Posted on 09/24/2003 1:14:31 AM PDT by kattracks
Edited on 05/26/2004 5:16:51 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
September 24, 2003 -- WASHINGTON - A U.S. airman who spied for Syria is among five Americans suspected of espionage at the terrorist prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, military sources revealed yesterday. Senior airman Ahmad al-Halabi, who worked as an Arabic translator, has been arrested and charged with espionage, the Pentagon said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
For these clowns, I doubt it was an accident. I suspect the feds have been watching them for some time, identifying terrorist cells and money conduits, and made the decision to crack down all at once when there was nothing further of value to get from these cretins. I only hope they face a firing squad.
It's political correctness gone mad is what it is. We need Arab speakers at Gitmo. Are the only Arab speakers we have Muslim? I think not. And if they are we are in a word of hurt.
While I agree with Schumer on this point, I bet that he and Hillary! would have been fighting for the microphone to attack the military for "discriminating against Muslims" if they had kicked them all out right after 9/11.
Wow, probing at Gitmo? I didn't realize the space aliens were conducting operations there.
I cannot help but wonder if Schumer and his Democrat minions are not somehow responsible indirectly for this with their constant support of political correctness.
As a loyal fan of the Bronx Bombers, I am shocked and outraged that five of our pinstripers would be accused of disloyalty to the red, white and blue.
I can assure you that Jeter, Giambi, Williams, Boone and Johnson are true blue sons of America. For that matter . . .
What? They're not talking about the New York Yankees? They've arrested some US soldiers at Gitmo? Never mind.
SYRIA
CHAPLAIN YEE was trained in SYRIA.
What in the world is our security clearance apparatus being told to IGNORE?
Time to take out SYRIA!!!
IMHO, you don't have to wonder. I believe it to be true.
I didn't hear Loftus.
But it may have something to do with the fact
that all Moslem chaplains in the army are required to be Wahabis!
(Unbelievable, but true, as I learned today, and the fact was confirmed by others)
And some of their acts have been for the purpose of liberating comrades. (9/11 took place the day before the sentencing of the embassy bombing defendants was scheduled to take place at the federal courthouse in Lower Manhattan, six blocks from the WTC.)
This is the part that really frightens me. How did he ever get in ? I doubt the INTEL community let him in to run CI on him.
I wonder how many moles they have in the INTEL community, key industries, and the Armed Forces at large.
Secret documents al-Halabi is accused of trying to pass to Syria include details of flights to and from the Guantanamo Bay base; names, serial numbers and cell numbers of prisoners; a map of the base; and other military documents.
Al-Halabi is charged with eight counts related to espionage, three counts of aiding the enemy, 11 counts of disobeying a lawful order, nine counts of making a false official statement and one count of bank fraud. The bank fraud charge involves allegations al-Halabi used false information in credit card applications for several prominent banks.
The chaplain, Yee, was also found with documents and maps. Something was clearly up, and this is not simply the overactive imagination of a base commander.
Most freepers were aware years ago of where mandatory political correctness and mandatory cultural diversity would lead.....and the malignant results are now showing up.
It's right to be right!
Leni
Clayton J. Lonetree is the first US Marine to be convicted of spying against the United States. Lonetree who was stationed in Moscow as a guard at the US Embassy in the early 1980's confessed in 1987 to selling documents to the Soviet Union. These documents included the blueprints of the US Embassy buildings in Moscow and Vienna and the names and identities of US undercover intelligence agents in the Soviet Union. Lonetree was convicted in 1987, the same year that Jonathan Pollard was sentenced. He received a 25 year sentence which was subsequently reduced to 20 years.Before celebrating, ponder the fact that my count also showed that there was only one Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) employee caught spying.Lonetree was released in 1996 after serving only 9 years.
I too believe it's extremely unlikely this guy was allowed to join the service with prior knowledge of his background in order to run a CI sting. Far more likely is the likelihood that DoD was so desperate for good Arabic translators that they weren't too concerned about "vetting" him.
What's in Qatar? Al-Jazeera is in Qatar.
What's the U.S. military doing about radical Muslim soldiers? Not enough.
By Deanne Stillman
The most disturbing story of the war so far is the fragging at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait. According to news reports, on March 23, Sgt. Asan Akbar rolled a grenade into each of three tents of sleeping officers and senior NCOs of the 101st Airborne Division. Then he allegedly shot the soldiers with an automatic weapon as they fled from their tents. Two of them, a major and a captain, died, and 14 others were injured.
The episode is unsettling for a number of reasons, most of all because it exposes a fact about our military that commanders have tried their best to ignore: the presence of radical, anti-American Muslims in the ranks. Akbar, a convert to Islam, reportedly said when he was captured: "You guys are coming into our countries and you're going to rape our women and kill our children." It's increasingly clear that there is a small group of soldiers for whom anti-American fatwas issued in mosques around the world supercede the oath of loyalty they took to their nation.
Almost nothing is known about radical Islam in the ranks. Very little is known about Islam in the ranks, period. Today, there are somewhere between 4,000 and 15,000 Muslims in the U.S. military. The estimates are so vague because Muslims, like Jews, often prefer not to declare their religion, and the armed services don't require that declaration. Some American servicemen and women are Muslim by birth. Many are converts, and most of the converts are black Americans. It was during the first Gulf War that the U.S. military first grappled with the issues raised by Muslim conversion in the ranks: As many as 3,000 U.S. soldiers may have embraced Islam since then. Click here for more about the Islamicization of the military in Gulf War I.
For most of the Muslims in today's military—as for most of the Jews or Catholics or Baptists—religion poses no problem for service. They worship at different times and in different places than Christians or Jews do and have different dietary restrictions, but they're simply loyal American soldiers. The military does whatever it can to accommodate this growing group. In 1997, it opened its first permanent Islamic prayer center, the Masjid al Da'awah, at the Norfolk, Va., Naval Air Station. At least two dozen sailors attend weekly. In 1998, Fort Lewis turned a space that had been used for Catholic and Protestant services into a Muslim center.
Do some soldiers visit radical mosques? Do some follow the teachings of anti-American imams? There are no studies to answer this, and the military doesn't talk about it. But Akbar's alleged fragging and other recent incidents suggest that some Muslim soldiers have been radicalized. There are even indications that some may be infiltrating the military in order to undermine it.
At best, military monitoring of radical black Muslims has been sloppy. The last year has witnessed three incidents, including Akbar's, suggesting the radicalization of Muslim soldiers. Beltway sniper suspect and former Army Sgt. John Allen Muhammad converted to Islam in 1985, around the same time he moved from the National Guard into the regular Army, according to news reports. During the first Gulf War, Muhammad may have been involved in a fragging incident very similar to last week's. Muhammad allegedly pulled the pin on an incendiary grenade in a crowded tent near the Iraqi border, setting a sergeant's sleeping bag on fire. No one was injured, but Muhammad was removed from the 84th Engineering company by MPs. "We assumed he was locked up," recalls a Marine who serviced with him. "Evidently that wasn't the case." It is not clear what, if any, punishment followed. Like Timothy McVeigh, another domestic terrorist who graduated from the Gulf War, Muhammad soon slipped back into the population and ultimately introduced the deadly combo platter of his military training, politico-religious views, and psychosis to the taxpayers who paid him to serve his country.
Shortly before Muhammad's murder spree, a black American Muslim named Jeffrey Leon Battle was among those arrested in Oregon, one of a group called the Portland Six accused of ties to al-Qaida. Battle was a former Army Reservist. According to the Justice Department, he planned to wage war against Americans in Afghanistan and may have joined the Army Reserves in order to learn how to kill American soldiers. And in May 2002, the feds arrested a Seattle-based Muslim cleric named Semi Osman as part of an investigation of a terrorist training camp in Oregon. Osman, a mechanic in the Navy Reserves, had access to fuel trucks similar to the type used in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 U.S. airmen. In January, he pleaded guilty to a weapons charge.
One of the weirdest stories of a radical Muslim is that of Ali Mohamed. According to various reports that surfaced after 9/11, Mohamed came to the United States in 1986 while he was a major in the Egyptian army, and secretly, a member of Islamic Jihad. After marrying an American, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and rose to the rank of sergeant. A busy soldier, he taught a class on Islamic fundamentalist perceptions of America to special forces at Fort Bragg, N.C., and also taught at the JFK Special Operations Warfare School where he stole classified military documents. After he was discharged from the Army in 1989, he hooked up with Osama Bin Laden's nascent al-Qaida operation. Using his new American passport and connections, he spent the '90s traveling around the world helping plot terror operations. The FBI finally arrested him in 1998, and he eventually pleaded guilty to conspiring with Osama Bin Laden to attack Western targets.
Even after the arrests of John Allen Muhammad, Jeffrey Leon Battle, and Semi Osman, alarm over jihadists with American military backgrounds has not been not widely sounded. "I'm shocked," former Gen. Wesley Clark told CNN after news of Akbar's alleged fragging broke. "I'm shocked," said the other military commentators on all the other networks.
Were they really? I hope not; as military men, they should have known what was going down in the ranks. But as high-profile members of the media, they were probably afraid to risk offense by speaking the truth, which is that a small number of anti-American Muslim soldiers endanger their brothers-in-arms and tarnish the reputation of Muslim soldiers generally.
Does the existence of a few poisonous soldiers mean that all Muslims in the military should be deployed to the sidelines? Of course not: That kind of silly response is exactly the prejudice that radical Islamists would like the United States to practice. It does mean that radical Muslims in the service, to the degree that they make themselves known or can be found out, should be treated differently. Civilians don't have to sign loyalty oaths, but servicemen and women do. And they should be held accountable. At the first sign of a problem, they should be told to step away from the weapons.
Certainly, the military can do a better job screening its recruits. Sgt. Akbar is a vivid example of this. He evidently had ties to the Wahhabi sect of Islam that has been the breeding ground for so many anti-American Islamic terrorists. Akbar attended the University of California at Davis, a school that has a very active chapter of the Wahhabi-sponsored Muslim Students Association. According to reports, Akbar's mosque in Los Angeles is partially funded by Saudi Arabia's Islamic Development Bank, which promotes Wahhabism. A college professor described Akbar as having a "chip on his shoulder" about Islam, and according to the news reports, he was permitted to guard a munitions depot even after he had displayed a so-called "attitude problem." Now, at least, recruiters and commanding officers should realize that these are signals they should heed.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2080770
This article appeared in Slate (of all places) way back in March. This was the only place I saw this "non-PC" perspective aired. The journalist said in an interview that she couldn't get any main stream media to run it, even with the many big-time magazines and newpapers that normally run her work. I guess that should be no surprise.
I hadn't heard that before. I wouldn't be surprised, but are you sure?
Something was clearly up, and this is not simply the overactive imagination of a base commander.
Yeah, but what? I doubt they'd actually be able to spring the prisoners, so perhaps they were setting up for a mass suicide?
I can come up with no plausible explanation for this level of a security breach unless they bypassed normal background investigation processes. Whoever approved his clearance(s) and the processes involved should be carefully reviewed.
I too believe it's extremely unlikely this guy was allowed to join the service with prior knowledge of his background in order to run a CI sting. Far more likely is the likelihood that DoD was so desperate for good Arabic translators that they weren't too concerned about "vetting" him.
Anyone with an affection for Islam has a conflict of interest in this war. We can use them but we can't be stupid or incompetent about it. Lives are at stake, not to mention our very way of life.
For once I agree with Schumer on this one. The fact that there appears to be such a high percentage of traitors among islamic soliers should give us some serious pause.
Correct. Translator / Linguist is an intelligence function ( You may need to be called upon to translate sensitive material) . Normally, non-citizens and naturalized citizens are barred from this MOS.
Of course, it seems that he had some sort of "supply" MOS. With the military's shortage of trained linguists , they probably sent this guy as a TDY fill-in.
My understanding is that DLI has expanded its Arabic school--but it takes a year or more to learn the language. If you have smart kids who want to serve their country----maybe you should encourage them to sign up. Plus, they get to spend a year in wacko-liberal Monterey!
Google "dli army monterey" and you'll get the largest language school in the world.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.