Jeffrey Battle

Jeffrey Leon Battle was a member of a terrorist group dubbed the Portland Seven, some members of which attempted to travel to Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 in order to aid the Taliban. He refused to cooperate with the government and was sentenced to eighteen years in prison after pleading guilty to seditious conspiracy and levying war against the United States. He had two years added to his sentence for refusing to testify before a grand jury.

Jeffrey Battle had a checkered past. According to an article in the Star-Ledger, "Battle was a ne'er-do-well, a one-time Mary Kay cosmetics representative who was trying to wriggle out of his commitment to the U.S. Army reserves after washing out in boot camp."

Battle moved to Portland in the late 1990s from Houston, Texas, where he served as a bodyguard for New Black Panther leader and community activist Quanell X.

On September 29, 2001, a group of men from what would later be termed the Portland Seven were engaged in shooting practice in a gravel Skamania County, in southern Washington, including Battle, Ford, al Saoub and Ali Khalid Steitiye, who was not a member of the Portland Seven but convicted in 2002 on firearms, fraud and immigration charges and testified against the others in 2004 as part of a plea agreement in a weapons-possession charge. The group was discovered by Deputy Sheriff Mark Mercer who was acting on a tip from a neighbor who had heard gunfire in the pit. Deputy Mercer let the men go after taking their names and reported the incident to the FBI. Battle was taped in a secretly recorded conversation indicating the members of the Portland Seven who were at the gravel pit had considered killing Deputy Mercer. “We was up there blowin it up … We was lightin’ it up … [W]e looked at it as worship because what our intentions were, to learn to shoot for. And a cop came up and he was like hey … you don’t understand how close he was gonna get popped … yeah, we was gonna pop him.” Battle later indicated they had opted not to kill the officer because he seemed "cool."

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Wikipedia