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Prominent Islamists Blast NSA for Monitoring Emails

by Meira Svirsky, July 10, 2014

Faisal Gill, Former Homeland Security Official
Faisal Gill’s emails were monitored by the FBI from April 2006 until February 2008 when the surveillance was terminated.
Gill was a spokesman for the American Muslim Council, the organization led by Alamoudi before he was arrested on terrorism-related charges. Gil claims he only met Alamoudi few times despite his prominent position.
In 2001, Gill became the director of governmental affairs for the Islamic Free Market Institute. This organization was founded by Norquist and Alamoudi’s close aide. As we chronicled here, the Institute had strong links to Islamist groups at this time.
After the 9/11 attacks, Gill joined the White House Office of Homeland Security, listing Norquist as a reference. He then became the policy director for the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence division. He was suspended after it was reported that the FBI discovered that he did not disclose his links to Alamoudi’s organization in his paperwork. Gill was then cleared.
In 2007, Gill ran for the Virginia House of Delegates as a Republican candidate and lost. His campaign received $3,000 from three companies belonging to the Safa Group, a Muslim Brotherhood-linked group in Virginia that was raided as part of a terrorism investigation after 9/11. The Safa Group also financed the Islamic Free Market Institute.
Greenwald reports that Gill travelled to Sudan in 2007 as part of work with his law firm that he formed with Asim Ghafour, another target of surveillance. The pair met with officials from the Sudanese government, which is designated as a State Sponsor of Terrorism by the U.S. State Department.
The meetings were to discuss representing Sudan in a lawsuit by victims of Al-Qaeda terrorism. The report says “Ghafoor was ultimately retained, and Gill performed the contract work on one case.”
To be fair, former government employees often do business with foreign governments. However, Sudan is a State Sponsor of Terrorism. This relationship alone may not warrant surveillance, but it certainly gives credence to the Intelligence Community’s claim that it had some kind of undisclosed justification for the monitoring.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210128081758/https:/clarionproject.org/prominent-islamists-blasts-nsa-monitoring-emails/