|
Court told Ft. Lewis soldier was an al-Qaeda supporter
A U.S. Army enlisted man, Specialist Ryan Anderson, shared his plans to join al Qaeda and attack U.S. forces in Iraq with a Montana woman posing as a Muslim sympathizer, she told a military court on Wednesday. Anderson was troubled at the prospect of fighting "on the wrong side" as his unit prepared to ship out to Iraq last February, Shannen Rossmiller, a judge from Conrad, Montana, who joined a private group monitoring Muslim extremists, said. She testified at the start of a two-day hearing to determine if Anderson should go before a court martial, where he could face the death penalty if convicted. Rossmiller said she contacted Anderson by email after reading a posting on the web site www.bravemuslims.org reading "...soon, very soon, I will have an opportunity to take my own end of the struggle." Anderson, who called himself Amir Abdul Rashid, feared he would be killed before he could correct the "mistake" of joining the U.S. military and was troubled by the prospect of facing "a brother" on the Muslim side, Rossmiller testified. Rossmiller said she reassured him: "It's never too late to do Allah's will." Anderson, 26, is a tank crew member from Lynnwood, Washington, near Seattle, who converted to Islam and has written several letters to newspapers strongly opposing gun control. Rossmiller said she found Anderson's personal profile posted on a web page, which showed a photo of a man wearing a red headscarf and toting a military rifle. She became interested in extremists after the Sept. 11, 2001, hijack attacks in the United States and began to spend several hours a day monitoring web traffic. She later formed a private, nonprofit group performing "counterintelligence" called "Seven Seas," with a web address of www.7/seas.net. Group members contacted the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI when they encountered potentially dangerous people, Rossmiller said. Undercover agents posing as al Qaeda operatives later contacted Anderson, who passed on diagrams of M1A1 and M1A2 Abrams battle tanks with instructions on their vulnerabilities, military prosecutors have said. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-05-12 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=32820 |