Soldier says he’s liar, not terrorist

FORT LEWIS, Wash. – In the case of Army Spc. Ryan G. Anderson, very few of the players were whom they seemed to be.

The “Muslim militant” who exchanged e-mail with Anderson actually was a small-town Montanan whose hobby is trolling for terrorists online. The “al Qaeda members” Anderson met in a Seattle parking lot turned out to be Army counterintelligence agents.

Now, as the 27-year-old Washington State University graduate battles charges of attempted treason in a cramped Fort Lewis courtroom, his lawyers are saying that he, too, wasn’t what he seemed.

Instead of the military expert and Muslim extremist he claimed to be, Anderson’s lead attorney said Monday, Anderson is a mentally troubled chronic liar who didn’t even have a security clearance. A former supervisor of Anderson’s told his lawyers that Anderson “lives in a fantasy world” and attempted suicide when younger.

“He likes to talk. He likes to tell people he knows more than he does,” Maj. Joseph Morse told a nine-officer jury as the court-martial began Monday. “He likes to pretend he’s something he’s not.”

If so, Anderson’s role-playing has landed him in deep trouble. He’s been in a military jail since his arrest in February, and, if convicted, could face life in prison without parole.

“This is a case about betrayal,” Army prosecutor Maj. Melvin Jenks told the jury. “Betrayal of our country, betrayal of our army, and betrayal of his fellow soldiers.”

According to Army lawyers, witnesses and counterintelligence agents, Anderson sought contact with terrorists through a series of e-mails and cell-phone text messages.

A National Guardsman whose unit was slated to deploy to Iraq in February, Anderson wrote messages saying he was struggling with the prospect of killing brother Muslims, and that he felt he was on the wrong side.

“Soon, very soon, I will have an opportunity to take my own end of the struggle,” he wrote on a Web site called Brave Muslims. He included a photo of himself, his face concealed in an Arab head covering. He was holding an AK-47-style rifle and peering out a window.

The photo and message were spotted by Shannen Rossmiller, a municipal court judge in Conrad, Mont. She’s a member of 7 Seas, a group of amateur terrorist-hunters.

Rossmiller easily traced down Anderson’s real name and the fact that he was in the military. Pretending to be a member of a Muslim extremist group, she wrote Anderson, trying to draw him out to see if he was really a threat. She sent him an e-mail titled “Call to jihad,” and offered to help interested Muslims go to a training camp in Pakistan.

Anderson responded.

“Just curious, would there be any chance a brother who might be on the wrong side at present could defect and join up?” he wrote in one e-mail. When she told him she was part of an Islamic intelligence group supporting a holy war against America, he wrote back, “It has been a while that I have been trying to find my way into this sort of thing.”

Rossmiller notified the FBI, which contacted Army counterintelligence. After two months of e-mails using several fake identities and e-mail accounts, Anderson wanted to set up a face-to-face meeting. He showed up for the first meeting, at a suburban Barnes and Noble bookstore, wearing a black beret.

The second meeting took place in Seattle, in a government car outfitted with hidden microphones and video cameras. In the video, Anderson eagerly offers technical tips and sketches of how attackers could exploit vulnerabilities of the Army’s main battle tank, the M1A1 and M1A2. He pointed out thinner-armored areas, and told the agents how to trigger a tank’s fire-extinguishers so the crew would have to escape.When the agents asked Anderson who he thought he was dealing with, he said, “I think you are who the Americans would call al Qaeda.”

Three days later, he was arrested and charged with trying to give information about U.S. troop strength, tactics and weapons to al Qaeda.

Anderson’s defense hinges on his own e-mailed lies. Among those cited by Morse: Anderson said his mother was Jordanian. He claimed to be able to fly single- and twin-engine aircraft. He claimed he had a brother who’d fought in Chechnya, a girlfriend who’d been killed in a car bombing in South Africa. He said he’d been born in Afghanistan, and South Africa, and that he’d been an African mercenary. He claimed to have a cousin who was an Iraqi policeman.

“It amounts to a guy with an overactive imagination, who starts out in little baby steps with those e-mails,” said Morse. “He’s prone to embellish.”

Morse didn’t name Anderson’s alleged mental disorder Monday, but cited two Army psychologists who agree with the diagnosis.

The defense lawyer urged the jury to consider Anderson’s flowery, over-dramatic language in the e-mails and meetings.

“Oh, how I wish I could deliver the blows myself. But we shall not question His infinite wisdom,” he wrote in e-mails. “Forgive my informality. My time is limited … I know how to fight with rifles, pistols and blades … There is nothing sexier than a woman with a rifle … From this point forth, I must say farewell.”

“It’s overblown, dramatic, over the top,” Morse told the jury. “It’s hokey, the stuff of cheesy movies and books, the kind of stuff Spc. Anderson likes to watch and read.”

Caught up in his own lie, Morse maintains, Anderson walked right into a trap set by the government. Government agents repeatedly initiated contact when Anderson was silent or noncommittal, Morse said. Anderson was as much a dangerous threat, he said, as the “Great and Powerful Oz” – a tiny, scared old man – in the movie “The Wizard of Oz.”

“You have to have the courage to open up the curtain and see what’s back there, and you’re not going to find a big scary monster,” Morse said. “He uses smiley faces in his text messages. Is that indicative of somebody that wants to defect and aid the enemy? Or is that indicative of somebody who’s role-playing?”