HOMELAND INSECURITY
Terror-support group controls most Islamic groups, mosques in America
By Paul Sperry
© 2011 WorldNetDaily
WASHINGTON – Staff investigators with the House and Senate intelligence committees say they areprobingthe domestic security threat posed by the radical Muslim Brotherhood and,
specifically, whether Brotherhood operatives have penetrated the U.S. government.
The true nature, ambitions and global reach of the Cairo-based Muslim Brotherhood suddenly have become the focus of debate in Washington, following unrest in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East.
As the Muslim Brotherhood threatens to effectively replace Egypt's secular, pro-Western regime, the tentacles of its worldwide jihadist movement have reached deep into the Muslim communityin America. Shockingly, federal court documents reveal that virtually every major Muslim organizationin Americais a front group for the Brotherhood. They also show that its U.S. network has raised millions of dollars for Hamas, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups.
"The most prominent Islamic organizations in the United States are all controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood," said FBI veteran John Guandolo, who worked several Brotherhood-related terror cases out of the bureau's Washington field office as a special agent after 9/11.
While the FBI has cut off ties to some of the well-established organizations, many others continue to participate in outreach programs with the Homeland Security and Justice departments, the former special agent says. Some of their leaders are even advising the government on how to respond to events in Egypt and elsewhere.
 Al Gore, top Muslim Brotherhood leader Abdurahman Alamoudi and Bill Clinton |
American Muslim activists deny the Muslim Brotherhood operates inside America. Even Muslims who have attached themselves to the Republican Party have pooh-poohed the internal threat.
"There's no Muslim Brotherhood in the United States," former Bush administration official Suhail A. Khan insisted earlier this month at the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference meeting in Washington.
However, the U.S. Justice Department has identified no fewer than 61 Muslim Brotherhood figures and entities operating within the U.S. They include:
- The Islamic Society of North America, or ISNA, the umbrella organization for most of the Muslim groups in the U.S. and Canada;
- The North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT, which holds title to most of the major mosquesin America, including one in the Washington suburbs attended by both the Fort Hood terrorist and some of the 9/11 hijackers; and,
- The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the largest Muslim-rights group in the country.
All are heavily funded by wealthy patrons in Saudi Arabia and other Mideast nations, according to sensitive embassy cables, tax records, bank wire transfers and other documents cited in the book,"Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America,"an expose of the Muslim Brotherhood and its American front groups.
Their names were entered intoevidenceas "co-conspirators" during a federal trial which ended in 2008 with the convictions of several Muslim Brotherhood leaders on terrorism charges. The "list of unindicted co-conspirators" implicated these otherwise mainstream Muslim groups in a criminal scheme to funnel millions of dollars to Palestinian terrorists under the guise of charity.
The 11-page document, submitted by federal prosecutors as "Attachment A" in court filings,has not been widely distributed or reported by the national media. Surprisingly few members of Congress are familiar withthe list, Hill sources say.
The largest Muslim charityin America– the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, or HLF – was at the center of the Muslim Brotherhood's terror-fundraising network. The government shut down HLF after 9/11 and recently convicted the organization on charges of laundering more than $12 million in donations for Hamas suicide bombers and their families. HLF wasformerlyknown as the Occupied Land Fund, or OLF, where it operated under ISNA and
shared checking accounts with the group.
"ISNA and NAIT, in fact, shared more with HLF than just a parent organization [the Muslim Brotherhood]. They were intimately connected with the HLF and its assigned task of providing financial support to Hamas," federal prosecutors said in a 2008 memo to a U.S. District Court in Dallas, HLF's national headquarters.
"Shortly after Hamas was founded in 1987, as an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, the International Muslim Brotherhood ordered the Muslim Brotherhood chapters throughout the world tocreatePalestine Committees, whose job it was to support Hamas with 'media, money and men,'" the memo continued. "The U.S.-Muslim Brotherhood created the U.S. Palestine Committee, which documents reflect was initially comprised of three organizations: the OLF (HLF), the IAP [Islamic Association for Palestine], and the UASR [United Association for Studies and Research]. CAIR was later added to these organizations."
Prosecutors concluded: "The mandate of these organizations, per the International Muslim Brotherhood, was to support Hamas."
Fairfax County Nexus
The Muslim Brotherhood's originsin Americago back more than four decades. In the 1960s, radical Muslim immigrants began organizingin Americaand developing a criminal underworld that largely escaped federal law enforcement scrutiny. They eventually incorporated nonprofit organizations with benign-sounding names, and told anybody who asked they were simply forming a social network or "cultural society" for Muslims.
 Top Muslim Brotherhood leader Abdurahman Alamoudi and George Bush |
But in the wake of 9/11, Washington allowed case agents to start connecting the dots, and they began to see a lot of overlap in the operations of the Muslim groups and their leaders – along with a lot of Saudi money and suspicious activity. This confirmed the hunches of veteran counterterrorism investigators, who believed the groups were connected in an international conspiracy against America and its key Mideast ally, Israel.
Although the groups appear independent of one another, many of them co-mingle funds and even share the same staff and office space.
For example, some 40 active Muslim charities and businesses have operated at one time or another out of the same office building in Herndon, Va. And several others have been headquartered out of the same non-descript office park in Alexandria, Va., in the shadow of the nation's capital, as first reported in the book,"Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington."
After 9/11, federal and local authorities identified more than 110 suspected shell companies, cut-outs and other fronts associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and its hub in Northern Virginia, known collectively as the "Safa Group." Their ongoing investigation of the Herndon-based Safa Group, which allegedly funneled money to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups, generated a separate list of suspected Brotherhood entities.The 13-page document, submitted by federal investigators as "Attachment C" among court filings,includes known al-Qaida charitable fronts as well.
Both the Herndon and Alexandria nexuses are located within Fairfax County, Va., across the Potomac from the nation's capital.
"There's only three degrees of separation between international terrorism and what happens in Fairfax County," observed a senior Fairfax County Police Department detective, as quoted in"Muslim Mafia.""Our society here is totally infiltrated by the bad guys."
Investigators also discovered the groups have interlocking boards of directors. One top Brotherhood leader, Abdurahman Alamoudi, sat on the boards of no fewer than 16 Islamic organizations, including CAIR. Many of the leaders live next door to each other on private, secluded streets.
"When we started to really look at this thing, we found it's all the same people. It's all the same guys," noted an FBI official in Washington.
Investigators also confirmed that many of the groups were laundering terrorist-bound funds through a maze of business conduits. They even used religious charities and think tanks as cover to carry out their illicit activities.
Soon, case agents and the assistant U.S. attorneys they worked with realized they were dealing with a vast criminal conspiracy, and began to look for ways to roll up the entire network, including using the RICO statute commonly aimed at the mafia.
Smoking Gun
Their first big break came several years ago with the search of one of the Brotherhood leaders' homes in Annandale, Va., following his arrest on suspicion he had cased the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and other bridges for possible terrorist attack. There, in a sub-basement of suspect Ismail Elbarasse's basement, FBI agents uncovered a stash of secret manifestos, charters and other documents revealing the depth of the conspiracy.
After translating the Arabic-written papers into English, investigators realized they had seized the archives of the U.S. branch of the militant International Muslim Brotherhood.
The trove of papers exposes the jihadist inner workings of the U.S. Brotherhood, and outlines its broader conspiracy of infiltrating and destroying the American government "from within."
One secret documentfound during the raid of Elbarasse's home lays bare the Brotherhood's ambitious plans for a U.S. takeover, replacing the U.S. Constitution with Shariah, or Islamic law.
Written in 1991 by another U.S. Brotherhood agent, Mohammed Akram Adlouni, the strategy paper describes the group's long-term goal of "sabotaging" the U.S. system. It's a blueprint for a stealth "grand jihad." Under the heading, "The role of the Muslim Brother in North America," it states:
The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by the hands of the believers, so that it is eliminated and Allah's religion is made victorious over all other religions.
"It is a genuine conspiracy to overthrow the government," the FBI official said, "and they have organizations to do it, and they have written doctrines outlining their plan."
The same documentalso lists 29 organizations working in the U.S. to further the Brotherhood's goals. In addition to ISNA, NAIT and CAIR's forerunner IAP, they include:
- The International Institute for Islamic Thought, or IIIT, the largest Islamic think tank in America;
- The Muslims Students Association, or MSA, which actively recruits on college campuses across the country;
- The Fiqh Council of North America, which renders religious rulings, or fatwahs, based on Islamic law for Muslim-Americans; and,
- The Islamic Circle of North America, or ICNA, which recently merged with the Muslim American Society, or MAS, another Brotherhood front organization based in the Washington suburbs.
(See image below for list of top Muslim Brotherhood fronts in America.)
For years, politicians and journalists have described these organizations as "mainstream" and "moderate." Investigators now warn they are U.S. franchises of the radical Brotherhood, established with a markedly different purpose than what they publicly claim.
Their secret manifesto is "a clear threat statement of hostile intent," says Pentagon consultant Maj. Stephen Coughlin, "with stated objectives that overlap with al-Qaida's."
The U.S. Brotherhood privately refers to its own organizations as "fronts."
"The Brothers in Egypt don't have fronts in the same broad way we have in America," Zeid al-Noman, a Brotherhood leader confides in one document seized by authorities.
Though the movement has been banned in Egypt, it still has popular support and operates relatively openly in that Muslim nation -- something the Brotherhood is loath to do here, especially after 9/11, investigators say.
The U.S. Brotherhood even set up a committee to study the legal aspects of establishing charities in America. The charities are critical because the Brothers have used them as a "side" or "facade," as they put it in their writings, to launder illegal payments to terrorists.
U.S. prosecutors entered the secret documents as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation terror trial. The chilling courtroom exhibits were unopposed by the defense, further attesting to their authenticity.
Terrorists in suits
The government put away several Brotherhood leaders on conspiracy charges in the case. Shukri Abu Baker, Mohammad El Mezain, and CAIR founding director Ghassan Elashi were sentenced to, in effect, life terms for funneling millions of dollars to Palestinian terrorists. Three other Brothers caught up in the investigation have also been imprisoned.
Omar Ahmad, founding chairman of CAIR, was identified at trial as an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror-fundraising scheme. Ahmad, a key Brotherhood leader, has privately told Muslim audiences the Quran should replace the Constitution as "the highest authority in America."
"The only difference between the guys in the suits and the guys with the AK-47s is timing and tactics," an FBI official in Washington was quoted as saying in"Muslim Mafia."
Indeed, the former head of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood'sshuracouncil was one of al-Qaida's top fundraisers in America, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. Abdurahman Alamoudi, who infiltrated both the Clinton and Bush administrations, is now serving 23 years in federal prison for plotting terrorism.
In 1996, Alamoudi told a Muslim audience in Illinois: "Either we do it now or we do it after a hundred years, but this country will become a Muslim country."
Alamoudi also set up the Pentagon's Muslim chaplains program, training and certifying most of the Islamic clerics and lay leaders serving in the U.S. military today.
Sami al-Arian, a former Tampa professor, is another Muslim Brotherhood leader convicted of terrorism. One of his alleged collaborators is senior ISNA official Louay Safi, whom prosecutors named an unindicted co-conspirator in the terror case.
Unwittingly, the Pentagon invited Safi to Fort Hood to counsel troops about Islam after a Muslim officer gunned down dozens of soldiers who were preparing to deploy to Afghanistan from the Army base. Safi and ISNA continue to certify Muslim chaplains for the military.
Ret. Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, former deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Pentagon, says the Muslim Brotherhood is a terror-supporting Fifth Column.
"The Muslim Brotherhood is very much alive. It is very real,"Boykin said in a recent speech."And we need to be very concerned about it."
Read more:FBI: Muslim Brotherhood deeply rooted inside U.S.http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=266725#ixzz1EqfNxXih
