Have you heard this one? A paramedic, a musician & martial arts expert, a bookseller and an ER doctor go into a bar. One asks another:

... “You really want to learn how to rip somebody’s throat out?”

Tarik Shah asked the man he thought was a terrorist.

**

“I could be joking and cutting their throats in the next second. It’s a strategy.”

**

It was March 2004, and Mr. Shah did not know that the man was recording him for the government.
“I’m talking about damage to the inside so they drown on their own blood.”
Mr. Shah, a jazz musician and martial arts expert, demonstrated the move on the neck of his stand-up bass. “You give them internal bleeding,” he said. “It fills their lungs with blood.”
Mr. Shah, 44, was arrested two years ago by the F.B.I. and, with an old friend, Rafiq Sabir, a physician, charged in a plot to provide close-combat training and medical assistance to Al Qaeda. But in that time, few details emerged: His federal indictment laid out the charges in the sparest form, and hearings revealed little beyond his background as an American-born man raised in the Bronx.
Then, last month, Mr. Shah stood up in Federal District Court in Manhattan and pleaded guilty to conspiracy, ending the possibility of a public trial.
But now his story is being told in full — and in striking detail — at a different trial, Dr. Sabir’s. Charged with conspiracy, Dr. Sabir, an emergency room doctor with a Columbia University medical degree, is the only one of the four men eventually charged in the case to fight the accusations. Along with Mr. Shah, who faces 15 years in prison, two other men — a paramedic from Washington and a Brooklyn bookseller — have pleaded guilty.