by Sperry, Paul
“It is my honor to be meeting with leaders who feel just the same way I do,” an unsuspecting Bush announced. “They’re outraged, they’re sad. They love America just as much as I do.”2
Cameras captured the Muslim leaders rubbing shoulders with the president during the ill-advised photo opportunity, which unfortunately was just one of many that have provided CAIR and other Muslim mob bosses with valuable political insurance.
“CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad stands to the president’s left,” CAIR notes below a treasured photo of Bush and Awad that the group has posted on its Web site. It offers it up as proof that “CAIR officials have met or regularly meet with U.S. presidents,” and therefore can’t possibly be in league with terrorists.3
The radical front group is even prouder of its engagement with federal law enforcement. It’s a relationship based for the most part on threats and appeasement, however, with CAIR charging cultural insensitivity or outright discrimination, and federal authorities bending over backward to prove otherwise.
On its Web site, CAIR clucks about senior FBI officials attending its annual banquets, and senior CAIR officials huddling with FBI brass at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington.
“CAIR has established a status of enviable prestige within [the] highest echelons of the ‘Washington establishment,’” the group brags.4
While CAIR has been known to exaggerate, its boasts are all too true in this case. In fact, CAIR’s hostile information campaign against the feds has been so successful that both the FBI and Homeland Security have invited it to conduct sensitivity training seminars for their agents, a dangerous disinformation campaign designed to desensitize police to the threat from Islamic terrorism.
How did this happen? After 9/11, the PC-addled FBI—the organization that’s supposed to be on the front line in our domestic defense against terrorists and their supporters—made outreach to CAIR and other dubious Muslim groups a top priority, and even tied senior-level performance bonuses to outreach activity.
In perhaps the ultimate concession, headquarters recently proposed sending agents on field trips to area mosques allied with CAIR and its sister group ISNA for cultural awareness education. The FBI also offered to sponsor special summer camps for Muslim youth, internal bureau documents reveal.
“The FBI praises CAIR’s dedication in representing the heart of the Muslim American community,” the agency gushed in one congratulatory letter to CAIR.5
But then in the summer of 2008, the bureau suddenly stopped blowing kisses to CAIR. And the group’s unfettered political access—and blanket immunity—came to an abrupt halt.
During a previous search of a terrorist suspect’s home in the Washington suburbs, agents with the FBI’s Washington field office discovered a trove of secret documents naming CAIR and other “mainstream” groups as part of a Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy to support terrorism and to infiltrate and destroy the American system from within. The documents were entered as evidence in the largest terror-financing case in American history, and prosecutors listed CAIR among the front groups participating in the conspiracy.
The listing reopened the debate over CAIR’s terror ties, and made outreach to CAIR politically untenable for the bureau, as much as some politically correct higher-ups wanted it to continue. Fresh evidence also emerged triggering a closer look at CAIR’s executives and their connections to Hamas – namely, CAIR’s founding chairman Omar Ahmad and its active executive director Awad.6 CAIR’s legal defense team tried to flash the group’s grip-and-grin photos with President Bush as proof it was not radical, but the federal judge hearing the case was not impressed. He left CAIR on the government blacklist.
“We were laughing about that one in the office,” says a senior FBI agent in the Washington field office. “We said we wouldn’t have to dig very deep and we can get you a picture of Alamoudi standing with Bush as well—and that guy is sitting in the pen.”7 Abdurahman Alamoudi, another Muslim Brotherhood leader and a former CAIR advisory board member, schmoozed Washington politicians while secretly raising millions for al-Qaida, and is now serving twenty-three years in federal prison for plotting terrorism.
FBI headquarters for years had put aside misgivings about CAIR, but faced with the new evidence, headquarters in August of 2008 finally decided to reverse its policy and sever formal outreach ties with CAIR and its national leadership.
“We have suspended any formal engagement with Council on American-Islamic Relations field offices around the country,” FBI spokesman John Miller confirmed in a letter to Congress.8 No longer will representatives of CAIR be a part of any organized committee or group sponsored by the FBI, including the FBI’s Arab/Muslim, Sikh American Advisory Committee, which meets regularly in Washington.
“The adjustment in our contacts with CAIR comes in part as a result of evidence gathered through FBI investigations and presented in connection with the Holy Land Foundation trial,” Miller explained. “CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in that case.”
A shaken CAIR responded by rallying other Muslim groups to threaten the FBI with a community-wide boycott. Calling itself the American Muslim Taskforce on Civil Rights and Elections, the coalition of predominantly Muslim Brotherhood fronts vowed it would never allow CAIR to be marginalized.
“If the FBI does not accord fair and equitable treatment to every American Muslim organization including CAIR, ISNA, and NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust, an ISNA subsidiary that underwrites U.S. mosques], then Muslim organizations, mosques, and individuals will have no choice but to consider suspending all outreach activities with FBI offices, agents, and other personnel,” the coalition warned.9
It was a hollow threat, however, because the entire coalition brought little to the table and therefore had little to take away. The main reason the FBI created the Muslim outreach program was to generate counterterrorism leads, and these Muslim groups have not been helpful in that regard, FBI case agents agree.
CRACKS IN THE POLICY
Privately, CAIR says it regrets the recent FBI decision.10 But it’s counting on the more Muslim-friendly Obama administration reversing it.
“We’re hoping that once [Attorney General] Eric Holder puts the department in order and places people in different positions, we can reestablish what were very positive relations [with the FBI] in our fifteen-year history,” CAIR spokesman Hooper says.11
They may not have to wait very long. Cracks in the new disengagement policy have already formed.
Just seven days after it was put into effect, FBI spokesman and assistant director Miller created a questionnaire and promised CAIR officials he would let them back in the door if they could answer it satisfactorily and put certain doubts to rest. He invited them up to the executive suites located on the seventh floor of the Hoover building to discuss the policy.
Agents were floored when they found out.
“Miller decided to bring them up for tea,” says veteran FBI agent John Guandolo, who has investigated CAIR and helped put the policy together. “We said, ‘What the f***? No! These are the bad guys. This is Hamas. What are you doing?!’”12
They cracked that they wouldn’t be surprised if Miller set up “a hookah bar for them on the seventh floor.” The deal was scuttled after agents howled.
Miller, a former ABC News correspondent who once interviewed Osama bin Laden, is in charge of the bureau’s outreach program, and has personally hosted “working lunches” with suspect Muslim leaders. Agents blame him for the FBI’s constant capitulation to groups like CAIR and ISNA, and for allowing their leaders high-level access within headquarters, which they say only lends them the legitimacy they desperately seek.
“The bad guys have managed to achieve outrageous penetration at the senior level,” Guandolo complains, and it’s demoralizing rank-and-file agents and supervisors alike.
“The director [of the FBI] hasn’t met or awarded anyone from the Muslim community yet who hasn’t turned out to be wanted, unindicted, ind
icted, or someone with an open case or a likely Muslim Brotherhood background,” he points out.
Agents don’t expect things to change, though, when FBI Director Robert Mueller steps down in 2011. If anything, the bureau may become more accommodating to Muslim muscle groups. That’s because retiring Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton is said to be on the short list to replace Mueller—and the obsequious Miller previously worked as a top aide to Bratton.13 Agents expect Miller to gain more power at headquarters under Bratton’s leadership, expanding the Muslim outreach program beyond the liberal parameters he’s already established.
It’s been Miller’s policy, for instance, to keep groups like CAIR in the loop about FBI plans to raid Islamic targets in counterterror investigations.
“When we execute a search warrant in a sensitive location—be it a charity, a mosque, a home of a member of the community—there’s a lot of planning that goes into how to do it so that we don’t deliberately offend sensitivities,” Miller says.
“There’s a lot of outreach,” he adds, “where we reach out to the community and say…‘Here’s the information that we can give you’” about the counterterror raids.14
FBI CAMPS FOR MUSLIM YOUTH
In his role as assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs, Miller took appeasement to a new level in 1997, when he made an official offer to ISNA and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups to create a special “FBI camp for high-school-age Muslim youth,” according to high-level FBI meeting notes obtained from sources within headquarters.15 He proposed developing the camp in coordination with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. The idea had the director’s approval.
Miller also offered to send FBI agents on tours of local mosques “to learn about the mosque and Muslim culture” and receive a “block of instructions” from mosque leaders on respecting Islamic customs, according to the six-page memo marked “Meeting Notes for Robert S. Mueller III.”16 The February 1997 meeting included among its attendees Sayyid M. Syeed, who is a co-founder and director of ISNA, the unindicted terror co-conspirator, and a former director of IIIT, the Brotherhood’s Islamic think tank raided after 9/11 on suspicion of funneling money to suicide bombers.17
In response to suggestions from ISNA and other Muslim groups, Miller proposed initiating “a program where new agent trainees visit a local mosque, similar to new agent trainees currently visiting the Holocaust Museum,” the memo says.18 Muslim leaders are angry over the attention the FBI pays to Jewish history and culture. Agents are sent to the Holocaust Museum to see for themselves what happens when law enforcement becomes a tool of oppression. More hate crimes are committed against Jews in America than any other people of faith, and dwarf those against Muslims.
Agents say Miller’s outreach policies have created discord at all levels of the FBI—except the highest level where they say top brass continue to be clueless about the nature of the enemy.
Because of current infighting, agents say the disengagement policy with CAIR is already fragile and risks breaking down.
“The Washington field office keeps having to glue it together because headquarters is undermining them,” says Guandolo, a twelve-year bureau veteran who after 9/11 worked in the Washington field office’s counterterrorism division, where he developed the FBI’s pilot Counterterrorism Training Program. And the special agents in charge of running the field offices across the country “don’t want to offend local Muslims”—and risk their performance-related bonuses, which are tied in part to outreach and positive feedback from the Muslim community.
Guandolo, who also spent nine years as a member of the FBI’s SWAT team, calls it “cowardice.” Part of the problem, he says, is that senior executives think outreach will help inoculate them from discrimination lawsuits ginned up by notoriously litigious Muslim groups like CAIR.
“They scream racism and threaten to sue, and headquarters just rolls over,” he says. “It’s total appeasement.”
But, “the other part of it is the bad guys are doing their job too well,” he says. “They’re good at spreading propaganda” to make themselves look good and law enforcement bad.
Even if the new policy holds, the damage from years of unbridled outreach may already be done.
SENSITIVITY TRAINING
Over the past several years, CAIR has formally trained the FBI and other law enforcement agencies across the country on Islam and how to treat Muslims. It lectures them to be sensitive to Muslims and respectful of Islamic customs, while misleading them about the meaning of jihad.
The “diversity workshops” are in fact a dangerous disinformation program, veteran counterterrorism agents say.
For starters, brainwashing police into believing jihad means “internal struggle against sin,” and not holy war, desensitizes them to pro-jihad materials discovered in the possession of Muslims they’ve stopped on the road or during the inspections process at the international airports. Rather than ask probing questions, they may instead give them a pass.
CAIR crows on its Web site that it “has conducted diversity/sensitivity training on Islam and Muslims for the FBI [and] several local law enforcement agencies.” And has it. Here is just a sample of the many police departments and law enforcement agencies CAIR has trained—at taxpayer expense—since 2001:
New York Police Department (115th Precinct)
FBI’s St. Louis field office
Central Ohio law enforcement officials
Detroit Police Department
Elk Grove Police Department (California)
Sacramento Police Department
FBI agents in Lexington, Kentucky
FBI agents in Jacksonville, Florida
California Highway Patrol
Cleveland Police Department
Houston law enforcement officials
Chicago Ridge Police Department
Gwinnett County, Georgia, law enforcement office
Texas Police Association officers
Anaheim Police Department (California)
Florida Department of Law Enforcement officials
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)
Texas Municipal Police Association
FBI’s New Haven, Connecticut, field office
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
U.S. Customs and Border Protection19
Most alarming, CAIR also has been training participants at the counterterrorism division of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Georgia. FLETC serves as the interagency law enforcement training organization for more than eighty federal agencies.20
If the feds knew CAIR were contributing heavily to the defense fund of a convicted Georgia cop killer, as detailed in a previous chapter, perhaps they’d rethink inviting the group to that state to train their officers.
And now that CAIR has been tied definitively to terrorism, the heads of all these police departments and agencies might consider deprogramming their officers following CAIR’s brainwashing. Though the damage is done, it’s not irreversible.
Experts warn that by whitewashing jihad, the sensitivity training misinforms agents and may prevent them from taking effective counterterror measures.
“The agents are going to be misinformed and they will be overly sensitive and they will not ask certain questions,” asserts Zeyno Baran, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank.21
The Department of Homeland Security has invited CAIR to conduct sensitivity training for officers and supervisors with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which is charged with rounding up and deporting fugitive aliens. The course in Chicago, for example, was taught by local CAIR officials Christina Abraham and Mariyam Hussain. So far, more than thirty ICE staffers have gone through the CAIR program, which among other things, corrects “misconceptions about jihad” calling for holy war.22
The Chicago training led to Homeland Security taking CAIR on a VIP tour of security operations at the nation’s busiest airport—at the same ti
me British authorities were working to break up a major plot to blow up U.S.-bound airplanes.
In June 2006, a senior Homeland Security official from Washington personally guided officials from CAIR—and even one from the Holy Land Foundation—on a behind-the-scenes tour of customs screening operations at O’Hare International Airport in response to CAIR complaints that Muslim travelers were being unfairly delayed as they entered the U.S. from abroad.
The tour included secure areas normally off-limits to travelers. These Hamas operatives posing as moderate Muslim activists were squired around the entire facility, including a walk through the point-of-entry, customs stations, secondary screening, and interview rooms. In addition, customs agents were asked to describe for CAIR and its terror-supporting entourage various features of the high-risk passenger lookout system.23
So, unwittingly, the government explained to terrorist supporters how programs designed to catch terrorists work.
In a meeting that same day, Brian Humphrey, Customs and Border Protection’s executive director of field operations, assured CAIR that customs agents do not single out Muslim passengers for special screening and that they all must undergo a mandatory course in Muslim sensitivity training.
That course includes watching a video featuring Margaret Nydell, director of graduate studies in the Arabic Department at Georgetown University, home to an Islamic studies center lavishly funded by the Saudis and closely allied with CAIR. A leading Islamic apologist, Nydell is the author of Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Westerners.
A Customs and Border Protection official describes her instruction as “politically correct drivel.”
“It’s all about how Islam means peace and tolerance,” he says. “We’re told how to deal with Arabs and Muslims, that they are loving people and not terrorists. And that jihad is struggle with sin, and has nothing to do with violence.”
