Posted on 01/06/2004 9:20:34 AM PST by JohnBerger
In 1992, al Qaeda recruited U.S. veterans by exploiting a Saudi government program that had converted thousands of G.I.s to Islam after the Gulf War. Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an African-American convert to Islam convicted of plotting in 1993 to blow up New York City landmarks, was called to a meeting at the Saudi Embassy in December 1992 and given the names of U.S. servicemen about to finish their tours of duty, whom he attempted to recruit as volunteer mujahideen and paramilitary trainers for a bin Laden-sponsored insurgency in Bosnia. The man who gave Hampton-El the list of servicemen was a Jamaican-born Islamic cleric named Bilal Philips, according to Hampton-El's court testimony, who ran the Gulf War conversion program on behalf of the Saudi government.
(Excerpt) Read more at intelwire.com ...
I've decided to move to a more general-purpose URL for several reasons, primarily the desire to host these investigative stories on a site which appropriately reflects the seriousness of their content and the credibility of the research that went into them.
As well, I have had increasing opportunities to move the OKC investigation into the mainstream media. This URL will enable me to more easily accomplish that goal.
Thanks to everyone who's followed these stories, and I hope to see you on the new site.
McVeigh?
What's the U.S. military doing about radical Muslim soldiers? Not enough.
By Deanne Stillman
The most disturbing story of the war so far is the fragging at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait. According to news reports, on March 23, Sgt. Asan Akbar rolled a grenade into each of three tents of sleeping officers and senior NCOs of the 101st Airborne Division. Then he allegedly shot the soldiers with an automatic weapon as they fled from their tents. Two of them, a major and a captain, died, and 14 others were injured.
The episode is unsettling for a number of reasons, most of all because it exposes a fact about our military that commanders have tried their best to ignore: the presence of radical, anti-American Muslims in the ranks. Akbar, a convert to Islam, reportedly said when he was captured: "You guys are coming into our countries and you're going to rape our women and kill our children." It's increasingly clear that there is a small group of soldiers for whom anti-American fatwas issued in mosques around the world supercede the oath of loyalty they took to their nation.
Almost nothing is known about radical Islam in the ranks. Very little is known about Islam in the ranks, period. Today, there are somewhere between 4,000 and 15,000 Muslims in the U.S. military. The estimates are so vague because Muslims, like Jews, often prefer not to declare their religion, and the armed services don't require that declaration. Some American servicemen and women are Muslim by birth. Many are converts, and most of the converts are black Americans. It was during the first Gulf War that the U.S. military first grappled with the issues raised by Muslim conversion in the ranks: As many as 3,000 U.S. soldiers may have embraced Islam since then. Click here for more about the Islamicization of the military in Gulf War I.
For most of the Muslims in today's military—as for most of the Jews or Catholics or Baptists—religion poses no problem for service. They worship at different times and in different places than Christians or Jews do and have different dietary restrictions, but they're simply loyal American soldiers. The military does whatever it can to accommodate this growing group. In 1997, it opened its first permanent Islamic prayer center, the Masjid al Da'awah, at the Norfolk, Va., Naval Air Station. At least two dozen sailors attend weekly. In 1998, Fort Lewis turned a space that had been used for Catholic and Protestant services into a Muslim center.
Do some soldiers visit radical mosques? Do some follow the teachings of anti-American imams? There are no studies to answer this, and the military doesn't talk about it. But Akbar's alleged fragging and other recent incidents suggest that some Muslim soldiers have been radicalized. There are even indications that some may be infiltrating the military in order to undermine it.
At best, military monitoring of radical black Muslims has been sloppy. The last year has witnessed three incidents, including Akbar's, suggesting the radicalization of Muslim soldiers. Beltway sniper suspect and former Army Sgt. John Allen Muhammad converted to Islam in 1985, around the same time he moved from the National Guard into the regular Army, according to news reports. During the first Gulf War, Muhammad may have been involved in a fragging incident very similar to last week's. Muhammad allegedly pulled the pin on an incendiary grenade in a crowded tent near the Iraqi border, setting a sergeant's sleeping bag on fire. No one was injured, but Muhammad was removed from the 84th Engineering company by MPs. "We assumed he was locked up," recalls a Marine who serviced with him. "Evidently that wasn't the case." It is not clear what, if any, punishment followed. Like Timothy McVeigh, another domestic terrorist who graduated from the Gulf War, Muhammad soon slipped back into the population and ultimately introduced the deadly combo platter of his military training, politico-religious views, and psychosis to the taxpayers who paid him to serve his country.
Shortly before Muhammad's murder spree, a black American Muslim named Jeffrey Leon Battle was among those arrested in Oregon, one of a group called the Portland Six accused of ties to al-Qaida. Battle was a former Army Reservist. According to the Justice Department, he planned to wage war against Americans in Afghanistan and may have joined the Army Reserves in order to learn how to kill American soldiers. And in May 2002, the feds arrested a Seattle-based Muslim cleric named Semi Osman as part of an investigation of a terrorist training camp in Oregon. Osman, a mechanic in the Navy Reserves, had access to fuel trucks similar to the type used in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. airmen. In January, he pleaded guilty to a weapons charge.
One of the weirdest stories of a radical Muslim is that of Ali Mohamed. According to various reports that surfaced after 9/11, Mohamed came to the United States in 1986 while he was a major in the Egyptian army, and secretly, a member of Islamic Jihad. After marrying an American, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of sergeant. A busy soldier, he taught a class on Islamic fundamentalist perceptions of America to special forces at Fort Bragg, N.C., and also taught at the JFK Special Operations Warfare School where he stole classified military documents. After he was discharged from the Army in 1989, he hooked up with Osama Bin Laden's nascent al-Qaida operation. Using his new American passport and connections, he spent the '90s traveling around the world helping plot terror operations. The FBI finally arrested him in 1998, and he eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring with Osama Bin Laden to attack Western targets.
Even after the arrests of John Allen Muhammad, Jeffrey Leon Battle, and Semi Osman, alarm over jihadists with American military backgrounds has not been not widely sounded. "I'm shocked," former Gen. Wesley Clark told CNN after news of Akbar's alleged fragging broke. "I'm shocked," said the other military commentators on all the other networks.
Were they really? I hope not; as military men, they should have known what was going down in the ranks. But as high-profile members of the media, they were probably afraid to risk offense by speaking the truth, which is that a small number of anti-American Muslim soldiers endanger their brothers-in-arms and tarnish the reputation of Muslim soldiers generally.
Does the existence of a few poisonous soldiers mean that all Muslims in the military should be deployed to the sidelines? Of course not: That kind of silly response is exactly the prejudice that radical Islamists would like the United States to practice. It does mean that radical Muslims in the service, to the degree that they make themselves known or can be found out, should be treated differently. Civilians don't have to sign loyalty oaths, but servicemen and women do. And they should be held accountable. At the first sign of a problem, they should be told to step away from the weapons.
Certainly, the military can do a better job screening its recruits. Sgt. Akbar is a vivid example of this. He evidently had ties to the Wahhabi sect of Islam that has been the breeding ground for so many anti-American Islamic terrorists. Akbar attended the University of California at Davis, a school that has a very active chapter of the Wahhabi-sponsored Muslim Students Association. According to reports, Akbar's mosque in Los Angeles is partially funded by Saudi Arabia's Islamic Development Bank, which promotes Wahhabism. A college professor described Akbar as having a "chip on his shoulder" about Islam, and according to the news reports, he was permitted to guard a munitions depot even after he had displayed a so-called "attitude problem." Now, at least, recruiters and commanding officers should realize that these are signals they should heed.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2080770
This article appeared in Slate (of all places) way back in March. This was the only place I saw this "non-PC" perspective aired. The journalist said in an interview that she couldn't get any main stream media to run it, even with the many big-time magazines and newpapers that normally run her work. I guess that should be no surprise.
I wasn't there, and I certainly wouldn't argue this characterization, but the point of the story is that the program collected the names of between 1,000 and 3,000 servicemen, and that some of these people were subsequently contacted in the U.S. and solicited to participate in an al Qaeda operation.
jmb
Yeah. I saw this when it first ran. The Washington Post story I cited covers some of this ground effectively. Here's the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50998-2003Nov1?language=printer
jmb
I was there. To me, the gross mischaracterization of the tents casts into doubt the veracity of the rest of the article.
We should immediately blow up all the Wahhabi run mosques. Blow 'em up to bits. Also, expel or imprison all suspected Islamists.
"We registered the names and addresses of over 3,000 male and female US soldiers," Philips said in a 2003 interview with a Saudi-owned Arabic language magazine published out of London. According to Philips, a team of workers trained in psychology identified soldiers who were receptive to Islam and singled them out for more personalized preaching in smaller groups. In some cases, soldiers also visited with Saudi families.
Thanks very much for your critique.
jmb
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