It’s becoming a sickeningly familiar story; a young man who seems at home in the “western world” ends up fundamentally altered. This. This is what terrifies me. Someone who had the same $70k/year programming job which so many people whom we all know do, someone who was a Yankees fan, incredibly, someone whose own mother escaped one of the towers before it fell…is someone who hates us. When a man can sympathize, nay, enthusiastically support and participate in a movement that almost killed his own mother…we’re fcuked.

From today’s WaPo:

It is safe to assume that most people would not react to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in quite the same way as Mohammed Junaid Babar. After all, the longtime resident of Queens, N.Y., told a Canadian television network that his own mother had been one of the survivors — barely escaping from the ninth floor of one of the towers before it collapsed.

Yet, Babar said in that same interview from Pakistan in the fall of 2001, his “loyalty is to the Muslims, not the Americans.”

“I will kill every American that I see in Afghanistan, and while I am in Pakistan, if I see them in Pakistan, I will kill every American soldier I can in Pakistan,” he said during the interview with ITN Five News.

Abhi wrote an SM post about Babar almost a year ago, after the erstwhile New Yorker attended a “terrorist summit” in Pakistan:

from Queens in New York City came Mohammed Junaid Babar, a Pakistani American who arrived with cash, sleeping bags, ponchos, waterproof socks and other supplies for the mountain-bound jihadis.

The “boy scout” of Al Qaeda also brough along night-vision goggles, helpfully enough. In that SM post, Abhi mentioned that Babar was wanted in connection with a “future terrorist attack”. As of two weeks ago, that future is here. This naturalized U.S. Citizen turned Jihadi joined al Qaeda just so he could battle U.S. soldiers…and civilians in Britain. Such bravery.

At least the Son-of-a…woman who is apparently expendable is useful:

Now in U.S. custody after pleading guilty to terrorism charges last year, Babar has proved invaluable to U.S. and British investigators probing this month’s attacks on the London transit system, numerous officials said. He has identified at least one of the suicide bombers, Mohammed Sidique Khan, through photographs and has provided other details that may be helpful in unraveling the plot, according to law enforcement and intelligence sources.

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‘Cooperate, or we’ll throw you in a hole so deep that no one will even remember your name.’ Inspired by the Soviet gulags, variations of that line are a staple of trite Hollywood screenplays.

Unfortunately, it also happened in real life. A villager from Assam was just released after spending 54 years imprisoned (thanks, Kool). He’s been held for almost as long as India’s been independent.

Seventy-seven year old Machang [Machal] Lalung was arrested in 1951 from his native village of Silsang… Police said that Mr Lalung… was booked for “causing grievous hurt”…. police said there were no evidence to support the allegation, so within a year of his arrest, he was transferred to a psychiatric institution [for schizophrenia]. “It seems the police just forgot about him thereafter,” says Assamese human rights activist Sanjay Borbora…

In 1967, the authorities at the institution certified Mr Lalung as “fully fit” and said that they intended to release him. But instead of being freed, police transferred him to another jail… Last year, local human rights activists brought Machang’s case to the attention of the National Human Rights Commission, which took up the case immediately and sought his release. [Link]

… the court papers wrongly mention the name as “Machang”… he had been languishing at Tezpur Mental Hospital… Machal, however, doesn’t remember what his crime was. “They say I hit someone,” he said… [Link]

The Medical Superintendent has stated that he has not been on any psychotropic medicine for several years and is free of any signs of mental illness. [Link]

I wonder whether someone will teach Lalang the words ‘compensation’ and ‘lawsuit.’ He could buy himself some chamak-chamak, ’cause that’s the way he rolls. Imagine the adjustments this Kumbhakarna has to make after being so long away from the world: audiotapes, nuclear power, PCs, video games, the Internet, the moonshot, space stations, cloning, the Berlin Wall, disco, the Indian wars with Pakistan and China, ‘India Shining,’ Zeenat, Shabana, Amitabh and Aishwarya. But no — at his age, it’s all about the water and the loo.

“I don’t like the kutcha toilet or people having to draw water from wells…”

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Fear and paranoia continue to sweep the land. I suppose if you have nothing to hide it’s not a big deal though. The New York Daily News reports (thanks for the tip Brian):

New York was fear city yesterday as heavily armed police swarmed a double-decker bus packed with tourists in Times Square…

In a dramatic sign of the city’s edginess since the London transit bombings, cops evacuated buildings, shut midtown streets and forced about 60 terrified tourists to march off the double-decker bus, with their hands up, in the heart of Broadway.

Cops in riot gear handcuffed a group of apparently harmless South Asian-looking men with British accents after a jittery tour bus worker reported they seemed suspicious.

The men were forced to kneel on the sidewalk, with their hands bound behind their backs, between 50th and 51st Sts. in front of the Winter Garden theater on a sunny summer Sunday with the city packed with tourists.

Here is a checklist I have been working on for myself. Life runs more efficiently when you use checklists for everything I have found:

1) Don’t sweat
2) Don’t carry a large bag
3) Conceal any accent of any kind
4) Read a newspaper (someone about to blow himself up probably wouldn’t be reading the news)
5) Do not pack your lunch in a plastic container

The five men in yesterday’s incident quickly were freed after cops determined they were tourists – not terrorists.

“We just want to clear our heads of the whole thing,” one of the men told the Daily News. “We were humiliated enough.”

“We just want to go,” added another.

“I was definitely frightened from the beginning,” said the driver, Mohammed Stout, 43, of the Bronx. “That’s human nature.”