Watch as they explain how Shariah is making inroads in the U.S., who’s behind the trend, and what can be done to stop it.

April 25, 2011

Hon. John Boehner
Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives

Hon. Eric Cantor
Majority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives

Hon. Nancy Pelosi
Minority Leader, U.S. House of Representatives

Hon. Harry Reid
Senate Majority Leader, U.S. Senate

Hon. Mitch McConnell
Senate Minority Leader. U.S. Senate

Dear Leaders of the House and Senate:

We recently published a competitive analysis of the politico-military-legal doctrine that animates those who wage jihad: Shariah: The Threat to America. Among the most important findings of our “Team B II” report was the fact that, pursuant to this doctrine, shariah’s adherents are using stealthy techniques – as well as violent means – to achieve their goal of imposing shariah worldwide and reestablishing the theocratic Caliphate.

Shariah is the crucial fault line of Islam’s internecine struggle. On one side of the divide are Muslim reformers and authentic moderates – figures like Abdurrahman Wahid, the late president of Indonesia and leader of the world’s largest libertarian Muslim organization, Nahdlatul Ulama – whose members espouse the Enlightenment’s embrace of reason and, in particular, its separation of the spiritual and secular realms. On this side of the divide, shariah is a reference point for a Muslim’s personal conduct, not a corpus to be imposed on the life of a pluralistic society.

By contrast, the other side of the divide is dominated by Muslim supremacists, often called Islamists. Like erstwhile proponents of Communism and Nazism, these supremacists – some terrorists, others employing stealthier means – seek to impose a totalitarian regime: a global totalitarian system cloaked as an Islamic State and called a caliphate. On that side of the divide, which is the focus of the present study, shariah is an immutable, compulsory system that Muslims are obliged to install and the world required to adopt, the failure to do so being deemed a damnable offence against Allah. For these ideologues, shariah is not a private matter. Adherents see the West as an obstacle to be overcome, not a culture and civilization to be embraced, or at least tolerated. It is impossible, they maintain, for alternative legal systems and forms of governments peacefully to coexist with the end-state they seek.

Of particular concern with respect to this stealth jihad is the role being played here by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB or Ikhwan in Arabic). To be clear, the Brotherhood in America is the franchise in this country of the same organiza- tion that is currently engaged in a shariah-compliant make-over of Northern Af- rica and the Middle East, with profound implications for U.S. interests and allies.

The true nature and purposes of the Muslim Brotherhood in this country was established in the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial – the largest terrorism- financing trial in U.S. history. In the course of that trial, a large body of evidence was introduced uncontested by the defense. It established the existence of a significant Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas conspiracy in the United States, involving nearly all of the prominent and most influential Islamic organizations in North America.

A particularly illuminating piece of evidence was a 1991 strategic plan entitled, “An Explanatory Memorandum of the General Strategic Goals of the Group.” Written by a senior member of the Ikhwan in America and discovered by the FBI in a clandestine MB archive in Annandale, Virginia, this memo described the group’s mission here as: “a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within, ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their [i.e., our] hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.”

Attached to the Explanatory Memorandum was a list of 29 groups under the heading “A list of our organizations and the organizations of our friends.” This list included what were at the time the most prominent Muslim-American organizations in the country. With a few exceptions (notably, groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations or CAIR), that came into existence subsequently), they continue to be such to this day.

As you may know, these organizations were among the roughly 300 indi- viduals and groups listed as unindicted co-conspirators in the Holy Land trial. We learned in the course of preparing our report that the prosecution had in- tended to bring charges against at least some of the unindicted co-conspirators once it had secured the initial conviction of five of the foundation’s officials, which it did in November 2008.

Thanks to recent interviews with unnamed Justice Department officials conducted by one of our Team members, counterterrorism expert Patick Poole, we have finally been able to confirm why the further prosecutions did not occur: According to Mr. Poole’s sources, “those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.”

One of the Justice Department officials put it this way:

Jim Jacks [the U.S. attorney in Dallas who prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation executives] and his team were ready to go. There’s a moun- tain of evidence against all of these groups that was never introduced during the Holy Land trial and it is damning. We’ve got them on wire- taps. That’s exactly why many of these leaders and groups were named unindicted co-conspirators in the first round of prosecutions.

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming ‘Islamophobia’ at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the prob- lem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups, knowing what we know?

We are very concerned that political considerations may have obstructed justice and allowed Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organizations and individuals to continue with impunity to engage in the stealthy forms of sedition against our country, government and Constitution that the Ikhwan calls “civilization jihad.” Failure to act against such co-conspirators not only enables them to persist in such activities. It is perceived as “submission,” which – according to their shariah threat doctrine – obliges the Brotherhood’s operatives and associates to redouble their efforts to “make [their enemies] feel subdued,” including through the use of terrifying violence.
We were pleased to see Chairman Peter King taking seriously the issue of “radicalization” within the Muslim-American community during his Homeland Security Committee’s recent hearings. This is a positive first step in understanding the seriousness of the threat of shariah in America and, accordingly, in deter- mining who within that community is a problem, and who is not. We also welcome Rep. King’s initiative last week in asking the Attorney General to respond to several pertinent questions about the failure to indict and prosecute other co- conspirators in the Holy Land money-laundering affair.

Mr. Poole’s Justice Department sources have raised broader concerns, however. These include evidence that – thanks to misbegotten official “out- reach” efforts to self-appointed “leaders” of the Muslim community – Brotherhood influence operations have been highly successful in penetrating and inter- fering with our law enforcement, homeland defense, military and intelligence communities’ performance of their vital missions. If that is the case, the implica- tions could not be more serious, and the need for corrective action could not be more acute.
Therefore, we call upon you as leaders of the legislative branch to under- take investigations of the aforementioned allegations as a matter of the utmost urgency. Should you need any further inducement, consider how one of Mr. Poole’s Justice Department sources characterized the stakes:

This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terror- ist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Founda- tion. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina.

Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terror- ist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giv- ing these groups cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working with who will be directly or indirectly responsible.

Team B II stands ready to assist in your inquiries and attendant hearings into this matter.

Sincerely,

Team Leaders

Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin
Lt. Gen. Ed Soyster

Associates
Mr. Andrew McCarthy
Ms. Christine Brim
Amb. Henry Cooper
Mr. Stephen Coughlin
Mr. Michael del Rosso
Mr. Frank J. Gaffney
Mr. John Guandolo
Mr. Brian Kennedy
Ms. Clare Lopez
Admiral James Lyons
Mr. Patrick Poole
Mr. Joseph Schmitz
Mr. Tom Trento
Mr. Michael Waller
Ms. Diana West
Mr. James Woolsey
Mr. David Yerushalmi

cc:

Hon. Peter King
Hon. Bennie Thompson
Hon. Mike Rogers
Hon. C.A. Ruppersberger
Hon. Howard “Buck” McKeon
Hon. Adam Smith
Hon. Lamar Smith
Hon. John Conyers
Hon. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen
Hon. Howard Berman
Hon. Darrell Issa
Hon. Joe Lieberman
Hon. Susan Collins
Hon. Diane Feinstein
Hon. Saxby Chambliss
Hon. Carl Levin
Hon. John McCain
Hon. Patrick Leahy
Hon. Chuck Grassley
Hon. John Kerry
Hon. Richard Lugar
Hon. Elijah Cummings

Team B II Letter to Congressional Leaders
(April 26, 2011) (PDF, 233K)

One of the most salient voices sounding this alarm has been that of Stephen Coughlin, now a Team B II colleague, who, as the senior military staff’s sole expert on Islamic threat doctrine (jihad), was unceremoniously dropped by the Pentagon back in 2008 when his now-famous jihad brief came to the attention of one Hesham Islam, senior aide to Gordon England, Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush administration. (More on Coughlin’s case and Hesham Islam to be found here.)

One of Coughlin’s key insights is that in relying on “Muslim outreach” for our interpretations of jihad and other Islamic doctrine, we have in effect “outsourced” our understanding of the enemy and his threat doctrine. This process has created a series of interlocking No Go Zones of the Mind, fortified mental regions we have barred ourselves from entering lest we follow the logic of fact and observation to conclude that the basic tenets of Islam are dangerous to liberty as we have known it.

While this sounds theorectical, it is not. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been waged by strategists who scrupulously avoid these same mental No Go Zones when sending troops to fight and to “nation-build.” This has had and continues to have tragic –  and, I would argue, criminally irresponsible — results measured in an incalculable loss of life and limbs. One notorious example of the human cost of the mindset reinforced by Muslim-outreach-apologetics is the attack on Ft. Hood by Nidal Hassan. Hassan’s own version of a jihad brief, a call to violent jihad (grounded in traditonal Islamic doctrine, not incidentally) that eerily tracks Coughlin’s warning brief, was presented to a large Army peer group before the Ft Hood attack. Hemmed in by their own No-Go-Zone-thinking, however, Hassan’s Army peers did nothing to neutralize the threat Hassan so obviously presented.

The incredible and untenable fact is, bucking the Islamic apologetics of Muslim outreach — a program of subversion guided and executed by groups such as CAIR known to be associated with the Muslim Brotherhood –  is a US government no-no. MB penetration is that deep.

We have now arrived at a new landmark in this sorry history. Patrick Poole, also a Team B II colleague, is now publishing an important series of articles at Pajamas Media revealing the impact of Islamic apologetics via “outreach” on Justice Department terrorism cases. Poole writes:

Last Thursday, I reported here exclusively at PJM on a DOJ memo dated March 31, 2010, from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. The memo effectively ended the prosecution of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Omar Ahmad — in addition to the prosecution of other prominent American Muslim leaders — for helping support the Hamas terrorist organization. This decision, according to my source, was not made based on the overwhelming evidence that had been compiled over the past decade by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, but was made due to potential political embarrassment for the Obama administration and out of fear of inflaming the American Muslim community.

While the context is different, it’s important to note that it is precisely the same fear of embarrassment and inflaming the American Muslim community (and harming their own careers) that rendered the Army community incapable of dealing with Nidal Hassan before he launched his jihad at Ft. Hood. We see this same strange form of emotional blackmail across the board: Our “leaders” are trading our national security for applause and approval from MB-linked pressure groups.

Today, Poole opens up his report to take in the systemic failures at Justice. Drawing on six hours of interviews with an anonymous senior Justice source, Poole explains how “Muslim outreach” to terror-tied Islamic groups has directly interfered with ongoing terrorism investigations.

Don’t miss.

Last Thursday, I reported here exclusively at PJM on a DOJ memo dated March 31, 2010, from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. The memo effectively ended the prosecution of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) co-founder and Chairman Emeritus Omar Ahmad — in addition to the prosecution of other prominent American Muslim leaders — for helping support the Hamas terrorist organization. This decision, according to my source, was not made based on the overwhelming evidence that had been compiled over the past decade by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, but was made due to potential political embarrassment for the Obama administration and out of fear of inflaming the American Muslim community.

But another troubling claim came out during our interview: “Muslim outreach” programs by U.S. government agencies to terror-tied Islamic groups have directly interfered with ongoing terrorism investigations.

My source began by complaining about the counterproductive nature of such programs:

In all my years working for the U.S. government I have rarely seen anything as mystifying as our outreach to Muslims. Do we really need it? Sure. We need to be reaching out to the Muslim leaders who are working to prevent radicalization, not the ones who are making it happen. But that isn’t what we’re doing.

Instead we’re having countless meetings from the Cabinet level on down with groups and individuals that we know are bad guys and who we’ve repeatedly said in court are actively working to support terrorist groups overseas. We even had [FBI General Counsel] Valerie Caproni meeting regularly with these Hamas guys to get their guidance. What advice do you think they were giving her?

And she knew exactly who she was dealing with. It was the FBI who went into federal court and said that CAIR is Hamas.

But at the same time that FBI agents were testifying in the [Holy Land Foundation] trial that CAIR is a Hamas front there was serious disagreement inside DOJ and the FBI about whether we should continue to work with CAIR or cut them loose. So now we do both.

We say publicly that we don’t have an official relationship, but CAIR still has most of the staff in [Attorney General Eric] Holder and [FBI Director Robert] Mueller’s offices on speed dial. Don’t think for a minute that we stopped dealing with them.

And what exactly is our end game for doing this? Nobody knows. Are we getting anything by reaching out to CAIR? Of course not.

Now think for a minute about what we’re doing in any other context. Thirty years ago we didn’t have government liaisons to the IRA. The FBI doesn’t have an interfaith outreach program to the Mafia. Janet Napolitano doesn’t sit down and have lunch meetings with the Mexican drug cartels. And we don’t appoint members of the Crips and Bloods to our advisory boards on gangs. Well, not yet, at least [laughs].

It sounds really silly when you put it like that, but we have been allowing the bad guys to dictate our national policy on terrorism since the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993]. Let’s not forget that during the Clinton administration we had one of al-Qaeda’s top operatives in America — Abdurahman Alamoudi — organizing iftar dinners at the White House! The same guy who stood beside President Bush right after 9/11. Two years later he’s in prison, but his people are still popping up all over Washington.

Then we had [CAIR Executive Director] Nihad Awad advising Al Gore’s aviation security commission back in the late 90s. We said absolutely nothing even though we had him on our wiretaps five years before at a major Hamas meeting in Philadelphia. Nobody from DOJ or the FBI said a goddamn word because CAIR was advising every single federal agency dealing with terrorism at the time. We wouldn’t have these problems if we had cut them off then and there.

Stuff like that really makes me wonder what in the hell are we doing. I could easily give a dozen more examples going on right now. This bizarre fetish we’ve had about Muslim outreach since 9/11 has even damaged ongoing terrorism investigations and is eventually going to get people killed. I really believe that.

I asked for an example of how these outreach programs jeopardized investigations:

Well the best example was the investigation into the missing Somali kids in Minneapolis two years ago.

When Al-Shabaab started gaining support in the Somali community after the Ethiopian invasion in late 2006 and early 2007, all of the government agencies started doing outreach to the Somali imams. But when these kids went missing in Minneapolis, did we get a call from these imams we were reaching out to?

No, they were telling the families to shut up and not to talk to the FBI.

[Author’s note: Subsequent to my interview, Abdirizak Bihi, the uncle of one of the missing kids who was later killed fighting with Al-Shabaab in Somalia, testified before the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee hearing on radicalization in the Islamic community making these same claims: religious leaders and CAIR were intimidating the families of the missing Somali men to prevent them from talking to law enforcement.]

It wasn’t long into the investigation before we started hearing that the ones primarily responsible for recruiting and raising the funds for these kids to go fight with Al-Shabaab were the same imams we had been doing outreach to all along. But everyone was saying “we must do outreach,” like they had all been hypnotized, so the outreach continued.

Now at the same time, the FBI was working to get information from these imams about what might have happened with these kids when somebody somewhere decides to put them on the no-fly list. [Author’s note: It was widely reported that Sheik Abdirahman Ahmed of Masjid Abubakar As-Saddique -- the largest mosque in Minnesota -- and the mosque’s youth director Abdulahi Farah were placed on and later removed from the no-fly list.] So they get stopped trying to leave the country, which tips them off that they’re part of the investigation. And the imams quickly lawyer up. Its months before we actually get their attorneys to agree to let them to talk to us. And we got nothing from them when we did.

Once we started to get a handle on how big this really was, it ended up being becoming the largest CT [counterterrorism] investigation since 9/11. And a couple of months in we finally convene a grand jury to look into this thing. So do we call these imams in? Hell no.

Subpoenas go out to a bunch of mid- and low-level people, but not the big fish. And when the low-level people get their subpoenas, who do they call? The imams who are our prime suspects, oh, and who also are supposed to be our outreach partners. And like magic, the low-level folks all suddenly get CAIR attorneys representing them. The result is that the indictments that have been handed down are virtually all minor players. Instead of going after the guys running the operation, we indict a couple of guys and a Somali woman who raised a couple of thousand of dollars for Al-Shabaab.

Don’t get me wrong, I think they should all go to jail, but do we really believe we’re winning the war on terror when this Somali woman gets indicted and the imams who recruited these kids and sent them to fight and die are allowed to walk free?

I asked: the outreach to the imams finally stopped, didn’t it?

Are you kidding me? They’re still working with these guys!

[Authors note: In fact, one Somali press outlet reported that Homeland Security, the FBI, and several other federal, state, and local agencies held an unpublicized outreach session at the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque earlier this month. According to that report, Sheikh Ahmed and other mosque leaders did not attend for fear of backlash from the Somali community.]

But here’s how we get twisted around our own outreach programs. About two months after all these kids disappear, the Al-Shabaab imams from all over the country get together at a meeting in Ohio, including the Minneapolis imams we’re looking at. Do we wiretap the meeting? Of course not.

Instead, a representative for the imams convinces some dimwit attorney from Homeland Security Civil Rights division to come talk at their meeting about outreach. And so they let this guy talk for about ten minutes, then he’s quickly ushered out of the building so they can get down to business. This gives them perfect cover. “Well we can’t be having a terrorist meeting because we had Homeland Security here!”

And can you guess what happened to the imam’s lackey who arranged for Homeland Security to be at that meeting? He’s now one of [Homeland Security Secretary] Napolitano’s senior advisors and running all of their Somali outreach! They gave this guy a security clearance! I’m not f***ing kidding you!

If anyone wants to understand how utterly insane our outreach policy is they should start right there.

Look, I have to admit that these guys are evil, but they’re absolutely brilliant. They are so inside our decision-making process they will always be twenty steps ahead of us. I honestly think if we stopped doing counterterrorism altogether we would be better off. I really don’t mean that, but for us to return to some semblance of sanity we have got to stop relying on the bad guys to make our counterterrorism policy. And we damn well have to stop hiring these people and putting them in charge of outreach.

We also need to get rid of all these supposed outside experts. Four years ago a bunch of these academic idiots were telling us that Al-Shabaab was a nationalist organization that was only concerned with liberating Somalia from U.S.-backed foreign occupation and there was nothing to worry about. Does anyone still believe that? I mean we just had that Somali kid from Portland [Mohamed Osman Mohamud] try to set off a bomb in the middle of a Christmas celebration that would have killed hundreds of people. The [FBI] ran a solid operation on that one, but they aren’t going to be able to catch them all.

And when the day comes that we have dead Americans lying in our streets, you know what we’re going to hear from these experts? We need more outreach! I guarantee it! And they’ll get huge grants from DOJ, FBI, and DHS to tell us that.

At the time of this interview there was considerable criticism from Muslim groups regarding the upcoming House Homeland Security hearing on Islamic radicalization (which I covered for PJM last month). So later in the conversation, I asked about the claims being made by the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and CAIR that the Muslim community has been actively helping law enforcement identify potential terrorists in their midst:

That is complete and utter bulls***.

In all my years working counterterrorism I can’t recall a single case where we prosecuted someone based on a tip from MPAC or CAIR or any of these groups. The only time we hear from them is when they think that someone is a government informant. That’s how MPAC blew a big al-Qaeda case in California. When they thought they had somebody spying inside the mosque, they called the FBI and said he was a potential terrorist and the whole case ended up falling apart. So what do we do in response? Did we cut them off? No, DHS has them train thousands of TSA employees in cultural sensitivity. I almost fell out of my chair when I heard about that. Oh, and they still call us when they want to bitch about us arresting one of their friends or employees or board members. But under Obama and Holder that doesn’t happen so much anymore. Just ask Omar Ahmad.

I hear them take credit for all these cases they had absolutely nothing to do with. Like the Lackawanna case. The FBI got one anonymous letter from someone in the Muslim community saying that a group of men had left to train in Afghanistan with bin Laden and he can’t say who he is because he’s in fear for his life. He was probably right to be in fear for his life. Who was he afraid of? Probably the people from his mosque.

But what about the dozens of people in the community who knew that an al-Qaeda recruiter had come through their mosque and knew these men had left to go train with al-Qaeda? From all those people who knew what was going on we got a single anonymous tip. But they raise this example anytime someone dares to question their lack of cooperation. The Muslim community can’t have it both ways. If they don’t want to be tarred every time a Muslim commits a terror attack they can’t turn around and claim to be cooperative with law enforcement when one person does the right thing and everyone else stays silent.

And then you have the case a couple of years ago of the three guys in Toledo who wanted to fight Americans and join the Taliban. When they were arrested the Muslim leaders kept praising themselves that someone from the Muslim community turned them in. But it wasn’t until the trial that it came out that the tip didn’t come from the Muslim community but from an undercover agent. I’m sure that CAIR and MPAC take credit for that as an example of their cooperation with the FBI, and then use that same case to attack the FBI for using an agent provocateur to entrap innocent Muslims.

And these are the groups we have been using as the bridge to the Muslim community for going on twenty years now. I mean the best thing we could do is burn that bridge to the ground and start building some new ones.

We don’t play around with criminals in my world. If CAIR is an organization that is a quote “criminal organization,” prosecute them. Hold them accountable and bring them to trial.

But according to a high-ranking source within the Department of Justice, who spoke exclusively to Pajamas Media on the condition of anonymity, Sheriff Baca, a long-time supporter of CAIR, was probably already in on the joke.

The joke is that a number of leaders of Islamic organizations (all of whom publicly opposed the King hearings on Muslim radicalization) were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade.

But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

Included in those indictments was at least one of the co-founders of CAIR, based on “Declination of Prosecution of Omar Ahmad,” a March 31 DOJ legal memo from Assistant Attorney General David Kris to Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler. A second DOJ official familiar with the investigation independently confirmed these details. Omar Ahmad is one of CAIR’s co-founders and its chairman emeritus. He was personally named, along with CAIR itself, as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. During the trial FBI Agent Lara Burns testified that both Omar Ahmad and current CAIR executive director Nihad Awad were caught on FBI wiretaps attending a 1993 meeting of Hamas leaders in Philadelphia.

Dean Boyd, public affairs representative for the DOJ National Security Division, declined to provide me a copy of the March 31, 2010, memo dropping the Omar Ahmad prosecution. Directing me to submit a FOIA request, Boyd did say that “as a general rule, internal DOJ deliberation memos spelling out arguments for or against potential prosecution of any particular suspect are not public.”

Pajamas Media will be filing a FOIA request for all the related documents in this case.

According to my source, the chief reason outlined in the DOJ memo declining to prosecute CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad was the issue of potential jury nullification. The first Holy Land Foundation trial in 2007 ended in a hung jury. When the case was retried in 2008, all five defendants, former executives of the Holy Land Foundation, were convicted on all 108 counts.

But, according to our DOJ source, possible jury nullification was hardly the primary issue in the DOJ’s scuttling of the terror finance prosecutions. “This was a political decision from the get-go,” the source said.

It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. Jim Jacks [the U.S. attorney in Dallas who prosecuted the Holy Land Foundation executives] and his team were ready to go. There’s a mountain of evidence against all of these groups that was never introduced during the Holy Land trial and it is damning. We’ve got them on wiretaps. That’s exactly why many of these leaders and groups were named unindicted co-conspirators in the first round of prosecutions.

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

“By closing down these prosecutions,” the source added, “the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”

The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated — just like what happened in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust, which holds the property titles of many of the mosques in America -- Ed.] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. Those came out during the [Holy Land Foundation] trial. But what if we won the case against NAIT and its leaders and the U.S. government finds itself the landlord to hundreds of mosques across the country? How well do you think that would that play in the Muslim community?

The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to cut ties with the group. In an April 2009 letter to Sen. Jon Kyl, FBI Assistant Director Richard Powers said that “the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner.”

And a February 2010 letter from Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich to four congressmen who inquired about the termination of the relationship between the FBI and CAIR — just weeks before the DOJ officially ceased further prosecutions, including of CAIR co-founders — elaborated on the evidence about CAIR that had emerged from the Holy Land trial. Yet, according to my DOJ source, CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and FBI officials despite the official ban and these statements made to members of Congress.

And just last November, a significant July 2009 memorandum order by Judge Jorge Solis, who supervised the initial Holy Land Foundation trial, was unsealed under direction of the Court of Appeals. It provides the court’s reasons for refusing to remove CAIR and two other prominent Islamic groups, the Islamic Society of North America and NAIT, from the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the case. Judge Solis concluded that “the four pieces of evidence the government relies on, as discussed below, do create at least a prima facie case as to CAIR’s involvement in a conspiracy to support Hamas” (p. 7), specifically naming Omar Ahmad’s part in the conspiracy (p. 6) and adding later that “the Government has produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) and with Hamas” (p. 15).

As I reported here at Pajamas Media, FBI Director Robert Mueller reiterated these reasons for cutting ties with CAIR before a recent House Judiciary Committee meeting — just two days before The Daily Caller reported that White House officials had publicly praised CAIR.

Adding to the hypocrisy, after the Obama administration scuttled the next round of prosecutions in the Hamas terror financing investigation last March, Attorney General Eric Holder gave the prosecutors and FBI investigators in the Holy Land Foundation case the AG’s Award for Distinguished Service last October for their work in the case.

I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:

This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. My biggest fear is that Americans are going to die and it will be the very Muslim leaders we are working with who will be directly or indirectly responsible.

But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?

We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target. If the mistrial hadn’t have happened, we probably would have gone through the second round of prosecutions before the change in administrations.

To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on.

It remains to be seen how Congress, the American people, and the establishment media — who always seem eager to rise to the defense of CAIR and the other terror-tied Islamic groups — will proceed.

Originally published at Pajamas Media

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr.

In 1987, Mr. Gaffney was nominated by President Reagan to become the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, the senior position in the Defense Department with responsibility for policies involving nuclear forces, arms control and U.S.-European defense relations. Previously, from August 1983 until November 1987, Mr. Gaffney was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control Policy under Assistant Secretary Richard Perle. Mr. Gaffney holds a Master of Arts degree in International Studies from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.