Clinton White House axed terror-fund probe

The Clinton administration shut down a 1995 investigation of Islamic charities, concerned that a public probe would expose Saudi Arabia's suspected ties to a global money-laundering operation that raised millions for anti-Israel terrorists, federal officials told The Washington Times.

Law enforcement authorities and others close to the aborted investigation said the State Department pressed federal officials to pull agents off the previously undisclosed probe after the charities were targeted in the diversion of cash to groups that fund terrorism.

Rajhi's father, Sheikh Saleh al-Rajhi, owns the kingdom's biggest real estate and contracting firm, which runs several residential compounds and commercial centers in Riyadh, in addition to other firms. His uncle, Sheikh Suleiman al-Rajhi, runs one of the kingdom's major banks, the Rajhi Banking Investment Company.

At the center of the federal investigation is a cluster of companies and charities based in Herndon, Va., that was launched in the 1970s by one of Saudi Arabia's leading banking families, the al-Rajhis. The network has owned or invested in businesses worldwide, including dairy farms in Zimbabwe, a poultry business in Georgia and lucrative office buildings in downtown Washington.

For years, most of the firms and foundations searched have engaged in extremely complex business deals with one another. And since the mid-1990s, federal agents have tried to track the $1.7 billion that has sloshed among them. Millions of dollars have ended up being sent to related firms in offshore tax havens, such as the Isle of Man, or to organizations that are under investigation for possible ties to terrorists.

The central figure in the interlocking companies and foundations is M. Yaqub Mirza, a financier with a reputation for brilliance who received a doctorate in physics from the University of Texas before taking the helm of the SAAR Foundation in Herndon, whose money he invested to start or gain positions in dozens of companies around the globe. SAAR and two close affiliates, the Safa Trust and the International Institute of Islamic Thought -- all of whose offices were searched -- donate funds to many legitimate Islamic causes, such as publishing religious texts and training Muslim clerics.

Five of their senior executives live in modest two-story homes on adjoining lots in Herndon. The houses were built on 22 acres that one of their affiliated firms bought and developed in 1987.

Many Muslims are dismayed because some sites searched are among the most established Islamic organizations in the United States, and in some cases, it is unclear what their ties to SAAR or alleged terrorist activity could be.

The Fiqh Council of North America in Leesburg, for example, is an organization of leading clerics that issues religious interpretations for mosques and Islamic centers across the country. The Graduate School of Islamic Social Sciences, also in Leesburg, trains Muslim imams for religious service, including in the U.S. military.

"It is a sad day for America again," said Mohammad Omeish, president of the Success Foundation, which describes itself as devoted to helping Muslim victims of war worldwide and whose Fairfax office was searched. "The message we are getting is, this war, even though they claim it is against terrorism, is against Muslims."

The keystone of the Saudi-sponsored Northern Virginia network is the Saar Foundation, created by Suleiman Abdul Al-Aziz al-Rajhi, a scion of one of the richest Saudi families. The Saar Foundation is connected to Al-Taqwa, a shell company formerly based in Switzerland, where its leading figures included a notorious neo-Nazi and Islamist, Ahmed Huber.

Saar has also been linked to Khalid bin Mahfouz, former lead financial adviser to the Saudi royal family and ex-head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia. Mahfouz has been named by French intelligence as a backer of Osama bin Laden; Mahfouz endowed the Muwafaq Foundation, which U.S. authorities confirm was an arm of bin Laden's terror organization. Muwafaq's former chief, Yassin al-Qadi, oversaw the financial penetration of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania by Wahhabi terrorists in the late 1990s.

Men like al-Rajhi, Mahfouz and al-Qadi are the big players in the financing of Islamic extremism. And their paths repeatedly lead back to Northern Virginia. They don't play for small stakes: Saar received $1.7 billion in donations in 1998, although this was left out of the foundation's tax filings until 2000. No explanation has been offered for this bit of accounting sorcery.

A major personality on the ground in Virginia is an individual named Jamal Barzinji, whose office in Herndon was a major target of the raids. In 1980, he was listed in local public records as a representative of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), an arm of the Saudi regime with offices in Virginia. WAMY has been deeply involved in providing cover for Wahhabi terrorism.

The 2002 entry in the U.S. Business Directory lists the president of the WAMY office in Annandale, Va., as Abdula bin Laden - the terrorist's younger brother.

Barzinji serves as a trustee and officer of the Amana Mutual Funds Trust, a growth and income fund headquartered in Bellingham, Wash., conveniently near the Canadian border. Amana's board also includes Yaqub Mirza, a Pakistani physicist who shares Barzinji's Herndon office address and who is widely described as a financial genius.

Another board member and tenant in the Herndon office is Samir Salah. He formerly ran a branch of Al-Taqwa in the Caribbean, heads a financial firm linked to Saar and directs Dar al-Hijra, a mosque in Falls Church, Va., notable for hardline Wahhabi preaching. Salah is also deeply involved with Taibah International Aid Association, a Virginia charity with a Bosnian branch that is being investigated by authorities in Sarajevo.

Front groups interfacing between the Wahhabi-Saudi money movers under federal suspicion and the broader American public include two institutions active in the religious field: the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS).

The involvement of GSISS with the financing of extremism is especially startling in that it alone is credentialed by the Department of Defense to certify Muslim chaplains for the U.S. armed forces. Barzinji has appeared on the boards of both.

The day of the raids, Barzinji appeared on U.S. television news insisting he knew of no questionable behavior by the groups under scrutiny and promising full cooperation with the authorities. But in a familiar pattern of duplicity, he expressed himself quite differently in the Islamic media.

Barzinji told the Internet news service Islam Online (www. islam-online.net) he believed the investigations fulfilled the will not of the Bush administration, but of "elements within the government, media and [academia] who were unhappy with the positive attention being given to Muslims."

This tortured formulation, repeated in several variations, embodies the Islamist fantasy that every doubt cast on the activities of the Wahhabi lobby is the product of Jewish influence.

To imagine that the aftermath of Sept. 11 has been anything but disastrous for the image and credibility of American Muslims is absurd. The presumption that anybody outside government dictates policy to the Treasury, however, is only the classic supposition about alleged Israeli influence that infests the Arab mind.

Perhaps it's to be expected that the Wahhabi lobby would react to a federal investigation with its usual combination of pseudopatriotic protest, claims of innocence and paranoia. But perhaps the White House might suggest to friends like Norquist that they should stop trying to protect enablers of terrorism. Otherwise, more and more people will wonder whether the administration really understands the problems afflicting Islam in the United States, and whether it really is united in resisting the influence of the extremists.

The "legacy" of Billyjeff Clinton just gets blacker and blacker, doesn't it? Not only did he fail as President to take effective action against terrorists, he stopped others in the government who had a clearer vision of what the United States should be investigating, from doing their jobs. He did so for "political" reasons.
We are in the opening stages of World War III. And Clinton helped us get there.
Jack Kennedy's ghost-written book, for which he received a Doris Kearns Godwin Pulitzer Prize (which is to say he didn't really earn it the old fashioned way), was called Why England Slept, It recounted how and why England found itself largely unprepared for WW II, when Germany invaded Poland and the war began in earnest.
What we are finding out now, is that Clinton offered the same services to America in his eight years. Of course, his myriad scandals would have been less had he merely "slept," but that is another, scumbag story that need not be repeated here.
Remember the claims that Clinton was capable of "compartmentalizing" and "multi-tasking"? All that means is he was capable of screwing up many aspects of American foreign policy and American domestic policy at the same time. Better we should have had a dolt like Jimmy Carter at the helm. He lacked the capacity of doing so may things wrong, simultaneously.
Heck, even Michael Dukakis would have been better, Now there's a scary thought.
As a FReeper whose name I wish I could recall, so cogently remarked in these threads, "I despised him then, I despise him now. I will despise him until he dies. And then I will despise his memory."

Congressman Billybob

Click here to fight Shays-Meehan.

Click here for latest column: "When Billie Comes Marching Home Again"

Bill Clinton may not be the worst president America has had, but surely he is the worst person to be president.*

---GEORGE WILL, Sleaze, the sequel

^{Q ERTY6}

Had George Will written Sleaze, the sequel (the "sequel" is, of course, hillary) after 9-11-01, I suspect that he would have had to forgo the above conceit, as the doubt expressed in the setup phrase was, from that day forward, no longer operational.

clinton-was-an- utter-failure

(Charlie Rose-colored glasses--an April Fool's joke?-- notwithstanding)

REALITY-CHECK bump!

Clinton's failure to grasp the opportunity to unravel increasingly organized extremists, coupled with Berger's assessments of their potential to directly threaten the U.S., represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures in American history

Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize

Bill Clinton may not be the worst president America has had, but surely he is the worst person to be president.*

---GEORGE WILL, Sleaze, the sequel

Indeed, assessing the clinton presidency an abject failure is not inconsistent with commentary coming from the left, most recently the LA Times: "Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize."

When the clintons left office, I predicted that the country would eventually learn--sadly, the hard way--that this depraved, self-absorbed and inept pair had placed America (and the world) in mortal danger. But I was thinking years, not months.

It is very significant that hillary clinton didn't deny clinton culpability for the terrorism. (Meet the Press, 12-09-01), notwithstanding tired tactics (if you can't pass the buck, spread the blame) and chronic "KnowNothing Victim Clinton" self-exclusion.

If leftist pandering keeps the disenfranchized down in perpetuity, clinton pandering,("it's the economy, stupid"), kept the middle and upper classes wilfully ignorant for eight years.

And ironically, both results (leftist social policy and the clinton economy) are equally illusory, fraudulent. It is becoming increasingly clear that clinton assiduously avoided essential actions that would have negatively impacted the economy--the ultimate source of his continued power--actions like, say, going after the terrorists.

It is critically important that hillary clinton fail in her grasp for power; read Peggy Noonan's little book, 'The Case Against Hillary Clinton' and Barbara Olson's two books; it is critical that the West de-clintonize, but that will be automatic once it is understood that the clintons risked civilization itself in order to gain and retain power.

It shouldn't take books, however, to see that a leader is a dangerous, self-absorbed sicko. People should be able to figure that out for themselves. The electorate must be taught to think, to reason. It must be able to spot spin, especially in this age of the electronic demagogue.

I am not hopeful. As Bertrand Russell noted, "Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so. "

Mia T, hillary clinton blames hubby for terrorism: (SHE knew nuttin')
Meet the Press, 12-09-01

*George Will continues: There is reason to believe that he is a rapist ("You better get some ice on that," Juanita Broaddrick says he told her concerning her bit lip), and that he bombed a country to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life, and that. ... Furthermore, the bargain that he and his wife call a marriage refutes the axiom that opposites attract. Rather, she, as much as he, perhaps even more so, incarnates Clintonism

Q ERTY3 co-rapist bump!

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