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FBI Wary of Investigating Extremist Muslim Leaders

FBI Wary of Investigating Extremist Muslim Leaders

Author: Walter Pincus, Washington Post Staff Writer
Publication: Washington Post
Date: October 29, 2001

Agency May Rethink Hesitancy on Religious Figures

Fearing charges of religious persecution, the FBI for years has hesitated to investigate radical Islamic clerics in the United States despite evidence that their mosques have been used to recruit and fund suspected terrorists, present and former law enforcement officials said.

Even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, "the veil of religion that has been draped over mosques . . . will be tough to move off," an FBI official said last week. "The Arab American community can become enraged and beat on the FBI."

President Bush, American Muslim leaders and clerics of many other faiths have stressed that Islam is a religion of peace and the United States a land of tolerance. Yet U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials suspect that a small number of American mosques with extremist leaders, or imams, have played a role in terrorism.

The religious doctrine preached inside Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network has drawn its adherents into "a divinely ordained battle to liberate Muslim lands," said Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who was a terrorism expert in the Clinton National Security Council.

"This outlook, and the violence at its core, is rejected by most modern Islamic authorities and an anathema to most Muslims. But it reflects how deeply alienated these extremists are," Benjamin said.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the FBI has broad powers to wiretap or bug any site where foreign terrorist activity is suspected. But some law enforcement experts believe the FBI has hamstrung itself by excessive sensitivity about possible criticism because religious figures are involved.

"You can't be in a struggle with a segment of a religious movement and not pursue them as you would any other suspected criminal," said Phillip B. Heymann, a professor of criminal law at Harvard Law School.

"The standard of probable cause ought to be the same for religious leaders as for others," said Heymann, who headed the criminal division of the Justice Department during the Carter administration and was briefly deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.

The bureau's fear of investigating religious leaders is illustrated by its handling of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, 62, the radical Islamic leader who came to the United States in 1990 with a history of alleged but unproven involvement in terrorism. He had been detained by Egypt's security services after the assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Though never convicted, he was kept for a time under house arrest in Egypt and was charged a second time in 1992. By then, he was already in the United States.

During the early 1990s, Rahman was one of a number of radical imams who appeared at Arab American gatherings across the country, "collecting money and preaching religious views antagonistic to the United States and its interests," a former FBI official said.

Rahman, who had met Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s and again in Sudan in the 1990s, "was his religious contact in the U.S.," the former official added. Two of Rahman's sons went to Afghanistan to work with bin Laden, and one was recently pictured at bin Laden's side.

Once in the United States, Rahman rose to a position of prominence in the Islamic communities centered in northern New Jersey and parts of New York City.

In 1991, Rahman and his coterie challenged Mustafa Shalabi, the local imam, for control of a mosque in Brooklyn. After Shalabi was later found murdered, Rahman challenged his successor and won a vote of mosque members in 1993. The murder remains unsolved.

Rahman already had control of another mosque in Jersey City, where some of his strongest supporters lived. But he did not limit himself to the East Coast. He also "traveled around the country . . . up and down the West Coast, where he was welcomed at mosques and greatly admired," the former bureau official said.

Five months before the Feb. 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center and three years after receiving intelligence about his alleged terrorist background, the FBI opened an investigation of Rahman. Approval to do so came only after months of internal haggling and discussions with Justice Department lawyers over the ramifications of focusing on a religious leader.

Although the FBI placed Rahman's bodyguard and driver under loose surveillance, Rahman himself was never questioned or put before a grand jury. Nor were his offices bugged, according to a former senior FBI official. Records of Rahman's mosques in Brooklyn and Jersey City were never subpoenaed, and no wiretaps were put on the mosques' phones, the official said.

The post-bombing investigation led to Rahman's 1995 conviction for "directing others to perform acts" such as plotting to bomb bridges, tunnels and buildings in New York City, in the words of the trial judge. That case showed him to be a central figure for the Islamic extremists who carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and, later, for some of those involved in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Although Rahman has been serving a life sentence since 1996 -- he is now held at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons' federal medical center outside Rochester, Minn. -- he remains an influential figure for al Qaeda.

At a trial last June, Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian arrested for planning to bomb the Los Angeles Airport as one of a series of worldwide terrorist attacks set around New Year's 2000, testified that the blind sheik's words were still being used in 1998 at bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan.

"A fatwah [religious ruling] issued by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman with his picture" was distributed at one camp, Ressam recalled. "It said it was a fatwah by Omar Abdel Rahman from prison. It says fight Americans and hit their interests everywhere," he said.

Witnesses in the embassy bombings trial also identified Moataz Al-Hallak as a fundamentalist cleric in the United States with ties to bin Laden. In the 1990s Al-Hallak ran a mosque in Arlington, Tex., where at one time he assisted in the purchase of a small airplane requested by Wadih El-Hage, then bin Laden's personal secretary.

Al-Hallak, who now lives in Laurel, appeared before a federal grand jury in New York three times in 1999 as part of the investigation of the embassy bombings. He was also questioned by the FBI after the Sept. 11 attacks. But he was released, and his attorney said he had no involvement in either plot.

"There remains tremendous sensitivity to investigating a member of the cloth," said a former senior FBI official who worked in counterterrorism. "You need overwhelming information, whether he is an imam allegedly supporting Osama bin Laden or a priest supposedly helping the IRA."

The senior FBI official, however, noted that despite the bureau's timidity in the past, "a change in thinking may be taking place" today.

One current FBI interest is in Rahman's followers -- the network of imams and mosques he presided over and visited in the United States. The bureau hopes to determine the names of American Muslims who were recruited and sent to Afghanistan for training at bin Laden's camps. "We don't have a clue of all those who went through that system," an FBI official said.
 


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