Jailhouse converts to jihad
Posted by Richard on May 23, 2009
The homegrown terrorists arrested in New York on Wednesday, who tried to bomb two synagogues and planned to shoot down planes, became radical Islamists in prison. Michelle Malkin reminds us that this is far from unusual:
In 2005, Bush officials busted a terrorist plot to attack infidels at military and Jewish sites in Los Angeles on the fourth anniversary of 9/11 or the Jewish holy days. It was devised by militant Muslim converts of Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (Arabic for "Assembly of Authentic Islam") who had sworn allegiance to violent jihad at California's New Folsom State Prison.
Convicted terror conspirator Jose Padilla converted to Islam during a stint at a Broward County, Fla., jail and reportedly fell in with terrorist recruiters after his release. Convicted "shoe bomber" Richard Reid converted to Islam with the help of an extremist imam in a British prison.
Aqil Collins, a self-confessed jihadist turned FBI informant, converted to Islam while doing time in a California juvenile detention center. At a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, he went on to train with one of the men accused of kidnapping and beheading Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
In East Texas, inmates were recruited with a half-hour videotape featuring the anti-Semitic rants of California-based Imam Muhammad Abdullah, who claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were actually carried out by the Israeli and U.S. governments.
Federal corrections officials told congressional investigators during the Bush years "that convicted terrorists from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were put into their prisons' general population, where they radicalized inmates and told them that terrorism was part of Islam."
So what should we do with the remaining Gitmo inmates? Hundreds of those considered less dangerous have already been released (and reportedly, at least one in seven of those returned to jihad). Those remaining are the most radical, violent, and dangerous, the ones implacably committed to waging jihad against all infidels. The Obama administration is committed to shutting down Gitmo, but admits that these men can't be released. So where should they go?
<snark>Here's an idea: let's send them to various high-security prisons around the country, where they can rub elbows and share their ideas with a bunch of mean, nasty, violent, disaffected bad-asses. What could possibly go wrong?</snark>
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