11 May 2014

The Terror Camp That Wasn’t

Were these 160 acres of Oregon farmland a jihadist training ground, or an elaborate scam?
By PHIL HIRSCHKORN 
May 07, 2014

On a fall weekend in 1999, James Ujaama drove his station wagon eight hours from the Seattle-Tacoma area to a rural, southern Oregon outpost he imagined could become a money-making training camp for “military-style combat.” Only Muslims need apply.

Born a Catholic as James Thompson, Ujaama had converted to the Muslim faith only three years earlier, as a 31-year-old. He became enamored with an extreme strain of the religion preached by the likes of al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden and a fiery cleric with an international following in London, Mustafa Kamel Mustafa, better known as Abu Hamza el-Masri, a nom de guerre reflecting his country of origin, Egypt.

Fifteen years ago, Ujaama traveled to Bly, Oregon, in a convoy of cars carrying about a dozen men from his Seattle house of worship, the Dar us Salaam mosque. On a 160-acre plot dotted with juniper trees – the nearest city was Klamath Falls – Ujaama saw potential: Rugged land with mountains and trees like Afghanistan. Ample space for Arabian horses to roam. Fishing, hunting and archery. A working farm. Sheep, goats, and cattle grazing. Self-defense training in martial arts and firing Second Amendment-protected weapons. Freely reciting the Quran. Listening to tapes of Abu Hamza’s lectures. To hear Ujaama and others who were there describe it, you might picture a Muslim kibbutz.

“It is 100% legal, and so are all of our activities,” Ujaama wrote in a fax spicing up the above details to Abu Hamza that October. “Our group is young, strong, and desirous.”

According to federal prosecutors now trying to convict Abu Hamza in Manhattan federal court, the Egyptian-born cleric backed the scheme. He allegedly sent two close aides, Oussama Kassir and Haroon Aswat, to check it out. In November 1999, the pair flew to New York and then rode Greyhound across the country.

Abu Hamza’s backing was crucial. “He would be the star attraction and attract others,” Ujaama testified last week.

Ujaama drafted a flyer to be posted in Abu Hamza’s home base, the Finsbury Park Mosque, a notorious incubator for radical Islamists, in London: “Get away from dunia [earthly matters] and be among Muslims!” it said. Cost: 660 British pounds sterling, or around $1,100, including airfare.

“Abu Hamza’s views on the physical jihad training was that it’s obligatory — every Muslim should engage in it,” Ujaama told the jury.

The conspiracy to establish a terrorist training camp on the U.S. mainland is the central accusation in an 11-count indictment that could land Abu Hamza, 56, in U.S. prison for the rest of his life. He already spent six years in British prison for inciting murder and following his 2004 indictment, he fought extradition until October 2012. The first time Abu Hamza set foot on U.S. soil he was wearing handcuffs. “The war against terrorism,” Attorney General John Ashcroft said at the time of the indictment, “is a war where innocent lives are endangered not only by the terrorist who carries the bomb, but by those who recruit and equip the terrorists.”

The government, which rested its case Wednesday, has also tried to prove that Abu Hamza had direct involvement in a 1998 hostage-taking in Yemen that left four Western tourists dead, and that he directly supported al Qaeda and the Taliban by sending followers to Afghanistan.

James Ujaama in 1991. | AP Photo

“Abu Hamza did not just talk the talk, he walked the walk,” Assistant United States Attorney Edward Kim asserted in the government’s opening statement. “Abu Hamza was not just a preacher of religion, he was a trainer of terrorists.”

Abu Hamza’s prosecution is the second major terrorism case this year in New York following the March jury conviction of ex-al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith, who will be sentenced in September. Since coming to office in 2009, the Obama administration counts more than 165 successful prosecutions of terrorism-related defendants. The tally includes hapless pretenders who were lured by informants beyond just talk, like the four men from Newburgh, New York, who targeted a pair of Bronx synagogues with fake car bombs.

More importantly, the record covers dangerous lone wolves such as failed Taliban-trained Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, would-be martyrs like thwarted Detroit-bound Yemen-supplied underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and foiled NYC subway attacker Najibullah Zazi, as well as several Minnesota men who went to Somalia to support Al-Shabaab, the group behind last year’s bloody Kenya mall attack.


An aerial view of the campground in Bly, Oregon. | United States Attorney, SDNY

Since 9/11, including the George W. Bush years, there have been more than 500 terrorism-related convictions by guilty plea or jury verdict in civilian federal courts, with dozens of foreign suspects among them. By comparison, there have been only a handful of convictions in the controversial military commissions at Guantanamo Bay, whose Washington, D.C.-style gridlock leaves the dozen most serious suspects there and some 75 detainees cleared for release in legal limbo—a contrast advocates of federal criminal trials, including Attorney General Eric Holder, have sought to play up. “While our military courts remain an appropriate venue in certain circumstances, decisions on how best to seek convictions against terrorism defendants must always be based on prosecutorial considerations, never political ones,” Holder told reporters in New York last month. “We can have full confidence that our federal court system is equal to any challenge.”

In his mind, Ujaama thought the Bly camp could support the Taliban with front-line trainees. In reality, the “terror ranch” was only a concept. Nothing had been done to prepare it. The only dwellings, a mile from the road, were two trailers.

In one trailer lived Ujaama’s friend Semi Osman, a prayer leader at the Seattle mosque, and his wife, Angelica Morris. It was Osman who had first told Ujaama about the property. At 21, Morris had converted to Islam and married Osman. Now 38, she was the trial’s first witness last month, appearing with a leopard print tattoo on her forehead and several piercings on her face. She said the visitors from London, Kassir and Aswat, had told her they were sent by “the sheikh” (Abu Hamza) to train “brothers” for “jihad.”

But there was no stockpile of weapons and nothing under construction, according to Morris and Eva Hatley, who lived in the other trailer with her husband, the shepherding farmer who owned the land. Hatley, who raised horses, told the court that aside from the trailers there was only a small metal barn and a tool shed.

Hatley, a soft-spoken middle-aged woman with long white hair drawn back in a ponytail, said her dreams for Bly had been very different from Ujaama’s.

“I wanted to have a teaching farm,” she testified. Growing and canning vegetables was her thing, not hosting a jihad camp.

Hatley said Kassir, the Abu Hamza acolyte who came to Bly with his wife and child, claimed to have run training camps in Afghanistan and described himself as “a hit man for Osama bin Laden.” Kassir dressed in black and carried a rifle most of the time. “He said America was the Great Satan, an evil place,” Hatley testified. At the end of 1999, Hatley left Bly and her husband.

The men who visited Bly with Ujaama on three weekends in the fall of 1999 brought their own pistols, shotguns and assault rifles. They drew circles on a cardboard box to do target shooting in a ravine. One of the weekend warriors, David Smith, told the court he considered the trip merely a weekend retreat, not jihad training.


Abu Hamza preaching in London. | United States Attorney, SDNY

“It was never discussed verbally,” the bow-tie wearing Smith testified under cross examination. “Not amongst us, no.”

Some wives and children made the trip, including Smith’s wife. The men sat around like cub scouts, as he put it. No night patrols. “We were supposed to do guard duty, but we were lazy,” Smith said. Their biggest fear was coyotes, which threatened the livestock.

Like Ujaama, both Bly wives, Morris and Hatley, have been cooperating witnesses for more than a decade. All three have earned more than $100,000 from the government for their assistance, and the unemployed Ujaama still receives a $2,000-per-month stipend.

Ujaama’s exaggerations to Abu Hamzaabout Bly—“We are all stock-piling weapons and ammunition….We are planning to build a mosque on the land,” he had written—comport with his reputation in the Seattle mosque as a spinner of tall tales, like the one about his riding a helicopter with bin Laden in Afghanistan. No one ever saw a picture of the two together.

Still, Ujaama was no innocent. He had gone to Afghanistan himself in 1998 for “jihad training.” In 1999, he moved to London, lived in the Finsbury Park Mosque, and edited the English-language website for Abu Hamza’s group, Supporters of Shariah (meaning Islamic law), which published screeds denouncing U.S. foreign policy and missives like Bin Laden’s “declaration of war” on America, complete with a note that S.O.S. “totally agrees with the context of this statement.” S.O.S. and Abu Hamza called for violently expelling U.S. and British troops from Muslim lands.


A trailer in the Bly camp. | United States Attorney, SDNY

Ujaama described his relationship then with Abu Hamza as “very close.” When he returned home, Ujaama sold tapes of Abu Hamza’s lectures at the now-defunct Seattle mosque and did a series of odd jobs around town. But after those three weekend trips, he never returned to Bly. Soon afterward, Kassir and Aswat were gone, but they spent time around the Seattle mosque before returning to Europe. Kassir had been upset at what he saw in Bly—no weapons, no recruits. “Very threatening and aggressive. He got in my face and began to point his finger at me,” Ujaama said in court this week.

Nonetheless, five years ago in the same courthouse, testimony by the same government witnesses helped convict Kassir of conspiring to establish a terror training camp in Bly. He is now serving a life sentence at the “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado. The United States is seeking to extradite Aswat from British custody.

As for Ujaama, Abu Hamza’s defense team tried to paint him as a jihad profiteer banking on his mentor’s endorsement to generate a flow of fee-paying Muslim brothers not permitted to possess guns in the U.K.

The jury will decide whether Abu Hamza bought in. He began testifying in his own defense Wednesday. “It was not a terrorist camp. There was no training going on here,” his defense attorney Jeremy Schneider told me outside court on the first day of trial. “It was a place where Muslims went to shoot guns and ride horses.”

But the jury has seen the evidence of Abu Hamza disciples going to Afghanistan for paramilitary training—shoe bombers Richard Reid and Saajid Badat, Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, and alleged Taliban fighter Feroz Abassi, who ended up at Guantanamo for three years until being repatriated to Britain.

Ujaama pleaded guilty to federal charges in 2003 and spent six years in prison before he was released on bail in 2010. He still faces the possibility of 30 years in prison for what he tried to organize in Bly. But his continued cooperation makes that unlikely.

Other than continuing to help the government prove events that occurred in the Oregon woods 15 years ago, Ujaama testified that he cannot find steady work. He said, “Because I’ve been labeled a terrorist.”

Phil Hirschkorn is a New York-based journalist and a fellow at the Center for National Security at Fordham University Law School. He has covered al Qaeda trials for 15 years.

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