The confused NYT.

Here’s James Taranto (another read the whole thing):

The New York Times now seems a bit confused as to the religion of the suspects in the terror plot revealed earlier this week:

Law enforcement officials initially said the four men were Muslims, but their religious backgrounds remained uncertain Thursday. [Laguerre] Payen reported himself to be Catholic during his 15-month prison sentence that ended in 2005, according to a state corrections official. [James] Cromitie and Onta Williams both identified themselves as Baptists in prison records, although Mr. Cromitie changed his listed religion to Muslim upon his last two incarcerations; David Williams reported no religious affiliation.

In the same article, however, is a detail that may bear on David Williams’s confessional leanings: It seems he “lately had grown a beard and taken to reading the Koran on slow nights at a steakhouse job.” Another article from today’s Times quotes Wanda Cromitie, James’s sister:

She added that as far as she knew, he was not a Muslim, but said “they do a little time in jail and they don’t eat pork no more.”

We could just call them “cafeterians” and be done with it. But the sister’s observation that “they do a little time in jail” is an important one. If it is difficult to identify the suspects clearly as Muslim, it is because their involvement with Islam is a recent development. But it seems that at least three of the four suspects were introduced to a violent supremacist strain of Islam while serving time in prison.

The Times article that quotes Miss Cromitie is titled “Suspects in Terror Bombing Plot: Drug Arrests and Prison Conversions.” It consists of a thumbnail profile of each of them. The Times flatly states that Payen converted to Islam while in prison and strongly suggests that James Cromitie and Onta Williams did as well. (For David Williams, according to Williams’s mother, Islam was “a religion he got from his father.”)

The use of prisons as recruiting grounds for violent jihad is a problem of which mainstream Muslims are aware. The Times Herald-Record of Middletown, N.Y., interviewed Hamin Rashada, who encountered Payen while Rashada worked as a “life coach” at the Orange County Transition Center, “a program that helps reintegrate parolees such as Payen”:

[Rashada] also encouraged [Payen] to attend Friday prayers at Masjid al-Ikhlas in Newburgh where Rashada is an assistan imam. Payen had told him he was Muslim, and Rashada figured he must have been introduced to Islam in prison. Misunderstandings of the teachings can occur in places such as prison, Rashada said, because educated teachers may be rarer. Rashada said at the Newburgh mosque, they worked to put teachings in their proper context. Payen attended only occasionally, however, he said. . . .

When Payen did come, he would try to impress other members of the mosque by spouting supposed knowledge of Islam, Rashada said. Often, he was so far off in his statements [that] Rashada would have to correct him in front of people.

Incredibly, even as this story was developing, President Obama was delivering a speech in which he proposed to import hundreds of the most violent Islamic extremists into America and house them in our prisons:

Our courts and juries of our citizens are tough enough to convict terrorists, and the record makes that clear. Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center–he was convicted in our courts, and is serving a life sentence in U.S. prison. Zaccarias Moussaoui has been identified as the 20th 9/11 hijacker–he was convicted in our courts, and he too is serving a life sentence in prison. If we can try those terrorists in our courts and hold them in our prisons, then we can do the same with detainees from Guantanamo.

Just a day earlier, Politico reports, Obama’s own FBI director, Robert Mueller, testified before the House Judiciary Committee, where he “raised concerns about bringing prisoners to the U.S. and holding them in maximum security prisons, noting that in some gang leaders have run their organizations while in prison.”

In his speech yesterday, Obama declared that “the American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology.” Importing hard-core Islamic supremacists into U.S. prisons is an insane policy. If Obama’s proposing it is not an example of an official being driven by rigid ideology, then the phrase has no meaning.