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ISIS-loving Air Force vet gets 35 years at weepy sentencing
More on this story from yesterday.
[NYPOST] A US Air Force vet who became the first American ever to be convicted of attempting to join ISIS prattled on, sometimes tearfully, for nearly 40 minutes Wednesday before a Brooklyn federal judge interrupted him to say he wasn’t the holy warrior’s "psychiatrist" and sentenced him to 35 years behind bars.

"This isn’t about whether you’re Moslem or Christian or Jewish," US District Judge Nicholas Garaufis told Tairod Pugh before handing down his decision. "This is about whether you’re going to stand up for your country, which has done so much for you, or betray your country.

"You made your choice," the jurist growled. "I have no sympathy."

Pugh, who did not testify during his trial, spoke at length Wednesday in a tangential, sometimes incoherent rant in which he attempted to explain away terrorist propaganda found in his possession, as well as maps of the border crossings from The Sick Man of Europe Turkey
...the only place on the face of the earth that misses the Ottoman Empire....
into Syria.

"I am a black man, I am a military man, I am a Moslem man," Pugh said before dissolving into tears.

"I protected this country and the Constitution," he choked. "And my service was repaid by stripping me of my career, shaming my wife, shaming my parents, shaming my children."

As he spoke to the judge, the Neptune, NJ, man -- who left his bride and children behind in Cairo when he made what he called "a one-way trip" to Turkey -- asked Garaufis to leaf through photos of him, mostly posing alongside various aircraft he’d worked on across the world.

The 49-year-old was convicted last March of plotting to join ISIS and obstructing a government proceeding. Upon his capture in Istanbul in 2015, he had attempted to destroy evidence of his plot.

Pugh served as an airplane mechanic for four years in the US military before he was honorably discharged and began working around the Middle East.
Posted by: Fred 2017-06-02
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=489440