I guess he needs to leave plenty of time for his extracurricular activities.
Seriously, while I doubt these guys are actually terrorists, they ARE stupid. These days, if you’re a visiting student from an Arab county, you need to toe the line absolutely. Just because half the male college students in the South have bought and transported illegal fireworks at one time or another, doesn’t make it okay for an Arab student to do it. That’s just reality, and if these guys are too stupid to recognize that, they don’t belong in a US university.
I think they probably were terrorists, or would have been if they could have gotten away with it.
They were flagged as part of a “continuing investigation,” probably of Florida cells, of which there are many. They were obviously bringing components to SC.
The main question - which I am sure they are being asked now - is who they were going to meet and what their target was.
If you’ve ever been to Goose Creek, you’d know it was studded with Navy facilities, some of which are so sensitive you literally cannot get anywhere near them (I say this as someone who once made a wrong turn in Goose Creek...).
Either these guys had someone on the inside (a possibility, since we keep permitting Muslims, including foreign-born Muslims, to join the US military), or they were going to hand over whatever they had to someone else on the outside who was then going to assemble the attack.