(MENAFN- Kuwait News Agency (KUNA)) Two more men, one of whom is the nephew of a suspect shot to death by the FBI in Boston last week, were arrested between Thursday night and Friday morning on terrorism charges, the Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement.
Twenty-five year-old David Wright, also known as Dawud Sharif Abdul Khaleq, of Everett, Massachusetts, and 24-year-old Nicholas Rovinski, also known as Nuh Amriki or Nuh al Andalusi, of Warwick, Rhode Island, were charged with conspiracy to provide material support to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the DoJ affirmed.
"Beginning at a date unknown but no later than May 2015, Wright, Rovinski and Usaamah Abdullah Rahim, 26, who was shot and killed after allegedly confronting officers with a large knife, conspired to commit attacks and kill persons inside the United States, which they believed would support ISIL's objectives," the DoJ said.
It added the men made plans to "behead" one of the organizers of the now infamous "Draw The Prophet" contest in Garland, Texas, before scrapping those plans and deciding to wage an attack on police officers in Massachusetts.
"The charging statute provides a sentence of no greater than 15 years in prison, up to life of supervised release and a fine of USD 250,000," the DoJ said.
The US government does not typically specify what exactly "material support" means in individual cases, but it has previously convicted defendants on that charge based on online rhetoric alone.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has long argued that a person's offensive opinions alone are not reason enough to warrant arrest.
"The Supreme Court has made clear that even odious political advocacy is protected unless it would incite imminent lawlessness or unless the speaker is an "active member" in a criminal group and intends to support its illegal ends," wrote Alex Abdo, a staff attorney for the ACLU's National Security Project in 2012.
"The right to hold and espouse offensive views is one of our nation's essential liberties," he added, citing the Supreme Court's allowance for the Westboro Baptist Church "to picket and protest the funerals of our soldiers with signs bearing repulsive messages (such as) 'God Hates the USA (and) Thank God for 9/11,'" Abdo said.
The US government's equation of rhetoric with actual "material support" - such as funding, for example - "threatens to dismantle the barrier that the Supreme Court has erected 'between words and deeds, between ideas and conduct,'" Abdo asserted.
"That barrier prevents the government from censoring speech based solely on its tendency to persuade." Ever since Rahim was killed on the street during daylight hours last week, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has demanded to know why the suspect was being so heavily monitored by the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.
The surveillance "had not resulted in probable cause for any arrest or search warrant," CAIR said in a statement. "We are asking for an independent and thorough investigation." The FBI and local police said Rahim lunged at them with a "military-style knife" just before he was killed, but his family has insisted that the grainy video of the incident released this week still does not prove that claim.
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