Jihad Joe (31 page)

During the next couple of years, Vinas drifted into the orbit of the Islamic Thinkers Society and met Revolution Muslim cofounder Yousef Al Khattab on several occasions.

In Afghanistan during the 1980s and later in Bosnia, many jihadists were drawn in by specific acts of aggression. Vinas was attracted by the paradigm that had been spreading like wildfire since the September 11 attacks—that America was at war with Islam. Vinas went further still, believing that America was behind
the September 11 attacks and that FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) was building concentration camps for Muslims.
²⁵

But Vinas was not like Alessa. He was smart and engaged with ideology, eventually coming to define himself as a Salafi, part of a strict movement that seeks to emulate the early days of Islam.
²⁶
Many jihadists call themselves Salafis, but not all Salafis are jihadists.

Friends said his anger simmered and finally began to dominate his personality.
²⁷
He explored the jihadist Internet, increasingly frustrated with the ITS, which he believed was all talk. With assistance from a friend at ITS, Vinas decided to act. He went to Lahore and met with Pakistani militants in the porous border region with Afghanistan.
²⁸
Vinas later said that someone in New York helped arrange an introduction.
²⁹

Vinas volunteered to be a suicide bomber. He was trained, but he washed out when his handlers decided that he wasn't up to the task and recommended additional religious training. There is only one case of an American suicide bomber in the public record, possibly due to cultural predispositions, but also because U.S. citizens—and their passports—are extremely valuable to terrorist networks.

Disappointed with his progress, Vinas decided to separate from the Pakistani group and seek out al Qaeda by wandering the wild, lawless region of Pakistan along the border with Afghanistan, where the terrorist group's top leaders are believed to be hiding.

It is a testament to both his determination and his capabilities that he succeeded in this task without getting killed. In early 2008 Vinas was inducted into al Qaeda as a formal member, swearing
bayat
, the Islamic oath of allegiance.
³⁰

Housed with other Western recruits, he lobbied to fight U.S. forces on the front lines in Afghanistan and was sent on a few unsuccessful missions during which he fired rockets at American troops. Yet despite his failure to destroy the target, he had proved his commitment, and it was time for the next phase. Under the watchful eye of senior al Qaeda leaders—including Mustafa Abu Al Yazid, one of the group's founders—Vinas was taught assassination techniques and how to build bombs, including suicide belts.
³¹

Vinas briefed his supervisors on the Long Island Rail Road, which he had ridden as a young man, and an operation to bomb the commuter hub was initiated, although it remained in the planning stages. During this process Vinas made a trip
to Peshawar to use the Internet, buy supplies, and look for a wife. By this time

U.S. intelligence services were looking for him. Vinas was arrested by Pakistani authorities and extradited to the United States.
³²
Like many captured jihadists, Vinas began to talk, giving rare and extensive intelligence on al Qaeda's reconfiguration after the invasion of Afghanistan.

“For informing on the people that are fighting in Afghanistan, I call him a coward,” said Revolution Muslim's cofounder Yousef Al Khattab.
³³
Unfortunately for Revolution Muslim, Vinas would not be the only collaborator.

Zach Chesser was born in Virginia in 1989. Much of his youth was unremarkable, at least on the surface. He played football and basketball and later signed up for crew.
³⁴
He was a joiner, jumping from obsession to obsession, whether it was Marilyn Manson or breakdancing.
³⁵

There were other Muslims at his high school, but he didn't embrace Islam until his senior year.
³⁶
It didn't take him long to discover the jihadist Web. With all the enthusiasm and arrogance of a new convert, he christened himself Abu Talha Al Amrikee and began to dispatch unsolicited advice to his fellow Muslims and to the seniors of the jihadist movement as a self-appointed expert in everything from economics to espionage.

In many ways, Abu Talha was the epitome of a jihobbyist. Armed with virtually no real knowledge of Islam, the history of the theological schools that he promoted, or the practical aspects of terrorism, Chesser became a ubiquitous Web presence, tirelessly aping the online propaganda he consumed voraciously while jumping from theme to theme and project to project in a manner suggestive of attention deficit disorder. Yousef Al Khattab described his output as “Tourette's
Dawa
[preaching].”
³⁷

Chesser went through a series of platforms, including a YouTube account and a blog, along with an active membership on the Islamic Awakening forum. Then he joined Revolution Muslim, where he posted for a few months, spending time with the site's cofounder Younus Abdullah Muhammad.
³⁸
Chesser next moved on to official jihadist forums such as Al Fallujah and Al Qimmah, a Somali jihadist site linked to the Al Shabab militia.

Abu Talha may have lacked focus and knowledge, but like many bloggers both inside and out of the jihad subculture, he tried to make up for these
lapses with self-confidence, enthusiasm, and sheer volume. A typical post featured Chesser—who had been a Muslim for less than two years—hectoring other Muslims about their failure to do right by the mujahideen.

Are you doing your part to support your Brothers and Sisters in Somalia? Have you given
d'ua
[prayers] for brothers like Abu Mansour Al Amriki and other brothers lately? It may be time brothers and sisters to not only agree with the actions of The Lions of
Tawheed
[Monotheism], but also do something to support your brothers in Somalia and other places where Al Islam is being attacked. This is a call to action and a call to fulfill your obligation as a Muslim to defend your brothers and sisters. As your brothers and sister in Somalia are raped and killed by the Ethiopian Puppets from Addis Ababa and the Somalia slaves of the United States, will you be like Brother Mohamoud Hassan or Brother Abu Mansour [two Americans who fought in Somalia] and answer the call to Jihad? For Allah (SWT) knows best and will reward those who sacrificed on the Day of Judgment.
³⁹

Chesser described his motivations in a June 2010 interview with Aaron Y. Zelin, then a graduate student in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University, who runs the Jihadology blog. Although Chesser wasn't above playing the classic Muslim victimization card (as in the previous excerpt), his ideological bent and interest in jihad were mostly on the broadest level:

I hope to take part in the creation of an Islamic state where the shariah is applied
inshallah
[God willing] with no exceptions of general matters of which there is a consensus. That is the bare minimum. After that I would hope that it is a just society where the law is applied and where the people are treated fairly.
⁴⁰

For most of his career, Chesser's ruminations on jihad were strictly “inside baseball,” of interest primarily to a handful of terrorism and jihadism researchers whose attention he virtually demanded. For instance, a series of blog postings on “Counter-Counter-Terrorism” proposed luring terrorism researchers (including the author of this book) into political arguments with each other in order to create
divisions. Other entries in the series focused on law enforcement, suggesting that jihadist sympathizers should create a flood of false reports of suspicious packages so that authorities would be lulled when a real bomb was left on a street corner.
⁴¹

Yet in April 2010, he managed to stumble into the big time with a post on Revolution Muslim about the Comedy Central animated TV show
South Park
, which was scheduled to air an episode satirizing the controversy over depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Beneath a picture of the dead body of Theo Van Gogh, a Dutch film director who was killed after producing a film critical of Islam, Chesser posted address information for South Park producers Matt Stone and Trey Parker, writing,

We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them.
⁴²

Of course, it was a threat, no matter how finely Chesser tried to parse his definitions in the interests of staying out of jail. A follow-up posting featured audio of Anwar Awlaki explaining that mockery of Mohammed was punishable by death. The threats garnered an avalanche of national attention, putting scrutiny on Revolution Muslim, sparking general outrage, and ultimately resulting in the episode being censored by its distributor Comedy Central.
⁴³
Chesser and his family received death threats, and his parents stopped speaking to him.
⁴⁴

Overwhelmed by the attention, Chesser went silent after the
South Park
incident, but he was not idle. He started to make preparations to travel to Somalia and join the al Qaeda–linked Al Shabab militia, which had already hosted a number of American fighters (see
chapter 10
).

Or rather, he put on a show of making preparations. Although Chesser went through the motions of trying to get to Somalia, something always seemed to get in the way. His first effort failed when he lost his very first battle in the jihad— convincing his mother-in-law to return his wife's passport, which she had hidden to keep her daughter from leaving the country. Chesser tried again in July 2010, with his infant son in his arms. He figured that U.S. authorities wouldn't believe he was taking his baby into a war zone. It wasn't clear what he planned to do with the child once he arrived in Somalia.

He was turned away by airport security because his name had been added to a no-fly list. Rather than keep trying, he called the FBI and said he wanted to provide information on Al Shabab. News of a Shabab suicide bombing in Uganda had prompted another one of his now-famous changes of heart, he explained, to the growing exasperation of the FBI.
⁴⁵
Perhaps simply to shut him up, FBI agents arrested Chesser in July and charged him with material support for terrorism in relation to his efforts to join Al Shabab.
⁴⁶

When a Western jihadist is arrested, the jihobbyists tend to circle the wagons, lining up to show support on the forums and “make
dua
” (pray) for the person arrested. It is a sign of Chesser's polarizing character that very few stepped up to post on his behalf. Revolution Muslim never even bothered to acknowledge the arrest. On the forums, some noted that “the brother [had] loose lips.”

Yousef Al Khattab, the Revolution Muslim founder who by this point claimed to have abandoned his commitment to al Qaeda and violent jihad, offered a particularly harsh critique.

Just because we are Muslim or their [sic] is no [Islamic caliphate] does not give us a carte blanche to behave like pre Islamic barbarians and give unconditional support to those that dig their own graves.
⁴⁷

Like Zach Chesser, Samir Khan was another young American Muslim with an attitude and Internet access. Khan was born in Saudi Arabia, and his parents were moderate Muslims who moved the family to Queens when he was seven.

Khan began blogging as a teenager, shortly after attending a Muslim summer camp sponsored by a little-known fundamentalist group called the Islamic Organization of North America that was devoted to the nonviolent establishment of the Islamic way of life in America.
⁴⁸
Soon after, Khan discovered the Islamic Thinkers Society.

Although his early blog entries didn't address the issue of jihad, they were unquestionably conservative. He wrote about the need to purify American society and signs of the End Days and generally presented a fairly chipper vision of a devout, intense Muslim who was not in the mainstream but perhaps not far from it either.

Humanity is in need of a Just Social Order; a way of life that protects men and women from the deceptions that this world can trap one into. In order to truly bring about this “Renaissance” within the fixed area of man's existence [sic], we must turn to the root of the different philosophies that man offered to the world; from there do we then choose the revolution which will bring about this great change. For this reason, I am in complete agreement with the Islamic Revolution brought about by Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). With his revolution, was the human changed not only externally, but also internally; it was the absolute greatest internal revolution which led to the spreading of Islam, not by the sword, but by the hearts! Conquering a land is easy, but conquering a heart … well, you will need one heck of a philosophy!
⁴⁹

The warning sign, if there was one, was to be found in Khan's username, “inshallahshaheed”—“God willing, a martyr.” With the advent and escalation of the war in Iraq, Khan became increasingly militant. He celebrated the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and dismissed their grieving families as “people of hellfire.” His blog linked to al Qaeda videos, and he justified the Islamic doctrine of
takfir
(which attempts to justify the killing of moderate Muslims) while celebrating the writings of Omar Abdel Rahman, Ayman Al Zawahiri, and Anwar Awlaki.
⁵⁰

Khan encountered challenges in keeping his blog online due to its controversial content, which violated most Internet service providers' rules on hate speech and the incitement of violence. If one Googles “inshallahshaheed,” the result is page after page announcing that the blog has found a new server. All the links are dead.
⁵¹
There were other complications as well. On at least one occasion, Khan's parents—in whose basement he lived—cut off his Internet access.
⁵²