Answers are trickling in to some of the questions I was wondering about yesterday concerning Jose "Abdullah" Padilla. There's still some confusion about the timeline of his association with radical Islamism and al Qaeda. According to this article, he converted to Islam in Broward County Jail in the early '90s. He travelled to the Middle East for the first time (presumably) in 1998, and began training at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 2000.
It's still not clear when he was recruited to serve as an al Qaeda jihadi, though the article implies that it happened in the Middle East after 1998. It's possible, though, that the recruitment could have occurred in prison, or in the US after his release.
By some accounts, the conversion to Islam did not occur in jail at all. According to Broward County Sheriff Ken Jenne "there were no records of Padilla requesting to meet with an imam, attending Islamic classes or requesting a name change while incarcerated." He did, however, legally change his name to "Ibrahim" (one word) in July 1994, and married a Muslim woman under that name; divorce papers identify him as "Jose Ibrahim Padilla." (No mention, in this account, of when or how he acquired the name Abdullah al Muhajir. We are talking about the same guy here, aren't we?) A "family friend" is quoted as saying that the conversion came "after he married a Muslim woman and moved to the Middle East."
No one seems to know very much about the specific recruitment procedures, how it happens, where it happens, who is in charge, etc. Does al Qaeda in fact actively recruit disaffected criminals in US prisons and in the prisons of other Western countries like Britain? Do they or their representatives or sympathizers recruit at mosques and "Islamic centers?" Do they recruit in any systematic way at all? Or do guys like Padilla, Richard Reid, and John Walker Lindh "fall in with" the radical element by accident, through chance meetings with extremists at various Islamic meeting places? How much of this kind of terrorist "networking" occurs in this country? Did Padilla make that first trip to the Middle East intending to volunteer for terrorist training, or was he persuaded to join the cause once he got there?
How many of these recruits ("dissidents" the AP article calls them) are there?
Posted by Dr. Frank at June 11, 2002 06:23 PM | TrackBack