These events both propel and confirm the larger worry that global terror syndicates continue to have a reach that extends to the United States, concerns that were raised by President Obama in his West Point address last week. But there's an interesting element to the story that I thought might go under-reported -- and just a few minutes ago on MSNBC, correspondent Pete Williams went on teevee and under-reported it:
Pete, you referred to them as young Americans. Do we know if they were actually all U.S. citizens?
WILLIAMS: That isn't clear. We know at least four of them were. There's some question about the fifth student. They were all going to school here in the Washington, DC area. And, of course, one of the things that makes this case unusual is that the way that the authorities got on to them was not through apparently intelligence tracking or some sort of sophisticated method, it was their parents worried that they had vanished or had left without saying where they were. And then at least one of the parents said they got a weird phone call from one of the young men. And that made them suspicious. And they ultimately, through an intermediary, went to the FBI.
And who was that intermediary? As it turns out, it was, per Spencer Ackerman, a "much-maligned American Muslim organization."
From The Washington Post today:
The men, who range in age from 19 to 25, went overseas without telling their families, who grew concerned after a family member called one of them on his cellphone and "the conversation ended abruptly," said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The council got the family members in touch with the FBI last week, and the families played the 11-minute English video for agents and Muslim leaders at a lawyer's office.
Huffington Post, 10 December 2009
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