This week’s story of the five Americans nabbed in Pakistan for allegedly trying to participate in terror attacks shows us a few things: 1) If you get all extremist your family may end up calling the FBI on you, and 2) that despite welcoming the notoriously loopy Adam Gadahn with open arms, al-Qaida is apparently selective and will deny you entry without good references.

More on the case:

“Five young American Muslims detained over alleged terrorist links in Pakistan are most likely to be deported, a local police chief said Friday.

The men have allegedly told investigators they tried to connect with Islamic militant groups in Pakistan and were intending to cross the border into Afghanistan and fight US troops there.

They were reported missing by their families in the Washington D.C. area a week ago after one of them left behind a militaristic farewell video saying Muslims must be defended. Pakistani police detained them this week in the town of Sargodha in eastern Pakistan.

Regional police chief Javed Islam said the men had yet to be charged with any crime. ‘They are American citizens. I think most probably they would be taken to America, that’s what I feel,’ he told The Associated Press.

US officials, including some from the FBI, have visited the men in custody.

…Islam said Thursday the five young men wanted to join militants in Pakistan’s tribal area before crossing into Afghanistan to take part in jihad, or holy war. He said they met representatives from the al-Qaeda-linked Jaish-e-Mohammed militant group in the southeastern city of Hyderabad and from a related group, Jamat-ud-Dawa, in Lahore but were turned away because they were not trusted, he said.

The men used the social networking site Facebook and the Internet video site YouTube to try to connect with extremist groups in Pakistan, said S.M. Imran Gardezi, the press minister at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington. ‘When they arrived in Pakistan, they took that effort to the street.’”

McClatchy reports more on the group’s suspected intentions:

“Usman Anwar, the chief of police in the town of Sargodha, told McClatchy that the five men, all from the Washington area, were seeking a link to an ultra-radical jihad group, possibly Al Qaeda.

‘It’s above Jaish. It’s something more serious than that,’ Anwar said in a telephone interview, referring to Jaish-e-Mohammad, the group that’s been implicated in the 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl.”

More on the case, and the homegrown terror threat, in this ABC News video.

(Mugshots: Sargodha Police Department)