Afghan President Warns Pakistan
June 15, 2008
I was happy to read this article that shows that Afghan President Karzai is getting tough with Pakistani based Taliban resitance. For years rebels across the border from Afghanistan have been targeting both Afghanis and coalition forces with terrorist methods and little has been done to stop it.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai threatened Sunday to send Afghan troops across the border to fight militants in Pakistan, a forceful warning to insurgents and the Pakistani government that his country is fed up with cross-border attacks.
Karzai said Afghanistan has the right to self defense, and because militants cross over from Pakistan “to come and kill Afghan and kill coalition troops, it exactly gives us the right to do the same.”
I’m happy to see this. It’s time to go after these murderers.
Worthington Kid Pleads Guilty To Terrorism Charges
June 4, 2008
From the Dispatch:
Christopher Paul already has been portrayed as a member of al-Qaida who worked with terrorists abroad and came back to central Ohio to train them at home.
But until Paul pleaded guilty yesterday in federal court, details of how he went from being a typical kid in Worthington to a man who wanted to wage “holy war” on Americans weren’t plentiful.
FBI Special Agent Tisha Hartsough outlined more than a decade of help that Paul provided to terrorists as Paul listened quietly in U.S. District Court.
After the list was read, Paul agreed that he’d done all those things, then pleaded guilty to conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction. He’ll probably spend 20 years in prison.
The agent’s summary seemed to show that the 44-year-old Paul had become a trusted member of al-Qaida.
It was a stark contrast to what relatives and friends have said about Paul, who was born Paul Kenyatta Laws and graduated in 1983 from then-Worthington High School.
Family members have said publicly that Paul was not guilty; friends and acquaintances said Paul grew up an easygoing boy who volunteered at the high-school office, was a gymnast on the school team and graduated from Columbus State Community College.
But according to the FBI’s Hartsough:
Paul, who had converted to Islam in the late 1980s, first went to Pakistan and Afghanistan in the early 1990s. He trained there to join a “holy war” and became a member of al-Qaida.
He then stayed awhile and “fought with other mujahideen in Afghanistan” and then later with the Islamic fundamentalist movement in Bosnia.
During this time, Paul put together a “master list of contact numbers for senior al-Qaida leadership and other radical Islamic fundamentalists and operatives worldwide.”
FBI agents found the list in a raid of Paul’s apartment on Riverview Drive on the Northwest Side, where he was living when arrested in April 2007.
In January 1997, two members of al-Qaida faxed Paul to ask him to find them a “true group and place to make jihad,” the FBI information shows. In 1998, he took a local group of men to Burr Oak State Park near Glouster, Ohio, to teach them the terrorist training he had learned.
The FBI agent also hinted that Paul’s dropping of the Muslim name he had adopted was part of his plan.
“Preparing to travel overseas again, on February 3, 1999 … defendant obtained a passport in the name of Christopher Paul after defendant had claimed ‘water damage’ to his old passport in one of his other aliases.”
Authorities speculated that Paul thought a more conventional American name would draw less suspicion.
Within a few months, Paul traveled to Germany to train others in explosives, Hartsough said. The group he was training planned “to construct bombs, car bombs and similar devices to be used against Americans while they vacationed at foreign tourist resorts.”
Paul listened to the list without much expression, speaking occasionally to his attorneys. Afterward, he didn’t dispute the allegations.
“Is there anything she said that was incorrect?” District Judge Gregory L. Frost asked.
“No, sir,” Paul told the judge.
Frost said he’ll wait for a presentence investigation to be completed before he decides whether to accept a sentencing recommendation.
The recommendation that Paul receive 20 years in a federal prison was an agreement among Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robyn Jones Hahnert and Dana Peters and defense attorneys Don Wolery and James Gilbert.
Paul is the third central Ohio resident to plead guilty to working with terrorists. Iyman Faris is serving 20 years in prison; Nuradin Abdi is serving 10.
What causes a kid from an affluent area of Columbus to take up arms against the U.S.?
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