Posted on 12/10/2002 8:47:34 PM PST by JohnathanRGalt
Of about 370 suspects on the list, 24 are associated with Texas addresses.
"We had a watch list - it was not called a watch list, it was called Project Lookout," FBI spokesman Steven Berry said by phone. "We exhausted it. We got all the information from individuals on the list."
Berry would not talk about current aspects of the investigation.
A form of the FBI list was published online in October 2001 by the Finnish government, which reportedly believed the United States had already released it. It details names and, in some cases, addresses and phone numbers of U.S. terrorism suspects.
The FBI appeared to have particular interest in Saudi Arabian Airlines' office in Houston. Eleven Middle-Eastern men on the list were identified with the airline's offices in Houston.
"Any people who were involved in the investigation are not here at this time," an employee at the airline office said.
News reports show that Mustafa Ahmad Adin Al-Husawi is suspected of slipping $500,000 from al-Qaida to the Sept. 11 hijackers. The watch list indicates that he lived, among other addresses, at a house in Sugar Land.
A phone number could not be found for the address in local phone books or online listings, and phone numbers given for him in Massachusetts and New York are not currently assigned to him.
Tareq Al-Jahini, whom the FBI watched for years, according to The (Portland) Oregonian, is listed at 147 McCue St. in Houston. But four online map search engines show that the address does not exist.
Bob Dogium of the Houston FBI field office declined comment on individuals the bureau has watched.
"There were certainly people here whose names popped up on lists," Dogium said. "The bottom line, though, is that nobody in Houston was taken into custody or arrested by the FBI because of having any connections to terrorist threats or terrorism."
But the Immigration and Naturalization Service, as well as the FBI, has handled detentions and arrests. Dogium conceded the INS had taken in suspects in Houston.
Houston previously was the base for a group of militant Islamic Web sites, including www.azzam.com, which some believe is controlled by al-Qaida.
Investigators have watched the progress of militant groups' online skills. Testifying before Congress in February, Steven Emerson, a journalist, listed nonprofit groups such as the Qatar Charitable Society and Al-Rashid Trust that used Web sites, he believed, to solicit contributions to terrorists.
One of Azzam.com's recent incarnations, which had U.S. and European components, contained narratives praising soldiers of the Taliban.
Many of the Texas sites are down, but their domain names still are registered. A search on Azzam and its alias, www.qoqaz.net, shows that both domains are listed with a Houston Internet company. The same company provided space to www.taliban-news.com and www.qassam.org. What happened to these sites remains unclear.
Starting in the 1990s, counterterrorism investigators in Dallas stepped into a circle of strange happenings involving a Richardson Internet company, a huge Islamic charity and a pro-Palestinian organization.
The FBI had kept track of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development since at least 1993. Investigators said the HLF, which claims to be the biggest Islamic charity in the United States, has numerous and deep connections to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
The foundation was a client of InfoCom, a Richardson Internet company that gives space to several Islamic sites and owns the online country code for Iraq.
The Islamic Association for Palestine was also a client of InfoCom. Its Web site operated on InfoCom space, though the site is now based in Virginia.
The North Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force raided InfoCom's offices on Sept. 6, 2001. The reasons for the search still sleep in a sealed affidavit.
Ihsan Elashi, who ran InfoCom with his brothers, is serving a four-year prison term for violating a trade restriction imposed the day of the raid.
His brother Ghassan Elashi, the company's vice president for marketing, said that he did not know why federal agents would search the offices.
But at the same time as the raid, two InfoCom bank accounts had been frozen. The reason, investigators told the company, was that those accounts contained money from Nadia Elashi Marzouk, the wife of a Hamas political leader.
Months later, President Bush announced that he had frozen HLF's assets because of links to Hamas. The foundation waded into a series of court battles, which continue.
Ghassan Dahduli, a former InfoCom technician, is now in Jordan after running afoul of FBI interrogators. They met him in a Dallas parking lot, his immigration papers in hand, according to Karen Pennington, who represented Dahduli. Eventually, they deported him.
"These people have been very much hurt. I'm a native Texan ... I'm not anti-American, but our government has never shown enough evidence for why it is doing this," Pennington said.
It is clear what happened to them:
http://www.azfalrasas.com/ redirects to http://216.97.79.152/nuke/index.php at C.I. Host in TexasIn the statement posted Monday at an Islamist Web site, a group claiming to be the "Political Office of Qaeda al-Jihad" said it had carried out last week's attacks on an Israeli hotel and airliner in Kenya... The supposed al Qaeda message was posted in Arabic on the site www.azfalrasas.com, which roughly means "melody of gunfire," and shows an AK-47 automatic rifle and a tank.
"Interior Contracting * JoineryBut when you look a the page source, there are all kinds of links to terrorist websites such as Azzam (many more).
Architectural Aluminum Systems"
stepping back in time..NEWSFACTOR.com - NEWSFACTOR NETWORK: "FBI TERRORISM TASK FORCE RAIDS ARAB WEB HOSTING FIRM" (ARTICLE NOTE: The firm is identified as InfoCom Corporation. ARTICLE SNIPPET: "Arab leaders held a news conference to protest the FBI's actions, calling it an "anti-Muslim witch hunt." They insisted the task force, which also included the Secret Service and the U.S. Customs Service, acted on little evidence, but rather on political pressure and anti-Arab stereotypes. "While Muslims understand the FBI's mission to protect American citizens, we are concerned that the civil liberties of InfoCom's owners and their many important clients were violated by this unexpected raid," the Arab group said in a statement.") by Tim McDonald (SEPTEMBER 7, 2001)
Voices of Palestine is a local muslim & pallie terror front.
It's registered to the Mansour family and the "American Mortgage Group" in Bellevue, WA.
From #7- The Islamic Association for Palestine is hyperlinked from alaqsaintifada.org as is voicesofpalestine.org
Voices of Palestine is a local muslim & pallie terror front.
It's registered to the Mansour family and the "American Mortgage Group" in Bellevue, WA.
Notice that Hamas and al-Aqsa seem to be working together in the US.
I am curious why the Islamic Assn for Palestine site moved to Virgina after InfoCom was shut down rather than, say, California or Portland. Since Abar has mentioned that the local site Voices of Palestine is registered to the Mansour family and the "American Mortgage Group" (which probably set up safehouses) in Bellevue, WA., I'm wondering if they want to draw attention away from those areas. Or do they feel they have more official protection in Virginia? Or do they now need proximity to communicate with various Islamic embassy employees?
sakina security bump.
Infocom is still a working ISP in Richardson TX. They also host many other Arabic sites such as the Arabic satellite news channel Al-Jazera and Islami-QA which sends out fatwas telling Muslims what is permissable or not.
It appears that IAP didn't move. I still see them at 63.175.194.197 -- which is in the netblock of infocom. Perhaps the news reporter got it wrong or is repeating disinformation told to him.
Another IIRC: the name Elashi sounds very familiar and I'm thinking it related to a number of scams in Florida that our excellent net sleuths traced to a web of familiar names and organizations with connections to the 9/11 attackers.
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)
December 16, 1990, Sunday, FINAL EDITION
BUSINESS, Pg. C1
COMMUNICATIONS; FAX EVOLVES WITH PHONE AS IT TRANSFORMS BUSINESS
Joanne Kelley; Reuters(snip) Now a handful of companies are making special cards and boards that enable owners of personal computers and printers to convert their machines to accept and send faxes.
International Computers and Communications Inc. began shipping such a new card last month.
The card, which sells for less than $ 10 and has a phone jack attached, fits into an expansion slot on the back of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s popular Laserjet computer printers. ''We see great potential in the trend toward multifunction devices and we want to take advantage of it,'' said Bayan Elashi, president of ICC, based in Los Angeles.
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