Shouting the famed “God is great”, the nineteen year old American kicked at FBI agents as they apprehended him in Portland Oregon’s Union Station. He was pressing a cell-phone key, maybe you can hear it in your head, pick a number one through five. The teenager is the same age I was in the second Battle for Fallujah Iraq. Reporters question his neighbors, lurking for the tell tale signs of a terrorist and there were none. The neighbors claim him to have come from a good family and seemed shocked but not quick to condemn. This is Portland Oregon USA, a bastion liberal thought and liberal arts, it is difficult for people in this land to hate anyone, even one intending to detonate an explosive device as the Christmas tree is lit in front of thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children who, when questioned by undercover FBI agents, the nineteen year old now very screwed Mohammad claimed to care less about.
I have heard nineteen year old American servicemen, including myself; express the same nonchalance toward dead foreign civilians. The story is almost always the same, “Fuck ‘em they shouldn’t have been there.” When these words escape the mouth of a young man he is saying, “You before me,” a policy I still subscribe to. For the young Mohammad there is no coming back, I would not want his poisoned brain near me or mine. If cruel and unusual punishment was the law of our land we would throw the kid in a cell with any of my brothers from the Battle of Fallujah and the work would be quick. My heart breaks at the thought of this darkness that has become us, and warms when I hear his neighbors waiting for the verdict. We are trapped in a box when the answers are so black and white. My brain says a bullet in his brain and my heart asks if this could have turned out different?
A strange thing about the strange city of Portland is that we remain the only major city in America that is not a member of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI intercepted emails from the accused to Pakistan that Mohammad had sent expressing a yearning for Jihad. The FBI played a game with Mohammad, gave him the outlet he was searching for and watched him run with it. A mosque Mohammad had frequented was burned down after his story broke on the news, because someone is very scared of Muslims. Now many Muslims are very scared of Portland and this circle of fear must have been anticipated by FBI officials. I wonder if there could have been a different approach to dealing with a young man searching for the radical, if instead of playing games, what affect could have been produced by confronting him after intercepting the emails and trying to flip him back into the world of sense. Instead of talking to undercover pretend Jihadis, could he have seen the light by being set up with an influential Imam who might have brought him back to the path of virtue? Who knows?
Now everyone is scared and as far as Mohammad goes, the way that I know him now instead of how it could have been…”Fuck him, he shouldn’t have been there.” If we are going to keep playing these games of fear, where will this get us other than where we have already been? The key to the case of Mohammad for me is the first interview that the FBI claims was recorded but that the recording had been too damaged to replay. All of the other recordings will be available for review. The scary part about that is when the nineteen year old is approached by people he thought were legitimate Jihadis, we don’t know if they told him once he began this there would be no turning back. But fuck him he shouldn’t have been there, I hear us talking about dead civilians, people who had real lives ahead of them, just like the Christmas tree people. Maybe someday there will be another way.
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