It’s becoming a sickeningly familiar story; a young man who seems at home in the “western world” ends up fundamentally altered. This. This is what terrifies me. Someone who had the same $70k/year programming job which so many people whom we all know do, someone who was a Yankees fan, incredibly, someone whose own mother escaped one of the towers before it fell…is someone who hates us. When a man can sympathize, nay, enthusiastically support and participate in a movement that almost killed his own mother…we’re fcuked.

From today’s WaPo:

It is safe to assume that most people would not react to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in quite the same way as Mohammed Junaid Babar. After all, the longtime resident of Queens, N.Y., told a Canadian television network that his own mother had been one of the survivors — barely escaping from the ninth floor of one of the towers before it collapsed.
Yet, Babar said in that same interview from Pakistan in the fall of 2001, his “loyalty is to the Muslims, not the Americans.”
“I will kill every American that I see in Afghanistan, and while I am in Pakistan, if I see them in Pakistan, I will kill every American soldier I can in Pakistan,” he said during the interview with ITN Five News.

Abhi wrote an SM post about Babar almost a year ago, after the erstwhile New Yorker attended a “terrorist summit” in Pakistan:

from Queens in New York City came Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani American who arrived with cash, sleeping bags, ponchos, waterproof socks and other supplies for the mountain-bound jihadis.

The “boy scout” of Al Qaeda also brough along night-vision goggles, helpfully enough. In that SM post, Abhi mentioned that Babar was wanted in connection with a “future terrorist attack”. As of two weeks ago, that future is here. This naturalized U.S. Citizen turned Jihadi joined al Qaeda just so he could battle U.S. soldiers…and civilians in Britain. Such bravery.

At least the Son-of-a…woman who is apparently expendable is useful:

Now in U.S. custody after pleading guilty to terrorism charges last year, Babar has proved invaluable to U.S. and British investigators probing this month’s attacks on the London transit system, numerous officials said. He has identified at least one of the suicide bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, through photographs and has provided other details that may be helpful in unraveling the plot, according to law enforcement and intelligence sources.
The revelation that Babar is linked to the July 7 London attacks, which killed at least 56 including the four suicide bombers, is only the latest connection to emerge between the grandson of Pakistani immigrants and al Qaeda.
In addition to his connection to the London bombers, Babar has admitted in court proceedings to supplying bomb-making materials to a Pakistani cell in the United Kingdom that had plotted to blow up restaurants, pubs and train stations there. (When the cell was broken up in 2004, British authorities discovered more than 1,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, the same material used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.)

If your skin isn’t crawling at THAT, know that Babar also set up terrorist training camps…that is, when he wasn’t connecting with Issa al-Hindi. al-Hindi is the man who is responsible for that anxious feeling many of us get whenever we pull out a camera to document pretty architecture; he is the person who observed and took notes on financial targets in the U.S. pre-9/11.

Speaking of abusing good activities, there’s a special place in hell for those who use the temple of my childhood for evil.

In an interview last fall, Frances Fragos Townsend, now the White House national security adviser, pointed to the Babar case as an example of a major prosecution. Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey also said in an interview during the same period that Babar’s case provided a lesson on the importance of greater surveillance powers for the government, citing evidence that he checked e-mail at a library despite having access in his home.

Sigh. I’m not a fan of the Patriot Act or big government…but I’d be a damned liar if I said that I wasn’t relieved that we’ve got someone this significant in custody. Now if you’ll excuse me, instead of counting sheep, I’m going to count the number of minutes it takes for Saurav or someone similarly-inclined to ream me for quarter-heartedly appreciating “surveillance”. (I keed, I keed.)