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Taliban

Tuesday, Dec 11, 2001 8:33 PM UTC

America’s handy new Insta-Traitor: Just add hot-tub water and stir!

Conservatives who say that America-hating California relativism produced John Walker don't know what they're talking about -- literally.

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He “was critical of America as a land that exalted self above all else.” Americans “were so busy pursuing their personal goals, he said, that they had no time for their families or communities.” He “wanted a value system of absolutes.”

These sentiments are boilerplate standards for fire-breathing American conservatives excoriating our spineless, Godless iniquity. As it happens, though, the words are from a Newsweek profile of John Walker — the American youth who turned up, smudge-faced and battle-shaggy, among the Taliban fighters who staged a savage prison uprising in Northern Afghanistan.

Of the many strange paradoxes surrounding Walker’s sad tale, this may be the strangest: It turns out that Walker’s own, radical-Islam-fueled critique of U.S. liberalism dovetails perfectly with that of American pundits on the right who are now trying to use his story as an example of liberalism gone awry.

The case — outlined most prominently by Shelby Steele in a Monday Wall Street Journal op-ed, but echoed on call-in talk shows and online forums — goes like this: Walker was raised in hot-tub-bedecked Marin County, cradle of California alternative lifestyles, home to woo-woo wackiness, schools that emphasize America’s sins and a permissive spirit that makes Dr. Spock look like a martinet. As his teenage spiritual quest veered deep into Islam, his well-to-do parents just smiled and said, “Yes, dear”; they even paid for him to study Arabic in Yemen, and stood by without intervening when he wandered first to a Pakistani madrasa and finally into the ranks of the Taliban. All this makes Walker, as one pundit on “The McLaughlin Group” put it, a “poster child for liberal alternative lifestyles gone bad.”

That’s no coincidence, Steele argues: Marin liberalism played an active part in Walker’s odyssey from pristine suburbia to a filthy Mazar-e-Sharif basement. Walker “came out of a self-hating stream of American life” with roots in both Marin’s “wispy relativism” and a broader “post-’60s cultural liberalism.” “Fashionable relativism” taught Walker that “Islam is as good as the family Catholicism” and that “anti-Americanism” could be worn as a badge of sophistication. The book that first turned Walker on to Islam, according to his father, was “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” “White American guilt,” Steele says, inspired Walker’s “Malcolm-style conversion into a politicized, anti-American Islam that culminated in treason.”

If Steele is right, and the forces of relativism, liberalism and “subversive, winking, countercultural hipness” that dominate American society are to blame for Walker’s apostasy, then the hills should be positively crawling with Taliban fellow travelers. Funny, though: I read Malcolm X as a high school student in the 1970s, at an affluent New York City private school at the height of what we still call “The Me Decade” (though its materialism and self-absorption were eclipsed by each decade to follow). “Cultural relativism” was at least as prevalent then as it is today. Many millions of high school students have read Malcolm X since. Of those millions, Walker is one of what can only be a microscopic number of supposedly self-hating white Americans to be persuaded by Malcolm’s story to convert to Islam. And he is almost certainly the only one to take up arms against his country.

Similarly, if Marin County permissiveness and “cultural liberalism” were the forces responsible for turning Walker into a Taliban fighter, then surely we’d have seen an active pro-Taliban movement recruiting on the slopes of Mount Tam — a latter-day Abraham Lincoln brigade of American lefties embarking from Sausalito to fight for the Mullah in Kandahar.

Forget it. Walker, of course, is notable for his singularity, his sheer unique improbability. No one expected to find an American kid among the Taliban — least of all among the diehard holdouts of a prison rebellion holed up for a hellish week. The U.S. today is more united behind its war effort than during any other conflict since the Second World War; in such times, Walker is sui generis — a fascinating fluke, not a representative case.

For Steele and those who share his perspective, though, the opportunity to turn Walker into a poster child for the evils of relativism and liberalism is just too tempting. Let’s rail against the liberal establishment that failed to give this kid a clear set of rules and beliefs! Let’s string up his parents for failing to “just say no”! It’s certainly easier than waiting for the facts, or trying to fathom what depths of alienation or anger could put a teenager on such a misbegotten trajectory.

Whether Walker deserves to be tried for treason, to plead guilty to some lesser charge or to be given psychiatric treatment is a proper question for the U.S. justice system, not for the talk shows. As a U.S. citizen, he can presumably still count on a fair public trial, rather than face a secret military tribunal. Due process can and should determine his fate — and if that fate is to be convicted as a traitor, so be it. Bearing arms against your countrymen is a grave matter, whatever the circumstances and the excuses.

But if we want to learn something from the events, plugging them into any kind of partisan matrix of good parent/bad parent — whether it’s “responsible conservative good, permissive liberal bad,” or “open-minded liberal good, mean conservative bad” — just won’t do.

Sure, the Marin-style permissiveness that irks Steele deserves to be viewed with a degree of skepticism. Balancing freedom and rules is every parent’s task, and in places like Marin, rules may not always get their due. An 18-year-old may well hear a parent’s “Follow your bliss” as an indifferent “We don’t care what you do.” Failing to give a child any guidance at all is just as unfair as forcing a child to follow a preset path.

But not every conflict in a teenager’s life is susceptible to easy Parenting 101 fixes. Adolescents work hard to script passionate dramas for their lives in which, finally, they and not their parents are the stars. Changing religions is — like joining a cult or dropping out of school or starting a band — an extremely popular plot twist.

Think back to your 18-year-old cohorts and you can probably remember one or more who share at least some of Walker’s apparent traits. We all knew and know seekers of faith, kids who, as part of the adolescent identity game, try on religions for size. For many it’s a phase; others latch onto some belief that their families find extreme and hold tight for the rest of their lives. For some it’s a genuine quest for meaning fired by an honest repugnance at the material excesses of Malltown, USA. For others it’s just a way to stick it to Mom and Dad.

Teenage rebellion is a fact of family life that knows no political allegiance or religious affiliation; when it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen, and the parent’s stance, whatever it is, simply calls forth its opposite. The colonel’s daughter becomes a pothead; the Nobelist’s child flunks out; the Marin free thinker’s son joins the repressive Taliban.

Now, most of us reading Walker’s story are probably going to think, “Hey, if my kid asked to go to Yemen to study Arabic, no way I’d agree!” And while it’s easy to second-guess another parent’s decisions, in this case it sure feels right.

But we don’t know John Walker. We don’t know whether he sought “a value system of absolutes” because his parents failed to give him one, or because he knew that it was the opposite of what his parents had taught him. Maybe a stricter upbringing than Walker’s parents provided might have kept him out of the Taliban; then again, maybe he’d have instead ended up as a runaway on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, bumming change.

Was Walker a true believer or an angry kid? Did he run away to Yemen out of love for the Quran or just to get away from his folks? We can’t answer till we know more of his story. In the meantime, it’s worth remembering what the New York Times reported, soon after Walker turned up in Mazar-e-Sharif: In the story, a Northern Alliance officer “indicated with a hand gesture that Mr. Walker was eccentric.”

Perhaps he meant that Walker was nuts; perhaps he just meant to suggest the strangeness of the very presence of this lone American mujahedin. Either way, the Afghan’s dismissive, rude “gesture” helps remind us that Walker is an individual, not a symbol. And in the end, his riddle will be answered by understanding his family and his psychology — not by crudely applying culture-wars rhetoric to his case.

Salon co-founder Scott Rosenberg is director of MediaBugs.org. He is the author of "Say Everything" and Dreaming in Code and blogs at Wordyard.com. More Scott Rosenberg.

Friday, Sep 30, 2011 7:31 PM UTC

“You Don’t Like the Truth”: Our first look at a Gitmo interrogation

A bewildered Canadian teenager goes to Guantanamo Bay in this disturbing look inside the War on Terror

By A still from "You Don't Like the Truth"

In the wake of the extrajudicial killing of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and several other people in Yemen this week, we’re faced (once again) with the realization that the United States Constitution has become a largely meaningless totem. It gets waved around enthusiastically by people on all sides of the political spectrum whenever it seems to serve their interests, but nobody pays much attention to what it actually says. Presumably President Obama, the military-intelligence establishment and the mainstream media are declaring Awlaki a special case. Thanks to the secret provisions of secret laws, he was deprived of all the rights of citizenship and not subject to the ordinary rule of law that extends back not merely to the Constitution but to the Magna Carta (at least).

Some similar exemption must also be made for the Canadian citizen Omar Khadr, who was 15 years old when he was found, badly injured and barely alive, after a 2002 firefight between U.S. troops and Taliban forces in Afghanistan. (Khadr’s father, an al-Qaida supporter and fundraiser, had apparently dropped him off at a Taliban compound a few weeks earlier.) Based on what we see in the painful, revealing documentary “You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo” — the first film to show actual interrogation footage from inside the secret American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — Khadr became a sort of ritual sacrifice by the Canadian government, an offering to its American allies and/or overlords. His case became a hot political issue north of the border, where Canadians pride themselves on a society that is more egalitarian, and more civilized, than that of their American neighbors.

Following a Canadian Supreme Court decision, most of Khadr’s seven-hour interrogation at Gitmo by CSIS officers — the approximate Canadian equivalent of the CIA — has been declassified, and veteran lefty documentarians Luc Côté and Patricio Henríquez use that claustrophobic, low-resolution 2003 footage as the basis for “You Don’t Like the Truth.” That sounds like something the interrogators might have said to Khadr, but it isn’t. It’s what he tells them after realizing they don’t want to hear his allegations that he was tortured by American forces, and that all his supposed confessions about knowing Osama bin Laden and attending al-Qaida barbecues were made up on the spot, to stop the pain.

You won’t see Khadr suffer physical torture on these surveillance tapes, although the interrogators rely on time-honored tactics of psychological abuse, alternately berating him and plying him with Big Macs. You will see a teenager who speaks idiomatic North American English, and who is obviously relieved to see fellow Canadians, whom he naively assumes have come to help him. And you’ll see him go through a near-total breakdown, sitting alone in the room weeping for his mother, after he realizes that no one cares about what happens to him and that he’s only interesting to his interrogators as long as he keeps making up stories about Osama and al-Qaida.

I have no idea whether Khadr actually threw a grenade that killed a U.S. Delta Force soldier, as was alleged after his capture. (Khadr has consistently denied it, and photographic evidence suggests that he had been shot through the back and was out cold before the soldier’s death.) But the Canadian interrogators barely mention it, and it feels suspiciously like an inflammatory distraction, thrown in mostly to alienate all possible North American sympathy. At best it’s an ancillary question. If Khadr was a genuine military combatant, then he can’t be prosecuted for killing an enemy soldier in battle. Furthermore, he would have to be considered a child soldier under international law, which theoretically immunizes him even for war crimes. Convicting him on such charges, as the government eventually did in a secret court on secret evidence, required the finding that he wasn’t a soldier but a civilian terrorist (even though he was supposedly linked to two organizations, al-Qaida and the Taliban, with whom the U.S. government has repeatedly said it’s at war).

Côté and Henríquez intersperse brief and highly effective interview segments between snippets of the interrogation tape, with subjects ranging from former U.S. military officers (including Khadr’s lawyer and psychiatrist) to former Guantánamo inmates (including Moazzam Begg, now a leading British activist for other detainees) to Khadr’s mother and sister (wearing full-face Islamic veils) to Damien Corsetti, the much-demonized former soldier who knew Khadr as a guard at Bagram. What comes through repeatedly is that questions of law and reason, or guilt and innocence, played no role in the case of Omar Khadr. He was a vulnerable and confused kid whose own government turned its back on him, which made him a perfect candidate to become one of the few Gitmo detainees convicted of something. He was 15 when he was captured, and will be 31 when he (supposedly) gets out.

“You Don’t Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo” is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with more cities and dates to follow.

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Thursday, Jun 23, 2011 2:56 PM UTC

Primer: Reactions to Obama’s Afghanistan plan

The president's announcement gets some approval abroad, but appeases neither war critics nor hawks at home

By President Barack Obama delivers a televised address from the East Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, June 22, 2011 on his plan to drawdown U.S. troops in Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Pool)(Credit: AP)

President Barack Obama’s announcement Wednesday night that he has ordered the withdrawal of 33,000 military personnel from Afghanistan by the end of the summer of 2012 has already triggered a firestorm of reactions both from his GOP opponents and his own party. His compromise on the drawdown, it seems, has not appeased war critics or hawks.

What he said: The crux of Obama’s speech was that what needed to be achieved in Afghanistan by the war has been achieved: The “tide of war is receding,” he announced. As the New York Times notes, however, some analysts believe that the withdrawal plan in fact indicates that “the administration may have concluded it can no longer achieve its loftiest ambitions there.”

Just over one third of the 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan will be brought back within 15 months (some 10,000 will leave this year with another 23,000 returnng just in time for the election). The draw-down, which will take a number of years, is still more rapid than his military commanders have advised (General David Petraeus, just named CIA chief, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have both publicy endorsed slow withdrawals. Obama mentioned neither Gates nor Petraeus in his speech).

GOP Response: (via Huffington Post) Some of Republican leaders have criticized Obama with reference to the advice of these military commanders. “This is not the ‘modest’ withdrawal that I and others had hoped for and advocated,” John McCain said, while the Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell declared that “the drawdown of forces described by the president needs to be conducted in a manner that respects the professional judgment of our military commanders, preserves the security gains of the last year and allows for a slower pace of withdrawal if necessary.”

A number of GOP presidential hopefuls towed this line too: Mitt Romney said, “This decision should not be based on politics or economics… I look forward to hearing the testimony of our military commanders in the days ahead”; Herman Cain responded, “Sadly, I fear President Obama’s decision could embolden our enemy and endanger our troops.”

Some GOP candidates argued against Obama’s plan using similar reasoning, but with rhetoric steeped in American exceptionalism: “President Obama speaks of winding down our engagement in Afghanistan, but he does not emphasize the need for victory,” said Sen. Rick Santorum, while Tim Pawlenty said (and then tweeted), “When America goes to war, America needs to win.”

And then, the members of the growing cadre of Republicans pushing for an even faster troop withdrawal spoke out too: Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson said, “reducing troop numbers to pre-surge levels, and taking a year to do it, is not acceptable to the growing number of Americans, like me, who get the reality that there is no compelling reason to risk another life or another dollar in a conflict that has no end”; and, unsurprisingly, libertarian Rep. Ron Paul’s 2012 campaign chairman commented, “This move is too little, too late.”

(Our own Andrew Leonard, riffing on the argument for swift withdrawal based on spending, points out that we cannot afford to stay at war, but that the withdrawal plan will barely touch the deficit: Thirty-three thousand troops by next summer adds up to around $15 billion [in savings] — or about 1 percent of the U.S.’s $1.5 trillion deficit. This peace dividend isn’t going to result in a budget surplus any time soon.”)

Democratic response: Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi expressed the views of many in her party, saying “It has been the hope of many in Congress and across the country that the full drawdown of US forces would happen sooner than the president laid out, and we will continue to press for a better outcome.” Senator Barbara Boxer, agreed, noting: “I am glad this war is ending, but it’s ending at far too slow a pace.”

International response: Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, called the drawdown “a good measure,” Politico reports. He admitted the Afghan security would in turn need to be strengthened. A representative from the Taliban also responded to Obama’s speech with a rare English statement. “Our armed struggle will increase from day to day,” he said.

According to the Guardian, British prime minister David Cameron “welcomed” Obama’s plan and commented “I have already said there will be no UK troops in combat roles in Afghanistan by 2015 and, where conditions on the ground allow, it is right that we bring troops home sooner.” France’s Nicolas Sarkozy announced too that France would follow the United States with a gradual draw-down of the 4,000 French troops stationed in Afghanistan. German Foreign Minister, Guido Westerwelle, said his country plans to start to reduce its contingent of 5,000 armed forces by the end of this year.

Watch Obama’s address East Room address, via WhiteHouse.gov:

 

 

 

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Natasha Lennard covers the Occupy movement for Salon. A British-born, Brooklyn-based journalist, she has been covering Occupy Wall Street since before the first sleeping bag was unrolled in Zuccotti Park. One of the first journalists arrested at an Occupy action, she has managed to enrage Andrew Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. You can follow her on Twitter (@natashalennard), and email her any Occupy updates/videos/ideas to natasha.lennard@gmail.com More Natasha Lennard.

Saturday, Jun 18, 2011 2:05 PM UTC

U.S. in peace talks with Taliban

Afghan President Hamid Karzai confirms the negotiations

By and , Associated Press Afghan President Hamid Karzai, right, addresses a joint press conference with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, unseen, as an Afghan Presidential bodyguard holds the Afghan flag, left, at the Presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, May 24, 2011. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told journalists in Kabul that the "transition is on track" for the hand over of seven of Afghanistan's 34 provinces in July. Both Fogh Rasmussen and Afghan President Hamid Karzai urged insurgent fighters to lay down their weapons and embrace an ongoing peace process. (AP Photo/Mustafa Quraishi)(Credit: AP)

President Hamid Karzai said Saturday that Afghanistan and the United States are engaged in peace talks with the Taliban, even as insurgents stormed a police station near the presidential palace, killing nine people.

The brazen attack in the heart of Kabul’s government district provided a sharp counterpoint to Karzai’s announcement that the U.S. and Afghan government are in talks with the Taliban, the first official confirmation of such discussions. The violence also underscored the difficulty facing any possible negotiated settlement to the decade-long war.

Three men dressed in Afghan army uniforms stormed the police station near the presidential palace and opened fire on officers, said Mohammed Honayon, a witness. The Interior Ministry said in a statement that one of the attackers detonated a suicide bomb vest outside the gates while the others rushed in and began shooting.

The crackle of gunfire echoed through the streets typically bustling with shoppers and government employees on a Saturday, the start of Afghanistan’s work week. The fighting ended by 3 p.m. when security forces shot dead the two other attackers. Three police officers, one intelligence agent and five civilians were killed in the attack, the Interior Ministry said.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid claimed responsibility for the attack in a text message to The Associated Press, saying the group dispatched three suicide bombers.

The assault occurred shortly after Karzai announced during a speech at the presidential palace that his government and the U.S. have begun preliminary negotiations with the Taliban aimed at ending the conflict.

“In the course of this year, there have been peace talks with the Taliban and our own countrymen,” Karzai said. “Peace talks have started with them already and it is going well. Foreign militaries, especially the United States of America, are going ahead with these negotiations.”

Karzai said some of the Taliban emissaries that have met with members of the peace council he set up were only representing themselves, while others were speaking for the broader movement. The exact nature of the contacts was not immediately clear, and further details were not available.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Attacks in the Afghan capital have been relatively rare, although violence has increased since the May 2 killing of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid in Pakistan and the start of the Taliban’s annual spring offensive.

The capital is one of seven regions scheduled to be handed over to Afghan security control in late July — part of NATO’s efforts to begin transferring security responsibilities ahead of its planned 2014 withdrawal from the country. The U.S. also plans to start drawing down troops in July.

The last major attack in Kabul took place last month when a suicide bomber wearing an Afghan police uniform infiltrated the main Afghan military hospital in late May, killing six medical students. A month before that, a suicide attacker in an army uniform sneaked past security at the Afghan Defense Ministry, killing three.

Associated Press writers Ahmad Seir and Amir Shah contributed to this report.

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Monday, May 23, 2011 3:30 PM UTC

Taliban denies leader has been killed in Pakistan

The insurgent group claims that Mullah Omar is alive and well in Afghanistan

By and , Associated Press An Afghan policeman stands guard at the scene of an explosion in Kandahar south of Kabul, Afghanistan on Sunday, May 22, 2011. In Kandahar, two police officers suffered injuries Sunday when a motorcycle laden with explosives detonated as they tried to disarm it, the ministry said. (AP Photo/Allauddin Khan)(Credit: AP)

The Taliban denied a report in the Afghan press that the insurgent group’s leader had been killed in neighboring Pakistan, saying Monday that Mullah Mohammad Omar is alive and in Afghanistan.

“This is absolutely wrong. It’s only propaganda and we completely deny these rumors,” Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid told The Associated Press in a phone call. “He is inside Afghanistan and he is busy directing military operations with his commanders.”

There has been much speculation that the U.S. might ramp up efforts to kill or capture the reclusive, one-eyed Taliban leader after the successful strike against Osama bin Laden. President Barack Obama has said he would order another covert military raid if it was necessary to stop terrorist attacks.

Attacks have increased in Afghanistan since bin Laden’s death and since the start of the Taliban’s yearly spring offensive. On Monday, four NATO service members were killed in an explosion in the east, NATO said in a statement. The military alliance did not provide details on the attack or the nationalities of the dead.

Most of those with knowledge of the Taliban organization say Omar is hiding in southern Pakistan, around Quetta or Karachi.

Afghan news channel Tolo quoted an anonymous Afghan intelligence official as saying Omar had been shot dead in Pakistan while being moved from Quetta to North Waziristan with the help of former Pakistani intelligence chief Gen. Hamid Gul.

North Waziristan is a tribal area home to militants whose primary focus is attacking U.S. and NATO troops across the border in Afghanistan.

A Pakistani intelligence official said that there was no information to suggest the report of Omar’s death was true. He spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject. U.S. and NATO officials said they had heard the report from Tolo but had no information to confirm or deny it.

Gul told the AP that the story was false.

“This is propaganda, sheer deception, disinformation,” Gul said. “I have never met him. I’ve never seen him. No contact whatsoever.”

Afghanistan’s leaders accuse Pakistan’s intelligence services of aiding Taliban and other insurgents fighting international and Afghan troops in the country, even as Islamabad battles the allied Pakistani Taliban at home.

Similar suspicions of collusion were raised after the raid on bin Laden, whose hiding place in a military town near the Pakistani capital led some to believe at least some Pakistani authorities must have known where he was. Pakistan denies that.

Latifullah Mashal, a spokesman for the Afghan intelligence agency, said Omar and some Taliban commanders had disappeared four or five days ago while moving from Quetta to North Waziristan. Mashal suggested that “maybe an incident has happened along the way,” but emphasized that officials had no further information about the fate of the Taliban leader.

“We can confirm he’s been disappeared from his hide-out,” Mashal told reporters in Kabul.

Mashal said that Afghan’s intelligence agency had shared information about Omar’s whereabouts “more than 30 times” with neighboring countries, especially Pakistan. He said he didn’t know how that information had been used during Omar’s more than a decade in hiding.

“Most of the allies are honest, some are not,” the spokesman said.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, meanwhile, arrived in Kabul to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. His discussions with Afghan and U.S. officials were expected to focus on how the three countries could work together to fight terrorism, improve economic ties and forge peace in Afghanistan.

Obama told the BBC in an interview broadcast Sunday that he could not allow “active plans to come to fruition without us taking some action,” and would send troops again if a senior Taliban leader were found in Pakistan.

Pakistan is furious that that United States sent Navy SEALs to raid bin Laden’s Pakistan hideaway earlier this month without informing Pakistani authorities in advance.

But there are also parallel efforts to get the Taliban leadership into negotiations with the Afghan government, making it unclear if such a strike would be in the interest of the American or Afghan governments.

The Taliban have stepped up attacks as part of their yearly offensive against NATO, Afghan government installations and officials. Insurgents also have promised revenge attacks after the killing of bin Laden.

The Taliban claimed they were behind an attack Saturday on the main military hospital in Kabul that killed at least six Afghan medical students.

On Monday, however, NATO spokesman Brig. Gen. Josef Blotz told journalists that intelligence sources showed the Taliban-allied Haqqani network planned and carried out the suicide attack on the nation’s top medical facility.

Also Monday, a suicide bomber attacked a gathering of tribal leaders in eastern Laghman province, killing four tribal elders and wounding 14 others having lunch at a hotel, governor’s spokesman Faizanullah Patan said.

Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Kabul and Nahal Toosi in Islamabad contributed to this report.

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Saturday, May 14, 2011 4:57 PM UTC

3 Florida men charged with supporting terrorism

Citizens accused of conspiring with and providing funds to Pakistani Taliban

By

Three South Florida men have been charged with providing about $45,000 in financial support to the Pakistani Taliban, which the State Department has designated as a terrorist organization.

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Miami announced Saturday the arrests of Hafiz Muhammed Sher Ali Khan and sons Irfan Khan and Izhar Khan. Hafiz Khan is the imam at Miami Mosque, also known as Flagler Mosque, and Izhar Khan is the imam at Jamaat Al-Mumineen Mosque in nearby Margate. Officials say the mosques are not suspected of wrongdoing.

Authorities say they have recorded conversations in which Hafiz Khan supported violence perpetrated by the Pakistani Taliban.

If convicted, the men face 15 years in prison for each of the four counts.

Attempts to reach the men, their attorneys and their mosques were unsuccessful.

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