increasingly out of step with the moderate selden mosque. he needs somewhere else to pray. he comes up this long dirt road to a small nondescript house. a new mosque. the man who was then deputy head of the fbi s national security branch tells me that he sees this pattern all too often. people peeling off in smaller groups because either they don t feel comfortable in one environment or people actively in that environment say, you re not welcome here. that s a pretty common phenomenon. are they more at risk once they ve peeled off? yes. i think they re clearly more at risk because you re going to get a close circle of individuals, where other ideas can t penetrate. we stand up for the truth! some in bryant s group tell me that bryant came to believe that the united states was at war with islam. he became so convinced of this that he took up bolinin laden s command to stop paying united
really, his desire and eagerness to get into the fight overseas. according to what bryant later tells investigators, he is soon asked to become a suicide bomber and he accepts. he may have viewed it as potentially some type of test to vet him as to whether he was really serious about this. you re going to go through multiple paths, multiple doors, if you will, before someone says okay, we think we kind of, sort of, maybe trust this person. but when taliban militants here in pakistan don t provide bryant with the kind of training in action he wants, his impatience gets the best of him, and he begins a series of unsuccessful attempts to join osama bin laden s followers. one time he disguises himself as a woman, dresses in a burka, to hide his hispanic-american identity, and sets off alone to
qaeda to try to explode a bomb in new york. he s interviewed close friends of his, tracked down other extremists in the united states who influenced venus. this a.c. 360 special investigation is an intimate and chilling portrait of a homegrown terrorist. al qaeda s target the busiest commuter railroad in the united states, the long island railroad in new york. hundreds of thousands of passengers every weekday. helping plan the bomb attack is an american, a lifelong new yorker, bryant neil venus. he gives an al qaeda leader detailed information about the operation at the long island railroad system. bryant is not providing the information from long distance,
bryant was like family. reporter: like another son? yes. what are your first memories of bryant? when we were younger, we d go in the pool a lot, he was respectful. as he grew up, bryant developed a passion for baseball. he took it very seriously. seriously enough to bike ride to the high school, which from here would take on a bike rout half an hour. but those would be bryant s last carefree days. his world would be shattered by family turmoil, by his father leaving his mother when he was a young teenager. he was devastated by their separation and eventually divorce. bryant was filled with anger and started acting out at home. there were tears and temper tantrums. bryant started quarreling with his sister, being disrespectful towards his mother. he refused to accept his
states taxes, he also told them that he wanted to go and fight jihad. but his friends never thought he would actually go and do it. i didn t think that he was going to go kill somebody. bryant suggests to alex they come here to this long island gun range just a few weeks before he would leave. alex still doesn t realize how serious his friend is about going to wage jihad. so what were you what were you shooting here? we was just clay shooting and shooting at targets. yeah? the targets up here? yes. yeah? oh, we probably shot a good 200 rounds. did he like it on the range? did he like being here and hearing the guns going off? yeah. he liked it very much. he felt free. but bryant has a problem how to get to pakistan, how to link up with jihadists. bryant neal vinas stands out as an individual who had no real