Posted on 09/23/2003 5:44:39 PM PDT by blam
Two held over US fears of radical cell in forces
By David Rennie in Washington
(Filed: 24/09/2003)
The United States military is urgently investigating a potential radical Muslim cell among its own servicemen at the Guantanamo Bay prison as it emerged yesterday that two more members of the garrison are in custody.
Senior Airman Ahmad I al-Halabi, an Arabic language translator, was secretly arrested a month ago, Pentagon officials said last night.
He is being held at an air base in California and is charged with more than 30 counts of espionage, aiding the enemy, disobeying a lawful order and making a false official statement.
CNN television reported that al-Halabi was found with classified material relating to the prison camp and its inmates on his laptop computer.
In an unconfirmed report, Fox News television said yesterday a man serving in the US navy had also been detained as part of the investigation.
It reported that both men were detained a month ago, and had been under surveillance for some time.
Sources told CNN that there was "every reason to believe" more arrests were imminent.
The reports came as shocked Americans were still digesting news of the arrest of Capt James Yee, a Muslim US army chaplain assigned to minister to Guantanamo's 660 terrorist suspects. His arrest two weeks ago was disclosed last weekend.
The US military regards as classified huge amounts of information about Camp Delta, the maximum security prison camp hastily erected last year at Guantanamo Bay, a US naval base on the far south-eastern tip of Cuba.
Military sources at the Pentagon suggested that al-Halabi was one of several translators or linguistic experts of Islamic ancestry drafted into the joint task force at Guantanamo to help with the work of questioning and holding suspects who are mostly from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Arab nations.
Military and civilian investigators are reported to be working to discover if there were any inappropriate links between the air force sergeant and Capt Yee.
The airman's arrest will be another crushing blow to the thousands of Muslims in the US military, already labouring under a cloud of suspicion as to their loyalties.
In March, an army sergeant, Hasan K Akbar, a Muslim convert, was charged with murder after a hand grenade was thrown into a tent at a US base in Kuwait, killing two officers and injuring 14 other soldiers.
Capt Yee, 35, was raised in a Lutheran Chinese-American family from New Jersey. He is married to a Syrian woman. In the late 1990s, he rejoined the US military as one of about a dozen Muslim chaplains.
Capt Yee, a former artillery officer who converted to Islam after spending four years in Syria, faces espionage charges after being found in possession of classified documents when he stepped off a military transport flight at Jacksonville, Florida.
Sources told reporters that those documents included diagrams of the prison and cells, and lists of names of detainees and interrogators.
His name was also reported to have surfaced during an unconnected investigation by civilian law enforcement agencies of radical Islamic groups based in the United States.
The chaplains programme in the US military and federal prison system is under formal investigation by the Pentagon and Justice Department following complaints that Muslim chaplains were referring their spiritual charges to radical clerics, some of whom advocate jihad against America.
Capt Yee is being held at a naval base in Charleston, South Carolina - the detention place of two US-born terrorist suspects, Yaser Esam Hamdi, a Saudi accused of fighting with the Taliban, and Jose Padilla, accused of plotting to attack America with a radioactive "dirty bomb".
From MSNBC.com:
” In addition to al-Halabi, military officials told NBC News that other potential suspects included a member of the Army, a member of the Navy and a Marine Corps contractor. The service affiliation of a fifth possible suspect could not immediately be determined. Intelligence officials said all five were Muslims.
“Pentagon officials told NBC News there was no evidence to suggest that al-Halabi was connected to Yee, whose case appeared to be a separate investigation that officials said was still under way.” What an amazing coincidence. ”Since the detention mission began, Guantanamo has had at least three Muslim chaplains, the first being Navy Lt. Abuhena Saif-ul-Islam, who in 1999 became the Marines’ first Muslim chaplain.”
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Browardchad comments: I wonder if anyone’s seen Saif-ul-Islam lately? The following is very interesting. An earlier news report today mentioned that Yee also trained at GSIS:
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Terror Indictments Muslim linked to Al-Arian trained military chaplains
By MARY JACOBY, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 27, 2003
WASHINGTON -- An Islamic scholar -- a man court records suggest is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Sami Al-Arian case -- has played a key role in training Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military, prompting a U.S. senator to pursue a Pentagon investigation.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., wrote the Defense Department's inspector general earlier this month to request a probe into a school run by prominent Islamic scholar Taha Jabir Al-Alwani.
Al-Alwani and a network of Virginia-based organizations with which he's associated -- including a group accused of funding alleged fronts for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Tampa -- are under federal investigation for suspected financing of terrorism.
A federal indictment last month named Al-Arian, a former University of South Florida professor, as the North American leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group prosecutors say has killed more than 100 people in Israel with suicide and car bombings.
Documents seized in a 1995 raid of a USF-sponsored think tank and charity founded by Al-Arian indicate that Al-Alwani is the unnamed "unindicted co-conspirator five" in the Tampa indictment.
The indictment alleges that Al-Arian used the World and Islam Studies Enterprise think tank and a charity, the Islamic Concern Project, as fronts to raise money for and recruit people into the Islamic Jihad. Al-Arian has denied the charges.
Al-Alwani, who lives in the Washington suburb of Herndon, Va., did not return phone calls. But his lawyer, Nancy Luque, said the scholar and Muslim activist "is not an extremist."
She criticized Schumer for suggesting Al-Alwani and the academy he runs, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences, have ties to terrorism. "It was outrageous," Luque said.
The graduate school, in Leesburg, Va., is one of three Islamic organizations that endorse Muslim chaplains for the military.
At least seven of the 12 Muslim chaplains in the armed forces were educated at Al-Alwani's school, which the Pentagon describes as one of the few academies in the nation able to provide Islamic theological training. In March 2002, a Customs Service-led task force raided the school, Al-Alwani's home and a network of interlocking Islamic nonprofit organizations and businesses in suburban Virginia.
The raid sought evidence that the web of Saudi-funded organizations was funneling money to al-Qaida, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups sympathetic to militant Islam. The search warrants named Al-Alwani and Al-Arian as targets, among others.
So far, only Al-Arian and seven others accused of supporting Palestinian Islamic Jihad have been charged with crimes. No charges have been filed against Al-Alwani. Luque said she has "no reason to believe" that prosecutors remain interested in her client. But in a March 14 motion filed with the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia, prosecutors described the probe of Al-Alwani and others in Virginia as "ongoing."
Rita Katz, executive director of the SITE Institute, a Washington group that researches terrorism, said Al-Alwani is a "person who supports and funnels money to terrorist organizations, and he's training Muslim chaplains for the military."
Katz is a consultant to South Carolina trial lawyer Ron Motley, who is suing members of the Saudi royal family and others -- including Al-Alwani -- on behalf of 3,100 family members of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of financing international terrorism.
The Army has seven Muslim chaplains, the Navy has three and the Air Force has two. A spokesman for the Army, Martha Rudd, said, "these are all good chaplains who have represented their faith and other faiths well."
The other two endorsing organizations are the Saudi-funded Islamic Society of North America and the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. Al-Alwani has close ties to both organizations.
The veterans affairs council is an outgrowth of the American Muslim Council, whose founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, helped place the Pentagon's first Muslim chaplain in 1993.
Alamoudi is a director of two organizations raided by the Customs-led task force last year. One group, the American Muslim Foundation, is funded primarily by Alamoudi's wealthy family in Saudi Arabia, which owns a construction business, Alamoudi said in an interview earlier this month. Alamoudi spoke with pride of his efforts to bring American Muslims into the mainstream by placing Muslim chaplains in the military. "That was an excellent opportunity to show my community we have people who are patriotic."
A Navy chaplain trained by Al-Alwani's graduate school, Lt. Abuhena M. Saifulislam, has ministered to prisoners captured in Afghanistan and held by the military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
In 2001, Al-Alwani issued a fatwa, or Islamic ruling, permitting American Muslims to fight in the conflict in Afghanistan. The fatwa was also endorsed by Sheikh Yussuf Al-Qaradhawi, a prominent Qatar-based religious scholar who has provided religious justification for suicide bombings in Israel.
The Al-Arian indictment says that "unindicted co-conspirator five," who is thought to be Al-Alwani, wrote a letter to Al-Arian saying he considered the Tampa group "as part of and an extension" of his own organization and "promised to send the remainder of the money pledged previously."
Schumer's office did not return phone calls seeking comment on the status of his request to the Pentagon. But people familiar with the matter said the department's inspector general has not yet responded to the senator's letter. © Copyright 2003 St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved - posted by freeper Browardchad
Well, if he was the Marin's first Muslim chaplain in 1999, is he still active duty or has he retired?
And if he's no longer active duty, is he now contracting for the USMC?
There was a mention earlier in the threads concerning Halabi that one of the five arrested was a Marine contractor.
I'm in the US military, and I say we should remove these people to safeguard Americans like me. This is total insanity, and I'm getting even more pissed off at muslims than I was after 9/11/2001.
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