Second man with ties to University of Idaho arrested [Yet More CAIR Terrorism evident]

Seattle Times ^ | March 14, 2003 | Nicholas K. Geranios

[Abar]

A second man with ties to the University of Idaho has been arrested by federal agents in a widening investigation of a suspected terrorist-related web in the Moscow, Idaho-Pullman, Wash., area, an FBI source confirmed today.

Former Idaho student Bassem K. Khafagi was arrested in January at the Marriott Hotel near New York City’s LaGuardia Airport and was returned to Michigan to face bank fraud charges, court documents show.

A total of four men with ties to the Moscow-Pullman area and the Michigan-based Islamic Assembly of North America have been implicated in the investigation.

They include current University of Idaho student Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, who was arrested in late February, about a month after Khafagi, and is in custody in Boise, Idaho.

Federal investigators allege the nonprofit IANA, which says it was formed to promote Islam, funneled money to activities supporting terrorism. Khafagi was a founding member of the assembly.

“There is a very strong University of Idaho tie to that organization (IANA),” the FBI agent told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. “It’s safe to say this investigation, because of the ongoing nature, is going to reveal additional information in the future.”

Khafagi has performed some freelance community outreach work for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit [terrorist front] group that seeks to promote a positive view of Muslims. A group spokesman today criticized the FBI for linking Khafagi to terrorism.

“All they are talking about here is some business dispute over a check and an immigration problem,” the official, who requested anonymity, told the AP. “This has nothing to do with terrorism and nothing to do with CAIR.”

Khafagi’s arrest was first reported in The Spokesman-Review newspaper in today’s editions.

Khafagi is charged with bouncing a $6,000 check in February 2002 to National City Bank of Ann Arbor, Mich., which is insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., making the crime a federal offense.

Moscow is home to the University of Idaho and Pullman is home to Washington State University. The towns are just eight miles apart, an isolated pocket of academia surrounded by farm fields far from large population centers. Both schools have students from Arab countries.

Investigators also have identified a third former University of Idaho student, who now lives in Detroit, as an associate of IANA. He has not been charged and the FBI agent refused to disclose his name.

The Spokesman-Review reported that a former Washington State University student, Ismail Diab, who lived in the area as recently as last August, is being held as a material witness in the investigation. Washington State University officials today could not confirm that Diab was a student at the Pullman school.

IANA is affiliated with Help the Needy, another nonprofit organization based in Syracuse, N.Y., also under investigation by the FBI. Four Arab men were arrested there in February and are accused of raising $4 million for unnamed individuals in Iraq through Help the Needy.

Khafagi and Al-Hussayen are being held for investigation of violating U.S. immigration laws while awaiting separate trials on the fraud charges.

Al-Hussayen, a Saudi national, is being held in Boise on charges of visa fraud and lying to federal agents. He has pleaded innocent to an 11-count federal indictment, and his trial is set for April 15.

Al-Hussayen is accused of making false statements on student visa applications and helping set up Web sites to gather money for terrorism against Americans. Prosecutors said a computer which Al-Hussayen used had thousands of photographs, including the World Trade Center towers before and after the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks.

Al-Hussayen’s attorneys and friends in Moscow dispute the government’s contention that Al-Hussayen has led a life on the fringes of terrorism.

But federal investigators contend Al-Hussayen and IANA provided Web sites for two radical Saudi sheiks, Salman Al-Awdah and Safar al-Hawali, who have direct contact with Osama bin Laden. IANA operated more than a dozen Internet sites, many of them managed by Al-Hussayen.

Khafagi, an Egyptian national, enrolled at the University of Idaho in 1986 and earned a master’s degree in civil engineering in August 1988, school officials say. His specialty was structural engineering.

After getting his degree, Khafagi remained enrolled at the University of Idaho, working as a teaching assistant in engineering and taking postgraduate classes.

He moved to East Lansing, Mich., and enrolled at Michigan State University in the fall of 1990, MSU records show. He received his doctorate in civil engineering, specializing in structural engineering, in 1993. He later lived in Ann Arbor, Mich., operating a business called International Media Group from his home, court documents showed. It was not clear what kind of business it was, court records said.

[TLBSHOW]

The Feb. 20 arrest of an alleged leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), operating what the FBI calls a Tampa-based terrorist cell under cover as a professor at the University of South Florida (USF), has exposed one suspected operation. In doing so it has turned media focus on political groups that had been working in Washington with the accused, Sami Al-Arian, and set White House officials pointing fingers at one another about how the alleged terrorist managed to be included in the administration's controversial Muslim-outreach program.

That outreach effort, with its roots in the George W. Bush 2000 presidential campaign, has provoked controversy among the United States' growing Muslim and Arab-American communities, as well as among security-minded supporters of the president. Critics allege favoritism toward a small but vocal cadre of groups they say support terrorism. Mainstream Muslim and Arab-American organizations that were shut out of the liaison effort tell Insight that extremists spent large sums trying to buy access in an effort to hijack the Bush administration's initiative, obtaining repeated meetings at the White House and with the president himself to acquire political cover and claim legitimacy.

http://www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=384348

[TLBSHOW]

this story title should read a troubling year for terrorist as they are trying to undermine this nation from within....

....
Some Muslim communities have begun to mount their own counteroffensives.

On a recent Muslim holy day, a big bear of a man in a double-breasted black suit lectures sternly to several hundred of the faithful worshiping at the Muslim Center of New York.

“My brothers and sisters, it is wrong to stay inside your house and think this storm is going to pass,” said Bassem Khafagi, community affairs director of the national office of CAIR.

“We owe it to our kids to stand up and explain who we are and what we believe. Otherwise, what kind of country are you going to leave them? A country that hates them? A country that knows nothing about their religion? Would you like your kid to say someday, ‘Oh, my dad left me with a million dollars, but with no dignity?’” Khafagi left no doubt about what he regarded as the path to salvation in America.

http://dupagepeace.home.att.net/civlib07.html

[TLBSHOW]

ping more hidden terrorist news as they try and infiltrate this country.

[TLBSHOW]

the bloody cult of islam

[TLBSHOW]

Bush's scary CAIR friends


Too bad Patrick Henry isn't around to advise President Bush.

"We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth," Henry remarked. "For my part, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst; and to provide for it."

Though Henry never faced modern-day Islamic terrorists, he was around for other miscreants, known as pirates. And unlike Bush and Colin Powell, neither he nor our other founding fathers consorted with the pirates' representatives and pro-pirate "civil rights" groups in America. In those days, our leaders didn't make "Coalitions Against Piracy" with the countries who hosted and harbored pirates. And they didn't make statements saying that this was not about piracy and pirates, a peaceful group who just wanted to plunder, rape and pillage.

But, unfortunately, as I've described in my recent columns, President Bush has invited representatives of the most radical, pro-terrorist Islamic groups in America to pray with him at the National Cathedral, to pray with him at the Washington, D.C., mosque, to sit near Mrs. Bush at the big speech to Congress and to hold hands with him at the White House.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24940

Today's terrorists have full entrée into the White House.

[TLBSHOW]

MONEY TRAIL [Mark Krikorian]
Newsweek's Michael Isikoff is on the trail again, this time linking libertarian activist Grover Norquist to a Saudi-backed "charity" raided last week by federal agents. Though Norquist denounces any implication of impropriety as "incompetent McCarthyism" (as opposed to the competent kind?), the chain seems pretty clear: The SAFA Trust gave thousands to the Islamic Institute, which Norquist helped found and which operates out of the same office as he does. The point is not that Grover is defending terrorism but that in his zeal to attract Muslims to the GOP (which he made the case for in a now-hilariously inappropriate column for The American Spectator in June 2001), he appears to be blinding himself to the less attractive aspects of their agenda and worldview--which is a problem given the near universality of virulent anti-Americanism and lunatic Jew-hatred among Muslims in the Middle East.
This just adds to problems that started with a November New Republic expose of Grover's ties with radical Muslims, including Abdurahman Almoudi, an open supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah.
http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/2002_03_24_corner-archive.asp

[TLBSHOW]

There is a Iraq connection to the oil companies in Michigan, but besides that..........

Is Michigan a Terror Stronghold?

A police report obtained by Newsweek calls Detroit “a lucrative recruiting area and potential support base for international groups.”

http://www.msnbc.com/news/645432.asp?cp1=1

[exnavy]

I've seen that, another poster suggested the proximity of the Canada border. Security isn't much improved at the crossings on the east side of Mi. since 9/11. I'm on Lake Michigan shoreline, still I don't like the closeness of this.

Guess I'll go out today and buy some more ammunition.

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for the find and your ping. I have bookmarked it.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of the Islamofacists activities in America as you noted.

[Grampa Dave]

Good for you. When the blood money trail from this country to Islamofacists/kazis and to this country gets exposed, we see a lot of top CAIR people involved.

[Grampa Dave]

FYI!

Abar has another great bit of documentation of the Islamofacists in action in America.

[VOA]

He received his doctorate in civil engineering, specializing in
structural engineering, in 1993.
Yep, use the fruits of free inquiry at our major universities...to calculate
amount of explosives/burning aviation fuel that would be needed to flat a building
and kill infidels in the country of The Great Satan.

He later lived in Ann Arbor, Mich., operating a business called International
Media Group from his home, court documents showed.
It was not clear what kind of business it was, court records said.

Probably would get an average Joe or Josephine a visit from the IRS...

As for spokesperson Hooper, I just pray he never quits going onto the Michael
Medved Show.
He always has to hedge answers to some of Medved's questions...otherwise he'd
lose credibility with his own constituency.
Love that First Amendment...and sharp minds like Medved who know how to ask the
right question to "get the b@$tards on the record".

[sheik yerbouty]

We will see what a spider's web they have tried to weave. If it is massive, their sympathizers and enablers should be contained and detained.

[Abar]

More on this particular terror cell:

Prosecutors said yesterday that a computer which Al-Hussayen used had thousands of photographs, including the World Trade Center towers before and after the 2001 terrorism attacks.
BOISE, Idaho — A Saudi student accused of visa fraud has ties to two radical sheiks who support violence against the United States and should not be released before trial, federal prosecutors argued today.
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=webstudent12&date=20030312&query=moscow


The government also said Al-Hussayen created or managed at least 14 Web sites that promoted terrorism, the overthrow of the United States and Israel, and the killing of people by suicide missions.
He is past president of the Muslin Student Association
http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=idaho27m&date=20030227&query=moscow+leader


Make NO MISTAKE about it... CAIR, AMC, MSA, et al are MUSLIM TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS that must be excised from our country!

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

This is the tip of the iceberg. MUCH more in the PNW.

When, oh when, will we hear from the peace-loving Muslims who will rise up and stop, or report upon, the violent elements of their faith? I have been waiting since September 12, 2001.

[Mad_Tom_Rackham]

[He moved to East Lansing, Mich., and enrolled at Michigan State University in the fall of 1990, MSU records show. He received his doctorate in civil engineering, specializing in structural engineering, in 1993. He later lived in Ann Arbor, Mich., operating a business called International Media Group from his home, court documents showed. It was not clear what kind of business it was, court records said.]

One can only imagine. Hope the Feds are giving this bloke a thorough anal exam.

[Libertina]

Thanks for the ping Abar.

[sheik yerbouty]

CAIR=Cancer!

[aeronca]

Bump

[thinktwice]

National Public Radio made the initial (Feb 26th ) arrest a big deal today, almost three weeks later, because there were 122 Federal agents involved.

The NPR "take" on the story focused on the number of agents involved without giving any details as to the widespread operation described in the MSNBC story, an operation that would require many people of varying expertise.

Spread the word ... this story has sprouted liberal wings.