Hatred at Home: al-Qaida on Trial in the American Midwest

11. Busy Summer

 11 Busy Summer In the spring of 2001, in the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna, six Yemeni Americans made preparations for a trip similar to the one Faris had made a year earlier. Two members of the group traveled to an al-Qaida guesthouse in Kandahar, where they viewed videotapes of bin Laden speeches and the bombing of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden the previous October, an attack that killed seventeen crew members and wounded at least forty others. A third member met Osama bin Laden on his fourth day at the Kandahar guesthouse. From there, the trio traveled to al Farooq, the same camp attended by Christopher Paul’s old friend Mohammedou Ould Salahi. Altogether, the six Lackawanna residents spent several weeks at the camp learning various techniques of the terrorist trade, such as using guns—including a Kalashnikov rifle—and being briefed on plastic explosives, TNT, detonators, landmines, and Molotov cocktails . Bin Laden made a guest appearance, speaking about the alliance of al-Qaida and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, taking responsibility for the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and declaring that fifty men were on a mission to attack America. The six eventually left the camps and were back in New York State by midAugust . They were some of the last U.S. Muslims attending alleged terrorist camps to have contact with bin Laden before 9/11.1 the summer of 2001 was a busy one for Abdi, beginning with his June 14 marriage to Safia Hussein Muse, another Somali refugee settled in Columbus. Abdi also stayed in close contact with Christopher Paul. Abdi agreed to provide Paul with credit card numbers and corresponding verification numbers gathered from his job at Cell-UCom . Abdi never figured out whether his friend used the numbers, but he knew what he wanted them for: buying laptops with satellite Busy Summer  capabilities that freedom fighters in Afghanistan could use. Or so, Abdi said, Paul told him.2 Abdi was also in touch with Iyman Faris. In July, he e-mailed Faris links to websites that concerned items like night vision goggles and antisurveillance equipment and a Soviet monoscope. Faris was also occupied. After returning from his yearlong sojourn in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he took Maqsood Khan’s advice and contacted the Khan family.3 ali khan and his family had moved to the United States from Pakistan in 1996, settling in Baltimore, where they ran their gas station . On Faris’s first visit, he met with Khan to discuss the possibility of investing in the family business, then had dinner at the family’s house, where he got to know Khan’s son. Majid Khan had graduated from high school two years earlier and was fluent in English. The two talked about everything from Afghanistan and religion to Majid Khan’s desire to work in construction instead of his father’s business . Faris went back two or three more times to visit the family. On one of these trips, Majid Khan made an admission to Faris: he’d met KSM, whom he referred to as an uncle, in Pakistan. The teen told Faris something else. He wanted to conduct a mission to kill Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf by exploding a suicide vest. And there was something else, which Faris may or may not have known about: KSM had allegedly tasked Majid with orchestrating attacks on U.S. gas stations and water supplies. Majid’s father worried that his son had come under the influence of some relatives with extremist views back home. As Faris got to know the family better, Ali Khan asked him to try to intervene with his son, to steer him off whatever path he was on. Faris was willing to help. But unbeknownst to him, that assistance would come at a high price. By now Majid Khan had attracted the government’s interest, and soon authorities were tapping phones and listening in.4 ...