A Wave of Foreboding

The Washington Post reports on what sounds like the possibility of a home-grown terrorist group out here in Los Angeles.

Only one of the three named suspects has a name that sounds Middle Eastern -- Hammad Riaz Samana. The other two are Gregory Vernon Patterson and Levar Haney Washington.

Here's a key sentence in the story:

The official said investigators are looking into whether the suspects have links to a radical Islamic group known as Jamiyyat Ul Islam Is Saheeh -- roughly translated as the Assembly of Authentic Islam -- which has been known to have a presence in a state prison where one of the suspects was recently incarcerated.

As Arnold Schwarzenegger parodies would say: Hear me now, believe me later. Authorities need to pay much more attention to what is happening in America's prisons. They are ripe recruiting grounds for Al Qaeda -- a fabulous way to recruit home-grown Americans into jihad against their native country.

That's why it's important to keep terrorist suspects and convicts segregated from the domestic prison population (just another good argument for keeping the Guantanamo detention facility open). And it's why America needs to start noting the content of what Islamic faith is being preached to our prison population (for more, read this in The Wall Street Journal -- "How a Muslim Chaplain Spread Extremism to an Inmate Flock: Radical New York Imam Chose Clerics for Prisons" [subscription required]).