Bush Challenges Terrorist Fronts

Federal agents raided more than a dozen homes and an Islamic institute in suburban Washington on March 20 as part of a continued sweep of organizations suspected of funding international terrorism. The raids were carried out by the U.S. Customs Service as part of the Treasury Department's "Operation Green Quest" to dry up terrorist finances. They targeted Muslim charitable foundations linked to extremist groups in the Middle East that financed political-influence operations in the nation's capital. Officials tell Insight some $1.7 billion was funneled through those organizations in recent years.

Instead of helping the FBI, Customs Service and other federal investigators, prominent Muslim groups — including one with close ties to the Republican Party — have protested the raids and accused the feds of insensitivity. They also have been putting the squeeze on the Bush administration to back off.

On April 4, according to an Islamic Institute bulletin, "Islamic Institute Chairman Khaled Saffuri and leaders of three Muslim and Arab-American groups attended a closed luncheon meeting … with Secretary of the Treasury Paul O'Neill to discuss the recent raids of Muslim organizations, businesses and homes in Northern Virginia."

The bulletin continued: "The meeting was constructive, and the leaders expressed their concerns to Secretary O'Neill regarding the insensitive actions of Treasury agents during the raids against the Muslim-American organizations, and concerns of the community that civil-rights violations occurred. Secretary O'Neill promised that these concerns would be investigated."

The day before, the Islamic Institute met with Justice Department officials to, in its own words, "seek clarification of offensive statements about Islam recently attributed to Attorney General John Ashcroft."

Following the meeting, Islamic Institute Executive Director Abdulwahab Alkebsi said, "The Muslim-American community perceives that it is targeted for abuse right now, and the perception in the community when they hear statements like those attributed to the attorney general is that they are true. Positive confidence-building measures by the Department of Justice are needed to clarify that the community is not a target. Muslim Americans are ready to help their country in the war on terror, but they must be treated as part of the solution, not part of the problem."

That's all well and good, counterterrorism experts say, but such groups complaining about "insensitive actions" and "positive confidence-building measures" have been slow to offer help as citizens in the ongoing counterterrorism investigations. While the Islamic Institute belatedly urged speakers of Arabic, Farsi and other languages to help the FBI as translators, it never publicly called for its friends to support federal antiterrorism investigations with information. Instead, such groups have been more concerned with promoting their victim status.

Yet not all Muslim groups agree with Saffuri's attempt to cast U.S. Muslims as victims. Some urge cooperation with federal law-enforcement authorities. Ironically, they believe that instead of being courted they have been frozen out of dialogue with the Bush administration. "We are concerned that some government staffers may be undermining the best interests of our president and his administration — either wittingly or not," says Dr. Hedieh Mirahmadi of the Islamic Supreme Council of America. "It is no secret that our organization has repeatedly been excluded from White House, State Department and attorney general events with the Muslim community."

For Mirahmadi and others, there's no room for impeding domestic antiterrorism investigations. "It is our patriotic duty as Americans and our duty as Muslims to speak up against any attempt by extremists to mobilize the Muslim community against our country," she says.

Longtime observers of terrorist support groups liken today's situation to the 1980s FBI investigations of U.S.-based groups, such as the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), that raised money and served as propaganda organs for Marxist-Leninist guerrilla forces in Latin America.

CISPES was a front group established by the late Communist Party USA operative Sandy Pollack with agents of the Communist Party of El Salvador and the Cuban government to serve as an American mouthpiece and political-action arm of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Private studies of CISPES found a direct correlation between the group's political action in the United States and FMLN's paramilitary and terrorist operations on the ground in El Salvador.

Related groups with charitable 501(c)(3) status worked with CISPES to raise money and supplies for FMLN civic-action programs in guerrilla-controlled areas, providing medical supplies to combatants, guerrillas' families and FMLN-controlled villages in the Salvadoran countryside. Some of the charitable groups, such as Medical Aid for El Salvador, were reincarnations of Vietnam War-era support groups for the Viet Cong, such as Medical Aid for Indochina. Other groups, such as New El Salvador Today (NEST), served to funnel American charitable contributions into guerrilla-controlled zones to finance and supply FMLN civic-action programs.

Suspecting that CISPES and affiliated groups might be breaking the law, the FBI began monitoring them, first as a possible agent of a foreign power, and again as an illegal funder of international terrorist groups.

Many FMLN support operations in the United States operated out of Christian churches, both to bilk unsuspecting people of their charitable contributions and to limit the FBI's ability to monitor their suspect operations. When the FBI did investigate, CISPES and its supporters — including influential figures in Congress such as Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), now the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee — alleged that the feds were running "domestic spying operations" and "spying on churches."

Conyers publicly sponsored both Medical Aid for El Salvador in the 1980s and Medical Aid for Indochina in the 1970s. He also helped raise money for the FMLN, signing a direct-mail fund-raising letter for NEST in the mid-1980s. Conyers' NEST letter was so inflammatory that it prompted the U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin G. Corr, to rebut it for its "serious distortions" and "blatant falsehoods."

The Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal group in New York, helped insulate CISPES and other terrorist support groups from federal scrutiny. The center set up a "Movement Support Network" to coordinate a nationwide effort to report FBI "harassment" of terrorist-solidarity committees.

In 1984, the center's Michael Ratner coauthored an article with a CISPES leader accusing the Reagan administration of having carefully set the stage for operations against domestic opposition, "beginning with then-Secretary of State [Alexander] Haig's declaration that 'international terrorism' would take the place of human rights as the principal concern of U.S. foreign policy. The administration went on to paint liberation movements such as the FMLN … and even countries like Nicaragua, as 'terrorist.'"

Ratner continued, "It is only a short step from this big lie to labeling as 'terrorist' domestic groups who support these countries and movements. In [Ronald] Reagan's worldview, even groups and individuals who merely oppose U.S. intervention are supporting terrorism." Ratner and CISPES urged activists to inform of any FBI questioning, "documenting the harassment for future reference."

The activists worked with a radical lawmaker from California to hold hearings denouncing the FBI for a pattern of "political harassment." Testimony from the hearings, the congressman said, "confirms my fear that there is indeed a national pattern of break-ins against churches and organizations opposed to the present policies in Central America."

FBI Director William Sessions told a Senate panel that the focus of the probe was "to determine the extent of monetary and other support by CISPES for terrorism movements and activities in El Salvador," plus its potential for waging terrorism in the United States and the extent of foreign control over the group.

The probe broadened after the guerrillas' assassination of Lt. Cmdr. Albert Schaufelberger in San Salvador and a spate of FMLN "solidarity" bombings in New York City and Washington. But the FBI made some mistakes in the probe, and political pressure became so strong that Sessions shut down the CISPES monitoring operation and demoted FBI counterterrorism chief Oliver "Buck" Revell, effectively destroying his career.

More than 15 years later, the Muslim charities raided in Northern Virginia, and related campaigns in many U.S. mosques, are seen as CISPES equivalents on behalf of Hamas and Hezbollah, which the State Department classifies as terrorist organizations. The outcry against FBI and Customs investigations and raids is the same as that of the FMLN supporters.

Even some of the characters are the same. Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights again are litigating and making public statements on behalf of terrorists and terrorist support groups. Conyers again is using his House Judiciary Committee post as a bully pulpit against the FBI.

Most recently Conyers was a plaintiff with Michigan media outlets in a lawsuit against the Justice Department to force the government to identify alleged terrorist detainees rounded up since Sept. 11 and to reveal the sensitive information federal authorities had against them. In April, a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Conyers' client, the evidence showed, was tied to a terrorist organization in the al-Qaeda network.

No one is alleging an al-Qaeda link with the groups raided in Northern Virginia, which seem devoted only to support for Hamas and Hezbollah. But the tactics of the "Muslim community" leaders mirror those of the CISPES network: deny the allegations, claim victim status, seek political refuge with prominent politicians and intimidate federal investigators into backing off.

Not all American Muslims are buying it. "Rather than becoming beacons for America's ideals by showing a willingness to submit to questioning by federal law enforcement instead of grandstanding about racial profiling, we are hiding behind the guarantees afforded to us by the very Constitution the terrorists sought to dismantle on Sept. 11," Pakistani-American businessman Mansour Ijaz wrote recently in the Washington Post. "Our anger demonstrates an inability to put citizenship before religious and ethnic allegiances and U.S. national-security interests before dubious claims of civil-rights violations."

After all, shutting off terrorist financing through nonprofits, whether the charities know whom they are funding or not, "is a paramount objective in America's war on terrorism," Ijaz noted. "The repeated denials by Muslim nonprofits about foreign sources of funding to operate their diverse and often dubious agendas are no longer enough. Neither are simplistic claims they fund legitimate causes abroad when the U.S. government — which they increasingly lobby and help to elect — has clear evidence to the contrary. If these groups want to lead America's Arabs and Muslims, they must lead first by setting an example for transparency and scrutiny."

That means, Ijaz wrote, that "America's Arabs and Muslims bear a special responsibility at this moment not to play the role of aggrieved victims. Rather, we should offer ourselves as resources to federal law-enforcement agencies interested in learning more about the complexities of our religious and ethnic roots; we should police our communities for sleeper agents; and we should stop the flow of foreign money — and its corrosive influence — into our political and religious nonprofit organizations."

The feds are being "insensitive" to probable terrorist fronts, huh?

Note to Muslim origanizations which made a limp effort at condemning terrorism in general, then continued "destroy America as usual" agendas:

Tough. It's hard enough keeping lynch mobs off your sorry, twisted, terrorist behinds.

You bring it opun yourselves. Shut up and live with it.

Mansoor Ijaz makes a lot of sense. He is genuinely concerned that the pigheadedness of the muslim groups in using victimisation theology is backfiring. Article also brings up a valuable point that moderate proAmerican islamic groups like the one quoted above has been systematically barred from the WH and other events. BUt they're both fighting an updhill battle.

" 'Rather than becoming beacons for America's ideals by showing a willingness to submit to questioning by federal law enforcement instead of grandstanding about racial profiling, we are hiding behind the guarantees afforded to us by the very Constitution the terrorists sought to dismantle on Sept. 11,' Pakistani-American businessman Mansour Ijaz wrote recently in the Washington Post. 'Our anger demonstrates an inability to put citizenship before religious and ethnic allegiances and U.S. national-security interests before dubious claims of civil-rights violations.' "

I like this man. Unfortunately, he's not a Muslim cleric, and the clerics are the only ones the media - among others - listen to. In a few weeks we'll probably hear that Ijaz's body has been found somewhere, after being murdered by unknown assailant(s), possibly in an abortive robbery attempt.

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