Skip to main contentThe FBI's arrest of four Portlanders on Friday has got the Nose thinking that the threat of terrorism at the hands of militant Muslims may be less troubling than he once thought.
This is no knock on the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Attorney General John Ashcroft, who announced the arrests last week as a "defining day" in the fight against terrorism.
Rather, it's because those arrested, despite the media coverage to the contrary, appear to be more wannabe revolutionaries than cold-blooded assassins.
Take a hard look at the information the feds have released about the four Portlanders charged with waging a holy war on the United States, and it's far from clear that Portland's "terrorist cell" was a legitimate threat to national security rather than
The Jihad that Couldn't Shoot Straight.
According to police reports, three of the suspects first caught cops' attention a year ago, in Washington, when a Skamania County sheriff's deputy got a call about gunfire near a gravel pit on Sept. 29, 2001. Now, anyone who's spent time in rural America knows that gravel pits and guns go together like raves and ecstasy, so deputy Mark Mercer wasn't too alarmed by the report of shots at a private quarry near Washougal.
Once he arrived on the scene, however, his blood pressure shot up, not so much because of the men's weapons, which included an assault rifle, but by their clothing, which included robes, and their pigment, which was more than a shade darker than the average Skamania County resident.
The Nose is willing to wager that if Mercer had walked up on a gaggle of good old boys with Mariners caps, this whole episode would have turned out a bit differently.
Put aside for another time the issue of whether this was a case of justified racial profiling. Instead, consider that these fellas weren't bright enough to realize that if you're going to go target-shooting out in the sticks, it's best to leave your turban in the trunk.
A month later, three of the Portlanders--Patrice Ford, Ahmed Bilal and Jeffrey Battle, along with two others who are still at large--left the United States to try to gain entry into Afghanistan. (Again, this is according to federal investigators.) All the would-be al Qaedalites were unsuccessful and returned to the U.S.
While local media were acting like bitches in heat over this story, The Oregonian's editorial board won the prize on Saturday with this opinion: "Now it turns out that few communities in the nation have greater cause for alarm about how deeply into America the tentacles of terror actually reach."
It took The New York Times, from its perch 3,000 miles away, to place the events in an appropriate context. In a Sunday news story on page 16, the Times reported that "Some law-enforcement officials say that when they have detected al Qaeda loyalists in the United States...they have tended to be hapless malcontents and not disciplined terrorists." Said one official, "Mohammed Atta wouldn't have asked most of these guys to take out his trash."
Perhaps more startling facts will emerge and if so, the Nose will be glad to eat his hankie. But for now, it appears all we've got is a soft cell of Portlanders who resemble John Walker Lindh more closely than Carlos the Jackal.
WWeek 2015