Enemy Within? Not Quite.

Derwish assumed that after spending time at al-Farooq camp, rubbing shoulders with dedicated jihadists determined to change history, the Lackawanna Six would find it easy to leave their aimless lives in upstate New York. But in the end, the young men could hardly wait to get back home. They faked injuries and left the camps early. Nearly all the men returned to the United States hoping that they could put their brush with Islamic extremism behind them.

And that might well have happened had someone in the Lackawanna Muslim community not sent an anonymous letter to the FBI's Buffalo field office. The Lackawanna Six were arrested within days of the first anniversary of 9/11. Both President Bush and Vice President Cheney personally told FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to bring them in. Absent any special reason to arrest them or any action that indicated that they were particularly threatening, it's difficult not to see the timing as political. A year after the attacks, the Bush administration needed a win, and the Lackawanna Six's story seemed to give them one.

Prosecutors played hardball. Newspapers reported that the men had known about the 9/11 plot but hadn't warned authorities -- something that the men and their lawyers say was flatly untrue but made for great copy. The six had heard at the camps that some al-Qaeda operatives were "ready to take their souls in their hands," but they had no idea when or what the target might be.

Prosecutors floated the idea of giving them the death penalty. They exaggerated the danger the young men posed, ramping up public fear to make the case against them more potent. Michael Chertoff, then an assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Criminal Division, insisted that the Lackawanna Six should serve no less than 20 years for attending the camp. But Michael Battle, the U.S. attorney for western New York, warned that such a sentence would not be well received in Buffalo: The Muslim community would certainly cry foul, and even the wider Buffalo community was starting to wonder whether the Lackawanna Six were merely a bunch of young men who had stumbled misguidedly into extremism.

Chertoff eventually told Battle that he could start plea-bargaining negotiations at 10 years, and the men all eventually pleaded guilty. They received sentences ranging from seven to nine years for providing material support to al-Qaeda. The case never went to trial.

Officials both inside and outside the FBI told me that if they were handling the Lackawanna case today, they would do it differently: They would have allowed the situation to play itself out, and they would have waited longer to see what kind of intelligence they might have gleaned from the group. But the political environment in 2002 required a heavier hand, and decisions about suspected terrorists still had a tang of vengeance.

American justice has started walking back from such extremes. Consider some of the recent so-called homegrown terrorism cases. The Muslim men accused of planning an attack on Fort Dix, N.J., were arrested after a 15-month investigation during which the FBI had been watching the six New Jersey residents around the clock. The decision to arrest them came only when they were about to purchase weapons from an undercover FBI agent. The FBI allowed the plot to unspool in hopes of discovering an overseas connection or al-Qaeda link.

Crucially, local Muslim communities are now part of the process. Before the Fort Dix arrests, the FBI held a conference call with national Muslim leaders. Bureau officials presented some of the evidence; Muslim leaders asked questions. When the American Muslim leadership explained the arrests to their followers, they were armed with facts -- without the media hype. Tellingly, the usual claims of racial profiling of Muslims didn't come up in the Fort Dix case. The FBI says that such conference calls are now standard operating procedure immediately before high-profile arrests.

Perhaps we are far enough away from 9/11 now to see that the United States is best served when we hold ourselves to the highest standards of fairness and inclusiveness. Selectively abandoning civil liberties and due process to wage the war on terrorism only plays into bin Laden's hands. Al-Qaeda succeeds at changing America simply by threatening it.

The first member of the Lackawanna Six will be eligible for parole next year. Will the men who emerge from prison return to Lackawanna as fervent jihadists or chastised Americans? Will their experience with the U.S. justice system make them better citizens? Or will they have become the very thing that most frightens us: a bitter enemy created from within?

One episode at that guesthouse in Afghanistan offers a glimpse of what is at stake. At one point, Sahim Alwan, the spooked young American, took one of his Lackawanna friends aside, according to legal documents. "This stuff isn't right," he whispered. "Do you want to stay?"

His friend Jaber Elbaneh looked surprised. "I want to be a martyr," he replied bluntly. "I want to die." Alwan returned to Lackawanna weeks later. Elbaneh is still at large in Yemen -- and on the FBI's list of most wanted terrorists.

DTempleRaston@npr.org

Dina Temple-Raston is National Public Radio's FBI correspondent and the author of the forthcoming

"The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six

and Rough Justice in the Age of Terror."