They are members of the Hmong hilltribe, and their leader is a man who is legendary in CIA circles, Vang Pao.

Vang Pao rose to become a major-general in Laos, thanks to his CIA mentor, a soft-spoken Texan named Bill Lair. Starting in 1961, the Hmong and the CIA operative created a tribal guerrilla army that fought successfully against Lao and North Vietnamese communists - for a while. Later, when Laos became a side-show of the bigger war in neighbouring Vietnam, the programme started falling apart. In 1975, when the US pulled out of Laos and Vietnam, over 10,000 Hmong were slaughtered by Laos' new communist regime. Many survivors fled the country and went to the US as refugees. Today there are about 200,000 Hmong-Americans; and although Vang Pao, now 77, is no longer their undisputed leader he is still their most famous name.

I have spent many hours recently with both Bill Lair and Vang Pao for a documentary-film project. The two men are not close, but they recognise that their legacies are intertwined; and Lair has volunteered to testify for Vang Pao at his upcoming trial.

Lair and I have also travelled to Southeast Asia, to visit the sites of his covert war, and to look into claims that Hmong are still fighting against their old enemies in Laos. We found those reports true on a small scale. Scattered bands of ragged fighters subsist off wild plants, trying to evade the Laotian army … and almost every day, the leaders of these Hmong bands talk on satellite phones with their Hmong-American relatives.

There is no doubt that some Hmong-Americans have been up to their eyeballs in supporting and guiding the Hmong resistance in Laos, but there are different ways of interpreting this fact. Some might say it is heroic and steadfast for old allies to continue the fight for years after the US forces went home. (After all, which of our Iraqi and Afghan allies will do that?) Others might say that the old Hmong-American leaders are like exiled White Russians in Paris after World War I, plotting and scheming to return to power and not doing a good job of it. Human-rights workers have another angle: go to the Amnesty International Website, they say, search under "Hmong" and start reading about all the violence done against tribespeople by the Lao regime, which adds up to borderline genocide. You can frame the arguments any way you want, but for me, the more I learn about the Hmong resistance in Laos, the more I find it ambiguous and troubling. There's a cycle of violence in the boondocks of Laos, and all sides are keeping it going. I put the blame first and foremost on the Lao People's Democratic Republic, which is doing the actual killing; the Hmong-Americans rank a distant second.

But almost everyone I've talked to who is deeply knowledgeable about Laos is dismayed by the indictments and accompanying press releases coming out of the US Attorney's office in Sacramento. The feds boast about stopping a massive attack on the Lao government, as though the Hmong are capable of that. The Hmong resistance in Laos is too scattered and beaten-down for that, and the Hmong-Americans are simply too disorganised.

The government's case is typical of the post-9/11 John Ashcroft-Alberto Gonzales at the Justice Department. You've seen the pattern before: at first, big, ringing announcements of a clear victory over evil are made. Later it turns out the charges have been exaggerated or distorted. Months or years later the cases are dismissed or the charges are greatly reduced. And that is probably what is going to happen with Vang Pao and the Sacramento Nine.

The government's case against the Hmong suffers from two weaknesses. The first is that the feds' undercover operative, who works for the Department of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, was the co-creator of the so-called plot. A former Navy Seal, he offered a stupendous array of weapons, including Stinger missiles, and American-trained mercenaries. He brainstormed extensively with the only non-Hmong defendant, a retired Army colonel named Harrison Jack, who stood to benefit financially if the deal went through. The Hmong-Americans didn't hatch the idea for this plot, or at least nothing this ambitious. They just made the mistake of liking the sound of it when the others proposed it.

The second weakness in the feds' case is that it does not take into account the cultural reality of the Hmong. Though many younger Hmong-Americans are US college graduates today, the elders of Vang Pao's generation still don't speak fluent English. They don't know how to "read" the intentions or sincerity of mainstream Americans and they don't fully understand US government rules. Whether they have been smart to support and guide the resistance in Laos or not,  the Hmong-Americans are going to claim the right of ethnic self-defence against their old enemies. Who else would help the Hmong in Laos? The US government abandoned the Hmong in 1975 and has shown no interest in supporting them since then. Rumour has it that the Hmong-Americans who were recently arrested hoped the undercover agent worked for the American government - and he did, just not for the right agency.

This case is already causing collateral damage abroad. Laos and its neighbour, Thailand, have cited Vang Pao's arrest as a so-called terrorist to end a tradition of sanctuary for Hmong refugees in Thailand. About a thousand legitimate war refugees are at risk of being forcibly repatriated, including women who have been raped and tortured by Laotian forces and others who have seen family members killed. The first 160 were repatriated soon after Vang Pao's arrest. Nobody has heard from them since. They will not get trials, or visits from neutral international monitors.

By contrast, I suppose, the Sacramento Nine are lucky. They will get trials, and the worst they can expect is prison for life. The shame is that much of the problem could have been avoided if the US government had taken a radically different approach 20 or 30 years ago. Bill Lair says he would have gladly worked with the Hmong elders to keep them on the straight-and-narrow once they came to this country, but the CIA doesn't provide long-term counselling to refugees, and neither does any other branch of the US government.

What these Hmong-Americans are most guilty of is acting like Hmong, instead of acting like Americans. But they don't deserve prison for that.

Roger Warner is the author of "Shooting at the Moon: the Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos".

Roger Warner