“A Terrorist in My House”

Charles Johnsonfollow me on twitter
Sun Dec 26, 2004 at 6:30 pm PST • Views: 231

Some background information on Orange County-born Adam Gadahn, whose ranting was featured in a recent Al Qaeda video: An American Married to Al Qaeda. (Hat tip: SoCalJustice.)

Dec. 22, 2004 - A California woman reveals to ABC News that she unknowingly married a Muslim extremist who helped set up what authorities say was one of the first al Qaeda sleeper cells out of their Orange County apartment complex.

Saraah Olson says she watched as her then-husband, Hisham Diab, and his group transformed local teen Adam Gadahn into an America-hating fanatic who she says is the masked man who promised in an al Qaeda video message released in Pakistan late October that the “streets of America will run red with blood.”

“I was just a stepping stone to a green card,” Olson said. “I married a terrorist. I married somebody who did not like America, who didn’t like Americans.”

Gadahn, who met Olson’s former husband at a local mosque, was “fresh meat,” she said. “Someone they could control. Not only that, he’s very unassuming-looking, he can do a lot of their tasks.”

The voice, gestures and rhetoric of the video’s “Azzam the American” were all familiar to Olson, especially the phrase “red with blood,” which was one of the group’s favorite sayings, she said.

And over the course of six years, Olson said, some of Osama bin Laden’s top deputies would stay with her and her husband, including blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who would later go to prison for life for his role in organizing terrorist plots against the United States.

Olson said she repeatedly tried to notify the FBI of her husband’s suspicious activities, but that she was never taken seriously. “I’m in hell,” Olson remembers thinking after she recognized Abdel-Rahman in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. “I have entered the bowels of hell and I’m going to be here forever. And I’ve only been married seven months. I’ve got a terrorist in my house.”

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