Director of The Investigative Project, an operation he launched to collect data on domestic Muslim organizations, Emerson has been labeled a “leading expert on militant Islamic terrorism.”
In 1994, his investigation into Islamic militants, “Jihad in America,” aired on PBS. While it won a prestigious journalism prize, Muslim organizations attacked both the program and its maker as racist and inflammatory.
Later, death threats and advice from federal authorities persuaded Emerson to take extraordinary safety precautions. His public appearances, such as his testimony before a congressional committee in 1998, are often conducted under police protection.
Yet Emerson has continued to keep tabs on militants who support or promote the concept of “jihad” -- in this case fundamentalist Islam’s virulent hostility toward Western nations, particularly the United States and Israel.
His book is primarily a straightforward history of nine “terrorist support networks” based in America: Muslim Arab Youth Association, the American Islamic Group, Islamic Cultural Workshop, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the American Muslim Council, Islamic Circle of North America, the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the American Muslim Alliance and the Islamic Society of North America.
Emerson boils the story behind these groups down to this “simple formula”: They use “the laws, freedoms and loopholes of the most liberal nation on earth to help finance and direct one of the most violent international terrorism groups in the world.”
Much of his information appears to be gathered through official sources, including the trials of several Muslim terrorists and FBI reports, but what he has uncovered about the groups’ role in terrorism seems largely speculative.
While threatening in their rhetoric and even their backing of weekend terrorist training camps, these groups appeared to be operating legally. And, despite Emerson’s reputation, he connected none of them to any direct role in Osama bin Laden’s Sept. 11 attacks.
His conclusion comes in only general terms: “Operating in the freewheeling and tolerant environment of the United States, bin Laden was able to set up a whole array of ‘cells’ in a loosely organized network that included Tucson, Arizona; Brooklyn, New York; Orlando, Florida, Dallas, Texas; Santa Clara, California; Columbia, Missouri; and Herndon, Virginia.”
There are several eye-openers, though, particularly the support of the University of Southern Florida for a quartet of Islamic Jihad members; open recruiting of bin Laden supporters; and the long-running recruitment and fund-raising efforts of the anti-Israel terrorist group Hamas from its American base.
Here's where you can find the article:
http://www.post-gazette.com/books/reviews/20020303review943.asp
I've seen his terror cell map posted here on FR some time ago, but I have no idea where to find it today...I did a search earlier, but had no luck, because I don't know the title of the thread...