'We Really Now Have the Worst of All Possible Worlds'

Such a charming lot, these young wannabe jihadis. Maybe when they're welcomed back to the USA they can aspire to become community organizers or ACORN employees. I recommend dropping them somewhere over the Atlantic.

Pakistani police this morning showed the pictures and the U.S. passports of the five young college students from the Washington, D.C., suburbs, who authorities say had come to Pakistan to train for jihad. The men have been identified as Ramy Zamzam, Umar Farooq, Waqar Khan, Ahmad Mini, and Aman Hassan Yemer.

The authorities said the recruitment began on the web site Youtue after 20-year old Ahmad Mini praised videos that featured attacks on American troops.

According to the Pakistani interrogation report, the men ended up in a house in Sargohda in Northeast Pakistan after traveling to the country on separate flights over the Thanksgiving weekend.

They were on their way to al Qaeda strongholds in North Waziristan when they were arrested on a tip from the FBI after their families back home reported them missing.

"They had left video cassettes back there for their parents," said Usman Anwar of the Sargodha police, "that they have left for jihad and they wouldn't be back, so we suppose that they were here for some very bad activities."

The news came as a shock in the suburban communities the men had left behind.

The five are now part of a steady stream of disaffected Americans coming to Pakistan to learn how to wage jihad.

"We really now have the worst of all possible worlds," said Clark Kent Ervin, former inspector general of the Transportation Security Administration. "We have a continuing threat from what I would call Al Qaeda central, foreign terrorists. We also have, as you say, a growing threat of insider terrorism here in the United States as well."

The five young men are being questioned today by the FBI in Pakistan, which is now focusing on the details of who exactly directed these men and how, in hopes that other Americans who might be in the same jihad stream can be detected.The men will likely be deported to the U.S.

Deported back the the USA. Where they should be confined to Supermax for the remainder of their miserable lives. Of course that will never happen. Instead they'll be feted on the left and will probably move on to lucrative careers blogging at Daily Kos or the Huffington Post. Maybe even work in some commentary at MSNBC.

Naturally, the Obama administration is "reaching out" to these disaffected youths.

"We have had access to the five detainees," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters yesterday at an unrelated news conference. She called the move "part of the usual outreach" of the US government, but declined further comment.

Javed Islam, a regional police chief in Pakistan, said the men wanted to join militants in the country's tribal area before crossing into Afghanistan, and said they met with a banned military organization, Jaish-e-Mohammed in Hyderabad, and with representatives of a related group, Jamat-ud-Dawa, in Lahore.

Another law-enforcement official, Usman Anwar, the local police chief in Sargodha, said that the five, all from the Washington, DC, area, are "directly connected" to al Qaeda.

"They are proudly saying they are here for jihad," Anwar said.

Maybe they should be sent to Club Gitmo. Oh wait, we can't do that any longer. We have to improve our image in the world community.