by Steven Emerson

IPT News

In a fright­en­ing and bizarre turn, the two chief agen­cies tapped with safe­guard­ing America’s national secu­rity have started adver­tis­ing in a pub­li­ca­tion that can only be described as objec­tively pro-terrorism.

The online edi­tion of the Wash­ing­ton Report for Mid­dle East Affairs (WRMEA), a pub­li­ca­tion linked to for­mer Con­gress­man Paul Find­ley, who once described him­self as “Yasir Arafat’s best friend in Con­gress,” fea­tures recruit­ing adver­tise­ments seek­ing new agents for both the Fed­eral Bureau of Inves­ti­ga­tion and the Cen­tral Intel­li­gence Agency.

WRMEA’s his­tory of sup­port for Hamas, other ter­ror­ist groups and indi­vid­ual ter­ror­ists is well known. Cur­rently on the front page of its web­site, right in the cen­ter, is an homage, con­sti­tut­ing of a col­lec­tion of arti­cles and hagiogra­phies, to con­victed Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad oper­a­tive Sami Al-Arian. (see the ad at right)

Al-Arian was inves­ti­gated by the FBI for a decade and finally brought to trial in 2005, pros­e­cuted by the Depart­ment of Jus­tice in Tampa. In April 2006, Al-Arian pled guilty to one count of “Con­spir­acy to make or receive con­tri­bu­tions of funds, goods or ser­vices to or for the ben­e­fit of the Pales­tin­ian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a Spe­cially Des­ig­nated Terrorist.”

This is the same Al-Arian who once told an audi­ence of Mus­lims, “Let us damn Amer­ica. Let us damn Israel. Let us damn their allies until death. Why do we stop?” (empha­sis added)

And yet, the same FBI that sought to con­vict him as a ter­ror­ist is now adver­tis­ing for recruits on a pro-Al-Arian (and pro-terrorist in gen­eral) web­site. The pro Al-Arian ori­en­ta­tion is part of a long and doc­u­mented his­tory of pro-Islamic ter­ror­ist fea­tures pub­lished by WRMEA dur­ing the past 15 years. Review­ing just about any issue of this Saudi-financed mag­a­zine would clearly deter­mine its pro ter­ror­ist bias.

It is the same lack of judg­ment that led the Depart­ment of Jus­tice to set up a recruit­ment booth and serve as a co-host for the annual Islamic Soci­ety of North Amer­ica (ISNA) con­ven­tion in Sep­tem­ber. Four months ear­lier, the same Jus­tice Depart­ment des­ig­nated ISNA as an unin­dicted co-conspirator in Holy Land Foun­da­tion for Relief and Devel­op­ment (HLF) case as part of the Hamas-Muslim Broth­er­hood con­spir­acy in the United States. U.S. Reps. Peter Hoek­stra, R-Mich., and Sue Myrick, R-NC, protested the Jus­tice Department’s recruit­ment effort with ISNA in a let­ter to then-Attorney Gen­eral Alberto Gon­za­les assert­ing that ISNA is a Jihadi organization.

The Jus­tice Depart­ment blithely dis­missed the con­cerns, say­ing other orga­ni­za­tions did it, too. That was true. That will­ful blind­ness was evi­dent in the fact that, in 2006, the Depart­ment of Defense dis­patched Deputy Sec­re­tary Gor­don Eng­land to an ISNA con­fer­ence and sent another rep­re­sen­ta­tive to the annual con­fer­ence in 2007. The Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity was there, too, with its recruit­ment booth adja­cent to the Hizb ut-Tahrir, a rad­i­cal move­ment which endorses the use of vio­lence and is devoted to estab­lish­ing a global Islamic state gov­erned by Shariah law.

After that embar­rass­ment, the FBI placed a full-page recruit­ing ad in the Novem­ber 2007 issue of ISNA’s mag­a­zine Islamic Hori­zons. “Help us light the way to a new era of under­stand­ing,” the ad reads.

Just what types of recruits are the FBI and CIA look­ing for? Appar­ently, these agen­cies do not learn from expe­ri­ence, even recent expe­ri­ences. Just last Novem­ber, for­mer FBI and CIA agent Nadia Nadim Prouty was arrested and pled guilty to fraud­u­lently obtain­ing Amer­i­can cit­i­zen­ship through a sham mar­riage, and using her ille­gally acquired sta­tus to attain employ­ment with both the FBI and CIA. Prouty is the sis­ter of Elfat Al Aouar, who is the wife of Talal Chahine – the Detroit-based restau­ra­teur linked to Hizballah.

While it is too soon to deter­mine where the break­down occurred in allow­ing a Hizbal­lah oper­a­tive to infil­trate the FBI and the CIA, it is clear that these ads fall into the dis­turb­ing pat­tern where back­ground checks of Islamic mil­i­tants are not being pur­sued properly.

Prouty used her secu­rity clear­ance, in vio­la­tion of the law and her job respon­si­bil­i­ties (for which she also pled guilty), to do back­ground searches into the FBI inves­ti­ga­tion of her sis­ter and brother-in-law. But that hasn’t stopped the FBI – or the CIA for that mat­ter – from reach­ing out to a pro-terrorist crowd for its next batch of recruits. And it is Amer­i­cans who will likely pay dearly for the fact that the FBI and CIA have failed to learn the obvi­ous les­son from the Prouty case. And Prouty aside, the fact that the CIA and FBI are adver­tis­ing for employ­ment on a site that lion­izes an Islamic Jihad king­pin and other ter­ror­ist groups should frighten everyone.

Con­gress should imme­di­ately investigate.