(Suspected Terrorists) Hiding in Plain Sight (Linked to Hamas, in Chicago, Milwaukee)

ABC News ^ | 6-5-03 | Brian Ross

[cgk]

Hiding in Plain Sight

College Instructor, Grocer Were on Federal List of Suspected Terrorists

By Brian Ross

June 5— An ABCNEWS investigation has found at least two suspected terrorists, both known to the FBI, who have been in the United States leading lives as a college instructor and a grocer.

One of the men is Mohammad Salah, 53, who was put on a U.S. list in of what are called "specially designated terrorists" for his alleged role in planning suicide bombings in Israel.

But the FBI never arrested Salah, who had been employed by the city college system of Chicago since February 2002. Federal officials fear Salah, who had been teaching computer programming, had unfettered access to school computers and the Internet.

School officials said that they had no idea that Salah was on the U.S. list of possible terrorists. The list was created in 1995 under an executive order implemented by the Clinton administration to monitor suspected terrorists.

After being informed about Salah's placement on the list, Chicago college officials said they terminated him for failing to disclose his background.

Salah, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is accused of funneling money to the militant group Hamas for terrorist attacks. He was arrested in Israel on Jan. 25, 1993, for membership and participation in Hamas. In January 1995, Salah pleaded guilty in an Israeli military court and spent five years in confinement.

After his release from prison, Salah returned to the United States in June 1998.

FBI Agent Robert Wright, who works in the counterterrorism office in Chicago and who is the lead FBI agent on the case, said he can't believe Salah was allowed to remain free in the United States.

"You're dumbfounded; how could this man be walking the streets?" Wright said.

Wright said he strongly believes that Salah "and a number of others should have been arrested, should have [been] behind bars, should have had their citizenship stripped, should have been evicted from this country."

Salah declined to talk to ABCNEWS.

Grocer Allegedly Tied to Killings in Israel

In a second case, ABCNEWS found a second alleged terrorist living and working in the United States.

Jamil Sarsour, 52, runs a grocery store in Milwaukee but also served jail time in Israel. Federal authorities in Milwaukee have brought money-laundering charges against Sarsour. The case is scheduled to go to trial in the next few months.

Israeli and U.S. authorities say Sarsour helped to finance a string of suicide bus bombings in Israel, including one that killed two Americans — Sarah Duker and Matt Eisenfeld — who were planning to be married.

"Of course I'm angry. And I'm frightened," said Arline Duker, Sarah's mother.

Duker and Leonard Eisenfeld, Matt's father, say they want to know why the U.S. Justice Department has not moved against Sarsour.

"I don't understand it," said Eisenfeld. "Whenever an American is killed abroad, that's a crime."

Duker said people like Sarsour "should be off the street. … The fact that they're just walking around, what kind of oversight is that? Or what kind of mistake is that?"

Like Salah, Sarsour would not talk to ABCNEWS.

[cgk]

Mohammad Salah, a suspected terrorist, was teaching in Chicago's college system. Milwaukee grocer Jamil Sarsour, right, is accused of financing suicide bombings in Israel. (ABCNEWS.com)

[joesnuffy]

University towns those bastions of diversity and morality..
best place for terrorists to hide...
Heck they are just average in those environs

[Bill Davis FR]

government incompetency grows...

[Diddle E. Squat]

Well in this case we should give the school credit, they fired the guy once the FBI alerted them to his background.

[cookcounty]

The story implies Salah has not been arrested. Have I got this right? He's on the lam?

[Daus]

From some website called PArtners for Peace. They obviously have a warm place in their heart for the guy in Milwaukee....

http://www.partnersforpeace.org/inmedia/db200206010
----------------------

Jamil Sarsour

Jamil Sarsour, now 51, was naturalized as an American citizen in 1983. He lives in Wisconsin where he has extensive business interests. He is married and has eight children. In October 1998, Sarsour was detained upon arrival at the Ben Gurion Airport and taken to Moscobiya Prison (two blocks from the U.S. consulate general) where he alleges he was subjected to interrogation and torture, including "shabah," a standard Israeli procedure for dehumanizing prisoners. After being handcuffed and having their feet chained, they are forced to sit in a tilted small chair tied to the ground, leaving them totally unable to move. They are then hooded with a filthy small bag which is very hard to breathe through. Meanwhile, very loud music blasts overhead. Sarsour was also denied the use of a toilet or shower for long periods.

The questioning centered on alleged transfers of funds to "illegal organizations" such as Hamas. Sarsour denies making such transfers but admits that he has helped to support a widow with four children who is a member of his extended family. He also acknowledges that he had $10,000 in cash on him when he arrived in Israel, but it is not uncommon for Palestinian-Americans to travel with large quantities of cash when returning to their ancestral homeland where they will share their good fortune with gifts for family and friends.

Sarsour’s brother Emad says the family notified the consulate of the detention 10 days after he was first detained, but he did not receive a consular or family visit until after 101 days of incarceration, when an American consul finally came. His wife was allowed to see him two weeks after that, but only on a non-contact basis.

It was 60 days more before Sarsour’s attorney visited him, and the two men were never allowed to meet in private. When the attorney visited him again, he was accompanied by a delegation of four American officials: a female U.S. district attorney from Chicago, a male DA from Milwaukee, an FBI or CIA agent, and a counterterrorism official. They interrogated Sarsour and wanted him to sign an agreement to cooperate with them by telling about a terrorist network in the U.S., saying that would help his case. When he refused, the delegation warned him that if he did not confess to providing money to Hamas he would be jailed "forever." He says they also showed him pictures of his home and those of his relatives back in the States, indicating they knew how to implicate them with the same charges.

Although the physical torture stopped once he received a consular visit, Sarsour was then moved from solitary confinement to a cell with Palestinians who he says tried to get him to incriminate himself and beat him when he refused.

After many postponements over a period of almost three years, his trial was finally held on Aug. 8, 2001, and he was convicted of channeling funds to Adel Awadallah, a top Hamas fugitive and mastermind of past suicide bombings in Israel. (Awadallah was killed in an Israeli raid.) Sarsour was sentenced and imprisoned at Ashkelon Prison, but his family hopes he may be home by Feb. 11, 2003. However, he missed the wedding of his oldest daughter last September, and neither his wife nor any other family member has been allowed to visit him since September 2000. Consulate General Jerusalem routinely sends a local staff person to visit American prisoners approximately once per month.

[glock rocks]

From some website called PArtners for Peace

so, the liberal press is reporting this as just another PAP smear?

[highpockets]

. In January 1995, Salah pleaded guilty in an Israeli military court and spent five years in confinement. After his release from prison, Salah returned to the United States in June 1998.

1998-1995 equals three. At least in my world.

[7 x 77]

Does anybody know at which Chicago City College Campus this guy taught?

[blam]

"1998-1995 equals three. At least in my world."

Good catch. What is the truth?

[California74]

"1998-1995 equals three. At least in my world."
Good catch. What is the truth?

Well he was arrested in Jan 1993 and waiting 2 years to plea seems like a long time to wait. It's probably a typo and they meant January 1993 instead of January 1995.

[afraidfortherepublic]

Does anybody know which Milwaukee grocery store Sarsour owns?

[Land_of_Lincoln_John]

A Google search on Mohammad Salah and Chicago is interesting. This has to be the same guy:

U.S. Government Moves to Seize Chicago Home of Mohammad Salah After His Conviction in Israel

By Raeed N. Tayeh

July/August 1998, page 118

Just one story. Some kind of background checks they do at City Colleges!!!

The federal government on June 9 moved to seize the assets of Mohammad Salah, including both his family’s home in the Chicago suburb of Bridgeview and the assets of the non-profit Quranic Literacy Institute (QLI), also in Chicago.

In a civil suit filed in federal court, the Justice Department accused Salah of being a top military leader of Hamas as well as the mastermind of an intricate money-laundering network that used QLI as a front for financing Hamas’ military operations within Palestine. The assets that the government has seized total about $1.4 million, including Salah’s home.

Salah resides with his wife, Aziza, who is pregnant, and their three children in a two-flat building. Aziza Salah also is named in the suit since she holds with her husband a joint bank account that was seized.

Mohammad Salah is a Palestinian-American who emigrated to the U.S. from Jordan in the early 1970s and earned a B.A. in electrical engineering in 1988. He made a good living as a used car salesman, but he also spent many hours serving the developing Muslim community in Chicago.

In January of 1993, while on a humanitarian mission to Palestine to distribute money collected by charitable organizations in the U.S. for victims of the Israeli occupation, Mohammad Salah and fellow Chicagoan Mohammad Girad were detained by the Israeli authorities for allegedly being members of the Islamic resistance movement, Hamas.

Girad was released after six months, but Salah was detained for nearly two years before his trial took place. When he was arrested, the Israelis found in his hotel room nearly $100,000, which they claimed was destined for the military wing of Hamas.

During his two years in pre-trial detention, Salah charges that he was tortured by Shin Bet interrogators, who are permitted by Israeli law to use such methods to coerce confessions. He finally signed a confession in Hebrew, a language that he does not know.

When the confession was presented to a military court, Salah immediately recanted, pointing out that he was forced to sign a document that he didn’t understand. Facing 12 years to life in an Israeli prison, however, Salah pleaded guilty to a lesser charge that carried a five-year sentence, including time served.

While he was in an Israeli jail, President Bill Clinton signed an Executive Order placing Salah on a U.S. government list of terrorists. Salah thus became the first American citizen in history to be placed on such a list. The U.S. government presented no evidence of its own to support the claim, nor did it give Salah an opportunity to defend himself. The U.S. action apparently was based solely on information provided by the Israeli government.

Mohammad Salah returned to Chicago in November 1997 after serving nearly five years in an Israeli prison. In Chicago he learned the government had frozen all of his assets, and that strict economic sanctions were placed on him and his family as a result of the new counter-terrorism law.

Those frozen assets are the ones that now have been seized by the government without a court order, and without any legal precedent in American jurisprudence. Salah’s lawyer is confident, however, that all seized assets will be reinstated, based upon the government’s inability to justify its actions.

Muslim community members were outraged, and the story soon drew major media attention in Chicago. As reporters arrived at the mosque of the mainly Muslim neighborhood where Salah lives looking for the community’s reaction to his ordeal, FBI agents also began making early morning and late evening appearances to interview community members. Some 30 complaints of FBI harassment or intimidation had been reported by June 17.

A coalition of Muslim, Arab, and Christian community leaders, The United Committee for Civil Rights (UCCR), was mobilized to deal with this situation. “This is an unprecedented case that could set a standard in the legal system if it is not fought sincerely and vigorously,” said Fadi Zanayed, an Arab-American activist and UCCR member.

In fact the government is using a law that it reserves for drug dealers and mob figures who are convicted of criminal offenses to confiscate any money that the offenders have after they are convicted in a court.

“The fact that the government has filed only civil and not criminal charges against Salah shows that their case is shoddy at best,” says Abdullah Salah, Mohammad Salah’s nephew. Abdullah adds that “in a civil trial, the government’s burden of proof is less than in a criminal trial, so basically whoever pleads the best case wins.”

Mohammad Salah contends that the evidence which the U.S. government claims to have is based solely on Israeli accusations and intelligence that weren’t even enough for the Israelis to convict him. “The evidence that they have on him is nothing more than forged documents that the Israelis have invented,” says Salah.

After Friday prayers on June 12th, worshippers at the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview assembled for a rally to show support for Salah, his family, and QLI. Other Arab and Muslim Americans joined a two-block march from the mosque to the Salah home, where nearly 1,000 supporters gathered.

Chants of “Allahu Akbar” (God is Great) could be heard for blocks as the crowd responded to speakers at the rally who reiterated support for Salah and QLI.

“We are law-abiding Americans who have equal rights like everyone else,” said Osama Jammal, the president of the Mosque Foundation. “Politically motivated attacks on our community are an unfortunate reality that must not be accepted…the stereotyping of Muslims and Arabs as being terrorist is wrong and it must stop.”

http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0798/9807118.html

[FreedomPoster]

Salah, who had been teaching computer programming, had unfettered access to school computers and the Internet.

OMG! And I bet he also used the Interstate Highway System! And the Post Office! And the Public Switched Telephone Network! Horrors!

Who writes this stuff, and are they sentient?

[Catspaw]

Right here:

http://www.jsonline.com/news/metro/dec02/106404.asp

[takenoprisoner]

I wonder how much taxpayer assistance in loans and grants this terrorist got to build his "grocer" empire?

[Eowyn-of-Rohan]

I wouldn't call either Milwaukee or Chicago a "university town"...

[cardinal4]

Well he was arrested in Jan 1993 and waiting 2 years to plea seems like a long time to wait. It's probably a typo and they meant January 1993 instead of January 1995.

Or maybe Israelis dont give a hoot about homicide bomber financiers civil rights.

[Lunatic Fringe]

He may have been in jail for 2 years before he plead guilty