On Monday, a jury found four men guilty on 30 of 32 counts in the plot to bomb Bronx synagogues and shoot down military aircraft with Stinger missiles. Sentencing is set for March 24.
But is life in prison enough -- when prison is where James Cromitie, David Williams,Laguerre PayenandOnta Williamsstarted down this path?
All four had been converted to a radical form of Islam while incarcerated in the New York state prison system. After their release, they all attended a mosque in Newburgh, run by clergy employed by the Department of Correctional Services.
Simply returning the four to the soil from which their hatred sprang is insufficient action in the War on Terror. They’re too likely to have an adverse effect on other inmates if placed in the general population -- especially in the prison Muslim community. They might be viewed as rock stars. That’s what happened to Rashid Baz.
Baz was sentenced to 140 years in prison after being convicted of opening fire on a vanload of Hasidic Jewish students on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994, killing Ari Halberstam. Immediately following his conviction,HamasandHezbollahsaluted him as a mujahid, a holy warrior. When he went into the prison system, he was chosen by the Muslim chaplain to be his administrative clerk and elected as a leader of the prison mosque by the other Muslim inmates.
Could that be the future of Cromitie and crew when they return to the joint?
Justice officials must strongly consider removing these four from the general population, as well as other stringent administrative security measures.
Nor is solitary confinement alone always foolproof. One individual convicted in the first World Trade Center bombing, Mohamed Salameh, sent letters from his cell in the Federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., to a terrorist cell in Spain before the 2004 Madrid train bombings.
Lynne Stewart, the attorney for “Blind Sheik” Abdel Rahman, was convicted of smuggling messages from the prison to his terrorist associates on the outside.
Officials must face the issue of prison radicalization and imprisonment of known terrorists head on. That means taking innovative measures to prevent the spread of radical doctrine in the prison. Removing radical Islamic literature and establishing a reliable certification process for clergy and religious volunteers would be a good start.
The time to act is now -- not when the next group of homegrown jihadists gets released.