Polls indicate that the American people care little that such discoveries have not been made. Bush administration officials thus continue to act as if none of this is an issue, while moving on to focus on other conflicts, like Iran and the Israel-Palestine peace process. But in nations allied with the U.S. — from Australia to Denmark to Ireland to the U.K. — opponents of the war are using Rumsfeld’s remarks about the MIA WMD as evidence of duplicity by the Bush administration. It all creates a sort of parallel-universe feel, where other men in far-off lands suffer recriminations because of remarks made here.

On Tuesday night, British Prime Minister Tony Blair was flying to Kuwait to thank British troops for their war efforts when Rumsfeld was telling an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations that “it is also possible that [Iraqi leaders] decided that they would destroy [the WMD] prior to a conflict. We don’t know what happened.”

In the U.S. the comments seemed just part of a rolled-out talking points plan for Bush administration officials to back off their declared confidence that they would discover WMD, what White House spokesman Ari Fleischer referred to in April as “what this war was about.” And there seemed little likelihood of recrimination from the American people, 41 percent of whom — according to a recent poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes — believe or are unsure about whether the U.S. has already found WMD in Iraq. Moreover, according to a Fox News/Opinion dynamics poll from late May, 82 percent of the American people think that any WMD have been moved or destroyed, while only 10 percent think that there were no weapons to begin with. But abroad, Rumsfeld’s remarks and those like them have been pounded upon by war opponents in countries that helped the U.S. fight the war.

Further doubts about pending WMD discoveries — fueled by Bush officials themselves — have bubbled to the surface at an awkward time, and not just because of Blair taking his Basra victory lap. On Wednesday, CBS News reported that Col. Tim Madere, an unconventional-weapons specialist with the Army’s V Corp, disputed U.S. intelligence claims about the site U.S. intelligence called Saddam’s bunker on the night of March 20, thus launching an early attack with 40 Tomahawk missiles. “We looked real hard,” Madere said. “We didn’t find any bodies or bunkers.” On Thursday, the BBC reported that members of British intelligence had serious questions about a dossier from Blair’s office claiming that Iraq could launch a WMD attack with only 45 minutes’ notice.

Since the Iraq war began and no evidence was immediately found to back up Vice President Dick Cheney’s Aug. 26 pronouncement that “simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” the administration has been back-pedaling. In his April interview with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, for instance, President Bush lowered the bar, indicating that the U.S. was looking for evidence not of the weapons themselves but that despot Saddam Hussein “had a weapons of mass destruction program.” The same day as the Brokaw interview, at an Abrams Army Tank plant in Lima, Ohio, Bush noted that “whether he destroyed them, moved them or hid them, we’re going to find out the truth.”

This has sufficed for those like Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., of the alleged opposition party, who told NBC on May 11 that he doesn’t think the failure to find WMD would be damaging to U.S. credibility. “I think we’ve got to recognize that there were more than one goal here,” Daschle said, as if reading from White House talking points. “One of the other goals was to remove a threat to this country, to remove a threat to the region, to remove a person who not only repressed and tortured his own people but clearly posed some serious problems throughout the world.”

But throughout the corridors of power among the leading “Coalition of the Willing” nations — where opposition to the war was much stronger — such back-pedaling has been received with less than open arms. Former Blair Cabinet Secretary Robin Cook, who resigned in opposition to the war, erupted upon hearing the defense secretary’s remarks. “If Donald Rumsfeld is now admitting the weapons are not there, the truth is the weapons probably haven’t been there for quite a long time,” Cook said to the BBC’s Radio 4. “We were told Saddam had weapons ready for use within 45 minutes. It’s now 45 days since the war has finished and we have still not found anything.”

But did it matter? After all, the Iraqi people had been liberated from Hussein’s oppressive regime. “It matters immensely,” Cook insisted, “because the basis on which the war was sold to the British House of Commons, to the British people, was that Saddam represented a serious threat. It is plain he did not have that capacity to threaten us — possibly did not have the capacity to threaten even his neighbors — and that is profoundly important.”

On his way to Kuwait, Blair was asked for comment about the brouhaha. Seeming to disagree with Rumsfeld, Blair said, “I have no doubt we will find such weapons. I have said throughout, and I just repeat to you, I have absolutely no doubt at all about the existence of weapons of mass destruction.”

Blair cited the “two trailers that both our and the American security services believe were used for the manufacture of chemical and biological weapons.” This was a reference to what U.S. intelligence officials have claimed this week is the “strongest evidence to date that Iraq was hiding a biological warfare program,” though no trace of any biological agents had been found in the trailers.

Rumsfeld wasn’t the only one gumming things up for allied governments. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz says in a pending interview with Vanity Fair that the emphasis on WMD was “for bureaucratic reasons; we settled on one issue — weapons of mass destruction — because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.”

On Thursday, opposition Labor Party leader Simon Crean told Radio Australia that the Wolfowitz comments were “another example of the government being caught out by its own deceit.”

Liberal Party leaders were thrust into an awkward situation. Defense Minister Robert Hill told Australian Radio that the Iraqi government “may have destroyed more [WMD] than we believed. It might be the case,” he told Australian Radio. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer told his countrymen that they “can lie in bed at night with full confidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime is not going to threaten anybody on earth with biological and chemical weapons, because his regime doesn’t exist.” He noted that Rumsfeld never said that the hunt for WMD was over. “He said they might be hard to find or might not be found,” he said to Australian Radio. Citing the two trailers as evidence of Iraqi malice, Downer allowed that “whether the agents that were to be used in those biological warfare vehicles will be found, that’s another question, because it’s obviously like looking for a needle in a haystack.” But Downer disagreed with Wolfowitz’s comments to Vanity Fair about the “bureaucratic” reasons for stressing WMD.

Other Bush officials have come forward to offer other explanations. Last Friday at a luncheon hosted by the National Defense University Foundation, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, John Bolton, said, “There has been a lot of misunderstanding as to exactly what it was we expected to find and when we expected to find it.” The weapons weren’t the issue, Bolton clarified. Rather, it was “the intellectual capacity in Iraq to recreate systems of weapons of mass destruction,” or “the continued existence of what Saddam Hussein called the ‘nuclear mujahadeen,’ the thousand or so scientists, technicians, people who have in their own heads and in their files the intellectual property necessary at an appropriate time … to recreate a nuclear weapons program.”

Rumsfeld’s remarks also set off some heated rhetoric in Denmark and Ireland. According to the Danmarks Radio Web site on Thursday, opposition forces like the Radical Liberals and the Unity List have issued demands that the government reassess the quality of the intelligence information given to the parliament about Iraq’s WMD. In Ireland, according to Thursday’s Irish Times, Socialist Party leader Joe Higgins, citing Rumsfeld’s remarks, charged that the government’s invitation to the U.S. military to use its airspace and an airport was based on a Bush administration “falsehood” that “misled” the Irish people and parliament. Rumsfeld was the “same person who reveled like a psychopath in his strategy of shock and awe as the entire infrastructure of a nation was blown to rubble by U.S. and British bombs,” Higgins said.

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern responded by saying that he was “proud of the actions we took in supporting the UN Security Council and anything else we did in this regard.” He said that it was “amazing how some people are so glad to argue the case for a dictator who was responsible for using torture and killing thousands of his own people.” But other Irish politicians took the moment to slam Rumsfeld, one calling him a “war criminal,” another saying that “if there were no weapons of mass destruction then the war was fought on a lie.”

Though the Bush administration has resisted working with international arms inspectors, it quietly gave in on this matter — perhaps at least in part due to these myriad criticisms. On June 6, representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency will return to Iraq where under tight American supervision they will be permitted to inspect one area, Tuwaitha, for nuclear weapons or their remnants. After all, as Ahmed Chalabi, leader of the U.S.-backed Iraqi National Congress, told CNN’s World Report Conference on Thursday, “It is not surprising they have not been found, because the effort to find them has not been that great.”

A picture caption on April 12, 2003, with an article about Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister of Turkey, featured a photograph of a turkey from the annual White House Thanksgiving “pardon the turkey” ceremony. Mr. Erdogan was Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister, while the turkey pictured is a North American Meleagris gallopavo ultimately eaten by a family in Scranton, Pa., despite the presidential pardon it received. We regret the error.

A story published on March 12, 2002, about President Rutherford B. Hayes misstated a number of details about his presidency. He was the 19th president, not the 17th; he was born in Ohio, not Iowa; he lost the popular vote but won the electoral vote in his 1876 presidential race against Gov. Samuel Tilden, not the other way around. Additionally, President Hayes never appeared in any pornographic movies — homosexual, “snuff” or otherwise — as far as can be ascertained. We regret the errors.

A report in our Food section on Feb. 2, 1996, about chicken-fried steak with gravy may have accidentally created a impression about its healthfulness contrary to what was intended. In actuality, each serving has 466 calories with 32 grams of fat, not 20 calories with 0 grams of fat. It is not particularly part of a healthy diet, despite the conclusion some of our readers reached based upon the sentence beginning “Part of any healthy diet.” We regret the error. Moreover, this correction was delayed by an editing lapse, which we also regret.

Our coverage from the summer of 2001 about the scandal surrounding Chandra Levy and Rep. Gary Condit, a former Democratic representative from California, misstated a number of details about the matter. Ms. Levy was 24 at the time of her disappearance, not 23, Mr. Condit was a member of the Blue Dog Democrat Coalition, not the Yellow Dog Democrat Coalition, and Mr. Condit was never seen carrying her severed head into the congressional gym. We regret the error.

Due to a transcribing error, in an opinion piece published last Sunday, we misspelled the first name of President Bush’s national security advisor, Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Additionally, the photograph that accompanied the story was actually that of Storm, the super-powered mutant played by Halle Berry in this summer’s blockbuster film “X2,” and not Dr. Rice. We regret the error.

Several cities that appeared as datelines in stories we reviewed were not actually visited by our reporters. These include, as far as can be ascertained, stories that were to have been written in Toledo, Ohio; Scranton, Pa.; Basra, Iraq; anywhere in Afghanistan; all of the continent of Asia; and essentially any place other than Washington and New York City. We regret both the errors and the failure to accrue frequent-flier miles.

In the third correction in this report we blamed the delay in our correction on an editing lapse, when in fact it was due to a combination of arrogance, sloth and alcoholism. We regret that, too, and hope we have not completely lost your trust.

Until Thursday, Foley had yet to acknowledge these stories publicly; if he had his druthers, they would all just go away. Maybe they will. But the matter raises a provocative question: How much do we really have a right to know about our elected politicians? And it also raises inevitable questions about Foley’s own party. If Foley continues to ignore the question, there will be plenty of people who will assume he is simply hiding his homosexuality. And for a Republican Party stigmatized in recent months by comments widely perceived as anti-gay by its No. 3 man in the Senate, it raises the question of whether Foley believes his party faithful, among others, will reject him if he reveals his sexuality.

Foley’s office noted that myriad Republican officials were issuing statements on his behalf. The one issued by Majority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., states: “Mark is one of my Deputy Whips. He is a key part of virtually every bit of work that we get done up here. He is an integral part of our team, and I value his help, advice, and understanding of what needs to be done and how to get it done.”

Presumably Blunt is reading from the textbook of those, like Charles Francis, a friend of President George W. Bush and co-chair of the influential Republican Unity Coalition, who think that Foley’s answer is totally acceptable and should be left right there. “I believe in the ‘non-issue’ approach,” Francis tells Salon. “Homosexuality as a non-issue is something that Republicans aspire to, it’s the president’s worldview, and it’s something I’ve tried to create at the Republican Unity Coalition.” Foley’s non-answer to the question would seem to fit in with the non-issue theory. “He has the right to say what he wants about his private life as he faces the voters,” Francis says. “God bless him, and good luck.”

Another prominent gay Republican organization agrees. “Our position is that our first priority is turning what is now a Democratic seat in the Senate to the Republican side,” says Patrick Guerriero, executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans. “We’re less concerned with any of the candidates’ sexual orientation than where they stand on issues of fairness.” Guerriero noted that Foley’s probable GOP primary opponent, conservative former Rep. Bill McCollum, sponsored a hate-crimes bill that offered protection to gays and lesbians, “so we have two candidates who have some track record on being right on our issues.”

He issues a warning to Democrats looking to exploit Foley’s discomfort. “I hope we’re not coming to a time when every single candidate will be asked to tell every single thing about their personal life,” he says. “The Democrats should know that this would be walking down a very dangerous path.” After all, as another Republican activist points out, there are plenty of rumors about the sexuality of a current Democratic senator and two Clinton administration Cabinet officials. People in glass houses (however divinely decorated)…

Even some partisan Democrats agree. “I think he has a right to take” the position of not answering the question, says openly gay Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass. “I used to take that position 17 years ago.” Careful to not address the issue of Foley’s sexuality one way or another, Frank says he disagrees with gays who refuse to acknowledge their sexuality. “While I do think you have right to keep things private, when you do that, it leaves an implication that there’s something wrong with it.”

And at least one veteran of the Clinton era, epitomized by what he called the “politics of personal destruction,” feels Foley will be facing this question for as long as he pursues the Senate seat. “Anybody, whether they’re gay or straight, they have a right to their own sex life,” says James Carville, a former Clinton campaign official and now co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire.” “But I doubt there’s much he can do to stop this. He can have all the conference calls he wants.”

And liberals will be the least of Foley’s worries. Lori Waters, executive director of the conservative Eagle Forum, tells Salon that what matters most to her organization “is how he votes, and he is not a conservative. If he’s out there pushing the gay agenda, we’re very much opposed to those things, and I would hope the voters in Florida would be as well.” But even a candidate with a strong record on the issues that Eagle Forum cares about — Foley scored 65 percent on its 2002 voting chart — couldn’t assume Eagle Forum support if he or she is gay.

“We certainly don’t agree with the gay lifestyle,” Waters says, “and when it comes to our decison-making for the PAC as to who we support, we have to give to people who are consistent with the values of those people who give to us.” If a conservative candidate were gay, “that would be a real stumbling block,” she says.

Even some of those who support Foley’s right to privacy see situations in which he might have trouble continuing his refusal to answer the question. Frank says that Foley will be trying to join the U.S. Senate, “a body in which Rick Santorum is the third-ranking member. So it’s not entirely irrelevant.” Last month Santorum, R-Pa., gave an interview to the Associated Press in which he likened the legality of homosexuality to that of bigamy, incest and bestiality. If a GOP senator is elected from Florida in November 2004 — Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., is currently running for president and may or may not seek reelection — that individual will cast a vote either for or against Santorum, now the chairman of the Senate GOP Conference and a possible future candidate for Senate Majority Leader.

Francis allows that asking how Foley would vote on Santorum’s anticipated leadership races would be a fair question, as would Foley’s thoughts on Santorum’s remarks — which he has yet to make public. And that seems to be the problem: That line of questioning leads directly to logical questions about how Foley feels about a man who thinks that gay relationships have no more legal basis than incestuous ones, and no more right to acceptance in society than what Santorum called “man on dog.” And that leads to perfectly reasonable questions about why he personally feels that way.

Moreover, in a political primary — especially a Republican one where Christian conservatives make up much of the base, not to mention one in a Southern state like Florida — whispers that Foley is gay, regardless of their accuracy, will likely have an effect on the race.

Carville, who hails from Louisiana, argues that there’s no way to know how such a matter will factor into the election. “There are very few acknowledged gays who have run in Republican primaries in the South, so you don’t really know,” he says. “I mean, you can’t go to a racing form and see what they traditionally do. My guess is it’s not going to be terribly helpful.”

Many of Foley’s likely voters, Carville says, consider homosexuality “a sin and an abomination against nature.” If some religious voters look at homosexuality as “immoral conduct that cannot be tolerated,” Carville doesn’t see how they could just brush the matter off, as Foley seems to hope they will do. “He goes and campaigns in some of these fundamentalist churches where they are, if I thought it was a sin and an abomination, I’d ask him, right there, ‘Are you a sodomite?’”

If a candidate tried to evade questions about whether he attends meetings of the Ku Klux Klan, Carville says, “it wouldn’t be enough to say, I’m not going to answer that. You’d have to answer that before I’d vote for you. And a lot of fundamentalist Christians view homosexuality the way I view the Klan.”

These issues are what prompted the April 26 Sun-Sentinel column by Buddy Nevins, which artfully tap-danced around the issue by focusing on how Foley’s liberal bent on issues of gay and lesbian rights — in 2000, he merited a 100 percent rating by the Human Rights Campaign, which bills itself as the nation’s leading “lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equal rights” organization — seemed incongruous with his conservatism on other issues. “I believe — as a longtime political writer and columnist in the state of Florida for over 20 years — that this will affect his campaign,” Nevins tells Salon. “We will continue to look at this subject and follow it.”

Nevins broached the matter with the congressman of how those votes might hurt him in a GOP primary, and says he took note of Foley’s discomfort in discussing the matter. Foley is “clearly uncomfortable talking about gay rights in this campaign,” Nevins wrote. “His speech slowed and his face darkened when asked a question about it.” Foley told Nevins that he hoped “people would understand that those votes are fairness issues — nondiscrimination against employees and things like that.”

Following that story came a May 8 cover story in an area alternative weekly, the New Times of Broward-Palm Beach, titled “Out With the Truth: With His Voting Record at Issue, Why Won’t U.S. Congressman Mark Foley Just Say That He’s Gay?” That story prompted a May 22 cover story in the Washington Blade, a gay and lesbian newspaper in D.C. “Newspaper Outs Fla. Congressman,” read the Blade’s headline. “Republican Mark Foley’s Staff Says Sexual Orientation Irrelevant to Senate Bid.”

Throughout it all, Foley remained mum. “Frankly, I don’t think what kind of personal relationships I have in my private life is of any relevance to anyone else,” Foley said in 1996 when the Advocate claimed he was gay in a story about the Defense of Marriage Act, legislation against the federal recognition of gay and lesbian marriage. Foley, along with most other members of Congress and President Clinton, supported the legislation. “I know one thing for certain: When I travel around the district every weekend, the people who attend my town meetings and stop me on the street corner certainly are a lot more concerned with issues like how I voted on welfare reform or whether or not Medicare is going to be there when they need it — not the details of whom I choose to have a relationship with.”

The only time Foley seemed to answer the question came back in 1994, when he first ran for Congress. When asked about his sexuality by his hometown newspaper, the Stuart (Fla.) News, Foley responded: “I like women.”

Guerriero of the Log Cabin Republicans says Foley’s record should suffice. “Mark Foley’s record on matters of fairness to all Americans of all walks of life is clear and unequivocal and makes it clear he does not concur with the sentiments expressed by Sen. Santorum,” he says. “While we welcome Republicans and Democrats to speak out against Santorum’s comments, which were so hurtful to some members of our American family, we’re far more interested in the comprehensive nature of their public service.”

Towson Fraser, communications director for the Florida Republican Party, agrees that Foley should be judged on his record and nothing else. He acknowledges that the recent stories have not escaped notice down in Tallahassee but refuses to touch them. “From our standpoint,” Fraser says, “Congressman Foley is a valued member of our Republican family. He has a strong conservative record of supporting the president, and we’re not going to get into that kind of gossip and innuendo.” Won’t Foley have to address the question? “That’s a question for him,” Fraser says. “We’re not going to allow our primary and eventually the U.S. Senate race to degenerate into a contest of nasty rumors and gossip.”

But privately, many Republican officials acknowledge that Foley will sooner or later have to address the matter — and they hope it will be sooner. Many consider Foley to be a strong and appealing candidate who could run a strong race, though they acknowledge that if he’s gay, that could hurt him in some more conservative areas of the state, particularly if the Democratic party nominates a moderate-to-conservative candidate.

What of the inevitable questions that will come from Democratic attack dogs regarding what they would characterize as the intrusive nature of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation and the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton? Foley, after all, voted in favor of two of the four articles of impeachment.

“It’s apples and oranges,” says Francis. “Monica Lewinsky was a private affair gone public.” Guerriero agrees, saying that while there was “overkill,” “the president brought that scandal upon himself and brought it into the Oval Office.”

Carville says he doesn’t think Foley’s role in Clinton’s impeachment should have any bearing one way or another, but that the Santorum questions seem a more convincing way that this could become an issue in his race.

Frank, the Massachusetts representative, points to three recent races where gay Republican candidates were defeated in primaries and says that, though Foley’s non-answer might work, he doubts it will. “I would think his dilemma is in part because he thinks if people think he’s gay — and I’ve carefully not commented on whether he is or he isn’t — they would hold it against him,” Frank says. “Some of the right-wingers, however, seem to accept gay candidates as long as they seem kind of abashed by it.”

Gay Republicans appealing to conservative voters may take solace that some “seem to accept the fact that being gay is beyond their control,” though they “wouldn’t accept someone acknowledging being gay if he appears to be unashamed of it,” Frank says. Thus, a gay Republican might be OK not denying that he’s gay, the congressman says, “as long as he appears to not be happy about it.”

The letter, released Wednesday morning, claimed “significant improvements to the state of our Nation’s treasured environment” and announced a departure date of June 27. In a statement, President Bush called Whitman “a trusted friend and advisor” and “a dedicated and tireless fighter for new and innovative policies for cleaner air, purer water, and better protected land.”

Inside the Beltway there was talk — based upon conjecture and Whitman’s losing battles with conservatives in the administration — that Whitman was shown the door; Whitman, meanwhile, has maintained that the president had tried to talk her out of her decision and others backed this account. “I don’t believe she was in any way pushed out,” said Rep. Jim Greenwood, R-Penn., a moderate and No. 2 Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s subcommittee on the environment and hazardous materials. “The information I have is that the president tried to get her to change her mind” and that Whitman quite simply misses her husband of 29 years, financier John Whitman.

Keith Nahigian, a friend and former aide, said that from her first day at the EPA she was talking about how much she missed her husband and the home where she grew up. She spends so little time with her husband, Whitman has jokingly complained that “it felt like they were dating again. They’d go out and it was like, ‘So, what’s going on with you? What are your interests?’” She also missed the family’s 230-acre estate and farm in Oldwick, in northwest New Jersey, known as Pontefract, where she grew up.

Gluck also says Whitman was excited to be returning to the Garden State. But she described her as “tired and exhausted,” and the exhaustion was not only due to how hard Whitman has worked and how far she’s traveled since taking office at the beginning of the Bush administration. “Some of the right wingers in our party really make it difficult for [Secretary of State] Colin Powell and for anybody who’s a moderate in this administration, and Christie was no exception,” Gluck said. While Whitman enjoyed a “great” personal relationship with the president, the “pressure from the right wing” wore on her.

“The pressures of the job are enormous,” Gluck says, “but this particular one with all the philosophical tugs, had to be part and parcel of what makes one tired.” Asked to elaborate and describe conversations she’d had with Whitman to illustrate the point, Gluck demurs.

Another GOP moderate, Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., says: “This was not unexpected.

“She did her best to be true to her principles and to serve the president,” Shays said, “but the bottom line is that the president makes the environmental policy.”

Whitman’s departure is the second such notice announced this week by a high-ranking Bush administration official, following the notice. Monday by White House press secretary Ari Fleischer. Whitman told White House chief of staff Andy Card two weeks ago that she was mulling this decision, and Tuesday she told the president she had decided it was time to go.

Both Whitman and Fleischer are Bush loyalists, but the job always came much easier to the latter, who apparently never disagreed with one thing the president has ever done. Whitman, conversely, was constantly seeing her moderate environmentalism overruled.

From the beginning of the Bush administration, it was clear that Whitman stood in left field on Bush’s team. And it was there — alone and isolated — where she often found herself.

After a Senate hearing on Feb. 27, 2001, Whitman said that “there’s no question but that global warming is a real phenomenon, that it is occurring.” Flooding and droughts “will occur” as a result, she declared. “The science is strong there.” She suggested administration support for laws to cap the emission of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. In a confidential memo to the president on March 6, 2001, Whitman urged the president to address the issue of global warming since it “is a credibility issue for the U.S. in the international community” and “we need to appear engaged” in negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Many conservatives, however, think of global warming as quite a question, doubt the science, and oppose such a cap — even though on the campaign trail in 2000 President Bush had promised to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from domestic power plants. By the Bush administration’s first Earth Day, in April 2001, the president had broken his campaign pledge about carbon dioxide, had signaled that the government would withdraw from the Kyoto accord, suspended cleanup regulations for mining companies, and suspended the regulations on arsenic in the drinking water that were signed into law in the 11th hour by the outgoing Clinton administration. Whitman was given the task of announcing the suspension of the arsenic regulation, then was sent out to reverse the decision once it was used as shorthand, sometimes unfairly, by the media as a symbol of an administration hostile to any environmental concerns. Long before 9/11 changed everything, Bush’s environmental record was a major subject of discord, and Whitman was in the thick of it, usually to her detriment.

After some Clean Air Act laws were relaxed last November to benefit coal-fired power plants, for instance, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., called for her resignation, and angry messages were issued by the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Lung Association, among others.

Whitman was generally perceived as one of the more out-of-the-loop and impotent Cabinet officials. In June 2002, the EPA sent to the United Nations a “Climate Action Report” that blamed human activity for global warming. President Bush said he disagreed with the report, which he dismissively described as having been “put out by the bureaucracy.” A week later, Bush rolled back “New Source Review,” a provision in the Clean Air Act requiring some industries to embrace sometimes costly cutting-edge environmental technologies. Whitman had embraced “New Source Review” as governor of New Jersey, so the move was seen as a direct rejection of her views. “This decision is a victory for outdated, polluting power plants and a devastating defeat for public health and our environment,” said Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt.

Still, Whitman seemed to perceive life as having improved somewhat from the lightning-rod first months of her tenure. In 2001, she had told the New York Times that Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to her as a “wind dummy.”

“It’s a military term for when you are over the landing zone and you don’t know what the winds are,” she explained. “You push the dummy out the door and see what happens to it.” In January of this year, Whitman told the National Journal that she didn’t feel “as much” like a wind dummy. “That was back when we had both the arsenic and the Kyoto issues,” she said, “which were the big ones out there. We’ve been able to ratchet down over here so we haven’t been quite as visible.” The controversies she’d experienced, she said, were because “it’s a terribly emotional issue. And for some people, you can never, ever, ever do enough. For other people, anything you do gets in the way of progress.”

In her resignation letter, Whitman not surprisingly chose to focus on her greener pastures, citing administration regulations to reduce pollution from nonroad diesel engines; the Clean School Bus USA initiative, which plans to ensure low-emission school buses for every student by 2010; the proposed Clear Skies Act of 2003 to reduce pollution from power plants; and an EPA plan to clean up PCBs from the Hudson River. These are the kinds of measures that have brought her under fire from various conservatives, who see the Bush administration’s occasional nod toward environmental concerns as weak and something of a betrayal.

“She was just a carbon copy of anybody who’s ever been head of the EPA,” said Fred L Smith Jr., founder and president of the pro-growth Competitive Enterprise Institute. Smith says that EPA administrators traditionally “regard as their duty to figure out what the green lobby wants and to implement it as quickly as possible” to the detriment of the nation, and Whitman was no exception. “This presents a dramatic opportunity for the administration to put someone in place to reinforce the changes already put forward in Congress,” where, according to Smith, for the first time in decades the members of the House and Senate leadership “aren’t part of the green establishment. They’re not locked into the view that the only way you can protect the environment is to lock businessmen in jail and pass more regulations.”

With such sentiments being voiced from the right, it’s therefore not all that surprising that Bush’s green opponents expressed not entirely anti-Whitman notions, a sort of “What’s a nice green girl like you doing in a place like this?” Even Lieberman, who had called for her resignation last year, said “it would be a welcome change if Gov. Whitman’s successor not only shared her interest in environmental progress, but were allowed to pursue it. But I won’t hold my breath, though we may need to do that to survive this administration’s clean air policies.”

Phil Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, said that “no EPA administrator has ever been so consistently and publicly humiliated by the White House.” Though Whitman may have fought for the cause on occasion, he said, in the end too often “the White House listened more often to industry lobbyists than to its EPA administrator.” Democratic National Committee chairman Terry McAuliffe quizzically likened her to “a fish out of polluted water from the minute she stepped into the Bush Cabinet.” True to überloyal form, Whitman appeared on CNN Wednesday morning and denied that she was “leaving because of clashes with the administration. In fact, I haven’t had any.” Regarding reports of any conflicts, Whitman allowed that “there’s always give and take,” but “that doesn’t mean that you’re having a battle about it.”

Greenwood, who voted against the Bush administration’s request to allow oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, seconded Whitman’s take on the policy debates. The EPA chief “brings pretty green recommendations to the administration, and others whose job it is to represent industry and commerce represent other points of view. And there’s pulling and tugging in the White House.”

Both Greenwood and Gluck argue that environmentalists didn’t fully realize what an advocate they had in Whitman. “I don’t think you can fault Gov. Whitman for not bringing strong environmental proposals to the administration,” Greenwood said, though clearly she didn’t always succeed.

Most recently, Whitman expressed frustration about an Office of Management and Budget analysis that factored the worth of the life of a person older than 70 at $2.3 million while those younger than 70 were assessed to be worth more — $3.7 million. While supporters of the move argued that it was practical and a realistic way to gauge the effectiveness of regulations, critics saw the change in policy as discriminatory and a way for the administration to undervalue the importance of human life. Whitman initially defended the OMB figures, saying critics were unfairly characterizing them, but after touring the country earlier this month she was frequently accosted by angry environmentalists and senior citizens over the issue. On May 7 in Baltimore, Whitman abruptly announced that the policy had “been discontinued. EPA will not — I repeat, not — use an age-adjusted analysis in decision making.”

According to the Associated Press, possible successors to Whitman include David Struhs, Florida Department of Environmental Protection secretary, and Josephine Cooper, president of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

Greenwood expressed the desire that in replacing Whitman the Bush administration “make a selection that will send a positive message to the environmental community.” This isn’t just for policy reasons; the environment is one of the few areas of vulnerability for the Bush administration and the GOP. In a January Gallup poll, 56 percent of those polled favored Democrats to deal with the environment as opposed to 27 percent favoring Republicans. Not incidentally, GOP pollster Frank Luntz — in a memo obtained and released by the liberal Environmental Working Group — issued a warning. “The environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general — and President Bush in particular — are most vulnerable,” he wrote, and as a result Republicans “risk losing the swing vote … [and] our suburban female base could abandon us.”

Through much of Whitman’s tenure, however, this was never a pressing concern. As one senior staffer from the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee assessed, “As long as people are scared of terrorists, most other issues fall by the wayside.”

The providence of that bust seems only to have grown over time, as five of the six, one after the other, have accepted guilty pleas with the U.S. government. Just last Monday, Yasein Taher — voted “friendliest” of Lackawanna High School’s class of ’96 — entered into his agreement, pleading “guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda, a designated foreign terrorist organization,” according to the Justice Department, and prompting some chest thumping from Attorney General John Ashcroft. “With today’s conviction, the Department of Justice continues to build on its strong record of prosecuting those who provide material support to our terrorist enemies,” Ashcroft said. “The cooperation we secure from defendants who trained side by side with our enemies in Afghanistan and elsewhere is valuable as we continue to wage the war on terrorism.”

Were the Lackawanna Six really a “sleeper cell”? Maybe. But even though the White House describes them as such, there is no direct evidence to support the charge; an FBI source points out that no one from his office has said such a thing in public.

Not only has the FBI not officially called them a sleeper cell, the U.S. attorney’s office hasn’t even charged them with conspiring to hurt anyone — the evidence shows they attended an al-Qaida training camp in the late spring or early summer of 2001 — but not with anything indicating that they were a definite threat: no orders received, no plans to strike. But all will be behind bars for the foreseeable future. All six insist that they love America and mean it no harm, but the government has threatened other charges — even the capital offense of treason.

They have all felt pressure from the Department of Justice to plead to charges. Otherwise, prosecutors can’t promise that they won’t add weapons charges to the mix or — even worse — that the Pentagon won’t designate them “enemy combatants,” like Jose Padilla, and ship them to Guatánamo Bay forever.

The six are the subjects of the Justice Department’s aggressive new policy to make arrests — and process convictions — even before hard evidence of terrorist plans are uncovered. It’s a shift from prosecuting crimes to anticipating and preventing them, and it has as a clear drawback: Suspects will go to prison despite an irreconcilable ambiguity about whether they are actually enemies of the United States.

That’s certainly the case with the five alleged terrorists from Lackawanna who have pleaded guilty. And all eyes are on the last one, Mukhtar al-Bakri. A former co-captain of Lackawanna High’s soccer team, al-Bakri was arrested in September 2002 at the age of 22, just hours after his wedding, and his admissions to law enforcement set the stage for the arrests of the other five. The government deems him a terrorist threat. None of that quite squares with what the citizens of Lackawanna’s Yemeni-American community — numbering approximately 1,100 — know of him: a nice guy who earned $300 a week as a deliveryman for Lackawanna’s Unity Wholesale and who cheered for the National Hockey League’s Buffalo Sabres.

Al-Bakri now sits in his cell at the Niagara County Jail. His family insists he wouldn’t hurt a fly, yet the government has ensured that he remains isolated from the other prisoners. Indeed, the Six are deemed such a threat to the nation they’ve been housed in three separate prisons. Today at 2 p.m., al-Bakri — who like the others faces a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, a fine of $250,000, or both — is scheduled to appear before U.S. District Judge William Skretny to enter into a plea agreement with the government, according to prosecutors. If all goes according to plan, the murky, complicated story of the Lackawanna Six — and a mysterious cast of characters who have yet to be captured by federal authorities — may never get a public court airing.

Most of the arrests stunned not just the Yemeni-American community in this town, but the larger community as well. The Lackawanna High School graduates — some went on to Erie Community College — played soccer in the park, shot pool at Crazy Eight Billiards on Abbott Road. Their fathers worked for Bethlehem Steel before the plant closed in the 1980s; all but one was born in the United States. They’re family men. None was known for anti-Americanism; about as political as they got was to register as Democrats. They were the cool, assimilated guys in the community. “They had fun,” attests Lawanda Albanah, 26, who attended high school with two of them. “They partied. They had girlfriends left and right.”

Taher, a former all-star soccer player who co-captained the varsity Steelers, is a handsome, trim 24-year-old who raised local eyebrows when he married a former cheerleader — a white girl — with whom he has a 3-year-old son. He loved tooling around his hometown on his Suzuki motorcycle, dressed in baggy hip-hop attire. His bio was so all-American, in fact, that newspapers and at least one network morning show referred to him as a former homecoming king — an honor he never won, according to his wife.

Or take Sahim Alwan, 29 when arrested, considered a clean-cut, articulate pillar of the community who worked with disadvantaged kids. The son of a steelworker, he earned $31,500 a year selling satellite TV systems, was quoted in the Buffalo News condemning the 9/11 attack and declaring that Muslims are “citizens of this country and we’re proud of that.” Before a 2002 pilgrimage to Mecca, Alwan called the local FBI to give them a heads-up.

But the Lackawanna Six were brought together by a seventh, shadowy figure named Kamal Derwish. Born in Buffalo, Derwish moved abroad as a kid, spending most of his life in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The pious and intimidating 27-year-old returned to Lackawanna in 1998, where he became the angry conscience of the Muslim community. From the Yemeni owner of the Holland Street deli who sold pork — considered an unclean food in Islam — to the younger men who went out clubbing, Derwish chastised his brethren for straying from the righteous path.

He led independent study groups at the mosque, taught at an Islamic school on weekends. “He was looking for guys who are sincere, devout Muslims,” a defense source says. “He told them that every Muslim has an obligation to be ready if Islam is attacked.” Derwish recruited the Six and told them “about this place in Pakistan which would be a place for them to go learn about the Islamic religion,” Albanah says. “Here in America we’ve got religion, but it’s not a good religion. They could learn more back home.”

Taher’s attorney, Rodney Personius, says his client “went there because he was brainwashed, shamed and guilted by Derwish. He believed he had to do this in order to cleanse himself of his past sins and prepare for Allah.” Those sins, Personius says, included drinking and partying, not praying enough and, worst of all, having a child out of wedlock with his non-Muslim common-law wife, Nicole Frick. Derwish slammed him for that and “Yasein bought it — hook, line and sinker.”

At least one other recruiter worked with Derwish — a mysterious figure from Indiana identified previously only as “Juma.” According to one source close to the investigation, his full name is Juma Muhammad Abdul Latif al Dosar. Known as Abdullah Juma at the Lackawanna Mosque, where he led prayers a couple of times, he said he and Derwish were old friends, that they’d fought together in Bosnia defending Muslims.

Juma, Personius says, was brought in to close the deal, get the Six to travel abroad for training on how to defend Islam.

No one should be surprised to learn that in 1998, al-Qaida was recruiting in the United States. Law enforcement officials assert that bin Laden had been trying since the ’80s to get American Muslims to join his jihad, and not without success. Egyptian-born former U.S. Army Sgt. Ali Mohamed was jailed for helping to plan the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224. Former Silicon Valley car salesman Khalid Abu-al-Dahab, currently serving time in an Egyptian prison, is credited with recruiting 10 or more Americans into al-Qaida. In 1995, the two smuggled Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s chief deputy, into the U.S. for fund-raising. Around then, bin Laden’s former personal secretary, Wadih el-Hage — since convicted of perjury and conspiracy in the embassy bombings — obtained U.S. citizenship and recruited in Texas, Oregon and Florida.

Since 9/11, the government has intensified its search. On April 14, Earnest James Ujaama of Seattle pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to provide goods and services — computer software — to the Taliban. Last July, authorities arrested former Chicago gang member and Muslim covert Jose Padilla, alleged to have conspired to detonate a so-called dirty bomb. In August, four Arab men near Detroit with fraudulent passports were charged as members of a “sleeper operational combat cell.” In October, four Portland, Ore., residents — one a member of the U.S. Army Reserves — were accused of trying to travel to an Afghan terrorist training camp after the 9/11 attacks.

Dr. Rohan Gunaratna, author of “Inside al-Qaeda: Global Network of Terror,” tells Salon that throughout the 1990s, al-Qaida recruiters favored areas where Muslim immigrants live — North Jersey, Brooklyn, Dearborn. “The threat is of those individuals that have gone through those training camps since 1996 that have scattered around the world,” Dale Watson, a former FBI counter-terrorism official told the Senate last September. “Where are those people? Are they living in Texas? Are they living in Montana?” Up to 100 recruits may still be living in the United States, terrorism experts say.

Once Derwish assembled the Six, he put up thousands of dollars to fund their travel to Pakistan, Personius says, though a law enforcement source says that the money trail is still being investigated. In March 2001, Shafal Mosed, 25, one of the best goalies in Lackawanna High history, visited a travel agent to order airline tickets to Lahore, Pakistan, for himself, Faysal Galab, 27, and Taher; all three later paid with cash — $1,309.20 apiece.

Taher ran into his uncle, Abdul Noman, the day of their flight, April 28, 2001. “I’m going to study the Islamic religion,” he said.

“Allah be with you,” Noman replied.

Mohamed Albanna — the father of Galab’s fiancée, Aisha, and the vice president of the local chapter of the American Muslim Council — says he found out about the trip at the last minute, and he wasn’t happy. “Their language barrier wasn’t going to be beneficial for them to learn anything religiously,” Albanna says. “And I personally wasn’t thrilled because my daughter just had a baby and he [Galab] was leaving her with two kids, which is not the right thing to do. Having said that, if they want to make a religious trip, they’re entitled to it.”

Mosed, Galab, and Taher flew from New York to Lahore. About a week later, they were contacted by an emissary from Derwish who took them to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

On May 12, the other three — Alwan, al-Bakri, Yahya Goba, 26, plus a seventh man from the neighborhood, Jaber Elbaneh, 36, a nephew of Mohamed Albanna — flew to Quetta, Pakistan, where they met Derwish. They, too, then traveled to Kandahar.

In both places, missionary Islamist scholars of Tablighi Jamaat lectured them — about prayers, but also teaching more extremist dogma like the al-Qaida view of Muslim struggles in the Palestinian territories, its stand against Kashmir, and justifications for suicide bombings. They watched a videotape about the bombing of the USS Cole. All six eventually traveled southwest of Kandahar, to the al-Farooq training camp.

Much of the al-Qaida recruitment video shown on cable news channels after 9/11 was filmed at al-Farooq. Terrorists in training fired Kalashnikov rifles at pictures of then-President Clinton, ran obstacle courses, blew things up. “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh arrived at the camp just as the Lackawanna Six were leaving. Months before, two Saudi recruits, Wail al-Shehri and Abdulaziz al-Omeri, trained there before tackling their final task — propelling American Airlines flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

The Lackawanna Six were there before 9/11. Nonetheless, Alwan had misgivings, he said in a court statement. “After realizing the crazy, radical mentality of the people at the camp,” on the fifth day of training he decided he wanted out. Crying, he asked a guard if he could leave but was rebuffed. He couldn’t leave without permission; the camp was “out in the wilderness” and he wouldn’t “know where to go or how to return to Kandahar or any place else,” he said in the statement. He faked an ankle injury. On his 10th day there he was released, riding in a pickup truck to Kandahar, where he stayed in a guest house for two days before taking a minivan to Quetta.

Something else happened in Kandahar, however, which Alwan didn’t readily admit.

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Last summer, a member of Lackawanna’s Yemeni community wrote to the FBI’s Buffalo office expressing concern about the trip the Six had taken the previous year. In July, federal authorities interviewed Mosed and Taher; they acknowledged having studied religion in Pakistan but denied traveling to Afghanistan. But U.S. intelligence agencies began conducting surveillance on them, discovering that Mukhtar al-Bakri was in Bahrain to prepare for his arranged marriage and that he kept in touch with Derwish in Yemen via e-mail. The authorities knew Derwish was a terrorist. Was al-Bakri one, too? They wanted to find out.

“Goodbye,” al-Bakri said in a tapped phone call to a friend before his Sept. 10, 2002, wedding. “You won’t be hearing from me again.”

Concerned by what sounded to authorities like a pre-jihad farewell, intelligence agents began reviewing his file. On July 18 he’d sent an e-mail to a friend in Buffalo:

Subject: The Big Meal

How are you, my beloved? Allah willing, you are fine. I would like to remind you of obeying Allah and keeping him in your heart because the next meal will be very huge. No one will be able to withstand it except those of faith. There are people here who had visions and their visions were explained that this thing will be very strong. No one will be able to bear it.

Alarmed, intelligence shared the information; even the Oval Office was briefed. Now cooperating with the government, Lindh said that at al-Farooq he’d heard talk about a group from Buffalo. Some in the FBI wanted more time to build their case, but, using post-9/11 reasoning, Ashcroft pressured the feds to take action before it was too late.

Al-Bakri had been married only a matter of hours when Bahraini authorities — acting on a request from Washington — arrested him. They “kicked in the door, ran him to the ground, beat him and threw him in prison,” his attorney later complained. His new wife burst into tears.

One day later, officials from the FBI’s Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, legal attache arrived at al-Bakri’s Bahrain prison. They asked about his e-mail alluding to “the big meal”; he said that he was just passing on remarks he’d heard during a trip to Saudi Arabia.

And the phone call about dropping out of sight forever? He was just submerging himself into the world of a married man, he insisted.

But though he at first denied having gone to Afghanistan in 2001, al-Bakri soon broke, admitting their trip to al-Farooq, their training with al-Qaida. At the camp he’d been assigned a code name — “Abu Omar Alyafei” — and was trained in the use of handguns, long-range rifles and Kalashnikov assault rifles.

At once, back in Buffalo, FBI Agent Ed Needham — one of about 70 agents in the local office — paid a visit to Sahim Alwan, whom he knew from the investigation and from Alwan’s call before leaving for Mecca. Once he’d heard what al-Bakri had said, Alwan admitted the trip as well. With that, the FBI and local police began making arrests. It was a huge story. Al-Bakri was flown home and charged within hours.

Prosecutors were confident they could convict the Lackawanna Six of violating a 1996 law against providing material support to a terrorist group, but they wanted to build a stronger case. Searches of the suspects’ homes yielded audiotapes containing anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli rhetoric, an unlicensed .22-caliber handgun, a stun gun, evidence of the use of aliases. Mosed had told police that he only had around a thousand dollars to his name, but at his home cops found $6,400. At Nicole Frick’s apartment was a nine-page document about suicide operations, stating that “the objective is to kill as many of the enemy as possible, and he will almost certainly die.” Suicide bombing is the preferred method to fight infidels, the booklet stated: “No other technique7strikes as much terror into their hearts.”

Defense attorneys argue that the tapes reference common points of Muslim culture, and in any event are legal. The $6,400 found in Mosed’s house belonged to his wife, his lawyer says. Taher’s nine-page document, Personius says, is simply a scholarly treatise on suicide bombing in Chechnya.

The government later acknowledged overreaching on one matter. Prosecutors removed remarks taken from the tape of “Koranic Recitations” as evidence of malicious intent. Such a charge, after all, could be made against anyone with a Koran.

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Recently, I walked around three successive Lackawanna streets — Wilkesbarre Street, Holland Avenue and Ingham Avenue — where five of the Six lived. Of the residents who agree to speak to me — and many don’t, claiming not to speak English (though “no comment” rolls off the tongue) — there are two common themes. One is that the government has invented the entire case in order to persecute Muslims. “It’s a scam,” says Mohamed Abdul-Jabar Alshish, 16, tossing a football with his friends outside the Lackawanna Mosque. “They’re really good kids,” says Saleh, who won’t tell me his last name. Is it persecution of Muslims? “That’s what I think, yes.”

The other argument you hear accepts the trip as fact, but insists the men were hoodwinked and harmless. “They attended the camp by mistake,” says Abdul Noman, 40, Taher’s uncle. “They went there, and then they realized it’s not right, so they came back. When Yasein came back, he told me that he’d never appreciated this country more.” They’d gone to learn about Islam and how to defend Islam in Bosnia, Chechnya, the Palestinian territories — not how to kill Americans. “It’s unfair,” seconds Saleh Mohamed, a hospital employee. They never “had the intention of harming human beings.”

Others from the area — non-Muslims, primarily — view it differently. “Certain things occur to you after this happened,” says Judy Chmielowiec, who lives across the street from Taher, her sons’ former classmate. “They always had $30,000 cars. We’re working three jobs and we can’t afford that.” (Taher’s brother owned an Infiniti, but he’s facing drug-trafficking charges, which may explain suspicious income.)

While the mothers of the defendants are “in denial” about their sons confessed deeds — according to Dr. Khalid Qazi, chairman of the Western New York chapter of the American Muslim Council — the trip to the camp is undisputed. At 3 a.m. there was the wake-up; 4 a.m., prayers; 5 a.m., physical fitness; 6:30 a.m., breakfast followed by nap; 8:30 a.m. to 11:30, military lecture; 1 p.m., lunch followed by prayer, then cleanup. Military instruction: mountain climbing, handguns, rifles, Kalashnikovs, the puttylike plastic explosive C-4 — used in the bombing of the USS Cole, a version of which “shoe bomber” Richard Reid tried to ignite. Dinner, prayer, bed. It seems that five of the Six — minus the injured Alwan — performed guard duty.

Though their trip preceded 9/11, bin Laden was already a dangerous enemy of the U.S., responsible for the bombing of the Cole and the embassies in Africa. And he came to al-Farooq to speak. Speaking to all 200 or so recruits there, bin Laden espoused anti-U.S. and anti-Israel rhetoric. He lauded suicide attacks as a legitimate tool against the enemy and claimed responsibility for the embassy bombings. And he promised more: 50 members of al-Qaida had been sent to attack America.

Taher didn’t understand the Arabic bin Laden was speaking, so others told him what he had said. Some things got through to him, however; according to Taher’s plea agreement, “one trainee at the camp asked for volunteers to sign up for suicide missions.”

Upon their return, the Six didn’t tell any of the authorities any of this. They claim to have ceased contact with that world.

But Juma stayed with Yahya Goba until right after 9/11, when he went to Afghanistan to fight the Americans.

In September 2002, assistant U.S. Attorney William Hochul mocked the defendants’ pleas of helplessness. “‘I was duped, I was going to Pakistan, all of a sudden I was going to Afghanistan,’” he said in a bail hearing. “They get back to the United States — do they say anything?”

Some see more simple human frailty in their reticence. “I think it would be difficult to come forward and say, ‘You know, I was with the most wanted terrorist in the world,’” says the AMC’s Qazi. “When you realize you’ve made a major blunder you don’t necessarily go around telling people about it,” agrees Patrick Brown, attorney for Shafal Mosed.

Still, the question remains: As the prosecution put it in one of their first filings last fall, “Why do a group of young Yemeni Americans, born and brought up in Lackawanna, New York, and, in the majority of cases married with children, suddenly leave their otherwise unremarkable lives to spend six to seven weeks in a terrorist training camp, then quietly slip back into roles of middle-class Americans?”

But there seemed enough gray area for Magistrate Judge Kenneth Schroeder to grant Alwan his request for bail last fall, swayed by Alwan’s early exit from the camp and anti-al-Qaida statements. But that all changed on Jan. 10, 2003, when another one of the Six — used-car salesman Faysal Galab — entered into a plea agreement with the government.

Galab copped to the different crime of “contributing funds and services to specially designated terrorists, in violation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act” — having paid cash for a green uniform — but not the “providing material support” charge leveled against the others. “It’s the same as if he brought back cigars from Cuba,” insists Joseph LaTona, his attorney. “He wasn’t planning, plotting or scheming in any way.”

Galab had some interesting news about at least one of his pals. One of the Lackawanna Six had had a private face-to-face with bin Laden: Sahim Alwan.

Alwan’s bail offer was immediately revoked.

In fact, Alwan had spoken with bin Laden twice, in two different Kandahar guesthouses: in May 2001, on his way to al-Farooq, and in a private meeting after leaving the camp in June. According to an account from Alwan’s attorney, James Harrington, at the latter meeting the two sat on the floor. Bin Laden asked Alwan what Muslims in the U.S. thought of “martyrdom operations.” Alwan said it wasn’t something Americans much thought about.

A long pause.

“How are your brothers doing at the camp?” bin Laden asked. All right, he replied.

“Why are you leaving?” bin Laden asked. Alwan said he missed his family.

Bin Laden was surprisingly soft-spoken, he thought.

“Bin Laden wanted Alwan to reconsider and continue training at the camp, and Alwan told him he couldn’t,” said Harrington. He denied that Alwan hid anything from investigators; no one ever asked if he’d met with bin Laden. Harrington even tried to cast the meeting with bin Laden as evidence of Alwan’s allegiance to the United States. “Despite the pressure of a face-to-face meeting with one of the most powerful and negatively influential men in the world, Mr. Alwan continued home from Afghanistan and was not swayed,” Harrington said to the court.

Galab was just the first of the Six to act on his fear of additional charges the government might file — especially as an “enemy combatant” held without trial, the right to an attorney, or necessarily even a formal charge. Lawanda Albanah says that her cousin Aisha, who’s engaged to Galab, told her that Galab’s attorney pressured him to enter into the agreement. LaTona, the attorney, disputes this.

Mosed pleaded guilty on March 24. Goba did the same on March 25.

“Look,” says Brown, Mosed’s attorney, “there was an executive order by President Clinton saying they were not supposed to go, so they ought to take their lumps for it. But that doesn’t make them terrorists.”

Alwan pleaded guilty on April 8. He also admitted having delivered two videotapes about the bombing of the Cole from the Kandahar guesthouse to an al-Qaida associate in Pakistan

Taher pleaded guilty on May 12. Al-Bakri — the one whose confession set the dominoes in motion — will be the last one to fall, as he’s scheduled to plead guilty today. All should receive sentences between seven and 10 years in prison.

Recruiter Kamal Derwish might be able to shed light on exactly what the Lackawanna Six were planning, if anything, but his testimony won’t be forthcoming. On Nov. 3, 2002, he was on a remote Yemen highway with the head of al-Qaida’s Yemen operations, long wanted in connection with the attack on the USS Cole.

An unmanned CIA Predator aircraft took aim. A Hellfire missile was fired. Direct hit. Everyone was killed.

Rumors swirl that Juma was arrested in Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom and is currently being held in Guatánamo Bay, which the Defense Department will not confirm. Mohamed Albanna — uncle of Jaber Elbaneh, the seventh man — says that he hasn’t heard from his nephew since he left for the camp in 2001. (Mohamed Albanna has his own troubles, of course. In December he and two relatives were arrested as part of “Operation Green Quest,” the federal crackdown on the illegal money-transfer systems in the Muslim world known as hawalas. The three are alleged to have sent almost $500,000 illegally to Yemen.)

After all this probing and confession, it seems nothing short of remarkable that the question still stands: Were the Lackawanna Six an al-Qaida cell? “You can see that they were not an immediate and a direct threat to the United States because they were not ‘missioned,’” al-Qaida expert Gunaratna says after reviewing their case for Salon. “But the very fact that they have been trained and the very fact that they have been in that environment would make them a potential risk.”

“There are several thousands of people like this,” Gunaratna says. “They have come to the West and they have not been given a mission.” But that doesn’t necessarily matter, he says. “There need not be a direct order. The environment itself could motivate any one of them to go and do something.”

“These guys couldn’t even organize a picnic,” counters Noman, Taher’s uncle.

Even with all the plea agreements, defense attorneys point out that the 1996 law in question that their clients violated — providing material support by providing “personnel” in the form of their own person — has yet to be reconciled by the courts. It was ruled unconstitutional in California but passed muster in a Virginia courtroom during the trial of Walker Lindh. The law could be tested, but that would require years and a client willing to put himself through an extended period of uncertainty.

In his plea agreement, Alwan told the government that a second group from Lackawanna was considering a trip to al-Farooq. The government has yet to name any in this second group, though Alwan’s attorney says that they didn’t actually make the trip. Still, prosecutors made sure to point out this second group; could they be charged with planning to go? “I certainly don’t think so,” Harrington says, “but who knows with this administration.”

A Justice Department source says that unsatisfying resolutions like that of the Six are the future of terrorism prosecutions. “There is a predisposition not to wait a build a case the way it used to be done,” the source says. Now there’s a “prevention paradigm — it’s Ashcroft specific and Ashcroft driven.”

The moment law enforcement has enough evidence to arrest and detain, it will. “What that means is sometimes the cases aren’t as strong as if we had waited another five and six months to gather other types of evidence, particularly electronic evidence,” the source says. “We really don’t want to wait until these people are about to fly a plane into a building.”