"We made every attempt to scare, give him a chance to contemplate, give him a way out. He didn't take any of them."
Photo: Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland, Ore.
The American Muslim teen who tried to blow up upwards of 25,000 people at a Seattle Christmas tree lighting ceremony made a jihad martyr tape. It seems that the FBI did everything to talk the teen jihadist out of it, but he was unmovable. He was excited and wanted desperately to do it.
"That's his jihad, what's yours?"
Where are the emergency actions by Obama, Cuomo, Bloomberg and other elected officials to address this problem in the way they jumped on Newtown? Where is the concern for lives in Fort Hood or Detroit (Christmas underwear bomber), New York (Times Square bomber), etc.?
Obama is hell-bent on banning certain kinds of guns, how about certain kinds of Muslims, like jihadists?
Victoria Taft has this:
...... the Oregon State University student, Mohamed Osman Mohamud made a tape to leave a message to his family and the world to bray about his clever plans to blow up thousands of Portlanders gathered to light "The Tree" on November 26th, 2010. His plan was to skip town after the mass murder.
The tape was played in a sealed federal courtroom in downtown Portland this afternoon during testimony of an undercover FBI agent who was Mohamud's "Al Qaeda" contact.
The undercover contact, "Youssef," was asked about ways in which he and another undercover agent, "Hussein," gave opportunity after opportunity for Mo Mo to back out, but he never did."We made every attempt to scare, give him a chance to contemplate, give him a way out. He didn't take any of them."
The New York Times has this: Harsher View of Bombing Suspect Is Revealed on Tapes
PORTLAND, Ore. — Jurors who may have been studying the defendant in recent days at the federal terrorism trial here of a 21-year-old Somali-American named Mohamed Osman Mohamud have seen a thin, neatly dressed young man at the defense table who sometimes quietly confers with his lawyers. But on Tuesday they got a drastically different view as video and audiotapes secretly recorded by the F.B.I. in 2010 revealed a sometimes bombastic, sometimes swaggering religious militant who said repeatedly he was willing to kill and die as a martyr if need be.
In talking through a plan to explode a huge bomb here in Oregon’s largest city, on one of the busiest and most festive nights of the year — the lighting of the downtown Christmas tree in a public square packed with tens of thousands of people in late November 2010 — Mr. Mohamud said simply and coldly as the secret tape rolled: “That would be the perfect time.”
The bomb, of course, was not a bomb at all, but a dummy built by the F.B.I. Mr. Mohamud, who thought he was sending a detonation signal to a real bomb through a cellphone call, is charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. He faces up to life in prison if convicted and has pleaded not guilty.
The tapes, recorded in hotel rooms in Portland and in cars with two undercover agents, are the heart of a case that both the prosecution and the defense say hinges on perception and belief — specifically who Mr. Mohamud really was, or was not, at the time of the would-be attack and in the months leading up to it. The prosecution portrayed him at the opening of the trial last week as a determined terrorist who might have found real co-conspirators had investigators not infiltrated his life. His defense lawyers said he was a mixed-up romantic — a former engineering student at Oregon State University with a fragile ego, whose fantasies were manipulated by government investigators who needed to justify a complicated and expensive sting operation.
The tapes seemed to offer evidence for both portraits.
On the tapes played Tuesday, for example, Mr. Mohamud is seen at some points gesturing animatedly with both arms, gazing upward, as he talks about what seems a harsh code of retribution for the deaths of Muslims by the American military.
“How do you feel if they kill your women and children?” he asks. Mr. Mohamud’s answer: an eye for an eye. “Same to them,” he said. The tapes also suggest that he had thought out the layout of Pioneer Courthouse Square, the scene of the planned attack — where a bomb truck could be parked and where holiday shoppers would be found in greatest abundance.
Often, though, the undercover agents, who portrayed themselves as older, seasoned veterans of the terrorist’s life, seemed to reinforce Mr. Mohamud’s focus on the bombing project, with repeated questions about whether he was up for it.
“We want to make sure, you know, it’s in your heart,” said one of the undercover agents, who was known to Mr. Mohamud as Youssef, on one of the tapes. The agent testified on Tuesday to explain and elaborate on the recordings for the jury. The public and the news media were only permitted to listen to his testimony from a separate room.
The agent, under questioning by a federal prosecutor, Ethan D. Knight, said the agents challenged Mr. Mohamud’s determination, not to press him to commit a crime, but to give him an opportunity to back away. He said the undercover team enlisted Mr. Mohamud to buy bomb parts, including cellphones and timers, as a further test, and also promised him an overseas escape after the bombing. The agent told the jury the goal was to keep Mr. Mohamud focused on the future, and thus to dissuade him from a suicide attack.
