Al Qaeda training camp? Try Cub Scout camp!
One-eyed, hook-handed hate cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri is accused of running a jihadi training base in Oregon — but the terror camp was merely a place to ride horses, enjoy the scenery, nurture little lambs and tell campfire stories, his lawyer insisted in Manhattan federal court Friday.
“You went there, looked at the land, told stories?” the lawyer, Jeremy Schneider, asked the trial’s second prosecution witness.
“It’s kind of like Cub Scouts?”
“Yes,” agreed the witness, David “Suffian” Smith, a former Masri devotee who began following the crippled cleric 15 years ago in London after hearing him exhort the Islamic faithful to “run up to the nonbeliever and bite him.”
Smith testified Friday with immunity as a paid government informant, but in describing Masri’s underfunded terrorist training camp in rural Bly, Ore., he did little to help the feds’ case.
With all the accounts of sight-seeing, storytelling and animal husbandry, Scout Master Masri wound up sounding more like Webelos troop leader than a mujahedeen mastermind.
“In 1999, you went to Bly, Oregon, overnight, you said, as a kind of retreat?” the lawyer asked Smith.
“Yes,” Smith agreed.
“Most of the time you spent there was riding a horse and learning to clean sheep and lambs?” the lawyer asked.
“Yes,” Smith answered.
“But there was also target shooting?” the lawyer asked.
“Yes,” Smith agreed again.
But the target-shooting facilities were apparently not very well equipped.
At a mosque in Seattle, Smith had learned from Masri’s closest lieutenants how to field strip an AK-47 and build a silencer out of PVC pipe and steel wool, he told jurors in Manhattan federal court.
But at Oregon’s Camp Masri, things were a little slacker. When not “cleaning” lambs and riding horses, campers were reduced to sharing guns — there just weren’t enough for everyone, Smith told jurors.
“The shooting session was informal?” Masri’s lawyer asked.
“Yes,” Smith agreed.
“No one was marching and shooting?”
“No,” Smith said.
“No one was in a ‘V’ formation, right?”
“No,” he repeated.
Even guard duty had more to do with keeping varmints away from the sheep than staving off infidels.
“So the guard duty was to protect the farm animals from coyotes?” the lawyer asked.
“Yes,” Smith said.
But Camp Masri’s activities were apparently not up to the standards of its founder or his lieutenants at the camp.
On Thursday, the first prosecution witness recalled one of Masri’s henchman complaining of the lack of firearms, training programs and would-be jihadists.
“You’re a liar,” the witness, Anjelica Morris, who lived at the ranch, recalled hearing one Masri lieutenant shouting at another. “You told [Masri] there were guns here for our use. You told him there were going to be brothers to train! Men here for training jihad!”
“He was very, very unhappy,” Smith said Friday of the lieutenant he met in Seattle, Abu Abdullah. “He [Abdullah] said he was following the sheik [Masri] for a very long time, and he came here to do something and nothing was going on.”
Masri has claimed he is simply a “freedom fighter” along the lines of Nelson Mandela and George Washington.
Prosecutors counter that he conspired to support al Qaeda before and after the 9/11 attacks.
Among the preacher’s followers in London were failed shoe bomber Richard Reid and 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.