters in a "jihad" against the United States.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation also began a global hunt for two other people linked to the Oregon case, a United States citizen and a Portland resident from Jordan.
Law enforcement officials said they believed the two fugitives were overseas.
The arrests, coming just weeks after federal prosecutors charged 11 people in separate terrorism cases in Lackawanna, N.Y., Detroit and Seattle, reflect the Justice Department's intensified effort to strike against suspected terrorism plots in their very early stages.
Attorney General John Ashcroft said that the Portland arrests, coupled with the sentencing of John Walker Lindh and Richard C. Reid's guilty plea to trying to blow up a plane, brought "a defining day in America's war against terrorism."
"It is a day both of victory and a day of resolve," Mr. Ashcroft said.
Coming on the same day, the three developments may help the Bush administration respond to critics who say that plans for an attack on Iraq are diverting resources from the war on terror.
Defense lawyers, civil libertarians and Muslim leaders have questioned the strength of the evidence in cases like the one brought today.
Privately, even some law enforcement officials expressed skepticism that the people arrested recently represented as serious a threat as the Justice Department maintains.
But Mr. Ashcroft said today, "We've neutralized a suspected terrorist cell within our borders."
In announcing the arrests, Charles Matthews, the F.B.I.'s special agent in charge of the Portland office, said, "The enemy recruits in this country, it trains in this country, it plans in this country and acts in this country."
Jeffrey Leon Battle, 32; his former wife, October Martinique Lewis, 25; and a man named Patrice Lumumba Ford, 31, were arrested at daybreak in Portland, the F.B.I. said. A fourth person, Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal, 22, was arrested this morning outside Detroit.
The four, all born in the United States, were each charged with conspiring to provide material support and services to Al Qaeda and the Taliban and conspiring to "levy war against the United States."
Mr. Bilal's brother, 24-year-old Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal, who is also an American, and Habis Abdulla Al Saoub, a Jordanian man living in the United States, are still at large, officials said.
Although officials said that investigators were pursuing evidence that at least one of the men was in Malaysia, an F.B.I. official acknowledged that "at this point, it's a generalized search overseas."
"We can't pinpoint a specific region where they may be," he said.
A federal grand jury charged that in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, as United States and allied forces began attacking Afghanistan in an effort to root out terrorists, the four defendants and their two wanted accomplices developed a plan to go to Afghanistan to aid Qaeda and Taliban forces and take up arms against the United States.
The six Portland residents trained in Oregon with Chinese rifles and semiautomatic pistols to prepare for the trip, prosecutors said. They said that Mr. Battle joined the Army Reserve to get weapons and tactical training for the "jihad."
Mr. Battle served as a supply specialist in the 671st Engineer Company in Portland but was discharged this year after he failed to show up for training, an Army official said.
An indictment by a federal grand jury in Portland said the group began "physical training" in the summer of 2001, but their plans accelerated after the Sept. 11 attacks and its members decided to travel to Afghanistan and Pakistan to aid Taliban and Qaeda forces.
With Ms. Lewis remaining in Oregon, the five men traveled to China on the first leg of their journey in October 2001. Ms. Lewis wired a few hundred dollars at a time to her former husband in China.
In a cryptic e-mail message to Ms. Lewis on Nov. 30, 2001, from China, Mr. Battle said that "three of the brothers could have made it by now." Prosecutors said that was apparently a reference to efforts to make it into Afghanistan and Pakistan.
But officials said that Mr. Battle, Mr. Bilal and Mr. Ford apparently never made it into Afghanistan. Mr. Battle told Ms. Lewis in an e-mail message that they had had trouble crossing the borders, and he went to Bangladesh instead.
The three men arrested today returned to the United States separately between November 2001 and February 2002, prosecutors said.
It was unclear whether the two men still being sought ever made it to Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Prosecutors did not say that any of the six had been able to make contact with Qaeda or Taliban members, nor has any evidence emerged to suggest that they were preparing to attack any American targets.
"They had not gotten to a point where they were identifying targets or anything like that," the F.B.I. officials said, adding that the goal was to fight for Al Qaeda and the Taliban against the American forces in Afghanistan.
The linchpin of the investigation, F.B.I. investigators said, was a Portland man now in federal prison, Ali Khaled Steitiye, a Palestinian who is serving 30 months in federal prison on weapons and fraud charges.
Mr. Steitiye was arrested in Portland last October when he was found with several weapons and 1,000 rounds of ammunition, and his case was turned over to the local terrorism task force after a search of his home found $20,000 in cash, a calendar with Sept. 11 circled in red, and material indicating that he sympathized with Hamas, the militant Palestinian group.
Publicity last fall about Mr. Steitiye's case produced a tip to federal authorities from a sheriff's deputy in Skamania County, in Washington, who remembered seeing Mr. Steitiye and several other people firing weapons, including a Chinese assault rifle and a semiautomatic pistol, at a private gravel pit in late September 2001.
Several of the people charged today were spotted with Mr. Steitiye that day, the authorities said.
The sheriff's deputy took down their names at the gravel pit, and his tip the next month about Mr. Steitiye led the F.B.I. to open an investigation into members of the Portland group even before five of them left for China a year ago, law enforcement officials said.
Although the F.B.I. was investigating the group at the time, it had no ability to stop them from going to China, a law enforcement official said.
"They were American citizens," the official said. "They hadn't broken any laws yet. You can't stop them from traveling."
Mr. Ashcroft likened the case to that of John Walker Lindh, the American from Northern California who went to Afghanistan and fought with the Taliban.
To some civil rights advocates, however, the Portland arrests raised more troubling questions about the broad net Mr. Ashcroft is casting to catch terrorist suspects.
David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University who has testified before Congress on civil liberties concerns raised by the war on terrorism, said the Justice Department's efforts in the Portland case and others to charge those who provide support for Al Qaeda could be misused to apply to people with no direct links to terrorism.
"If these allegations are true, it's certainly proper to punish anyone who tries to take up arms against the United States," Professor Cole said.
But he added that several of the laws that the people in Portland were charged with violating "rest on guilt by association and don't require the government to prove any intent to further terrorist activity of any kind."
A senior Justice Department official, however, said that prosecutors were fairly applying the terrorist label to the defendants from Portland.
The official said that while people might disagree about what much-used law enforcement terms such as "terrorist cell" and "sleeper cell" really mean, "I certainly view this as a group of people who wanted to engage in terrorist activity."
Copyright The New York Times Company | Permissions | Privacy Policy
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better
than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not
your counsel or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands of those who feed
you. May your chains set lightly upon you.
Samuel Adams
NEURONAUTIC INSTITUTE on-line: http://home.earthlink.net/~thew
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html">Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
