Free Republic

‘Every conspiracy against Islam and scheming against Islam and the Muslims — its source is America.” “Jihad is Jihad. There is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad. This is calling things other than by its [sic] own name. If Allah says, ‘Do jihad,’ it means do jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile. This is Jihad. Jihad against Allah’s enemies for Allah’s cause and his word.” “Why do we fear the word ‘terrorist’? If the terrorist is the person who defends his right, so we are terrorists. . ....

WASHINGTON - An American who has made al-Qaida propaganda videos is charged with aiding terrorists in a secret federal indictment expected to be unsealed soon, the New York Daily News has learned. Adam Yahiye Gadahn, a 28-year-old Californian who now calls himself Azzam al-Amriki, has appeared in four al-Qaida videos. In two of the videos, released since the July 7 anniversary of last year's bombings of London's transit system, he appears with his face uncovered. The federal indictment is expected unsealed in Los Angeles in the next few days, three sources said. It will likely charge Gadahn with giving material...

NEW YORK, Dec. 23, 2004 — A California woman reveals to ABC News that she unknowingly married a Muslim extremist who helped set up what authorities say was one of the first al Qaeda sleeper cells out of their Orange County apartment complex. Saraah Olson says she watched as her then-husband, Hisham Diab, and his group transformed local teen Adam Gadahn into an America-hating fanatic who she says is the masked man who promised in an al Qaeda video message released in Pakistan late October that the "streets of America will run red with blood." Olson said she repeatedly tried...

CAIRO – Hundreds...have staged a protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo to demand the release of an Egyptian cleric imprisoned in the United States for plots to blow up New York City landmarks. Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the blind sheik, is serving life in prison after a 1995 conviction for his advisory role in conspiracies to blow up the United Nations and several New York bridges and tunnels. ....Thursday, protesters near the heavily fortified embassy held banners reading "freedom for our sheik" and chanted slogans and held prayers. The protest leader was Abboud el-Zomor, who...

Attorney Lynne F. Stewart is a progressive icon. A protege of Ramsey Clark and the late William Kunstler and a member of the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Stewart embodies the committed professionalism of the radical "legal left." Under this code, attorneys select clients whom they regard as the put-upon victims of an oppressive system or the persecuted champions of a just cause. Stewart represented Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric convicted in 1995 of masterminding the first World Trade Center bombing. She is now on trial as a terrorist herself for aiding and abetting...

WASHINGTON -- The health of terrorist cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheik, is deteriorating _ renewing fears that his death in prison could trigger an attack on the United States, officials said Thursday. There is no credible indication that an attack on the U.S. is imminent, said several law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation. In a two-page bulletin, dated Dec. 8, the FBI reported to federal intelligence officials that Rahman was rushed from prison to a Missouri hospital two days earlier for a blood transfusion. There, doctors discovered...

Jama'a al-Islamiya leader Omar Abdel Rahman, who is being held in a prison in North Carolina, US, in a 15-minute telephone conversation with his wife Aisha said “the Egyptian revolution achieved the impossible.” His son Mohamed said an officer from the prison called Abdel Rahman’s home on the landline first to make sure that his wife was there, and that her voice matched the registered "voiceprint." He added that a recorded message from the prison’s phone said the line would be cut immediately if any person other than Aisha talked on the phone. He also said that his father was...

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

It is imperative that anyone wanting to be up on the War On Terror should go out of his way to learn as much about the players involved as possible. The AP/Yahoo! reports on an Egyptian character called Mustafa Abu al-Yazid who has been named as a contact of suspected Denver-based Muslim Najibullah Zazi.

ASHINGTON, June 7— A re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week.As Congressional investigators look back far beyond the series of signals missed before the Sept. 11 attacks, they are seeking answers to many questions about Al Qaeda that law enforcement and intelligence agencies still cannot answer themselves, officials said.In particular, they said, Congressional investigators are trying...

The real battle for religious freedom lurks beneath the Ground Zero mosque controversy. It is sadly ironic that our public debate presents the mosque proponents as the partisans of liberty: That includes everyone from imam Feisal Rauf, the project’s sharia-touting sponsor, to President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and the rest of the Islamist-smitten Left, to the GOP’s own anti-anti-terrorist wing. Yet, wittingly or not, when they champion this mosque and its sponsors, it is the agenda of an alien and authoritarian Islam that they champion — an Islam against which many American Muslims chafe. When it comes to liberty, no one...

Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan, by Caroline Fourest; foreword by Denis MacShane (Encounter Books, 262 pp., $23.95) In the 1990s, Western liberals, alarmed at the presence of Islamic fundamentalists in their midst, turned in desperation to Muslims whom they dubbed “reformers” or “modernizers.” They hoped that these figures would have a moderating influence on disaffected Muslim youths who refused to integrate into Western society. One such “reformer” is Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born academic. Ramadan has won the confidence of many in the West, including the British government, which asked him to serve on its task force for...

A federal appeals court has ordered a civil rights lawyer convicted in a terrorism case that originated in Minnesota to begin serving her prison sentence. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan today also upheld Lynne Stewart's conviction, which was based in part on illegally aiding her client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, during a visit with him at the federal prison in Rochester, Minn., in May 2000. She was convicted of smuggling messages between Abdel-Rahman and a terrorist group. Stewart was sentenced to a little more than two years in prison.

A recently released propaganda video by the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is quite revealing. Not only does the video demonstrate the group’s growing effort to package arguments in a manner designed to appeal to Westerners on the political left, but it also serves as a barometer of radical Muslim groups’ broader shift in rhetorical strategy. The video, “Iraq: Past and Present Colonialism,” appears for the first twenty-seven minutes to be a standard leftist critique of the Iraq war, indistinguishable from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The slickly-produced video begins with the history of past colonialism in Iraq—including the Mongol conquest...

SPEAKING without a text in front of him, Barack Obama betrays a troubling lack of knowledge on important issues - such as the law and terrorism. In his ABC interview last Monday, for example, Obama attacked the Bush approach on fighting terror. He claimed that, in the case of "the first attack against the World Trade Center, we were able to arrest those responsible, put them on trial. They are currently in US prisons, incapacitated."

Friday, August 27, 2004 A captured al-Qaeda operative has told Canadian intelligence investigators that a Montreal man who trained in Afghanistan alongside the 9/11 hijackers was responsible for the crash of an American Airlines flight in New York three years ago. Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents were told during five days of interviews with the source that Abderraouf Jdey, a Canadian citizen also known as Farouk the Tunisian, had downed the plane with explosives on Nov. 12, 2001. The source claimed Jdey had used his Canadian passport to board Flight 587 and "conducted a suicide mission" with a small bomb...

When Jihad Came to America by Andrew C. McCarthy On May 2 and 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy in Cairo alerted its counterpart in Khartoum that Egypt’s “leading radical,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was on his way to Sudan. Warning that his ultimate plan might be to seek exile in the United States, the Cairo embassy asked its colleagues to pass along any information they might learn about his activities on Sudanese soil. What did U.S. officials already know about Abdel Rahman in 1990? As the 9/11 Commission would later determine, they knew that he had been arrested repeatedly in Egypt...

SANTA ANA — An Orange County woman said in an expose that aired last night that her ex-husband is a Muslim extremist who helped set up an al Qaeda sleeper cell in their Anaheim apartment complex in the 1990s. Saraah Olson told ABC-TV's "Primetime Live" that her ex-husband, Hisham Diab, beat her, turned a local teenager into a terrorist fanatic, and brought other terrorists into their home. Authorities say the couple's former neighbor, Khalil Deek, is considered a major al Qaeda figure, and is believed to have run the Orange County cell -- one of the first al Qaeda sleeper...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has extended for two more years the imprisonment of a terror suspect linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological weapons, saying he has more information about terrorist operations. Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist and former Malaysian army captain, was arrested in late 2001 as he returned home from Afghanistan, where officials say he was working on a biological and chemical weapons program for al-Qaeda that was ended by the U.S.-led war. Since then, he has been held without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act on accusations of being a member of Jemaah...

October 21, 2006 Lawyer Convicted in Terror Case Lied on the Stand, a Juror Says By JULIA PRESTON He was known as Juror 8, for the jury box chair where he listened silently for more than six months as the convoluted evidence unfolded in the trial of Lynne F. Stewart, the radical defense lawyer accused of aiding Islamic terrorism. The jurors argued behind closed doors in Federal District Court in Manhattan for another month before they finally agreed to convict Ms. Stewart on all five charges she faced for smuggling messages out of prison from her terrorist client, Sheik Omar...

RIVERSIDE'S TERROR RALLY By CHARLES E.F. MILLARD October 18, 2006 -- In the uproar over Monday's outrageously soft sentence for terror-aiding lawyer Lynne Stewart, Riverside Church seems to be distancing itself from the despicable rally it hosted in her support Sunday. Stewart was convicted by a jury of her peers. The uncontested facts were that she had smuggled messages from convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman ("the blind sheik") to his followers in the Islamic world. Those messages directed his followers in the terror group Gama'a Islamiyya to end their cease-fire with the Egyptian government and begin killing Rahman's enemies. Rahman,...

NEW YORK -- Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart was sentenced to 28 months in prison in federal court in Manhattan Monday. She was convicted of providing support to terrorists by helping a jailed Egyptian sheik communicate with his followers on the outside. Before sentencing, her lawyer told the judge that any prison sentence for Stewart would be a death sentence because of her serious health problems. Stewart pleaded with the judge to allow her to live out the rest of her life "productively, lovingly, righteously.'' Assistant US Attorney Andrew Dember rejected defense suggestions that Stewart's conduct was judged differently after9-11. "This case...

Imam Fawaz Damra helped lay the groundwork for an organization that ultimately merged into al-Qaida in the late 1980s. He was an unindicted co-conspirator of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. And he passionately raised money for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which killed dozens of Jews in Israel during the 1990s. Yet Damra, spiritual leader to thousands of Muslims in Northeast Ohio, seemed to fly comfortably beneath the radar of U.S. terror investigators - until Tuesday. FBI agents swooped in on the Palestinian cleric at his Strongsville home, arresting him on a relatively minor - and...

WASHINGTON — A Pentagon secret intelligence team identified 9/11 leader Mohamed Atta through a probe of blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman — the mastermind of the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center, it was revealed yesterday. An outside contractor to the intelligence unit, code named Able Danger, has told congressional staffers Atta's name was discovered by a computer data-mining search of connections to Abdel-Rahman, the Muslim cleric in prison for inspiring the 1993 trade center bombing and a plot to blow up New York landmarks. Contractor James D. Smith testified that a California researcher was later able to purchase...

SFSU Hosts a TerroristBy Lee KaplanFrontPageMagazine.com | May 2, 2005 Lynne Stewart “Why can’t we get anyone but criminals to come here to SFSU and speak?” Robert Journey, treasurer of San Francisco State University College Republicans asked rhetorically as five members of the campus club met to attend a lecture by Lynne Stewart. The terrorist lawyer, who billed herself as a “Civil Rights Lawyer and Political Prisoner,” was recently convicted of conspiracy and for passing along fatwas (Islamic religious edicts) from Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman to his terrorist followers in Egypt’s Islamic Group. Rahman is the blind sheikh responsible for...

Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic-language translator, has been practicing for life in a prison cell. He closes himself into small spaces to meditate and combs through his library for nonpolitical books he supposes his keepers will allow him to read. But he still cannot quite believe that prison is where he is going. After working for nearly a decade as a translator for Lynne F. Stewart, a New York defense lawyer, Mr. Yousry, 49, was convicted along with her on Feb. 10 in Manhattan federal court of providing material aid to terrorism and conspiring to deceive the government. Now free on...

One year ago, I wrote a piece exposing radical Islam within Florida Atlantic University (FAU). My goal was twofold: [1] to bring awareness concerning a growing problem within FAU [2] to push the university to take action so that this problem ceases to exist. Unfortunately, only the first part of my goal was accomplished, as FAU is continuing to allow radicals on its campus, the latest being this Saturday'S (Jan.22, 2005) return engagement of potential co-conspirator to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Siraj Wahhaj. The Enemy Thrives at FAU In recent times, a fairly large list of...

American jurisprudence and homeland security aligned yesterday, as a jury of her peers found terrorist lawyer-cum-facilitator Lynne Stewart guilty of aiding international Islamist murderers. After 13 days of deliberation, the federal jury found Stewart and her two co-defendants guilty on all counts, including providing material support to terrorism, conspiracy, and defrauding the government. The saga began in 1995, when Stewart defended and befriended “the Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In the ensuring years, Stewart – with the aid of co-defendants Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry – illegally passed on fatwas...

In the wake of activist lawyer Lynne Stewart's conviction yesterday, several defense attorneys said fear of prosecution could now hamper zealous defense of unpopular clients, including suspected terrorists. Others agreed with prosecutors that Stewart crossed a line that made her situation complex. Activist attorney and radio talk show personality Ron Kuby, who once represented Stewart's client Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, said the verdict will intimidate attorneys handling unpopular political clients. "It makes it that much more easier for the government to intimidate activist lawyers," Kuby said. "The threat of 20 years incarceration is a terrible deterrent against zealous advocacy."

NEW YORK (AP) - A month of deliberations in the trial of a lawyer and two others accused of helping terrorists appears to be taking its toll on jurors, leading two of them to ask to speak with the judge Tuesday. The text of what was said in the two jurors' separate meetings with U.S. District Judge John Koeltl was sealed. The proceedings were witnessed by a lawyer for the government and a lawyer for the defense teams, and raised the possibility of a mistrial. After the two jurors met with the judge, the three defendants and their lawyers gathered...

NEW YORK -- More than half a year after beginning its work, a federal jury on Wednesday started deliberating the fate of a Manhattan lawyer accused of assisting terrorists and lying to the government. After about two hours, it went home without a verdict. Attorney Lynne Stewart, 65, was charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, defrauding the government and lying to the government as she represented Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life prison sentence. Prosecutors say Stewart conspired with Arabic interpreter Mohamed Yousry and postal employee Ahmed Abdel Sattar to spread Abdel-Rahman's deadly messages to...

NEW YORK (AP) - A lawyer and two co-defendants helped an imprisoned Egyptian sheik commit a sort of "jailbreak" by allowing him to get around prison rules and feed messages to terrorists overseas, a prosecutor told a federal jury Wednesday. In his closing argument, assistant U.S. attorney Andrew Dember asked the jury to convict the three of a conspiracy to overcome the government's effort to silence the still "powerful and influential" prisoner, Omar Abdel-Rahman. Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart and her co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry, testified they obeyed the law in the work they did for Abdel-Rahman....

NEW YORK - After nearly six months of testimony, closing arguments were set to begin Wednesday in the trial of civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart and her two co-defendants, all of whom were members of a legal team that represented imprisoned Egyptian Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman in the 1990s. The defendants, accused of helping a convicted terrorist communicate deadly messages to overseas followers, spent several weeks on the witness stand testifying in their own defense, in a risky move. The testimony is likely to figure prominently in the closing arguments and could influence the eventual verdict in the first major terrorism...

For the last three months, the defendant who has drawn the most attention in a terror trial under way in Manhattan federal court is Lynne F. Stewart, who made a name as a defense lawyer for suspects accused of terrorism. But as the prosecutors' case has unfolded, most of the evidence about the international conspiracy they hope to prove has centered on a defendant who sits silently beside her, Ahmed Abdel Sattar. A Staten Island postal worker and a Muslim, Mr. Sattar served as a paralegal aide for Ms. Stewart in the 1995 trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the...

NEW YORK (AP) - Prosecutors on Tuesday presented the core of their terrorism case against a civil rights lawyer: grainy videos of her meetings with a jailed Egyptian sheik she allegedly helped to communicate with followers. A hidden camera at a federal prison in Rochester, Minn., recorded conversations of lawyer Lynne Stewart, Arabic interpreter Mohamed Yousry and Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence. Prosecutors contend the videotaped conversations prove a conspiracy among the three to aid terrorists. Also charged in the case is postal worker Ahmed Abdel Sattar, who had served the sheik as a paralegal and...

NEW YORK -- Authorities believe a U.S. postal employee in custody here helped draft a letter of introduction that may have been used by two men who posed as journalists to assassinate a leading opposition figure in Afghanistan last fall, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case.Click here for full Washington Post article

PATERSON, N.J. (AP) - Secret evidence presented in a closed court session alleged that a man who sold fake IDs to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers had closer ties to terrorism than previously revealed, according to transcripts released Tuesday. In the end, authorities found no evidence to bring terrorism charges against Mohamad El-Atriss, and U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie said Tuesday that El-Atriss "is not considered a threat to national security by us." In a plea bargain, El-Atriss was sentenced in March to five years' probation and fined $15,000 for selling phony documents. El-Atriss and his lawyer on Tuesday...

ederal prosecutors filed new charges yesterday against the defense lawyer Lynne F. Stewart, who had succeeded in getting a federal judge to dismiss earlier charges that she had helped one of her clients, a convicted terrorist, pass messages from prison.The new charges accuse Ms. Stewart of conspiring to provide material support with a co-defendant, Mohammed Yousry, a translator, to the same client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in prison after being convicted of plotting to blow up New York landmarks. Ms. Stewart and Mr. Yousry are also charged with concealing their support for the sheik.When...

Terror suspect linked to Afghan assassination October 28, 2003 - 9:11AM A Frenchman under investigation in Australia and France for possible terrorist activities was also suspected of links to the assassination of an Afghan leader, authorities said. Willie Virgile Brigitte, 35, is in custody in a Paris area jail where he is being held on suspicion of association with a terror group, French police and justice officials said. Investigations are under way in France and Australia into Brigitte's alleged links to the al-Qaeda terror network, French officials said today. A judicial official said that Brigitte was also suspected of running...

<p>In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, Sami Omar al-Hussayen led fellow Muslims as they joined an emotion-charged candlelight march remembering the dead. The Saudi graduate student in computer science at the University of Idaho helped organize a blood drive for victims. He issued a press release on behalf of the Muslim Students Association, stating that the small town of Moscow's Muslims "condemn in the strongest terms possible what are apparently vicious acts of terrorism against innocent citizens."</p>

<p>Dean Kristin Booth Glenn told members of the graduating class Tuesday that attorney Lynne Stewart could not receive the award for public interest lawyer of the year during graduation ceremonies.</p> <p>Stewart, 63, was charged along with two others last year with helping deliver messages from her jailed client, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, to the Islamic Group, an Egyptian-based terrorist group. All three have pleaded innocent and are scheduled to go to trial Oct. 7.</p>

Muslim was rising fast in agency until ex-wife's fraud allegations Gamal Abdel-Hafiz wanted more from life than managing 7-Eleven stores in dangerous neighborhoods around Fort Worth. He yearned for a career in the law, something impressive. His dream was to be an FBI agent. It seemed impossible, but it wasn't. The FBI desperately needed Arabic speakers to work in counterterrorism. A naturalized American from Egypt with a college degree and military experience fit the profile of an almost ideal job candidate. In 1996, Mr. Abdel-Hafiz became perhaps the first immigrant Muslim to earn the badge of a special agent. He...

The arrested al-Qa'eda leader blamed for organising the September 11 attacks was betrayed by Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, the son of the man who ordered the first bombing of the World Trade Centre, it emerged yesterday. Abdel-Rahman, 30, an Egyptian known to his followers as "the Lion of God", was arrested in Pakistan last month. His capture, a serious setback for al-Qa'eda, was kept secret in the hope that more would follow. Pakistani officials said that, under duress, he had divulged information about the head of al-Qa'eda's military committee, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, with whom he had been hiding. With intercepted mobile telephone...

NEW YORK, Oct 04, 2002 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- A Manhattan attorney accused of helping a jailed Egyptian cleric direct terrorism will not go on trial until late next year, a judge ruled. U.S. District Judge John Koeltl on Thursday set a trial date of Oct. 7, 2003, for Lynne Stewart and co-defendants Mohammed Yousry, an Arabic translator, and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a U.S. postal worker. The judge considered setting a Sept. 16, 2003, trial date until Stewart's lawyer objected, arguing it fell too near the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The risk to a fair trial...

Terrorist LawyerBy George PackerThe New York Times | September 23, 2002 One Saturday morning in November 1994, Ramsey Clark, attorney general under President Johnson and more recently a spokesman for radical Arab causes, met in his Manhattan office with a criminal defense lawyer named Lynne Stewart. Clark wanted Stewart to take on a new client -- Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric and the spiritual leader of the worldwide jihad movement, whose most recent address before the Metropolitan Correctional Center was a fourth-floor apartment in Jersey City. The sheik was about to go on trial for directing a...

Four associates of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, including his American lawyer, were indicted Tuesday on charges of helping the "blind sheik" conduct terrorism from his prison cell. In announcing the indictment, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Abdel Rahman was "a leader of the designated terrorist organization the Islamic Group." Ashcroft said Islamic Group was affiliated with al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization believed to have orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks. Monitoring Attorney-Client Discussions The attorney general said he was invoking, for the first time, a Justice Department policy allowing officials to monitor attorney-client conversations, if department officials believed the conversations were being...