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 29 Disturbing Picture By 2006, christopher paul was getting accustomed to unwanted visitors. FBI agents were dropping by to talk to him. They were interviewing family members. They were following him and his wife and coming by the factory to interview people he worked with. They’d searched his apartment the previous year, and in November 2006, they’d searched his parents’ house on North Street in Worthington. Paul politely, but steadfastly, declined to talk to the agents. Privately he complained he was being unfairly harassed , that he hadn’t done anything wrong with Faris or Abdi or anyone else, that at worst he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, that anyone who attended the Omar mosque automatically became a terrorism suspect. He went to the Ohio offices of the Council of American-Islamic Relations and asked the legal director, Jennifer Nimer, for her assistance. When Toledo/Mettler suddenly fired him in 2006, they gave him a generous severance package. Paul was convinced they’d been spooked by the FBI’s visits and just wanted him gone. He showed Nimer the severance agreement and asked if it checked out. The document appeared normal, but Nimer had her doubts about Paul. He didn’t seem the type of person capable of getting involved in the things he said he was being pursued for. In any case, there wasn’t much she could do. He hadn’t been arrested or indicted. And frankly, his wasn’t the first such story she’d heard. The office had had visits from a lot of people with similar concerns.1 in the spring of 2007, Iyman Faris was serving his twenty-year sentence in the federal supermax in Florence, Colorado. Nuradin Abdi was still in Franklin County Jail, preparing for his upcoming trial. In April, a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay was about to hold a hearing on whether to declare Majid Khan, Faris’s friend from Baltimore, an enemy combatant. Officials at the highest levels of the Disturbing Picture  FBI were seething over an editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on March 29 that accused the agency of “flying high on the wings of the Patriot Act,” using it to collect private information, “telephone and financial records, e-mails, whatever—almost on a whim.” In Columbus, terrorism had faded from people’s minds. More pressing concerns included the fate of the general manager of the Blue Jackets ice hockey team and the continued self-destruction of the once proud City Center downtown mall, now about to lose its four Limited Brands stores, including Victoria’s Secret.2 On April 11, an overcast day threatening rain, Christopher Paul walked from his apartment to midday prayers at the Omar mosque. Afterward, he headed back, strolling along the right side of the road, umbrella in hand. He was walking by himself, but he was not alone. A car passed him, then slowed to a stop in front of him. Another car pulled up beside him, a third behind him. A handful of FBI agents materialized, told Paul he was under arrest, handcuffed him, placed him in the back of a car, and drove off. The entire operation couldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes. Frida and Khadija awaited his arrival just a few hundred feet away at 676 Riverview, for a few minutes unaware that their lives had just changed irrevocably.3 A federal judge unsealed the indictment against Paul the same day, and Washington released news of his arrest. “The indictment of Christopher Paul paints a disturbing picture of an American who traveled overseas to train as a violent jihadist, joined the ranks of al Qaeda, and provided military assistance and support to radical cohorts both here and abroad,” said Kenneth Wainstein, U.S. assistant attorney general. He added: “Our persistence and determination in the pursuit of this case should serve as a strong warning to any American who considers joining forces with our enemy.” Tellingly, four years after Faris’s conviction, it was no longer the attorney general himself announcing the news of another domestic terror case. In fact, compared to the arrests of Faris and Abdi, the news about Paul made a relatively small splash in the Muslim community . Perhaps that was because his name had been floating for years as an associate, perhaps because people knew him well enough to think charges might not be far-fetched. But the news sent a shockwave through at least...

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