From Masha Gessen:
“Some facts about Bowling Green that I don’t find particularly funny. Conway was referring to (ok, fantasizing on the basis of) a case in which two men who came to the U.S. from Iraq on refugee visas were accused of “attempting to provide material support to Iraqi insurgents.”
Note the “attempted to.”
I have covered cases based on this kind of vague accusation; in these cases the defendants were immigrants from Muslim countries who had been “caught” sending money home. I don’t know if this was that kind of case – these men never got a trial. They pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges. Never mind that the accusations against them – that they were supporting insurgents in Iraq – fits no one’s definition of terrorism (there is no single definition, but no one thinks that fighting against armed soldiers is terrorism).
One of them was sentenced to life in federal prison. He was 25 at the time of sentencing, 23 at the time of arrest. The other was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison, followed by life of “supervised release” (this was a “reduced” sentence in exchange for cooperating with the prosecution). These are not entirely atypical sentences for people who are serving time on terrorism convictions in the U.S. There are roughly 500 such people in American federal prisons right now. In the vast majority of cases, they were entrapped by the FBI.
One of the Bowling Green defendants’ lawyers claimed that this was what happened in this case as well – but, of course, we have no details because they took the plea, which is also typical. The most serious charges that the men pleaded guilty to – out of a total of 23 counts – were: “conspiring to kill U.S. nationals abroad; conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (explosives) against U.S. nationals abroad; distributing information on the manufacture and use of IEDs; attempting to provide material support to terrorists and to AQI and conspiring to transfer, possess and export Stinger missiles.”
Note that they are charged with intent, not with commission of a crime.
All this happened during the Obama administration. I am glad that this country is finally waking up to the insanity of its current Islamophobia. It would be good, too, to wake up to the insanity of the War on Terror, which paved the way for Conway’s fantasies and so much more.”