Adam Yahiye (Y.A.) Gadahn (Photo#1, Photo#2), the U.S. citizen from Southern California who is believed to be the masked man making terrorist threats against Los Angeles and Australia in a tape delivered to ABC News in Pakistan last weekend (Photo, Real Video), was a "passionate, courteous, intelligent kid excited about life, but somewhat cowed by its unnecessary human-induced dark side, thus prone to listening to lots of quality death metal," according to a former associate who shared a love for metal music with Gadahn and befriended him back "in the 1990s."

In an "open letter" to the American people posted at Anus.com, Spinoza Ray Prozak — former host of the KSPC 88.7 "Metal Show" radio program — writes, "I never met Y.A. Gadahn face-to-face, but I knew him through his contributions to my radio show. When I last spoke to him, back in the 1990s, he created several flyers for the show, and helped out with numerous music programming suggestions. I remember him as a passionate, courteous, intelligent kid excited about life, but somewhat cowed by its unnecessary human-induced dark side, thus prone to listening to lots of quality death metal.

"Call it compassion, or call it empathy, but a lot of kids like Y.A. Gadahn resonated with me in spirit. They came from dark homes where overworked parents (if they were lucky — often a single parent) drove long hours to labor in the bowels of the city-machine, and came home with no energy for their kids. Brainless, authoritarian public schools. Neurotic adults who couldn't explain why all of this was important. An increasingly-restrictive republic whose electorate seemed uninformed as to the actual issues. A natural world being consumed and turned into strip malls at an alarming rate.

"I think this future is what alarms a lot of us, patriotic Americans and al-Qaeda radicals alike. The idea that maybe we're speeding toward something we can't control, that we can't undo. The thought that as our obsession with money and power reaches new heights, we'll forget nature, and will also forget there's another way outside our dark thorny path of righteousness.

"I don't believe al-Qaeda is evil, and I don't believe George Bush is illegal. I definitely don't believe Y.A. Gadahn is 'evil,' or even ill-intentioned. I think he's a sincere guy like any number of others you may have grown up next door to, worked a cube over from, spent time guffawing with at a baseball game. I knew him as a normal kid, with normal desires and normal fears, including a growing dread of what 'modern life' has become.

"Because of this, today, I ask for your compassion, and for your consideration of a singular thought: it could be there are no 'good guys' and 'bad guys' here, but that we, as a society, have lost our way and need to re-invent our values. Where we once had a goal in overcoming nature, we now have no goals except those in society itself... money, power, look-at-me social importance.

"More than any tangible political goals, I think it's the goal of al-Qaeda and other dissident groups (including ANUS, the GNAA, and Abrupt) to resist that coming darkness. It might not yet have stamped its consequences onto our foreheads, but it's like that day in school when your teacher is delayed in conference and you and your friends spend the first twenty minutes of class raising hell: this can't end well. Ultimately, there will be a piper to pay.

"Your oceans are choked with plastic. Your air, awash in chemicals. Your cities wastelands of crime and look-a-like plastic storefronts. Your children, alienated and lonely in dysfunctional families, broken social relationships, and prisonlike schools.

"Before you ride another normal guy into the ground so he can be worked over by military intelligence, I ask you this: consider an option.

"Do it for Y.A. Gadahn, or do it for whatever ideals you hold dearest, or do it for yourself, but do it. Resist. With reason, passion and the knowledge that it doesn't have to be this way."