The case of Mohammad Weiss Rasool
shows why such infiltration is potentially dangerous.
The FBI busted Rasool, an Afghan
immigrant, for tipping off an al-Qaida terrorist suspect last decade while
working as a police officer for the Fairfax County Police Department outside
Washington and moonlighting for CAIR. He worked his way up to sergeant before
authorities realized they had an al-Qaida spy in their ranks.
According to a Justice Department
complaint filed in 2008, Rasool searched a national criminal database
containing names of terrorist suspects and confirmed that FBI agents were
tailing a Muslim friend of his from a local mosque.
When agents went to arrest the
target early one morning, they found him and his family already dressed and
destroying evidence. They knew they had a mole, and worked back through the
system to find Rasool.
That's when agents discovered the
cop had breached their database at least 15 times to look up names of other
contacts, including relatives, to see if they showed up on the federal
terrorist watch list.
Rasool's actions "damaged
the integrity of the NCIC system and jeopardized at least one federal
investigation," prosecutors said in federal court papers. "The
defendant's actions could have placed federal agents in danger."
Rasool at first claimed he didn't
know the terrorist target. He confessed only after hearing a recording of his
message for the suspect, Abdullah Alnoshan - a close associate of al-Qaida
cleric Anwar Awlaki, a local imam who had helped some of the 9/11 hijackers
obtain housing and ID's in Fairfax County.
Rasool finally pleaded guilty to
illegally searching a federal database.
According to the bestselling book
"Muslim Mafia," Rasool at the time worked closely with CAIR, which
lobbied on his behalf during his prosecution.
In fact, Rasool acted as CAIR's
liaison within the police department, and often met with CAIR officials at
CAIR's headquarters located just three blocks from the US Capitol.
A senior Fairfax County Police
Department official, who called Rasool "a traitor" who
"disgraced the uniform," said he was "deeply embedded with
CAIR."
"He was the spokesman to the
department for CAIR," the official explained in "Muslim Mafia."
Muslim Terrorists Infiltrating
Law Enforcement
by PAUL SPERRY
In an alarming trend, more and
more Muslim terrorists are infiltrating the ranks of security firms and police
departments, where they have acquired official IDs and uniforms to help gain
access to secure areas, as well as firearms and tactical training to help carry
out attacks.
Some jihadists posing as law
enforcement officers have also gained access to classified federal databases to
tip off other terrorist suspects under surveillance.
On Sept. 17, Somali-American Dahi
Adan wore a security guard uniform as he stabbed or slashed 10 people at a St.
Cloud, Minn., mall with a knife before he was shot and killed by an off-duty
police officer. Adan made at least one reference to Allah during the stabbings
and asked victims if they were Muslim before attacking. An ISIS affiliate
claimed Adan was a "soldier of the Islamic State."
Stockholm-based Securitas AB, a
security firm that provides security services to companies in more than 200
cities worldwide, confirmed that Adan worked through June as a guard for its US
division.
On the same day, Afghan-American
Ahmad Rahami allegedly detonated a pressure-cooker bomb in the Chelsea
neighborhood of New York that left 31 injured. A blood-soaked journal found on
Rahami after he was shot by police indicated he was carrying out
"jihad" against "nonbelievers" in their
"backyard."
Though Rahami was working for his
family restaurant at the time, he aspired to be a police officer, according to
friends and neighbors. He majored in criminal justice at Middlesex County
College in Edison, N.J. Rahami was enrolled there from 2010-2012 but did not
graduate.
Another Afghan-American
terrorist, Omar Mateen, was employed as a security guard for a major federal
security contractor this June, when he opened fire at an Orlando nightclub,
killing 49 people. He had been dismissed from training as a prison guard after
making threatening remarks, and ended up as a private security guard for G4S
Secure Solutions USA Inc., which maintains a $234 million contract with the
Department of Homeland Security.
Mateen was subject to a
background check and psychological test when he was recruited by G4S in 2007
and rescreened in 2013 with no adverse findings - even though he threatened to
kill a sheriff's deputy at the St. Lucie County Courthouse where he was
stationed as a security guard and had been placed on a terrorist watch list by
the FBI.
"Omar became very agitated
and made a comment that he could have al-Qaida kill my employee and his
family," St. Lucie County Sheriff Ken Mascara said. "If that wasn't
bad enough, he went on to say that the Fort Hood shooter was justified in his
actions."
As CounterJihad first reported,
the Jupiter, Fla.-based security contractor G4S also provides security guards
and other security services for "90 percent of U.S. nuclear
facilities."
In fact, G4S has the US Nuclear
Regulatory Commission (NRC) contract to run simulated Red Team terrorist
attacks on US nuclear plants and US nuclear weapons labs, CounterJihad has
learned. G4S is managing the exercises, and its armed guards are participating
in the force-on-force attacks, including mock terrorist strikes, which are
designed to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities in nuclear security.
CounterJihad has also learned
that Senate investigators have been working with NRC's Nuclear Security and
Incident Response division to determine if there are other potential Mateens
working as security guards at America's nuclear facilities. A preliminary
review has found that dozens of other Middle Easterners have landed jobs with
nuclear reactor licensees as contract security guards - including a possible
relative of Mateen. Only further
scrutiny might identify insider threats among them.
It is far from an idle
concern. In a 2011 intelligence report,
Homeland Security warned that "violent extremists have, in fact, obtained
insider positions" at nuclear facilities.
Security experts fear opening nuclear security jobs to insufficiently
vetted Muslims like Mateen risks inviting jihadists to exploit weaknesses and
vulnerabilities in the security of US nuclear plants, as well as spent-fuel rod
repositories and even the federal nuclear weapons labs.
"ISIS has nuclear facilities
on their targeting radar, not only to secure fissile material for dirty bombs,
but also to exploit the inherent vulnerability presented by overfilled spent
fuel pools," said Brian F. Sullivan, retired FAA special agent, retired
Army lieutenant colonel in the military police corps and senior fellow at the
American Leadership and Policy Foundation.
"Europe is well aware of
this threat potential and the results could be devastating here in the United
States, where our government has totally dropped the ball," Sullivan added
in a recent interview with CounterJihad. He said radioactive fallout from dirty
nukes could render major US cities uninhabitable for years, if not decades.
Of increasing concern, meanwhile,
are the operatives the terrorist front group Council on American-Islamic
Relations is planting inside law enforcement agencies. CAIR is no friend of
police. The group has published and distributed posters advising Muslims not to
cooperate with FBI agents investigating terrorist suspects and to slam the door
in their faces.
In Florida, for example, the
Broward Sheriff's Office employs a senior CAIR official, even though CAIR has
been identified by the US Justice Department as a co-conspirator in funding
terrorism and is so closely tied to the Hamas terrorist group that the FBI has
banned CAIR from all its outreach activities nationwide.
Broward deputy sheriff Nezar
Hamze doubles as regional director for CAIR in Florida, where he pushes CAIR's
Islamist agenda and defends Islam against criticism it promotes terrorism, most
recently in the bloody wake of the Orlando terrorist attack by devout Muslim
Omar Mateen, whose radical mosque was defended by a CAIR lawyer.
Broward Sheriff Scott Israel, who
calls himself "Florida's most progressive sheriff," has ignored calls
for Hamze's removal from the force despite growing local protests.
Another CAIR executive, Khalid
Latif, infiltrated the NYPD as its Muslim chaplain. Reportedly, Latif led the
pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia that Mateen joined in 2012.
The
case of Mohammad Weiss Rasool shows why such infiltration is potentially
dangerous.
The
FBI busted Rasool, an Afghan immigrant, for tipping off an al-Qaida terrorist
suspect last decade while working as a police officer for the Fairfax County
Police Department outside Washington and moonlighting for CAIR. He worked his
way up to sergeant before authorities realized they had an al-Qaida spy in
their ranks.
According
to a Justice Department complaint filed in 2008, Rasool searched a national
criminal database containing names of terrorist suspects and confirmed that FBI
agents were tailing a Muslim friend of his from a local mosque.
When
agents went to arrest the target early one morning, they found him and his
family already dressed and destroying evidence. They knew they had a mole, and
worked back through the system to find Rasool.
That's
when agents discovered the cop had breached their database at least 15 times to
look up names of other contacts, including relatives, to see if they showed up
on the federal terrorist watch list.
Rasool's
actions "damaged the integrity of the NCIC system and jeopardized at least
one federal investigation," prosecutors said in federal court papers.
"The defendant's actions could have placed federal agents in danger."
Rasool
at first claimed he didn't know the terrorist target. He confessed only after
hearing a recording of his message for the suspect, Abdullah Alnoshan - a close
associate of al-Qaida cleric Anwar Awlaki, a local imam who had helped some of
the 9/11 hijackers obtain housing and ID's in Fairfax County.
Rasool
finally pleaded guilty to illegally searching a federal database.
According
to the bestselling book "Muslim Mafia," Rasool at the time worked
closely with CAIR, which lobbied on his behalf during his prosecution.
In
fact, Rasool acted as CAIR's liaison within the police department, and often
met with CAIR officials at CAIR's headquarters located just three blocks from
the US Capitol.
A
senior Fairfax County Police Department official, who called Rasool "a
traitor" who "disgraced the uniform," said he was "deeply
embedded with CAIR."
"He
was the spokesman to the department for CAIR," the official explained in
"Muslim Mafia."
The FBI has its own problems with
Islamist moles.
Consider the case of the Muslim FBI
agent in Los Angeles who allegedly compromised a multi-agency terrorism
investigation by tipping off the ringleader of a Pakistani-based terror cell
that the local Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) had under surveillance for
more than two years.
The "dirty" agent - an
Egyptian-American married to an Afghan woman - allegedly sabotaged several
investigations across the country, including ones in New York and Boston, that
tie back to the Taliban in Pakistan. According to "Muslim Mafia," he
not only tipped the terror cell leader off to a so-called "trash
cover" that investigators tried to execute outside his home in Los
Angeles, but also identified surveillance vehicles for the terrorist suspect.
After an internal FBI
investigation, the Muslim agent was reprimanded but not fired.
"The dirty FBI agent, my
JTTF counterpart, compromised by investigation as well as several other agency
investigations across the country," said a detective who works
counterterrorism intelligence for the LAPD. "The agent is embedded with
the bad guys and gave them critical information detailing the
investigations."
The LAPD source added: "The
FBI is covering it all up."
Bureau tolerance for such
betrayal by Muslim agents is not new.
Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, an
Egyptian-American and the first Muslim FBI agent, twice refused on religious
grounds to tape-record Muslim terrorist suspects under investigation, including
his friend Sami al-Arian, who was later convicted in spite of Abdel-Hafiz
gumming up the investigation.
In early 2001, then-FBI Director
Louis Freeh picked Abdel-Hafiz to become the FBI's deputy legal attache at the
U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - a key post in the battle against
al-Qaida, which had hit American military barracks inside Saudi and a warship
in neighboring Yemen.
After 9/11, when 15 of the 19
hijackers turned out to be Saudi nationals, Abdel-Hafiz was in a prime position
to run down leads in the Saudi capital. Only, that didn't happen, at least not
as often as headquarters had hoped. Agents back in Washington complained about
his performance there, saying they were not getting answers to the hundreds of
leads they were sending him in Riyadh. Abdel-Hafiz says he was one of only two
people manning the office there and was further hobbled by an antiquated
computer system.
But he and his FBI boss Wilfred
Rattigan, a black convert to Islam, had still found time to travel to Mecca for
the annual pilgrimage, where they surrendered their FBI cell phones to Saudi
nationals and were out of contact with officials back in the U.S. who were
trying to ring them up about investigations into al-Qaida and 9/11. Both
Rattigan and Abdel-Hafiz wore traditional Muslim headgear and robes while on
the job in Saudi Arabia, further outraging fellow agents.
When a senior supervisor was sent
to the Riyadh office nearly a year after 9/11, she found secret documents
strewn all over the office, some even wedged between cabinets. She also found a
huge backlog of boxes each filled with three feet of paper containing secret,
time-sensitive leads. Much of the materials, including information on Saudi
airline pilots, had not been translated or reviewed.
It's anyone's guess how many
terror cases were compromised in the FBI's Saudi office.
The FBI tried to fire Abdel-Hafiz
in 2003 for insurance fraud and making false statements on his FBI application.
But his termination was overruled by a special panel convened to hear the case,
and he was reinstated. Reassigned to Dallas, Abdel-Hafiz recruited other
Muslims to join the FBI at Islamic conferences held by Muslim Brotherhood front
groups.
He finally retired last year,
after being placed in the bureau's post-adjudication risk management program,
or PARM, which stripped him of access to certain classified material. He now
works as a Homeland Security contractor advising on "countering violent
extremism," or CVE, the program the Obama administration started to
pretend Islam has nothing to do with terrorism.
Among other things, Abdel-Hafiz
argues against arresting young Muslim men who are being radicalized in order to
build "trust" in the Muslim community.
Hundreds of other Muslim FBI
agents, analysts, linguists and contractors have been subjected to additional
security screening under the PARM program. The investigations have been
prompted by concerns these FBI employees maintain family and other ties in the
Middle East, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, and could be coerced by
foreign spies or terrorist organizations to leak classified national security
information.
