Tag Archives: Osama Bin Laden

Group urges Muslims in Canada not to cooperate with authorities on al Qaeda probe

A prominent Canadian Islamic group is urging Muslims not to cooperate fully with authorities in an investigation of al Qaeda terrorist cells north of the border.

Acting guilty: A Muslim group in Montreal is publicly taking an adversarial stance against terrorist investigations, “calling on Muslims in Canada not to cooperate with the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service,” CanWest News Service reports. Canadian Muslims should not cooperate with authorities without a warrant or without presence of legal counsel, the group said.

Adil Charkaoui was arrested in May on suspicion of being a “sleeper agent” for Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda terror group, according to the CSIS. Muslim activist groups in Canada are rallying on behalf of the alleged terrorist.

The pressure group’s adversarial approach appears designed to frustrate authorities’ capabilities to unravel terrorist networks that have infiltrated Canada’s growing Muslim community. It mirrors the modus operandi of New York-based terrorist support groups that urge people not to cooperate with the FBI. Several prominent Washington-based Islamist pressure groups urged their supporters not to cooperate with the FBI before and immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Senate hearing finds Saudi Arabia to be ‘epicenter’ of Wahhabi ‘enterprise of terror’

A Senate homeland security panel found Saudi Arabia to be what a senior federal counterterrorism official calls the “epicenter” of an international “enterprise of terror.”

The hearing, called by Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology, Terrorism and Homeland Security, heard expert testimony from the FBI, the Treasury Department, and two independent experts including Alex Alexiev of the Center for Security Policy.

Said Kyl, “The problem we are looking at today is the state-sponsored doctrine and funding of an extremist ideology that provides the recruiting grounds, support infrastructure and monetary lifeblood to today’s international terrorists.”

The senator pointedly tackled the issue of the Saudi state religion, Wahhabi Islam, head-on, titling the hearing, “Terrorism: Growing Wahhabi Influence in the United States.

Significantly, the FBI witness, Counterterrorism Division Assistant Director Larry A. Mefford, avoided mentioning Wahhabi influence in his testimony.

Alexiev warned senators that US terrorism-fighters “avoided suggesting that Saudi Arabia, an important U.S. ally, is the world’s leading source of terrorist funding, but that Treasury Department General Counsel David Aufhauser, the senior US official responsible for tracking terrorist finances, testified to senators that “‘in many ways, [Saudi Arabia] is the epicenter’ for the financing of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and other terrorist movements.”

On the Democratic side, New York Senator Charles Schumer praised Kyl for holding the hearing, and in a detailed statement raised concerns about how Wahhabi extremists have infiltrated the Muslim chaplaincies in American prisons and in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Alexiev testifies on Wahhabi influence in US

As we near the second anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. war on terrorism has scored some impressive successes. After denying Afghanistan as a base of operations to Al Qaeda in the fall of 2001, the United States has been able to neutralize a number of its high-ranking operatives and disrupt its operations. The removal of the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Operation Iraqi Freedom has precluded that rogue regime from developing and using weapons of mass destruction or supplying them to fellow-terrorists. On the domestic front, significant strides have been made in shoring up homeland security and no serious terrorist incident has taken place on American soil since 9/11. Despite these very positive developments, it would be highly premature to claim that we’re close to winning the war. Indeed, recent terrorist attacks in Riyadh and Casablanca, as well as the putative conspiracy to blow-up Brooklyn Bridge, have shown unmistakably that terrorist networks and groups retain considerable ability to wreak havoc.

WAHHABISM: STATE-SPONSORED EXTREMISM WORLDWIDE

Testimony by Alex Alexiev
Senior Fellow, Center for Security Policy

U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security
Thursday, June 26, 2003

As we near the second anniversary of 9/11, the U.S. war on terrorism has scored some impressive successes. After denying Afghanistan as a base of operations to Al Qaeda in the fall of 2001, the United States has been able to neutralize a number of its high-ranking operatives and disrupt its operations. The removal of the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein in Operation Iraqi Freedom has precluded that rogue regime from developing and using weapons of mass destruction or supplying them to fellow-terrorists. On the domestic front, significant strides have been made in shoring up homeland security and no serious terrorist incident has taken place on American soil since 9/11. Despite these very positive developments, it would be highly premature to claim that we’re close to winning the war. Indeed, recent terrorist attacks in Riyadh and Casablanca, as well as the putative conspiracy to blow-up Brooklyn Bridge, have shown unmistakably that terrorist networks and groups retain considerable ability to wreak havoc.

This is the case because while the United States has been successful in inflicting strategic defeats on state sponsors of terrorism, such as Afghanistan and Iraq, it has not applied the same decisive strategic approach in dealing with the phenomenon of Islamic extremism, which is both the root cause and basic support structure of the terrorist phenomenon exemplified by Al Qaeda and others. It is worth reminding ourselves here, that Al Qaeda is not the cause, but rather the symptom of the malignancy called Islamic extremism and that even if we are able to defeat Al Qaeda totally, somebody else will almost certainly continue in its footsteps, as long as the underlying malignancy lives on.

Thus, most of the measures taken to defeat Islamic terrorism to date have been essentially tactical in nature and therefore of transitory effect. We have, for instance, attempted to block financial inflows to the terrorist networks, but have avoided taking a critical look into the real magnitude and nature of terrorist finances, especially with respect to the evidence of state sponsorship. The result is that despite some $117 million of frozen assets, the terrorists do not appear to be lacking in funds at all. We have attempted to come to terms with the psychology behind the terrorists’ murderous fury, yet refuse to examine systematically, let alone do something about, the effect and implications of daily indoctrination of hundreds of thousands if not millions of Muslims around the world into a hate-driven cult of violence. Similarly, we have tried and often succeeded in disrupting the terrorists’ tactical organizational structures and communications networks, but have paid scant attention to the huge world-wide infrastructure of radical Islam which breeds and nourishes violence.

Yet, without a critical consideration of these realities and the formulation of a forceful strategic response based on it, it is unlikely that we’ll make lasting progress in the war on terror. It is thus necessary to briefly examine the key factors that have made and sustained Islamic extremism as a daunting challenge to our liberal democratic order.

The Ideology of Extremism

It is difficult, indeed, impossible to successfully defeat a violent ideological movement, such as radical Islam, without understanding the ideology motivating it. And there has been no lack of scholarly attention to the subject from both the liberal Western and the Muslim perspective recently. Nonetheless, it is worth encapsulating the main doctrinal tenets of Islamic extremism here because they are regularly and consciously obfuscated by the extremists themselves and continue to be misunderstood.

Islamic extremism as an ideology is hardly new with the first movement that resembles today’s phenomenon, known as the Kharijites, appearing shortly after the birth of Islam in the 7th century. Later it was expounded on by various Islamic scholars, such as Ibn Taymiiya in the 13th century, but it did not become institutionalized until the mid-18th century when the theories promulgated by the radical cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab were accepted and imposed as the state religion of his realm by the founder of the House of Saud. Wahhabism, as this creed got to be known, like most other extremist movements before it, believed that traditional Islamic virtues and beliefs have been corrupted and preached a return to the ostensibly pure Islam of the time of the Prophet and his companions. In reality, Wahhab’s extreme doctrines contradicted and stood on their head major tenets of traditional Islam and in a real sense represent an outright falsification of the Muslim faith.

To name just one egregious example, a key postulate of Wahhab’s teaching asserts that Muslims who do not believe in his doctrines are ipso facto non-believers and apostates against whom violence and Jihad were not only permissible, but obligatory. This postulate alone transgresses against two fundamental tenets of the Quran – that invoking Jihad against fellow-Muslims is prohibited and that a Muslim’s profession of faith should be taken at face value until God judges his/hers sincerity at judgment day. This extreme reactionary creed was then used as the religious justification for military conquest and violence against Muslim neighbors of the House of Saud. Already in 1746, just two years after Wahhabism became Saud’s religion, the new Saudi-Wahhabi state proclaimed Jihad against all neighboring Muslim tribes that refused to subscribe to it. Indeed, well into the 1920s the history of the House of Saud is replete with violent campaigns to force other Muslims to submit politically and theologically, violating yet another fundamental Quranic principle that prohibits the use of compulsion in religion.

Today, the Wahhabi ideology continues to be characterized by a set of doctrinal beliefs and behavior prescriptions that are often inimical to the values and interests of the vast majority of Muslims in the world to say nothing about those of non-Muslims. Non-Wahhabi Sunni Muslims (syncretic Muslims, Sufis, Barelvis, Bahai, Ahmadis, etc) are still considered illegitimate, at best, while the Shia religion is particularly despised as a "Jewish conspiracy" against Islam. The Wahhabis continue to believe and preach violence and Jihad as a pillar of Islamic virtue, rigid conformism of religious practice, institutionalized oppression of women, wholesale rejection of modernity, secularism and democracy as antithetical to Islam and militant proselytism.
This jihadist ideology par excellence, is by and large, also the worldview of radical Islam and it is not at all an exaggeration to argue that Wahhabism has become the prototype ideology of all extremist and terrorist groups, even those that despise the House of Saud.

How did this obscurantist, pseudo-Islamic creed manage to become the dominant idiom not only among the extremists but increasingly the Islamic establishment? The short answer is money and an acute legitimacy crisis in the Muslim world in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Regarding the latter, the progressive, centuries-long, gradual decline of Islam as a dominant force and civilization reached its nadir in 1924, when Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) simultaneously did away with the Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire by overnight transforming the latter into a secular Turkish republic. The unceremonious discarding of the symbol of the Muslim community (ummah), coupled with the establishment of European colonial rule over much of the Muslim world gave rise to revivalist movements and ideologies seeking to come to terms with Islam’s predicament and efforts to restore it to previous glories.

Beginning with the Muslim Brotherhood of Hassan el-Banna in 1928, followed by the movements founded by Islamist ideologues like Abul ala Maududi, Sayyid Qutb and the extremist Deobandi creed in South Asia, radical Islam established a strong presence in the Muslim world in the second half of the 20th century. Then in the 1970s and 1980s Islamic terrorist groups (Al Jihad and Gamaa Islamiya in Egypt, Front for National Salvation (FIS) in Algeria etc.) began appearing in the Middle East and South Asia, especially after the beginning of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. While none of these groups and movements were 100% Wahhabi originally, their ideological differences were insignificant.

As these movements were violently suppressed in places like Egypt and Algeria, the Saudis were quickly able to co-opt them by providing sanctuary and financial assistance to their members in both Saudi Arabia and outside of it. Thus, the economic and logistical dependence of many of these extremists on the Saudis, coupled with the ongoing radicalization of Wahhabism itself, created a highly synergistic relationship between the practitioners of terror and their Wahhabi supporters and paymasters despite the fact that many practicing jihadists like Osama bin Laden resented the Saudi regime.

While this ideological affinity between the Wahhabis and modern day radical Islam is undoubtedly of key import, it was vast amounts of money more than anything else that made Wahhabism the chief enabler and dominant influence of the Islamist phenomenon.

Financing Radical Islam

Saudi financing of Islamic extremism plays such a huge role in its emergence as a global phenomenon that a proper understanding of it is impossible without coming to terms with its dimensions. Simply put, without the exorbitant sums of Saudi money spent on supporting extremist networks and activities, the terrorist threat we are facing today would be nowhere as acute as it is.

While the Wahhabis have always been sympathetic to Sunni Muslim extremists and evidence exists that they have supported such people financially as early as a century ago, the real Saudi offensive to spread Wahhabism aggressively and support kindred extremist groups world-wide began in the mid-1970s, when the kingdom reaped an incredible financial windfall with rocketing oil prices after Riaydh’s imposition of an oil embargo in 1973. "It was only when oil revenues began to generate real wealth," says a government publication, that "the kingdom could fulfill its ambitions of spreading the word of Islam to every corner of the world."

There are no published Western estimates of the numbers involved, which, in itself, is evidence of our failure to address this key issue, but even the occasional tidbits provided by official Saudi sources, indicate a campaign of unprecedented magnitude. Between 1975 and 1987, the Saudis admit to having spent $48 billion or $4 billion per year on "overseas development aid," a figure which by the end of 2002 grew to over $70 billion (281 billion Saudi rials). These sums are reported to be Saudi state aid and almost certainly do not include private donations which are also distributed by state-controlled charities. Such staggering amounts contrast starkly with the $5 million in terrorist accounts the Saudis claim to have frozen since 9/11. In another comparison, it is instructive to put these figures side by side with the $1 billion per year said to have been spent by the Soviet Union on external propaganda at the peak of Moscow’s power in the 1970s.

Though it is claimed that this is "development aid" it is clear from the Saudi media and government statements alike that the vast majority of these funds support "Islamic activities", rather than real developmental projects. For example, a report on the yearly activities of the Al Haramain Foundation described as "keen on spreading the proper Islamic culture" are listed as follows: "it printed 13 million (Islamic) books, launched six internet sites, employed more than 3000 callers (proselytizers), founded 1100 mosques, schools and cultural Islamic centers and posted more than 350,000 letters of call (invitations to convert to Islam)" while the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), another key "charity," completed 3800 mosques, spent $45 million for Islamic education and employed 6000 proselytizers. Both of these organizations have been implicated in terrorist activities by U.S. authorities and both operate directly out of Saudi embassies in all countries in which they do not have their own offices.

The Saudi money is spent according to a carefully designed plan to enhance Wahhabi influence and control at the expense of mainstream Muslims. In Muslim countries, much of the aid goes to fund religious madrassas that teach little more than hatred of the infidels, while producing barely literate Jihadi cadres. There are now tens of thousands of these madrassas run by the Wahhabis’ Deobandi allies in South Asia and also throughout Southeastern Asia. In Pakistan alone, foreign funding of these madrassas, most of which comes from Saudi Arabia, is estimated at no less than $350 million per year. The Saudis also directly support terrorist activities in places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Chechnya, Bosnia and, as noticed above, most of the large Saudi foundations have been implicated in such involvement.

It needs to be emphasized here that contrary to Saudi claims that charities such as Al Haramain, the World Muslim League (WML), the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) are independent and non-governmental, there is conclusive evidence from Saudi sources that they are tightly controlled by the government and more often than not run by government officials. It is also the case that as early as 1993, the kingdom passed a law stipulating that all donations to Muslim charities must be collected in a fund controlled by a Saudi Prince

Early on in the Wahhabi ideological campaign, the penetration of the Muslim communities in non-Muslim Western societies was made a key priority. The objective pursued there was slightly different and aimed to assure Wahhabi dominance in the local Muslim establishments by taking over or building new Wahhabi mosques, Islamic centers and educational institutions, including endowing Islamic chairs at various universities. Taking over a mosque, of course, means more than just the ability to impose the Wahhabi version of Islam. The imam and the leadership of the mosque are also responsible for the collection of zakat (the 2 ?? % yearly tithe Muslims must donate), which gives them the ability to contribute these funds to extremist organizations. Most Pakistani mosques in the United Kingdom, for instance, have reportedly been taken over by the Wahhabi/Deobandi group even though their members belong primarily to the moderate Barelvi creed. As a result, millions of their donations are said to be supporting terrorist groups in Pakistan.

While nobody knows for sure how much the Saudis have spent on getting a foothold in non-Muslim regions and especially in Western Europe and North America, the sums are clearly huge. According to official information, the Saudis have built over 1500 mosques, 210 Islamic centers, 202 Islamic colleges and 2000 schools for educating Muslims in non-Muslim countries. Most of these institutions continue to be on the Saudi payroll for substantial yearly donations assuring that Wahhabi control is not likely to weaken any time soon.

What have the Saudis been able to buy with this unprecedented Islamic largesse? Quite a bit it would seem. For starters, the Wahhabi creed which is practiced by no more than 20 million people around the world, or less than 2% of the Muslim population, has become a dominant factor in the international Islamic establishment through an elaborate network of front organizations and charities, as well as in a great number of national establishments, including the United States. In just one example, the venerable Al Azhar mosque and university in Cairo, which not too long ago was a paragon of Islamic moderation has been taken over by the Wahhabis and spews extremist propaganda on a regular basis. Two of their recent fatwas make it a religious duty for Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons to fight the infidels and justify suicide attacks against American troops in Iraq. The Wahhabi project has contributed immeasurably to the Islamic radicalization and destabilization in a number of countries and continues to do so. Pakistan, for instance, an important U.S. ally, is facing the gradual talibanization of two of its key provinces under Wahhabi/Deobandi auspices and the prospect of large-scale sectarian strife and turmoil. Riyadh-financed extremist networks exist presently around the world providing terrorist groups and individuals with a protective environment and support and even the recent terrorist incidents in Saudi Arabia itself do not seem likely to bring about meaningful change.

Already Saudi officials have stated that they do not intend to either change their anti-Western curriculum or stop their "charitable" activities. Yet the evidence of conscious Saudi subversion of our societies and values as partly detailed above is so overwhelming that to tolerate it further would be unconscionable. Failure to confront it now will assure that we will not win the war on terror anytime soon.

 

CIA report reveals U.S. knew Saudi-backed charities tied to terrorism in 1996

A CIA report from 1996, obtained by investigators for the lawyer suing a number of Islamic charities on behalf of victims of the 9/11 attacks, reveals that the U.S. government knew that over one-third of the Islamic charities operating throughout the world were aiding known terrorist groups.

Many of the charities detailed in the report are Saudi-sponsored and official Saudi government charities are implicated in supporting terrorism. These charities include the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and the Saudi High Commission, the official Saudi government organization for collecting and distributing aid, which the report accuses of ties with Hamas and Algerian extremists.

According to the report IIRO is affiliated with the Muslim World League, a major international organization financed by the government of Saudi Arabia. It goes on to say that IIRO is connected to both Osama bin Laden and Ramzi Youseff, the man convicted for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

In March 2001 Operation Green Quest, the interagency task force searching for terrorist financing, raided the U.S-based Success Foundation, which is alleged to be IIROs sister organization. Success is headed by Abdurahman Alamoudi, who has publicly supported Hamas and Hezbollah, and has been invited to White House briefings and met with the President (see picture).

‘Fifth Column’ within the US armed forces

It’s no surprise, sadly, that the US Army sergeant who allegedly tried to wipe out the entire brigade command of his 101st Airborne Division unit in Kuwait just happened to be a convert to Islam.

Not a convert to normal Islam, but obviously a radical mutation of the faith. For Sgt. Asan Akbar’s attitude problem, as the army calls his motive, means he no longer views himself as an American, and that his own buddies in the 101st are the enemy. “You guys are coming into our countries and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children,” Akbar reportedly said after the attack, which murdered one and wounded a dozen others.

“You guys.” “Our countries.” “Rape our women and kill our children.” He’s no longer “with us,” as the president would say. An attitude problem, indeed.

The murderous insider attack in the 101st could be the precursor for a far larger and more dangerous problem, both for the military and for American society more generally. That problem is the “fifth column” that is developing inside the United States and its institutions.

Radical Muslim sects and organizations distinguished from peaceable, nonviolent and law-abiding adherents to Islam by the term “Islamists” have been making steady progress over the past four decades in establishing a presence in the United States (as elsewhere around the world) and dominating their co-religionists and, in due course, others they consider to be “non-believers.”

Saudi-funded fronts and cutouts have spent a fortune on Wahhabi agitprop within American universities, in the hijacking of mosques, and inside the armed forces. One of the Center for Security Policy’s big concerns is how extremists and those who front for them have penetrated the US military. As of June 2002, nine of the armed forces’ 14 Muslim chaplains received their religious training from another Saudi-supported entity, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS) in Leesburg, Va. In March of that year, the multi-agency Operation Greenquest raided the offices of GSISS, along with 23 other Muslim organizations.

Agents also raided the homes of Iqbal Unus, the dean of students at GSISS, and Taha Al-Alwani, the school’s president. According to search warrants issued at the time, these groups were raided for “potential money laundering and tax evasion activities and their ties to terrorist groups such as … al Qaeda as well as individual terrorists . . . [including] Osama bin Laden.”

It may be that last Sunday’s attack turns out to be an isolated event. It should, nonetheless, serve as a wake-up call to the Bush administration and all who love this country that there are among us some who do not. They, and organizations that may be fomenting their hatred toward the United States, must be recognized as such and dealt with accordingly.

Update: Traitor Akbar claims another life: Air Force Maj. Gregory Stone, 40, of Idaho

The fifth column syndrome

(Washington, D.C.): The most traumatic loss the U.S. military has suffered to date in the war with Iraq may, ironically, have been inflicted not by Iraqi Republican Guards, regular army units or irregular “Fedayeen.” Rather, it may have come at the hands of an American servicemen.

‘Fragged’ by One of Our Own

Early Sunday morning Kuwait time, a sergeant assigned to an engineering brigade of the 101st Airborne Division allegedly attacked three tents in which many divisional commanding officers were sleeping on the eve of their unit’s jump-off into Iraq. According to press reports of the incident, Sgt. Asan Akbar rolled three or four grenades into the tents then proceeded to shoot some of those who sought to flee the ensuing fire and carnage. The attack killed Captain Christopher Seifert and wounded more than a dozen other members of the storied “Screaming Eagles,” several so severely they had to be flown to the U.S. military hospital at Ramstein, Germany.

What made this episode so wrenching was not merely that a U.S. soldier would have turned his weapons on his comrades. Such “fragging” incidents have happened before — notably, during the dark days of the Vietnam conflict, when a demoralized and drug-ridden military comprised of significant numbers of conscripts was fighting an increasingly unpopular war. They are always corrosive to the good order and discipline essential for successful combat operations.

Foretaste of What is To Come?

The attack for which Sgt. Akbar is being held at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait is sending shockwaves through the national security community for another reason, though: It could be the precursor for a far larger and more dangerous problem, both for the military and for American society more generally. Call it the “Fifth Column syndrome.”

While details of Sgt. Akbar’s personal history are sketchy at the moment, published accounts indicate that he is a black Muslim convert. Exactly when he converted to Islam is unclear, as is the nature of his adherence. (One report says his neighbors in Fort Campbell, Kentucky saw beer bottles in his trash; another neighbor, however, told a journalist that Akbar had declined an offer of a beer at a social occasion, saying he was a Muslim).

What is clear, however, is that in the days leading up to the attack on the tents comprising the 101st’s Tactical Operations Center, Akbar exhibited unsettling behavior. Evidently, what has been called an “attitude problem” reached a point where his superiors decided the sergeant would be “left behind” when the division deployed into Iraq.

The words Akbar is reported by the Los Angeles Times to have uttered when he was seized after the fragging suggest the ominous nature of his “attitude”: “You guys are coming into our countries and you’re going to rape our women and kill our children.”

Whence Came These Notions?

The question occurs: If this account is correct, where would a serviceman get the idea that his non-Muslim colleagues were different from him (“you guys”) and that they were determined to do horrible things to the civilians of countries with which he evidently identifies more than with his own?

Since Sgt. Akbar’s personal case is, at this writing, under investigation, it is too early to say with precision. Yet what is known of his background is illuminating of the larger problem we must now confront.

Radical Muslim sects and organizations — distinguished from peaceable, non-violent and law- abiding adherents to Islam by the term “Islamists” — have been making steady progress over the past four decades in establishing a presence in the United States (as elsewhere around the world) and dominating their co-religionists and, in due course, others they consider to be “non-believers.” Thanks to the oil-revenue underwritten largesse of the Saudi Arabia’s state religion, the Wahhabi sect, this Islamist enterprise has established itself in several places where a man like Akbar could have come under its sway.

Perhaps, Akbar was exposed to Islamist thinking via the Wahhabi-backed Muslim Student’s Association, which has a chapter at the University of California, Davis — an institution he reportedly attended from 1988-1997. Or perhaps, it was at the mosque he attended in the South Central section of Los Angeles, the Masjid Bilal Islamic Center. The Center’s school (they are called madrassas in places like Pakistan) received funds from the Islamic Development Bank (ISDB), a Saudi-controlled fund headquartered in Jeddah that claims to have capitalized $19 billion worth of projects around the world.

Alternatively, and particularly worrisome, is the possibility that Akbar could have gotten murderous ideas about America, its armed forces and the Muslim world from a chaplain in the U.S. military. As of June 2002, nine of the armed forces’ fourteen Muslim chaplains received their religious training from another Saudi-supported entity, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS) in Leesburg, Virginia. In March of that year, the multi-agency Operation Greenquest raided the offices of GSISS, along with twenty-three other Muslim organizations. Agents also raided the homes of Dr. Iqbal Unus, the Dean of Students at GSISS, and Dr. Taha Al-Alwani, the school’s President. According to search warrants issued at the time, these groups were raided for “potential money laundering and tax evasion activities and their ties to terrorist groups such as…al Qaeda as well as individual terrorists…(including) Osama bin Laden.”

The Bottom Line

It may be that last Sunday’s attack turns out to be an isolated event. It should, nonetheless, serve as a wake-up call to the Bush Administration and all who love this country that there are among us some who do not. They, and organizations that may be fomenting their hatred towards the United States, must be recognized as such and dealt with accordingly.

Who’s ‘with’ the President?

(Washington, D.C.): President Bush has characterized the choice to be made in this war on terror: “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.” The stark clarity of this binary decision has served the United States well in marshaling a large number of nations in the fight against al Qaeda and a smaller, but still ample, number for the next phase of this war: the liberation of Iraq.

Embracing the Wrong Sorts of Muslims

Regrettably, in the months since September 11, 2001, people who have made no secret of their sympathy for terrorists, provided them financial support, excused their murderous attacks and/or sought to impede the prosecution of the war against them have repeatedly been put in the company of the President. In other words, individuals and organizations who appear to be “with the terrorists” have time and again been allowed to be with the President in the White House and elsewhere. For example:

  • On September 20, 2001 — just nine days after the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — Shaykh Hamza Yusuf was the Muslim representative in a small ecumenical gathering held in the Oval Office. At the same time, FBI agents were trying to interview him at his house in California since he had declared two days before the attack: “This country is facing a terrible fate….This country stands condemned. It stands condemned like Europe stood condemned because of what it did — and lest people forget that Europe suffered two world wars after conquering the Muslim lands.” His wife told the incredulous agents Yusuf wasn’t home, he was with the President.
  • Six days later, President Bush met in the Roosevelt Room with a Muslim imam by the name of Muzammil H. Siddiqi. Siddiqi is a long-time board member of several organizations in the United States funded by, and closely tied to, Saudi Arabia’s radical state religion known as Wahhabism. Two of these groups, including one where Siddiqi still sits on the board, were raided in March 2002 by Federal authorities in pursuit of terrorist financing.

    This presidential meeting was all the more puzzling since the imam had shown his true colors by claiming, at a rally the previous October: “America has to learn…If you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come. Please, all Americans. Do you remember that? Allah is watching everyone. God is watching everyone. If you continue doing injustice, and tolerate injustice, the wrath of God will come.”

  • On September 17, 2001, President Bush paid a visit to the mosque in Washington. There he was photographed flanked by Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). CAIR has long been an admirer and public defender of terrorist organizations whose attacks against even innocent women and children it sees as legitimate acts of “liberation.” Awad has personally declared, “I am a supporter of the Hamas movement.”
  • Also in the picture with President Bush at the mosque was Khaled Saffuri, currently chairman of an organization called the Islamic Institute, which he co-founded with conservative activist Grover Norquist. Saffuri previously served as the development director of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization when it made no bones about using terrorism for political purposes. He went on to become deputy director of the radical ,b>American Muslim Council (AMC), under then-director Abduraman Alamoudi — a publicly declared supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, whose statements of solidarity with these groups prompted the Bush 2000 campaign to return his contributions.

    Under Saffuri’s leadership, the Islamic Institute has attacked the Bush Administration’s investigations of radical Muslim groups and closures of organizations suspected of funding terrorists. The Institute has been funded by groups raided in the above-mentioned terrorist financing investigations. It lobbied intensively against portions of the USA Patriot Act. And Saffuri has personally denounced the President’s listing of the Holy Land Foundation as a charity that supported terrorist organizations. He has acknowledged sponsoring the children of suicide bombers through the Foundation, even after its closure by the government.

Its Not Just the President

In addition to the President, a number of his senior subordinates — including Cabinet officers — have met, in some cases more than once, with members of the aforementioned and other organizations with troubling attitudes towards jihadist terrorists. A particularly bizarre instance was FBI Director Robert Muellers keynote address last year to the American Muslim Council.

The AMC has a long record of activities hostile to the Bush Administrations prosecution of the war on terror. It has even urged Muslims not to cooperate with the FBI! Nonetheless, according to a press release dated last Thursday, Mr. Mueller has invited the AMCs chairman, Dr. Yahya Mossa Basha, to attend an upcoming meeting with him and leaders of major Muslim and Arab-American organizations.

As recently as January 16, 2003, White House officials engaged in a “dialogue” with representatives of the AMC and CAIR, among others opposed to the Administration’s efforts to register aliens from terrorist-sponsoring and -harboring nations. In a press release issued the next day, the American Muslim Council’s executive director, Eric Vickers (who has called al Qaeda “a resistance movement” and repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas or Hezbollah), thanked the Associate Director for Cabinet Affairs, Ali Tulbah, for ensuring that AMC and CAIR were included.

As it happens, Mr. Tulbah’s father was as recently as 2001, treasurer of a large Wahhabi center in Houston. This may have influenced his judgment about the advisability of bringing people who sympathize with terrorists into the White House complex. Suhail Khan, the son of another prominent Wahhabi (who hosted bin Laden deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri on two fundraising tours in the 1990s), was the man first charged by the Bush Administration with Muslim “outreach.” He was in place in the White House’s Public Liaison Office when several of the meetings described above were arranged during the months after 9/11.

Its Not the Secret Services Job

One might be forgiven for assuming that, even if political appointees failed to understand the folly of bringing people who are not with the President on the Islamist terrorist threat into the White House, the Secret Service would. Unfortunately, Mr. Bush’s spokesman excoriated the Secret Service in June 2001 after it expelled from a meeting in the complex the son of Sami al-Arian, another Islamist who helped raise funds for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The guys protecting the President got the message: It is not the Secret Service’s job to protect his Administration from making the mistake of embracing its foes.

Why It Matters

That mistake has two possibly far-reaching strategic repercussions. First, making no distinction between peaceable, pro-American Muslims and those with ties to radical, anti-American Islamism affords the latter opportunities to exercise undesirable influence over U.S. policy. In the United States, they have ample legal means to try to undermine the President on waging war with Iraq, strengthening law enforcement tools and intensifying surveillance of hostile groups and facilities (including mosques). These groups are making full use of such techniques. They should not, however, be granted the opportunity also to advance this agenda by pressuring Administration officials behind closed doors.

Second, photographs with the President and press releases exulting over access to the White House enable radical Islamists a further windfall: With the exclusion of moderates, it increases the radicals’ stature within the Muslim community and facilitates their efforts to dominate and claim to represent the larger and surely less anti-American portion of that religious population.

The Bottom Line

It is very much in the President’s interest — and the Nation’s — that moderate, law-abiding, peace-loving and patriotic American Muslims be embraced and empowered by the Bush Administration and by all those who support it in waging a war on terror, not on Islam. To do so, however, the Administration must not allow those who are with its enemies in that struggle to continue being with the President and his team.

Al-Qaeda, Hamas say Muslim duty is to attack Americans; problem for White House seen

The Arabic television station Al Jazeera played an audio tape today purportedly of Osama bin Laden calling on all Muslims to resist any U.S. attempt to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The Palestinian group Hamas also called on its terrorists to murder Americans – a development that should complicate the White House’s relations with several US Islamic activist groups whose leaders have expressed support for Hamas in the past. The Center for Security Policy and its leadership have come under attack in recent days for questioning the actions of certain administration officials who brought Hamas backers into the White House.

In a show of solidarity, the al-Qaeda leader told Iraq that we are with you and we will fight in the name of God. He went on to say, We stress the importance of martyrdom attacks against the enemy, which threatens more suicide attacks against the U.S.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, testifying before the Senate Budget Committee this morning, told Senators that the tape demonstrated this nexus between terrorists and states that are developing weapons of mass destruction can no longer be looked away from and ignored.

The release of the bin Laden tape follows a call by the leader of the terrorist group Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, that should war break out between the U.S. and Iraq, Muslims should threaten Western interests and strike them everywhere. At the same time Sheik Yassin repeated his intention to destroy this cancer that is called Israel.

See also, Center President criticizes conservative leader for bringing Hamas supporters into White House.

North Korean scorecard

(Washington, D.C.): The headlines these days are chock-a-block with warnings of nuclear war from North Korea. Scarcely less shrill are the sounds of teeth-gnashing from former U.S. government officials and others who insist that Washington must negotiate with Pyongyang to avoid this dread outcome.

It’s time to take a deep breath and consider what we have learned so far in this “crisis,” lest the combined effects of such hyperbole lead the Bush Administration to do what it has pretty much refused to do to this point: embrace and prop-up one of the most odious regimes on the planet — that of Kim Jong-Il in North Korea.

  • First, Kim’s regime is evil, indeed monstrously so. President Bush should be commended, not assailed, for having identified North Korea as one of the members of the “Axis of Evil” that threatens the security of the United States, its allies and interests around the world. That statement certainly discomfited those in foreign capitals and the U.S. State Department who have pretended since 1994 that the North Korean government had become a nation with whom we could safely do business. But we did so at our peril — and only by studiously ignoring the danger that it continued to represent.

    This danger is evident in the North’s unchecked proliferation of ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction technology to virtually all the world’s rogue states and possibly to terrorist organizations like Osama bin Laden’s. (According to the Times of London, such sales — Pyongyang’s only hard currency-earning export — were worth some $560 million to the bankrupt regime in 2001.) It can also be seen in the persistent deceit that has made a mockery of North Korean promises to forego nuclear weapons.

    And the danger from North Korea is apparent in the Orwellian comprehensiveness of the regime’s repression, mind-control and starvation of its people. As Dr. Norbert Vollertsen — a German physician who, in the course of several years’ humanitarian service in North Korea, obtained an unprecedented insight into the appalling conditions in that prison-state — has noted, any government that treats its own citizens with such brutality cannot be expected permanently to refrain from trying to harm others.

  • Second, arms control and similar “processes” cannot genuinely contain a government like North Korea’s. This is not simply because it is difficult to devise and implement effective verification arrangements when dealing with the quintessential closed society. It is inherent in the fact that regimes like that of Kim Jong-Il have nothing but contempt for the rule of law — and for those who put stock in such concepts. Accordingly, deals struck with such regimes are, by their nature, exercises in Western self-deception.
  • Third, the desire of dangerous nations’ neighbors to accommodate, rather than confront, them is understandable. But it should not be determinative of U.S. policy. Such pleading today from South Korea and Japan is reminiscent of the Cold War advocacy for detente by Leftists in the West German government. The Free Democrats’ policies did nothing to mitigate the actual threat posed by the Soviet Union. They did, however, provide indispensable economic life-support for the Kremlin, deferring by decades the USSR’s collapse — at a cost, by the way, of many tens of billions in German taxpayer-subsidized loans that had to be written off after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
  • Fourth, the United States must be clearly able to project power in two distant theaters simultaneously in order to prevent a second adversary from taking advantage of our preoccupation with a first. The foolishness of eliminating over the previous decade the necessary U.S. military force structure, compounded by the failure to make during that period appropriate investments in modernizing the armed forces, are illustrating yet again the costly false economies associated with cashing in “peace dividends” when international threats appear to have receded.
  • Fifth, the fact that the North Korean government has taken to brandishing its ballistic missiles to heighten the demands from Seoul, Tokyo and Washington for its further appeasement, powerfully underscores the wisdom of President Bush in deciding to end America’s abject vulnerability to attack by such missiles. It should, as well, add urgency to his effort to deploy anti-missile defenses without further delay.

    This can be done most swiftly, and with greatest benefit to our forces and friends in East Asia, by upgrading existing Navy vessels equipped with the Aegis fleet air defense system. President Bush recently announced that such sea-based missile defenses would begin to be put into place, but not until late 2004. The threat from North Korea underscores what has long been obvious: We need such defenses now. A Rickover-like figure — perhaps the Navy’s long-time and most visionary leader on anti-missile systems, Rear Admiral Rod Rempt — needs to be given a presidential mandate to cobble together at once the best and fastest interim capability available.

The Bottom Line

These lessons underscore the soundness of President Bush’s basic approach to date towards North Korea. The United States should do nothing to prop-up the North Korean regime or to legitimate it. Most especially, Washington should refrain from making any commitments at odds with the U.S. interest in truly ending the threat Kim Jong-Il and Company represent and in liberating the North’s enslaved people.

This is, of course, far easier said than done. And, since Mr. Bush is properly focused on effecting the liberation of the people of Iraq at the moment, his Administration must for the time being pursue temporizing measures towards North Korea. It is imperative, however, that these be guided by the President’s appreciation of the loathsome evil of the North Korean regime and by the need to arrange for it to join Saddam Hussein’s on the ash-heap of history at the earliest possible moment.

‘Drain the swamps’

(Washington, D.C.): Some stock-taking is in order after a week of terrorism in the suburban communities surrounding Washington, D.C. and in such distant locations as Indonesia, Yemen, Kuwait and Israel. A good place to start is with a comparison between the Beltway shooter and our enemies in the war on terror.

Deadly Mosquitoes

Both might be thought of as deadly mosquitoes, striking at will against vulnerable targets of opportunity, be they individuals going about their civilian lives here at home or those frequenting nightclubs in a foreign resort like Bali, crewing an oil tanker off the Yemeni coast, engaging in U.S.-Kuwaiti training exercises or riding on public buses in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. The task faced by law enforcement personnel charged with catching and punishing those responsible — the equivalent of trying swat each mosquito before it attacks — is difficult, time-consuming and, while the killing continues, maddeningly futile.

There is an option available for dealing with terrorists like al Qaeda, however, that may not apply to the domestic assassin (assuming, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the latter is not one of the former). Applying the mosquito analogy, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the Bush Administration’s most serious and influential strategists, has observed that the United States can do more than just go after individual attackers. It can also work to “drain the swamps” — denying terrorists the safe-havens, logistical support, intelligence, financial assistance, training facilities and headquarters that state-sponsors of terrorism provide.

World War IV

The United States has already made good progress draining the Afghan “swamp.” While the job there is far from complete, al Qaeda no longer has the ability to use Afghanistan’s territory with impunity to plan, prepare and launch its deadly assaults.

That’s the good news. The bad news is — as the past week’s events indicate — al Qaeda cells and those of other terrorist organizations are still functioning elsewhere around the world. These are a vivid reminder of an unsavory reality. This is a global conflict, one whose scale and stakes are accurately captured in the moniker applied by some, most recently former CIA Director Jim Woolsey: World War IV (the Cold War counting as the globe-straddling struggle).

Some are arguing that the appropriate response to the threat posed by al Qaeda and its ilk is to do essentially what Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose and his colleagues are trying to accomplish: Figure out who the individual mosquitoes are and crush them. While such a campaign is seemingly the only approach available to deal with the Beltway sniper, it is not the only — and certainly not the most efficient — means of dealing with the global threat.

Why Iraq?

Fortunately, President Bush appears to understand that the war on terror cannot be successfully waged without going after the habitats from which our most virulent enemies operate. After dismantling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, he has rightly made the next priority denying al Qaeda and other terrorists the sponsorship of Saddam Hussein’s regime and access to its weapons of mass destruction.

The Bush Administration’s case for doing so would be further enhanced if it acknowledged what is indisputably true: Saddam not only has the sorts of connections to al Qaeda to which the President, Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld and others have increasingly been referring. There is evidence that he has been involved in previous terrorist attacks on the United States, as well — notably, the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City truck-bombings and, of course, September 11th.

This evidence is circumstantial, in some cases fragmentary. It does not represent a “smoking gun” and U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly insisted that it is either unsubstantiated or at least not conclusive. Yet, if someone as serious about his own survival as Saddam Hussein is were to involve his regime in acts of terror against the United States, it stands to reason that he would go to great lengths to cover his tracks. Using cut-outs like a blind sheik in New Jersey with ties to Iran, angry American militia types (one of whom had ties to the Philippines) and terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden would be precisely the sort of tradecraft one would expect Saddam’s operatives to employ.

For that matter, the question arises whether Saddam is behind the attacks of the past week? Whether his bases, training facilities, funding, etc. are involved may never be proved but one thing is clear: His increasingly desperate bid to stave off the U.S. military’s liberation of Iraq — thereby draining that “swamp” — stands to benefit directly from the distracting effect of seemingly unrelated terrorist activities elsewhere.

The Bottom Line

To President Bush’s credit, the latest reminders of the global nature of this conflict appear not to have diverted him from a strategy of waging this World War wherever our enemies operate — and denying them the state-sponsors that maximize the lethality of their terrorist attacks. He would be well- advised to impress upon the American people, as part of that strategy, the necessity of mobilizing appropriately for such a conflict and the imperative of pursuing it in the only way likely to prove effective: by draining “swamps” like Saddam’s Iraq.