“There was some people out there that wore long clothes, but the only time we ever saw them was at the post office”
What they’re thinking in the town where the Feds say Abu Hamza was hoping to set up a terrorist training camp. This article and this one at Dhimmi Watch show how important it is for Americans to have a full and working knowledge of Islam and the goals of Islamic radicals like Osama bin Laden and Abu Hamza. From AP:
Dean Lawrence used to think it was a joke when he heard all the talk about terrorists thinking about training on a sheep ranch outside his tiny hometown of Bly, Ore.
He was rethinking things Thursday after the arrest of a Muslim cleric in London on charges of trying to establish a terrorist training camp near Bly, a logging and ranching town in the sagebrush-dotted high desert of southern Oregon.
“A small town like this – I read in the paper one time there was 15 people came down to look” at the ranch, Lawrence said Thursday in a telephone interview from the gas station he owns in Bly.
The townspeople have been slow to believe terrorists were really targeting their town.
Two people connected to a mosque in Seattle, Semi Osman and James Ujaama, were charged in 2002 with trying to start a training camp for Al-Masri, but the charges were dropped in exchange for guilty pleas on lesser charges.
Authorities have said Ujaama sent al-Masri a fax proposing a camp outside Bly, and al-Masri sent two representatives to evaluate the site. The two were reportedly disappointed that the property had no barracks for trainees, and the camp was never developed.
The Klamath County Sheriff’s Department got a tip from Interpol about the ranch in 1999 and sent some deputies to keep an eye on it, but they did not notice much beyond a dozen people taking target practice, said Sheriff Tim Evinger.
The shooting was not enough to catch the notice of neighbor Don Wessel, a retired logger who himself is used to taking shots at gophers on his ranch. He saw the news about Al-Masri’s arrest on television.
“There was some people out there that wore long clothes, but the only time we ever saw them was at the post office,” said Wessel.
Finally one wonders, “Why Oregon?”
Oregon had a brush with terrorism in 2002, when seven Portland-area Muslims, most of them American-born, were charged with plotting to join the Taliban to fight in Afghanistan.
Only one, accused ringleader Habis Abdu al Saoub, made it to the battlefield, where he was killed by U.S. forces last year. The others met with visa and money troubles and returned without firing a shot. They pleaded guilty to various charges and are serving three to 18 years in prison.