Patrick Poole
Pajamas Media
4/18/2011
The nearly six-hour interview I conducted earlier this year with a top Department of Justice official on the condition of anonymity brought forth a number of revelations about serious problems within the U.S. government’s homeland security and law enforcement community.
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]…
…UPDATE: On the heels of last week’s article by Patrick Poole, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) has sent a letter to Eric Holder this morning demanding answers as to why the Department of Justice decided not to prosecute CAIR, its co-founder Omar Ahmad, and others regarding the Holy Land Foundation case.
(UPDATE: Rep. Peter King demands answers following Poole’s previous article on this topic.) An explosive, must-read interview brings sunlight to our counterproductive “outreach” programs. The case of the missing Somali men from Minneapolis highlights the failure and the absurdity.
Read the entire article at Pajamas Media.
H/T Chris Muir (Beer Goggles, below) via Backyard Conservative (Women Key Players in Arab Spring)
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Update: Read about the 2011 U.S. – Islamic World Forum here. If you go to the site be sure to read the list of participants.
