The Jihadi Next Door?

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There have been 441 arrests in domestic terrorism investigations since Sept. 11, but drawing any conclusions about homegrown terrorism from these cases is risky--largely because so many of them involve foreign nationals arrested on American soil. As for native suspects, Seas of David--a partly Christian, Muslim, martial-arts, Bible-study group that wore black outfits with a Star of David on the sleeve and met in a pastel orange clubhouse--should defy any attempt at logic. But in cases from Toledo, Ohio, to Lodi, Calif., we do have a rough sketch of which Americans are getting nabbed. Mostly, they're young, lower-middle-class Muslims, Americans who flirt at some level with radicalism. They get caught when they try to get training, weapons or, as was apparently the case in Florida, when they reach out, however ham-handedly, to a larger network. "Anyone who forms their own little group and then tries to connect with al-Qaeda is more likely to run into government agents than al-Qaeda agents," says John Nutter, a terrorism expert and professor at the University of Toledo. "Clearly our government is watching those types of contacts."

The feds are monitoring nonverbal forms of contact too. As revealed last week, a U.S. deal with an international banking consortium, SWIFT, lets intelligence officials look at the financial transactions of suspected terrorists. In its pursuit of serious jihadists with moneyed connections abroad (a category the FBI admits Seas of David does not belong in) the program, run out of the CIA, targets millions of bank transfers, some of which appear to have involved U.S. residents, or even U.S. citizens, and many others that did not.

While computers sift through reams of transfers in the hunt for terrorism's big guns, the gumshoe task of proving guilt in Miami could be tricky. Some legal scholars suggest that the government's case creeps to the edge of entrapment. Would the accused have taken the bayat--al-Qaeda's loyalty oath--had they not been prompted to do so by the informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative? Is it possible that the defendants were more interested in money than in joining al-Qaeda? [As a hedge, charges were brought under both federal statute 18 U.S.C. 2339(a), which makes it illegal to intend to join any terrorist organization, and 18 U.S.C. 2339(b), which specifically lists al-Qaeda.] A senior Administration official told TIME the inquiry might have provided more answers, but arrests had to be made because "indications were that the group was starting to catch on to the informant."

Even more revealing than who gets busted is that the Department of Justice doesn't seem particularly concerned about how it convicts those it arrests. The Attorney General's office trumpets 218 guilty pleas, but admits that in many cases those are for minor immigration offenses that were uncovered during the course of a terrorism investigation. In response to critics who noted that one of the few patterns to emerge from domestic prosecutions is that the suspects seem too incompetent to carry out the deeds they're accused of, Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty acknowledged last week that the Department of Justice's goal is "prevention through prosecution."