Generally sympathetically, putting the most damning facts at the end of the story.
From the WSJ story:
>>>snip<<<
Mr. Hawash started working for Intel in 1992 as a software engineer on cutting-edge digital video software. With an Intel colleague, he co-wrote a book on advanced video graphics. When his father, a carpenter in Nablus, on the West Bank, became ill, Intel made special arrangements for him to work in 1994 at an Intel facility in Israel, according to a former Intel supervisor. His close friends say that after he returned to Portland about two years later he continued to have Jewish Israeli friends. Intel eliminated Mr. Hawash's division in 2001 and he lost his job. But the company took him back as a contract employee.
>>>snip<<<
Rohan Coelho, a close friend of Mr. Hawash's -- he introduced Mr. Hawash to his future wife and was best man at their wedding -- said before the charges were filed that he couldn't conceive of Mr. Hawash setting off to do anything violent or anti-American.
But to friends such as Mr. Coelho and Ms. Gregory, it appears that Mr. Hawash was deeply influenced by the recent death of his father, and in the aftermath underwent a religious reawakening.
>>>snip<<<
According to the criminal complaint, Mr. Hawash allegedly went to China six weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks with a mostly down-on-its luck group of five fellow Muslims from Portland. Those individuals, and the wife of one who is accused only of wiring money to her husband in China, were charged in October 2002 with conspiring to make war against the U.S. by attempting to aid the Taliban and al Qaeda. They have all pleaded not guilty and denied the charges.
The charges stem from an alleged attempt to reach the Taliban to aid the ultra-orthodox Islamic regime in defending Afghanistan against the American military attack. They traveled from Portland to China, but quickly abandoned their plan because they could not reach Afghanistan. Evidence so far made public indicates that they never made contact with the Taliban, and most simply returned home to Portland.
>>>snip<<<
Mr. Coelho, a former Intel software engineer, said in an interview before the charges were filed that some time around October 2001, Mr. Hawash left the U.S. for "a couple of weeks," telling friends and family that he was going to visit his mother and sister in Nablus. Mr. Coelho said that when Mr. Hawash returned, he said that he hadn't been allowed into the West Bank. He didn't want to talk much about his trip.
The trip followed a marked change in Mr. Hawash, after which he increasingly turned toward his ancestral religion. Until his father's death in early 2001, friends say, Mr. Hawash had routinely fasted during the holy month of Ramadan. But otherwise he seemed to pay little attention to religious observance. After his father died, Mr. Hawash stopped drinking alcohol, grew a beard, and made a pilgrimage to Mecca, according to his friends.
The transformation resulted in strains on his marriage. "As Mike became a lot more Muslim, the change was something Lisa had to struggle with," Mr. Coelho said, adding that she felt that he was no longer "the person she first married." It got so bad, Mr. Coelho said, that one night the couple fought and Mr. Hawash ended up sleeping in his car. Mrs. Hawash could not be reached.
Just before he left on the October 2001 trip, moreover, Mr. Hawash took several steps that suggest he thought he might not return. He paid off the mortgage on his house, for example, and transferred title of it to his wife. But Mr. Coelho says Mr. Hawash said he paid off the mortgage simply because the Koran forbids Muslims to borrow money at interest. And he said Mr. Hawash transferred title to the house because he wanted to get his affairs in order in case he got stuck in the West Bank indefinitely, due to continuing violence and uncertainty about the border.
In an affidavit filed in court with the charges, the FBI said that Lisa Hawash had told them that her husband said he was going to China to look for business opportunities. But the FBI said that his telephone records showed no phone calls to China before he left.
Mr. Coelho and other friends say that Mr. Hawash, like other Palestinians, might have reasons to be angry with Israel and the support it has received from the U.S. When Mr. Hawash was a child, his family was exiled for a time by Israel to Kuwait, the friends say. In recent months an Israeli tank has been stationed in front of Mr. Hawash's mother's house, often firing shells over her roof at Palestinian targets.
Nevertheless, he says he can't imagine Mr. Hawash engaging in violence. He says that as his friend became more religious, Mr. Coelho, a devout Catholic born in India, challenged him about whether Islam, with its requirement for jihad, or holy war, prescribed in the Koran, wasn't a violent religion. "He said actually 'no'," Mr. Coelho recalls. "He said the religion is about peace and charity."
Ms. Gregory, the Intel executive, recalls that when Mr. Hawash returned from making the pilgrimage to Mecca, he complained bitterly about fellow Muslims who he said had pushed and shoved as the pilgrims approached the holy places, in contravention of what he said was supposed to be the religion's spirit of peace and cooperation. "He told me that there was a whole class of people who didn't seem to understand what it was all about," she says.
Friends also say they find it hard to believe that Mr. Hawash would have accompanied the individuals charged in the earlier indictment. While the Portland Muslim community is small, estimated at from 7,000 to 10,000 individuals, and closely knit, the five defendants who allegedly set off to fight for the Taliban were people with menial jobs who associated with few people outside of the Muslim community, and weren't the type Mr. Hawash normally spent time with. They included a nurse's aid, a bagel-maker and someone who sold cellphones and taught physical education part time at a local Muslim school.
But the FBI affidavit states that neighbors told FBI agents that they had seen several of the defendants in the Portland case at Mr. Hawash's house in the month or so before their alleged departure for China and that one of them had done yard work for the Hawash family.
Its pretty easy to guess which way the WSJ will come down on these kinds of issues.
It ain't Vermont Royster's paper anymore.
Uh... sort of left some things out. The guy who sold cell phones and taught phys-ed is Patrice Lumumba Ford; his daddy [Kent Ford] was a Black Panthers member. Patrice Ford didn't start selling phones until AFTER he returned to the US from the group's apparently failed trip to China.
(snips)
"Patrice Lumumba Ford is world-traveled, apparantly a graduate of or attended the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul Nitze Center for Advanced Studies (SAIS), he studied in Beijing in the mid-1990s and has attained fluency in Mandarin Chinese. These are no small feats. Reports are that he spent about a year at Johns Hopkins University's prestigious program in China, earned a master's degree in Chinese studies and married a Chinese woman."
..."Lumumba Ford was an intern twice between 1997 and 1999. He had contacts with Vera Katz's office in office in Aug., 2001 that concerned the office so much that they turned this information over to the police. He was also a progeny of Kent Ford, who was a Black Panther in the '60's."
... "Patrice Lumumba Ford also taught physical education at an Islamic school in the Portland suburb of Tigard, operated a private shuttle service and worked to resettle recently arrived Muslim refugees into the Portland community."
"And after being replaced after a two-month trip to China last year, he was selling cell phones and leather wallets from the back of his van. Family members viewed it as a faith-based change. "He converted to a religion that says help the person behind you, and that's what he did," said James Britt II, a Portland businessman who was once married to Ford's mother. "
..."Named after the African (communist) resistance leader and first president of Congo, Patrice Lumumba Ford worked as an international relations intern in 1986 for then-Portland mayor Bud Clark and again in 1998 and 1999 for Portland Mayor Vera Katz, Patrice Lumumba Ford also taught physical education at an Islamic school in the Portland suburb of Tigard, operated a private shuttle service and worked to resettle recently arrived Muslim refugees into the Portland community. His father is Kent Ford, former head of the now defunct Portland chapter of the Black Panthersand now is a weight-training coach at Matt Dishman community Center, part of Portland Parks and Recreation, in Northeast Portland, Oregon. Patrice has a brother named James Britt."
(/snips)
The "nurse's aide" - actually nurse's aides- are Martinique Lewis and Jeffrey Leon Battle:
(snips) October Martinique Lewis, 25, and Jeffery Leon Battle, 32, get divorced just five months after their September 1999 marriage, but they continued to live together at a southwest Portland apartment complex flanked by two mosques. Lewis' mother, Vivian Lewis, told The Oregonian that the couple worked as nursing assistants at a Portland retirement home. A neighbor of the couple, Matt Hawkey, said he often saw men - sometimes in suits, sometimes in traditional Muslim garb - clustered in the parking lot near their apartment. They talked, listened to music from a car and sometimes shuffled large duffel bags between a Ford Blazer and the apartment, he said.
"Jeffery Leon Battle obtained an administrative discharge from the U.S. Army Reserve in January 2002. An indictment on October 4, 2002 said Battle had enlisted to receive training in U.S. tactics and weapons, which Battle ultimately intended to use against American soldiers.- "U.S. Arrests 6 on Terror Charges," by Ted Bridis, Friday, October 4, 2002 Associated Press*
He was discharged for failing to show up to advanced training.*
Jeffrey Leon Battle obtained an administrative discharge from the US Army reserves in January 2002 while in Bangladesh. Court papers identified the six as Battle, Patrice Lumumba Ford, Ahmed Ibrahim Bilal, Muhammad Ibrahim Bilal, Habis Abdullah al Saoub and October Martinique Lewis, the ex-wife of Battle."
(/snips)
The bagel-maker was this guy:
(snip) Muhammad Bilal earned $7 an hour working for Sunrise Bagels in Hillsboro at Northwest 185th Street and Cornell Road. "He made sandwiches and worked as cashier," said Steve Kim, Sunrise Bagels owner and manager.
(/snip)
They forgot this guy- his specialty is beinmg a sponge:
(snip)"Al Saoub was unemployed, living in Portland and had applied for government disability payments based on back problems when federal officials allege he bought a $673 airline ticket to Hong Kong in October 2001 to travel to Afghanistan to join Taliban troops fighting U.S. forces."
(/snip)
And they didn't mention this guy, who didn't make it to China:
(snip)
Ali Khaled Steitiye : Law enforcement officials in Portland, Ore., have charged a Lebanese man who apparently has links to a Middle Eastern terrorist group with felony weapons violations for allegedly lying about his criminal record when he tried to buy an assault rifle this year. Kroeker also said the suspect has told police he received training at Lebanese guerrilla camps, and that at the man's Portland home police found a plaque with the name " Hamas "? the guerrilla group that has been staging suicide bombings in Israel.
Police who arrested Ali Khaled Steitiye, 39, in late October said they found a small cache of weapons, as well as ammunition, fake credit cards, phony citizenship documents and $20,000 during searches of his apartment and vehicle.
Authorities found a plaque with the word " Hamas " and a calendar with Sept. 11 highlighted at the home of a Lebanese man arrested on a weapons charge, police said Tuesday. - Source : Columbia Newsblaster, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/nlp/newsblaster/archive/summaries/85/12_13_01_35.html *
Lebanese citizen and Hamas sympathizer, arrested in Portland October 2001 for having an illegal weapons cache. Steitiye is a Hamas sympathizer who was found to have circled the date Sept. 11 in red on his calendar.well before the others. He was seen by Sheriff's Deputy Mark Mercer in WA shooting at the gravel pit with other members of the Portland Group in September 2001. Upon questioning after his later arrest in portland, OR, he admitted he had trained in Lebanese Hamas camps "in his youth." He has a long criminal record and was caught after being reported by a suspicious Oregon gun dealer.
(/snip)