GAMBIA COUP PLOTTERS: Model citizens at home in US, but ‘everybody has a breaking point’.

To those who knew him in Texas, Cherno Njie was a pillar of the community: a well-educated senior government worker turned rich and socially conscious property developer, a former school board member and a supporter of human rights and political progress in Africa.

To his alleged fellow insurgents in the Gambia he was codename “Dave”, a mastermind and financier behind a bungled plot to overthrow the president of the tiny west African country and install himself as the interim leader.

To the FBI he is a suspect charged with breaking a law dating back to 1794 called the Neutrality Act by conspiring to attempt a coup against a nation with which the US is at peace.

I wonder at the use of the phrase “model citizens” in the headline, when the people described were willfully breaking a federal law whose purpose is in part to prevent the nation from being dragged into foreign conflicts.