Dog Cry Ranch: Al Qaeda Camp in Oregon Again Drawing Attention

For a time in the 1990s, the sagebrush and rocky soil of south-eastern Oregon was home to an al-Qaeda training camp.

Amateur Jihadi enthusiasts from Seattle rented the 158 acre Dog Cry Ranch, in Bly, Oregon, and sought out help from al-Qaeda.

But when two hardened al-Qaeda operatives arrived in late 1999 they flew into a rage at the pitiful facilities, and the lack of recruits and weapons.

“It was a running joke,” says Les Zaitz, senior investigative reporter for the Oregonian newspaper. Zaitz investigated the Ranch after one of the militants, Oussama Kassir, went on trial in 2009.

The jihadi effort to set up shop inside America collapsed within weeks.

But the effort was enough to prompt US authorities to pursue the participants with vigor. Oussama Kassir is currently serving a life sentence. And just this week, one suspected militant was marked for extradition from Britain.

That man is the one-armed, one-eyed Islamic cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri.

He never visited the ranch but allegedly helped connect the amateur jihadis in Seattle with the hardened al-Qaeda operatives.

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Marco Werman: I’m Marco Werman. This is “The World”. The European Court of Human Rights gave the green light this week for five suspected Islamic militants to be extradited from Britain to the United States. As we reported earlier this week, the most prominent suspect is the one armed, one eyed cleric, Abu Hamza al-Masri. One of the charges against him relates to an attempt to Al Qaeda training camp in a rather unlikely place. That’s the 158 acre Dog Cry Ranch in Southern Oregon in a small town called Bly. Les Zaitz investigated the ranch with the Oregonian newspaper when another suspect was on trial in 2009. So, Les, first off, paint a picture for us. The Dog Cry Ranch, what does it look like?

Les Zaitz: Well, this is really scrubby, rolling flat land in a very remote part of Oregon. This is typically sheep and cattle grazing country, so you don’t have a lot of vegetation. You don’t have a lot of water. It’s a fairly arid part of Oregon and it’s quite remote.

Werman: It sounds like a good place for a secret terrorist training facility. When it had its height in 1999, how many militants were there?

Zaitz: Oh, you know, in calling them militants it’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, I guess.

Werman: OK.

Zaitz: At the most, they had a couple of weekend visits from the militants from the Seattle area that, maybe a dozen at a time. It was never a very large encampment.

Werman: Did they have any arsenal to speak of? Weapons?

Zaitz: Their arsenal, at the end of the day, really was like a couple of rifles and a couple of pistols. Not anything that you would use as a basis for some sort of an assault attack.

Werman: I mean it sounds like home grown militia camps are scarier than this one. I mean how long was the base operating before they took it down?

Zaitz: Well, it just became a running joke that the folks from overseas tried very hard for a couple of weeks to turn it into a camp and they started doing night patrols and doing training, but it became pretty apparent that this was in no way a location for a formal training camp and so they fairly quickly abandoned this and returned to Seattle, hoping to train followers in Seattle and they found in Seattle that the folks who had professed such an interest in this camp had day jobs, had family, had very tight schedules, just didn’t have time for militant training and Kassir threw up his hands and said, “I’m done,” and went back to Europe.

Werman: It is. I mean I can see why people started to joke about it because it’s like “I can’t go to terrorist training camp this weekend. I’ve got to take my kids to soccer” kind of thing

Zaitz: Yeah. It’s exactly what happened.

Werman: Is it clear to you that the Dog Cry Ranch is something US prosecutors are going to even want to bring up in court?

Zaitz: Yes, I believe so. The indictment that is subject to the European court are, specifically it piles charges concerning the creation of this ranch and a couple of folks have already been convicted. So even this late in the game this many years after it, it appears that the Federal Government is quite serious about prosecuting the good Imam and his associate.

Werman: Les Zaitz, senior investigative reporter with the Oregonian. Thanks for telling us about the Dog Cry Ranch. Appreciate it.

Zaitz: Happy to do it.

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