SHARE IT

News Analysis

Witchita Suicide Bomber Radicalized Online

Sun, December 15, 2013

The Witchita Mid-Continent Airport, where the bomber planned to carry out his act.

The Witchita Mid-Continent Airport, where the bomber planned to carry out his act.

by: 
Ryan Mauro

The FBI has prevented a suicide bombing at a Kansas airport by a 58-year old white convert to Islam, the Bureau announced yesterday. The suspect stopped by undercover FBI agents pretending to have Al-Qaeda ties.

The criminal complaint against the aspiring terrorist, Terry Lee Loewen, explains that he came into contact with an undercover FBI operative in August. Loewen is an airport technician with access to the tarmacs at Witchita Mid-Continent Airport.

“Let me preface the bottom line by saying I have become ‘radicalized’ in the strongest sense of the word, and I don’t feel Allah wants me any other way,” he told the secret FBI agent, who had posed as a radical Islamist.

Loewen said the website of a New York-based group named Revolution Muslim was instrumental in setting him on his path. The group’s leadership is now in prison and was seen in the Clarion Project’s second film, The Third Jihad. Loewen said he gave money to the family of one of the group’s founders.

He then began reading the works of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American convert to Islam and an Al-Qaeda operative that was killed in a drone strike in Yemen in September 2011.

Loewen was not motivated out of foreign policy disagreements with the U.S. He said:

“I have been studying subjects like jihad, martyrdom operations and Sharia law. I don’t understand how you can read the Quran and the sunnah of the Prophet and not understand that jihad and implementation of sharia is absolutely demanded of all the Muslim ummah.”

He explained that he believed that radicals are closer to the authentic interpretation of Islamic teaching than the moderates. Loewen criticized Muslim moderates for failing to fight the West.

“The one thing we are doing wrong is that all 1.5 billion of us don’t rise up against the world and tell them how it’s going to be,” he said.

The online chats led to Loewen meeting with an FBI agent in October who posed as an associate of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Loewen then began developing plans to carry out a terrorist attack, ultimately deciding to destroy a passenger airline at the Witchita airport using a car bomb.

The FBI provided him with fake explosives and arrested him when he tried to enact the plan. The Bureau regularly gives fake weapons to suspects involved in violent crimes in order to develop an air-tight case against them for prosecution.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity, should be expected to continue its pattern of accusing the FBI of entrapment in the coming days. CAIR and its allies consistently claim that terrorism suspects were radicalized by an FBI eager to arrest Muslims.

For example, Executive-Director of CAIR-Michigan Dawud Walid tells Muslims that the FBI is “manufacturing their own terrorism suspects to give the appearance that they’re actually doing something tangible in the so-called ‘War on Terrorism.’”

The arrest of Loewen is an indictment of the Islamist worldview that propelled him to action. Groups like CAIR will try to turn this into an indictment of the FBI in order to downplay the Islamist terrorist threat and excuse their common Islamist ideology.

 

Ryan Mauro is the ClarionProject.org’s National Security Analyst, a fellow with the Clarion Project and is frequently interviewed on top-tier TV stations as an expert on counterterrorism and Islamic extremism.