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In Montana, Casting A Web for Terrorists
Anderson was arrested six days before his unit was deployed to Iraq. Rossmiller was a key witness at his court-martial, during which one of her e-mail identities was published in newspapers. Within hours, she said, a man with a Middle Eastern accent called the Montana courthouse where she works and asked for her address.
She and her husband have since obtained permits to carry concealed weapons. She sometimes carries a .38-caliber pistol in her purse. Although her home town has been named in previous articles about her, she asked that it not be printed in this one.
  Judge Shannen Rossmiller, an online expert who works with federal agencies, and her husband, Randy, somewhere in Montana. (By Blaine Harden -- The Washington Post) |
In February, she was again identified in court documents after she posed online as an al-Qaeda operative and offered money to Michael Curtis Reynolds, who a U.S. attorney in Pennsylvania has said is suspected of plotting to blow up oil and gas pipelines.
Rossmiller snared the two American terrorism suspects, she said, while casting Internet hooks for bigger fish: Arabic-speaking extremists in the Middle East and in Pakistan. To find them, she said she has invented a cast of male online characters. They hold court -- spitting insults at "dirty Americans" and distributing videos of beheadings -- on several Islamic Web sites, according to transcripts of her e-mail exchanges.
Using those personas, Rossmiller said she strikes up conversations with chatty extremists. Rossmiller said she communicates primarily in Arabic, which she began learning after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. She also uses a computer translation program and said the FBI has occasionally provided her with a native Arabic speaker.
As part of her online approach, she offers arms and money to fight in Iraq and to kill "slaves of the cross." She said her work led to the detention last year of several men training to enter Iraq to fight U.S. troops, as well as to the arrest of a Middle Eastern academic seeking al-Qaeda funding for his plans to build a nuclear bomb. Federal agencies declined to comment on both cases.
Rossmiller said that "2005 was a very productive year for me."
Why is Rossmiller talking about terrorist hunting that has not been made public in court?
"With the Reynolds case coming up, it is important that people understand what I do," she said during two long conversations in a Perkins pancake house here. "I don't work for the FBI, the CIA, Mossad or any of those folks. It wouldn't make me feel right to be on a payroll."
Rossmiller is angry that some news reports have portrayed her merely as a "Montana mom."
"I am so upset about the press presenting me as this stupid little blonde woman patrolling the Internet," she said.
After four years of watching the Bush administration's efforts against terrorism, Rossmiller said her commitment to finding enemies of the United States is stronger than ever and that she continues to track suspects in the middle of the night. "She doesn't have normal sleep patterns, never has," her husband said.
