The camp wasn’t a bust. It was a threat. Why weren’t you told?
For years we’ve been told efforts to set up the Bly, Oregon terrorist training camp went nowhere. It fizzled. It was a failure. Now, in stories about the conviction and sentencing of Abu Hamza al-Masri, I read in fact ‘car loads’ of jihadis converged upon the ranch of a woman–a Muslim convert–who turned her place over to the terrorists.
Al- Masri, a British citizen, is the notorious former Finsbury Park imam who funded terrorists, kidnappings and other forms of murderous jihad.
Here’s what the New York Post wrote about the Eva Hatley’s testimony:
But US-born Muslim convert Eva Hatley testified in Manhattan federal court Tuesday [April 2014] that after the “carloads’’ of fellow Muslims she met through her mosque arrived at the 160-acre ranch in Bly in 1999, the couple watched helplessly as their home was turned into an al Qaeda training camp.
“It wasn’t anything like I envisioned for the property,” insisted Hatley, testifying at the trial of one-eyed, hook-handed hate preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri.
Hatley, a two-time witness-protection-program flunky who prefers going by her Muslim name, Ayat Hakimah, said other Muslims from London would soon arrive on al-Masri’s orders.
Failure? Really?
Hatley said one of the arrivals, militant Oussama Kassir, boasted about previously running training camps in Afghanistan and being a “hit man” for Osama bin Laden.
She said Kassir told her that al-Masri was his “leader” and that al-Masri sent him and others to the Bly ranch to create a “training camp” where men would learn to shoot guns, throw knives and do calisthenics along open, spacious fields abutting a ravine and desolate dirt roads.
“He said he was there to train men for jihad,” she said. “He said that Abu Hamza sent him. He intended to train them to fight.”
I’d like to ask what constitutes a failure in any of this? Foreign nationals, possibly illegal aliens, converge upon a property, take it over, and train jihadis IN OREGON. Sounds like a SUCCESSFUL training camp to me. Perhaps it was short lived, but up to now, the description of the the Bly, Oregon operation has been that it simply never got off the ground, no one was trained and little harm was done except scare to the heck out of people after the fact. Now we discover that wasn’t true. At all.
She added that some had CDs with information on how to make poisons to “kill people” and regularly “talked” about “robbing and killing truck drivers” on nearby roads.
Kassir, she recalled, claimed there were plans to eventually dig a hillside compound at the ranch for al-Masri to hide out in.
“I was shocked,” said Hatley, who claims she fled the ranch in fear in December 1999, four months after moving in.
Now granted, she is a bit of a weirdo and twice got booted out of the witness protection program. That’s right, home girl there was in the witness protection program. Why? Because she knew the people running a TERRORIST TRAINING CAMP IN OREGON, that’s why.
The UK Daily Mail reports:
However one arrival, a militant man named Oussama Kassir, told a particularly terrifying campfire story, boasting of running training camps in Afghanistan and acting as a ‘hit man’ for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.
…A Lebanese-born Swede, in 2009 he was convicted of plotting to help al-Qaeda build a weapons-training post at the ranch as well as distributing terror training manuals online to help recruit new members.
Kassir claimed at the time that al-Masri was his ‘leader’ and that he had been recruited by hm to the Bly Ranch to create a new training camp where the terrorist group’s future foot soldiers could learn to shoot, throw knives, and use the open fields to practice calisthenics.
In some of the most willfully ignorant and gullible reporting I’ve seen in quite some time, the Zero said the training camp was a big bust, indeed, it was a scam:
What emerges from the trial record is an almost comic account of passwords, night patrols and target practice. Jihad, it seems, couldn’t take root alongside the sagebrush and weeds that greeted Kassir.
Kassir recently was sentenced to life in prison for his effort, and his two partners in the enterprise are awaiting extradition to the U.S.
The whole set up was in fact a hustle by a petty crook from Seattle named James Ujaama.
Weird. The Feds didn’t think having ‘carloads’ of jihadis coming into train — seriously or not–was a big nothing burger or a hustle.
Then the paper reported on the bad actors involved in the ranch.
Kassir and Aswat took refuge in a Seattle mosque and tried taking the training to the Muslims who hadn’t wanted to move to Bly.
After a few classes, the men from London gave up and packed their bags for home. Kassir explained his exasperation to Osman.
“I’ve been trying to train these brothers,” Kassir said. “They’re not taking it seriously.”
The Oregonian purposely tried to minimize the seriousness of the real and potential threat from this camp. I suppose they’d take it seriously when–what?–a cell from the camp had successfully carried out jihad? And, how do we know people complicit in it did not. We DO know the organizers did and were very bad actors to the highest degree. They’re going to prison for life for it.
The Zero lived up to its name in coverage of this trial.
Al Masri –you know, the guy who inspired this camp in the first place– has been found guilty on eleven terrorism counts, each worth a life sentence. It’s undetermined yet in what prison he’ll spend the rest of his life.
If he is sentenced to the supermax in Florence, Colorado, he’ll join these… er … people …already locked up. See my story on this for Independent Journal Review here. Note the bad guys who are scheduled to get out in the next few years. I’m sure they’ll be trade bait for President Obama in the future. Watch.
