Recorded June 12, 2005
REALAUDIO
NB: This stream con­tains both FTR #s 514 and 515 in sequence. Each is a 30 minute broadcast.

Begin­ning with news of GOP big­wig Grover Norquist’s mar­riage to an obser­vant Pales­tin­ian Mus­lim woman, the pro­gram brings up to date ongo­ing dis­cus­sion of the strong con­nec­tions between George Bush’s GOP and the very Islamist forces he pro­fesses to be fight­ing. Norquist and Karl Rove were instru­men­tal in set­ting up the Islamic Institute—a point of inter­sec­tion between the GOP and the Mus­lim Brotherhood’s ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions Al Qaeda and Hamas. Norquist’s bride worked for his Islamic Insti­tute and now works for the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment, a gov­ern­men­tal depart­ment that often works with the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. This pro­gram also enter­tains the [uncon­firmed pos­si­bil­ity] that Norquist has con­verted to Islam. Legal inves­ti­ga­tion into the GOP/Islamist con­nec­tion began with the case of Sami al-Arian, the North Amer­i­can leader of Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad, a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood off­shoot. A close asso­ciate of George Bush’s, al-Arian had Norquist as his lob­by­ist. This broad­cast exam­ines the fact that the present legal case against al-Arian is weak because of the expi­ra­tion of the statute of lim­i­ta­tions on the acts in which he is known to have par­tic­i­pated. The author­i­ties can only charge him with con­spir­acy, and his pri­mary co-conspirators are not in the coun­try. The pro­gram con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of Paul Wolfowitz’s romance with an Arab woman from Saudi Arabia.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: Review of the con­nec­tions between the inves­ti­ga­tion into Sami al-Arian and the tar­gets of the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002; review of the links between al-Arian and the Al Taqwa milieu; the role of Wolfowitz’s new para­mour in admin­is­ter­ing funds for Iraqi reconstruction.

1. Point man in the GOP’s Mus­lim out­reach pro­gram, Grover Norquist’s recruits into the GOP include many Islam­o­fas­cists con­nected to ter­ror­ist groups like Al Qaeda, Hamas and Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad, as well as the al-Taqwa milieu of Youssef Nada. Norquist has appar­ently mar­ried a Pales­tin­ian Mus­lim woman and may have con­verted to Islam him­self! (For more about Norquist’s links to Islamists, see—among other pro­grams—FTR#’s 356, 357, 415, 425, 435, 454, 455, 462, 467, 514.) “Is Grover Norquist an Islamist? Paul Sperry, author of the new book, Infil­tra­tion, in an inter­view calls Grover Norquist ‘an agent of influ­ence for Islamists in Wash­ing­ton.’ When asked by FrontPageMag.com why a Repub­li­can anti-tax lob­by­ist should so pas­sion­ately pro­mote Islamist causes, Sperry implied that Norquist has con­verted to Islam: ‘He’s mar­ry­ing a Mus­lim, and when I asked Norquist if he him­self has con­verted to Islam, he brushed the ques­tion off as too per­sonal.’ As Lawrence Auster com­ments on this exchange, ‘Clearly, if Norquist hadn’t con­verted to Islam, or weren’t in the process of doing so, he would sim­ply have answered no.’”
(“Is Grover Norquist an Islamist?;” by Daniel Pipes; Weblog [of Daniel Pipes]; 4/14/2005.)

2. “Indeed, Norquist mar­ried Samah Alrayyes, a Pales­tin­ian Mus­lim, on April 2, 2005, and Islamic law lim­its a Mus­lim woman to mar­ry­ing a man who is Mus­lim. This is not an abstract dic­tum but a very seri­ous imper­a­tive, with many ‘honor’ killings hav­ing resulted from a woman ignor­ing her family’s wishes.” (Idem.)

3. Note that Norquist’s new wife worked for his Islamic Insti­tute and now works for the Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment, a branch of the gov­ern­ment that fre­quently works with intel­li­gence agen­cies. Is she another part of the Under­ground Reich/Islamofascist Fifth Col­umn that exists in this coun­try? “Alrayyes has rad­i­cal Islamic cre­den­tials of her own; she served as com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor at the Islamic Free Mar­ket Insti­tute, the Islamist orga­ni­za­tion Norquist helped found. Now, she is employed as a pub­lic affairs offi­cer at the U.S. Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment, and so it appears that yet another Islamist finds employ­ment in a branch of the U.S. Gov­ern­ment.” (Idem.)

4. “Norquist has for some years now been pro­mot­ing Islamist orga­ni­za­tions, includ­ing even the Coun­cil on American-Islamic Rela­tions; for exam­ple, he spoke at CAIR’s con­fer­ence, ‘A Bet­ter Amer­ica in a Bet­ter World’ on Octo­ber 5, 2004. Frank Gaffney has researched Norquist’s ties to Islamists in his exhaus­tive, care­ful, and con­vinc­ing study, ‘Agent of Influ­ence’ and con­cludes that Norquist is enabling ‘a polit­i­cal influ­ence oper­a­tion to advance the causes of rad­i­cal Islamists, and tar­geted most par­tic­u­larly at the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion.’ But if Norquist is indeed a con­vert to Islam, it could be that he is not just enabling the Islamist causes but is him­self an Islamist. (April 14, 2005)” (Idem.)

5. Among the Islamists that have wormed their way into the GOP’s eth­nic out­reach orga­ni­za­tion is Sami al-Arian. (The inves­ti­ga­tion into Sami al-Arian led to the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002. For more about the tar­gets of the raids, see—among other pro­grams—FTR#’s 356, 357, 382, 415, 423, 425, 432, 433, 435, 454, 455, 456, 473, 514.) Al-Arian’s trial is under­way, with the lapse of time threat­en­ing the integrity of the case. Although al-Arian’s mon­i­tored com­mu­ni­ca­tions revealed his strong oper­a­tional links to Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad (an off­shoot of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood), the statute of lim­i­ta­tions has expired on pos­si­ble indict­ments. Only charges of con­spir­acy could be brought at this time, and the fig­ures with whom he con­spired are out of the U.S. “Three co-defendants of accused ter­ror­ist leader Sami al-Arian, a for­mer Florida uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor on trial here, staunchly deny any con­nec­tion to the Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist group at the heart of the case, their lawyers said in court Tues­day. . . . There is a vast dis­crep­ancy between the grav­ity and detail in the charges against al-Arian, and those against the other three on trial, whom the pros­e­cu­tion calls rank-and-file mem­bers of the Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) orga­ni­za­tion, which spon­sors sui­cide attacks on Israelis, accord­ing to court doc­u­ments.”
(“Co-Defendants in Fla. Deny Ties to Con­spir­acy” by John Mintz; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 6/8/2005; p. 1.)

6. “Some defense attor­neys said out­side the court­room in recent days that the three defendants—Ballut, for­mer uni­ver­sity stu­dent Sameeh Taha Ham­moudeh and Illi­nois char­ity man­ager Hatim Maji Fariz—were swept into the case because of pros­e­cu­tors’ need to build a crim­i­nal case of conspiracy—in this case, con­spir­acy to kill and maim hun­dreds of Israelis since the 1980’s. Legal experts said that the U.S. gov­ern­ment had lit­tle choice but to craft a con­spir­acy case. The vast bulk of their evi­dence, derived from years of secret wire­taps and mon­i­tor­ing of faxes, cen­ters on the early to mid-1990s, before al-Arian’s offices and home were searched and he became more cir­cum­spect over the tele­phone.” (Ibid.; pp. 1–2.)

7. Again, with the statute of lim­i­ta­tions hav­ing expired, the only charge that could be lev­eled against al-Arian is con­spir­acy. As men­tioned above, the fig­ures with whom h

e con­spired are not avail­able to stand trial with him. That, cou­pled with the “acci­den­tal” destruc­tion of doc­u­ments dis­cussed below may threaten the integrity of the government’s case. Bear in mind that al-Arian was an asso­ciate of Bush and was of great assis­tance in help­ing Bush carry Florida. “But the statute of lim­i­ta­tions allows the pros­e­cu­tion to charge some­one for crimes going back only five years—unless the charge is con­spir­acy, in which case the gov­ern­ment can bring in alle­ga­tions going back decades, as it has done in this trial. [Ital­ics are Mr. Emory’s.] The prob­lem for the pros­e­cu­tion, defense attor­neys said, is that those secretly mon­i­tored wire­taps and faxes show al-Arian dis­cussing inti­mate details of PIJ’s oper­a­tions not with his three co-defendants but with five other men.” (Ibid.; p. 2.)

8. “All of those five men were top PIJ lead­ers with al-Arian for years, U.S. pros­e­cu­tors said, and all of them have been charged with him with con­spir­acy to murder—but they are over­seas and will not be tried in this case. Defense attor­neys and crim­i­nal lawyers who have observed the case said the gov­ern­ment was in a jam—how could it put on a trial for crim­i­nal con­spir­acy and have only one con­spir­a­tor at the defense table?” (Idem.)

9. “The three defen­dants on trial with al-Arian are basi­cally stage props,’ said Steve Craw­ford, a for­mer fed­eral pros­e­cu­tor who has fol­lowed the case and who recently rep­re­sented Hammoudeh’s wife on an unre­lated fraud charge. ‘The gov­ern­ment didn’t have enough of the big guns [from PIJ] here to give a visual show­ing of a con­spir­acy, so they sweep in the poor mopes at the bot­tom.’” (Ibid.; p. 3.)

10. Note that there is abun­dant evi­dence against al-Arian and com­pany, but the statute of lim­i­ta­tions has expired. In that con­text, recall John Lof­tus’ frus­tra­tion at the fail­ure of the FBI and related agen­cies to pur­sue the al-Arian milieu and the Saudi/Muslim Broth­er­hood backed 555 Grove Street nexus. (There is good dis­cus­sion of this in FTR#’s 473, 514.) “Defense lawyers and pros­e­cu­tors declined to com­ment. U.S. Dis­trict Judge James Moody has barred them from speak­ing about the case out­side the court­room. The five over­seas defen­dants who are not on trial now were caught in hun­dreds of phone calls and faxes dis­cussing the key strate­gic issues then fac­ing PIJ—deep inter­nal strug­gles, the dis­ap­pear­ances of mil­lions of dol­lars, how to pla­cate its angry finan­cial back­ers in the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment, and whether to merge with the Islamic Resis­tance Move­ment, a com­pet­ing mil­i­tant Pales­tin­ian group.” (Idem.)

11. “The five are Ramadan Shal­lah, who worked at an al-Arian think tank at the Uni­ver­sity of South Florida and who now runs PIJ from Syria; Abd al Aziz Awda, PIJ’s orig­i­nal spir­i­tual leader; al-Arian’s brother-in-law, Mazen al-Najjar; lead­ing Mus­lim scholar Bashir Nafi; and Muhammed Tasir al-Khatib, the group’s alleged trea­surer. . . .” (Idem.)

12. The pro­gram reviews infor­ma­tion from FTR#464 about al-Arian’s rela­tion­ship to George W. Bush. “On March 12, 2000, Bush and his wife, Laura, met with more Mus­lim lead­ers at a local mosque in Tampa, Florida. Among them was Sami Al-Arian, a Kuwaiti-born Pales­tin­ian who was an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of engi­neer­ing at the Uni­ver­sity of South Florida. . . . But Al-Arian had unusual cre­den­tials for a Bush cam­paigner. Since 1995, as the founder and chair­man of the board of World and Islam Enter­prise (WISE), a Mus­lim think tank, Al-Arian had been under inves­ti­ga­tion by the FBI for his asso­ci­a­tions with Islamic Jihad, the Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist group. Al-Arian brought in Ramadan Abdul­lah Shal­lah, the number-two leader in Islamic Jihad, to be the direc­tor of WISE. A strong advo­cate of sui­cide bomb­ings against Israel, Shal­lah was allegedly respon­si­ble for killing scores of Israelis in such attacks.”
(House of Bush/House of Saud; by Craig Unger; Scrib­ner [HC]; Copy­right 2004 by Craig Unger; ISBN 0–7432-5337-X; pp. 206–207.)

13. More about al-Arian’s asso­ciates: “Al-Arian also brought to Tampa as a guest speaker for WISE none other than Has­san Turabi, the pow­er­ful Islamic ruler of Sudan who had wel­comed Osama bin Laden and helped nur­ture al Qaeda in the early nineties. . . .Nor were those Al-Arian’s only ties to ter­ror­ists. Accord­ing to Amer­i­can Jihad by Steven Emer­son, in May 1998 a WISE board mem­ber named Tarik Hamdi per­son­ally trav­eled to Afghanistan to deliver a satel­lite tele­phone and bat­tery to Osama bin Laden. In addi­tion, Newsweek reported that Al-Arian had ties to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Cen­ter. Among his claims to fame, the mag­a­zine said, Al-Arian had ‘made many phone calls to two New York-area Arabs who fig­ured in the World Trade Cen­ter bomb­ing inves­ti­ga­tion.’” (Ibid.; p. 207.)

14. “There were also Al-Arian’s own state­ments. In 1998, he appeared as a guest speaker before the Amer­i­can Mus­lim Coun­cil. Accord­ing to con­ser­v­a­tive author Ken­neth Tim­mer­man, Al-Arian referred to Jews as ‘mon­keys and pigs’ and added, ‘Jihad is our path. Vic­tory to Islam. Death to Israel. Rev­o­lu­tion! Rev­o­lu­tion! Until vic­tory! Rolling, rolling to Jerusalem!’ That speech was part of a dossier com­piled on al-Arian by fed­eral agents who have had him under sur­veil­lance for many years because of sus­pected ties to ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions. In video­tape in that file, al-Arian was more explicit. When he appeared at a fund-raising event, Tim­mer­man says, he ‘begged for $500 to kill a Jew.’” (Idem.)

15. “Al-Arian would be arrested in Florida in Feb­ru­ary 2003 on dozens of charges, among them con­spir­acy to finance ter­ror­ist attacks that killed more than one hun­dred people—including two Amer­i­cans. The indict­ment alleged that ‘he directed the audit of all mon­eys and prop­erty of the PIJ [Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad] through­out the world and was the leader of the PIJ in the United States.’ The charges refer to the Islamic Jihad as ‘a crim­i­nal orga­ni­za­tion whose mem­bers and asso­ciates engaged in acts of vio­lence includ­ing mur­der, extor­tion, money laun­der­ing, fraud, and mis­use of visas, and oper­ated world­wide includ­ing in the Mid­dle Dis­trict of Florida.’ Al-Arian was still fac­ing pros­e­cu­tion in Decem­ber 2003.” (Ibid.; p. 208.)

16. Next, the pro­gram reviews infor­ma­tion about how the inves­ti­ga­tion into al-Arian led to the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 3/20/2002. Those raids stemmed from inves­ti­ga­tions into the over­lap­ping SAAR net­work and Safa Group. (This infor­ma­tion is also reprised from FTR#464.) “The raid on al-Arian led to the Safa Group. The FBI found let­ters doc­u­ment­ing Safa enti­ties’ finan­cial sup­port of al-Arian to the tune of tens of thou­sands of dol­lars a year. In a Sep­tem­ber 7, 1993, let­ter, Safa Group lead­ers told one al-Arian-led group: ‘We con­sider you a part of us and an exten­sion of us and we as a part of you,’ adding that their finan­cial dona­tion of tens of thou­sands of dol­lars was ‘for you as a group, regard­less of the party or façade you use the dona­tion for.’” (Blood from Stones: The Secret Finan­cial Net­work of Ter­ror; by Dou­glas Farah; Broad­way Books [HC] {sub­sidiary of Ran­dom House}; Copy­right 2004 by Dou­glas Farah; ISBN 0–7679-15262–3; p. 159.)

17. Note that among the GOP big­wigs extend­ing their wel­come to al-Arian was Karl Rove. “But the al-Arian and Safa Group inves­ti­ga­tions lan­guished. In the 2000 ele

ctions al-Arian sup­ported George W. Bush, urg­ing Mus­lims to vote Repub­li­can as the best hope of end­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion against Arab-Americans. Al-Arian and his fam­ily were pho­tographed with a beam­ing Bush and his wife, Laura, dur­ing a Florida cam­paign stop. Al-Arian liked to boast that he had deliv­ered ‘con­sid­er­ably more’ than the 537 votes that gave Bush his vic­tory in Florida and allowed him to cap­ture the White House. On June 20, 2001, al-Arian was invited to the White House as part of a large del­e­ga­tion of Mus­lims to be briefed by pres­i­den­tial adviser Karl Rove.” (Idem.)

18. Bush asso­ciate Talat Oth­man, a direc­tor of Norquist’s Islamic Insti­tute, went to bat on behalf of the tar­gets of the Oper­a­tion Green Quest raids of 2002. “In 2002, dur­ing the pres­i­dency of George W. Bush, Oth­man again won access to the White House and met with Sec­re­tary of the Trea­sury Paul O’Neill to dis­cuss U.S. gov­ern­ment raids on Mus­lim char­i­ties that were allegedly fund­ing ter­ror.”
(House of Bush/House of Saud; by Craig Unger; Scrib­ner [HC]; Copy­right 2004 by Craig Unger; ISBN 0–7432-5337-X; p. 125.)

19. Is it a “coin­ci­dence” that fed­eral employ­ees in Tampa “acci­den­tally” destroyed key paper­work in the al-Arian case?! “ . . . In Decem­ber 2003, clerks at a fed­eral cour­t­house in Tampa acci­den­tally destroyed search war­rants in the Al-Arian case. The doc­u­ments con­tained affi­davits from fed­eral agents that sup­ported 1995 searches of Al-Arian’s home and offices and were among thou­sands of doc­u­ments shred­ded some­time between 1998 and 2002. As this book went to press, there were seri­ous ques­tions as to whether the destruc­tion of the doc­u­ments might affect his pros­e­cu­tion.” (Ibid.; p. 208.)

20. The pro­gram notes the sig­nif­i­cant over­laps between the SAAR net­work, the Safa Trust and the Al Taqwa net­work. (For more about the Al Taqwa/SAAR/Safa Trust link, see—among other pro­grams—FTR#’s 356, 357, 382, 415, 423, 425, 432, 433, 435, 454, 455. For more about the Norquist links to the tar­gets of Oper­a­tion Green Quest, see—among other pro­grams—FTR#’s 356, 357, 415, 425, 435, 454, 455, 462, 467, 514.) Again, the dis­cov­ery of these links stemmed from the inves­ti­ga­tion into al-Arian. “ . . . Oper­a­tion Green Quest was launched in Octo­ber 2001 as part of the Cus­toms Ser­vice ini­tia­tive to track bin Laden’s finan­cial empire. In a small, win­dow­less con­fer­ence room Green Quest agents charted the Byzan­tine rela­tion­ships among the more than one hun­dred Safa net­work enti­ties, a spi­der­web of over­lap­ping names and orga­ni­za­tions. Green Quest inves­ti­ga­tors also charted the rela­tion­ship among the Safa net­work enti­ties and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood through the Al Taqwa Man­age­ment empire of Yousef Nada. U.S. offi­cials said they had tracked about $20 mil­lion from Safa enti­ties flow­ing through Nada’s Bank al Taqwa, but said the total could be much higher.”
(Blood from Stones; pp. 154–155.)

21. More about the links between Al Taqwa, Safa, SAAR and the al-Arian/Norquist/Bush milieu: “The ties between Nada and Safa lead­ers were many and long-standing, as were their ties to other Broth­er­hood lead­ers. Two mem­bers of the Safa Group helped set up Bank al Taqwa in the Bahamas and sev­eral Safa lead­ers loaned Nada money. In 1976, two other men who later became promi­nent in the Safa Group founded Nada Inter­na­tional, a Broth­er­hood bank in Liecht­en­stein. For a time, Sulaiman Abdul al Rajhi, the SAAR Foun­da­tion founder, worked for Nada at that bank. Nada Inter­na­tional was des­ig­nated a ter­ror­ist financier by the Trea­sury Depart­ment after 9/11. . . .” (Ibid.; p. 155.)

22. The broad­cast con­cludes with dis­cus­sion of Deputy Defense Sec­re­tary Paul Wolfowitz’s romance with a Tunisian woman who was raised in Saudi Ara­bia. Employed by the World Bank, Ms. Riza has been sig­nif­i­cantly involved with Iraqi reconstruction—a major source of cor­po­rate and gov­ern­men­tal cor­rup­tion. (It should be noted that there is no indi­ca­tion that Ms. Riza is an Islamist.) It is inter­est­ing to note the neo-Nazi right and ele­ments of the left have focused on Wol­fowitz as the embod­i­ment of the “Zion­ist Con­spir­acy” that the neo-Cons have allegedly per­pe­trated in Wash­ing­ton. Wolfowitz’s romance with Riza is an amus­ing nega­tion of those charges. Wol­fowitz is—in Mr. Emory’s con­sid­ered opinion—a dog of the first order. He is not, how­ever, part of some non-existent “Zion­ist” con­spir­acy. “Social Wash­ing­ton has been buzzing for months about the dis­creet romance between Deputy Defense Sec­re­tary Paul Wol­fowitz and Shaha Riza, an Arab fem­i­nist and a com­mu­ni­ca­tions adviser at the World Bank. Now that he’s been nom­i­nated to head the bank and their rela­tion­ship has become pub­lic, some of Riza’s neigh­bors have become irked enough to dish.”
(“What Will the Neigh­bors Say? Wol­fowitz Romance Stirs Gos­sip” by Richard Leiby; The Wash­ing­ton Post; 3/22/2005; P. C03.)

23. “This being Wash­ing­ton, there’s a polit­i­cal under­cur­rent to the gos­sip: Turns out that some Iraq war foes in the diplomat-heavy neigh­bor­hood south of Amer­i­can Uni­ver­sity don’t seem to appre­ci­ate that Wol­fowitz reg­u­larly spends the night at Riza’s home. Two res­i­dents told us that Wolfowitz’s guards wait in a car out­side until he departs early in the morn­ing.” (Idem.)

24. “ ‘They kind of picked the wrong place, if they want to be pri­vate about it. I don’t know if it could be more pub­lic if it were on 16th and K streets,’ said one neigh­bor, who declined to be iden­ti­fied, cit­ing a desire to main­tain cor­dial rela­tions with Riza. ‘It’s an inter­na­tional neigh­bor­hood and he’s the icon for a fab­u­lously expen­sive tragic war. It’s the one thing we talk about now.’ . . .” (Idem.)

25. “ . . . Riza, an Oxford-educated British cit­i­zen, was born in Tunisia and grew up in Saudi Ara­bia. She’s known for her exper­tise on women’s rights and has been listed on the bank’s Web site as a media con­tact for Iraq recon­struc­tion issues.” (Idem.)