Adam Gadahn, captured or not, is only the tip of the American terrorist iceberg

By Chuck Frank / chuck@theklaxon.com / 03.08.2010

Updated on: 03.08.10 at 12:42 pm

Adam Gadahn has been reported captured and not captured by every wire service on the planet. Gadahn is the grandson of a prominent Jewish urologist, raised in California, death metal devotee and current public relations flack for the Osama drama video production company.

But why is it that no one agency said they really caught him?

Look no further than another disgruntled child of affluence, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka the Christmas Day underwear bomber. Following this incident, authorities were able to question him for 50 minutes before Eric Holder and company swept in to save the American Constitution by mirandizing this clown.

Once Abdulmutallab lawyered up, we were assured by the Department of Justice that he (facilitated by his defense attorney) just gushed valuable and incriminated information.

As a result, any hard-working intelligence officer who may need more than 50 minutes of “sharing time” with enemies of the state, just couldn’t seem to officially identify who had been caught.

Reports out of Pakistan now are saying the man in custody is Abu Yahya Mjadin Adam, though no other details out of Islamabad are being discussed.

One thing is certain, though, while our “bought for billions” friends in Pakistan are questioning whoever has been detained, it may be a painful interval before the DOJ can rescue us from “old school” interrogation techniques that may provide names, places, dates, plans and specific times, but are frowned upon in Oslo.

Gadahn is only the tip of the iceberg. A new report prepared for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has disclosed that as many as three dozen Americans, recently released from jail where they all became budding linguists and could not wait to travel to Yemen to study the Arabic language, have gone missing.

Another group of ten preceded them and found language studies so enthralling that they all married Yemeni girls and have disappeared from the prying eyes of the Great Satan in order to master all of the difficult Yemeni idioms.

The Chairman of  the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said in reference to al-Qaeda, “The group seeks to recruit American citizens to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States. These Americans are not necessarily of Arab or South Asian descent; they include individuals who converted to Islam in prison or elsewhere and were radicalized.”

The Obama Administration has stated that they have no idea how many Americans have traveled to the Middle East for cultural studies, disappeared from view, still hold legal passports and may present a difficult to discern, blond-haired and blue-eyed threat as returning terrorists. They fear that the total number is “great.” Great?

There is something fearfully wrong with our culture when young American men cannot find a group to identify with, until they become so angry and disenfranchised that they can only find meaning in murder disguised as a noble cause.

Whether it is Columbine or al-Qaeda, Virginia Tech or Fort Hood, the lines have become so blurred for these folks that they are ripe for the picking when any group decides to harvest them with the promise of meaning, belonging, adventure and the chance to deliver the sword of retribution for all of the pain they could not process productively.

Through the yawning maw of the Internet, young men who have not found a social network to plug into can find a home through reading Jihad Recollections magazine, a snazzy, upscale webzine published in North Carolina and full of “Osama Wants You” vitriol for the angry young man.

Or, if one is contemplating studying language arts in Yemen, this al-Qaeda training manual will serve as a good primer in preparation for your trip abroad: FAS.

Abdulmutallab went to Yemen for Arabic language studies. The fact that he already was fluent was not a cause for suspicion? He may have been memorizing idioms with many of these American converts when he was there—right before his Christmas trip to Detroit.  They all may have been in underwear class together. He and his defense attorney have probably shared everything he knows about the Idiomatic Institute for Infidels in Yemen. We may never know the many things he could tell us about these American terrorists and their homecoming plans.

The one bright spot over the past 48 hours, however, has been the outspoken voice of American Muslim leaders in Los Angeles and Detroit, speaking out against Gadahn and his most recent video message encouraging Muslims serving in the U.S. military to follow the example of Maj. Nidal Hassan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter, and come up with creative ways to murder their fellow soldiers in the name of Allah.

These folks have found value in America as an imperfect place of promise, where their dreams of a better life can be realized through hard work and outspoken support for all of the freedoms we hold so dear.

In the mean time, common sense being incredibly uncommon these days, one is left to be his or her own first line of defense. Every single incident of domestic terror has had plenty of up-front clues that nobody nearby thought to mention.

“Seemed like a nice enough guy” won’t cut it anymore. People must pay attention and speak up when things they observe do not make sense. If someone has a blond-haired, blue-eyed cousin with a sudden passion to speak Arabic, fine. If he has been attending a local mosque, great. If he has been working out twice a day and making pipe bombs in the garage, that’s the first clue.