A US Army enlisted man, Spc Ryan Anderson, shared his plans to join Al Qaeda and attack US forces in Iraq with a Montana woman posing as a Muslim sympathiser, a military court was told on Wednesday. Anderson, who called himself Amir Abdul Rashid, feared he would be killed before he could correct the ‘‘mistake’’ of joining the US military and was troubled by the prospect of facing ‘‘a brother’’ on the Muslim side, Shannen Rossmiller, a judge from Montana, who joined a private group monitoring Muslim extremists, said.She testified to determine if Anderson should go before a court martial, where he could face death penalty if convicted. She said she contacted Anderson by e-mail after reading a posting on a Muslim extremist message board on the Net. Undercover agents posing as Qaeda operatives later contacted Anderson, who passed on diagrams of M1A1 and M1A2 Abrams battle tanks with instructions on their vulnerabilities, military prosecutors have said. — (Reuters)
