In an apparent attempt to silence a leading American Muslim civil rights advocacy group – the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - Republican Congressman Frank Wolf from Virginia has expressed deep disappointment at the FBI's "insufficient response" to his letter that apparently sought negative information based on smears against CAIR by Muslim-bashers like Steven Emerson.

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In an apparent attempt to silence a leading American Muslim civil rights advocacy group – the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) - Republican Congressman Frank Wolf from Virginia has expressed deep disappointment at the FBI’s “insufficient response” to his letter that apparently sought negative information based on smears against CAIR by Muslim-bashers like Steven Emerson.

In a letter sent to FBI on February 2, Rep. Wolf asked

Has the FBI severed ties with CAIR? If so, how is the FBI planning to formally notify Members of Congress and other government officials of this decision?

If FBI policy has changed with regard to CAIR, is there any indication that this decision is being revisited by the new administration? If so, what new evidence would justify a change in course?

Is CAIR's national office still in contact with the FBI?

The (FOX) report quotes Assistant Director John Miller from the FBI Office of Public Affairs as saying: "The FBI has had to limit its formal contact with CAIR field offices until certain issues are addressed by CAIR's national headquarters." What specifically are the "certain issues" which you have raised with CAIR? Is there still informal contact with any field offices? If so, what is the distinction between formal and informal and why is there a distinction between field offices?

To your knowledge, does CAIR receive financial contributions from foreign sources? If so, which ones and how much?

Congressman Frank Wolf, who has a track record of anti-Muslim bearing, sent this letter after the FOX News reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has cut off ties with CAIR "amid mounting evidence that it has links to a support network for Hamas." Given that Hamas is on the current list of U.S. designated foreign terrorist organizations, this is obviously a serious claim, one which would rightly inform a shift in FBI policy, the Wolf wrote.

In response, John Miller, Assistant Director Office of Public Affairs wrote: “As you know, we recently acknowledged that we have suspended any formal engagement with Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) field offices around the country. "Formal" relationships as defined here means appointing or accepting CAIR or its representatives on any organized committee or group sponsored by the FBI. However, representatives of CAIR have the same access to the FBI as any other persons and are encouraged to report any crime or violation of civil rights.

“Members of the United States Government, especially those serving in a law enforcement capacity, have a duty to be judicious in our activities as representatives of the Federal Government. The adjustment in our contacts with CAIR comes in part as a result of evidence gathered through FBI investigation and presented in connection with the Holy Land Foundation trial. CAIR was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in that case.”

However, Rep. Wolf was not satisfied with the FBI answer and on March 9 sent another letter which said: I was deeply disappointed with the FBI's response-hand-delivered to my office last Friday-to my letter of February 2 inquiring about the Bureau's position on meeting with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

I would like these questions fully answered by this Friday, March 13, and by someone who works on counter-terrorism, rather than a public affairs officer. Other members of Congress, both House and Senate, have expressed interest in and additional information about the Bureau's position as it relates to CAIR. I would think the Bureau would be embarrassed to send the insufficient response I received.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has charged that Rep. Frank Wolf has “abused his office” by seeking to pressure the FBI to produce negative information about the Muslim civil rights and advocacy group.

Wolf’s attempt to obtain negative information to be used against CAIR may stem from CAIR’s long history of criticism of the Virginia congressman’s political stances.

“It appears that Congressman Wolf is seeking payback for all the times CAIR and American Muslims have challenged his political positions using their constitutionally-protected right to petition elected representatives,” said CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad. “It is unfortunate that Wolf has abused his office to pressure a government agency to target those he obviously views as political opponents. Public office should be used to serve the people, not to pursue personal vendettas.”

Awad cited the numerous times CAIR “butted heads” with Wolf over the past 12 years:

In 1997, CAIR asked members of the American Muslim community to contact Wolf about his “Freedom from Religious Persecution Act,” which it said seemed to ignore the persecution of Muslims. Also that year, CAIR asked Muslims to contact Wolf, then chairman of the Transportation and Related Agencies Subcommittee, to raise questions about passenger profiling and about how the civil liberties of all travelers could be guaranteed.

In 1998, CAIR asked Muslims to contact leaders of a House-Senate conference committee and urge them to amend or eliminate new legislation that would create a National Commission on Terrorism. Wolf introduced the legislation to create the commission.

CAIR expressed concern about the objectivity of the proposed commission because of “Wolf’s legislative history, his apparent focus on Islam and Muslims and the backgrounds of several individuals proposed as members of the commission.” The council said that a number of those put forward as possible commission members were “associates of Muslim bashers who have targeted the American Muslim community as a threat to this society.”

In 1999, CAIR called on the American Muslim community to defend a Muslim appointee to Wolf’s National Commission on Terrorism by Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-MO). The appointee, Salam al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, was under attack by pro-Israel groups. A New York Post editorial attacking the appointment referred to “a list of public statements compiled by terrorism expert Steven Emerson,” the same Muslim-basher now smearing CAIR.

In 2001, CAIR challenged a decision by Wolf’s office to deny the right of an American Muslim leader of Sudanese heritage to attend a meeting to discuss policy toward Sudan on Capitol Hill. That leader, who was and is the Imam of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society (ADAMS) in Herndon, Va., was a resident of Wolf’s district.

In 2006, CAIR called on “Muslims and other people of conscience in Northern Virginia” to contact Wolf to urge him to repudiate anti-Muslim remarks by his colleague Rep. Virgil Goode (R-VA). Goode was critical of the planned use of a Quran for the ceremonial swearing-in of Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress.

Unindicted Co-conspiritors.

CAIR is America's largest Islamic civil liberties and advocacy group with 35 offices and chapters nationwide and in Canada. In 2007, the Holy Land Foundation charity prosecutors used McCarthyite tactics by naming 306 individuals and organizations, including CAIR, as un-indicted co-conspirators in the case.

Implicating the mainstream Muslim groups is an apparent attempt to silence the genuine Muslim voices while providing ammunition to the anti-Muslim organizations. It is a Justice Department effort to smear the entire Muslim community.

The government's co-conspirator's list includes the largest Muslim civil right group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); the nation's largest Muslim educational source, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and the North American Islamic Trust, the country's largest holding company of deeds to about 300 mosques, Islamic centers and schools in the U.S.

Typically, prosecutors identify a person or a group as an unindicted co-conspirator so that their statements, or those of people involved in the listed organizations, about the defendants can be used in court without them being considered hearsay, which is not permitted in trial.

However, the co-conspirator designation could be a blow to the credibility of the national Islamic organizations.

The perverse nature of the un-indicted co-conspirator designation made public in the HLF case is that those so-designated cannot challenge the designation in a court of law and thus have no way to restore their reputation to its earlier standing. This is a unique situation where any person or organization can be designated “guilty by association” and stigmatized as such without legal redress.

There is no doubt that the Department of Justice in selecting that list of 306 organizations and individuals intended to accomplish such results, especially for three of the largest and most effective American Muslim organizations: The Islamic Society of North America, the North American Islamic Trust and the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

The practice of publicly naming unindicted co-conspirators is frowned on by some in the legal community, chiefly because there is no trial or other mechanism for those named to challenge their designation. Justice Department guidelines discourage the public identification of unindicted co-conspirators by the government.

"In all public filings and proceedings, federal prosecutors should remain sensitive to the privacy and reputation interests of uncharged third-parties," the Justice Department's manual for prosecutors says. When co-conspirator lists have to be filed in court, prosecutors should seek to file them under seal, the guidelines say.

In practice, the lists are often made public. A list of co-conspirators was released in connection with the federal trial in 2005 of a former college professor, Dr. Sami Al-Arian, on terrorism support charges. However, when Enron executives went on trial in 2006, the list of alleged co-conspirators was kept under seal.

Retrial of Holy Land ends in convictions.

After a series of legal twists, secret evidence and questionable witness of Israeli intelligence agents, the Holy Land Foundation, once a leading American Muslim charitable organization and five of its former officials were convicted on November 24, 2008 on criminal charges related to humanitarian aid given to Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. The defendants said they were engaged in legitimate relief work, while the government claimed that work benefited terrorists.

During the trial, defense attorneys accused the government of bending to Israeli pressure to prosecute the charity, and of relying on old evidence. But jurors agreed with the government's contention that at least $12 million raised in the U.S. had been illegally funneled to Hamas after that organization was banned as a terrorist group by the federal government in 1995.

Prosecutors spent more time in the second trial explaining the complexities of the case and painting a clearer picture of the money trail. Following the mistrial, prosecutors streamlined their case and eliminated almost 100 charges against the remaining defendants.

The first trial of the Holy Land Foundation ended in a mistrial on October 22, 2007 when the jurors returned no convictions against any of the five former leaders of the Holy Land. Mohammad El-Mezain, the Holy Land's original chairman, was acquitted on most of the counts by a unanimous jury after 19 days of deliberations.

Tellingly, while prosecutors said the foundation raised money for Hamas they did not accuse the charity of directly financing or being involved in "terrorist" activity. Prosecutors said the charity was spreading Hamas' ideology by funding schools, hospitals and social welfare programs controlled by the group in the Palestinian territories, and permitting it to divert funds to the activities of fighters.

Attorney Greg Westfall, who has been involved in the case since 2005 called the prosecution shameful and compared the 42-day trial to some of the darkest days in American history. Alluding to the statement Richard Roper, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Texas, "This is a great day in the United States. We will not tolerate those who fund terrorism," Westfall said: "Yeah, like Dred Scott was a great day for the United States. Like the 'Red Scare’ was a great day in America." Dred Scott was the 1857 Supreme Court case that declared no slave or descendant of a slave was a citizen of the United States and, therefore, had no right to sue in federal court. In pandering to racial and religious prejudices, Westfall said, the prosecution depended on people accepting the stereotype that "Muslim equals Islamist equals terrorist." It was based mainly on guilt by association, he said, including associations with groups that have never been proven to be "terrorists" or supporters of terrorism.

According to Nancy Hollander, a lawyer from Albuquerque who represented one of the defendants, Shukri Abu-Baker: “Our clients were not even allowed to review their own statements because they were classified — statements that they made over the course of many years that the government wiretapped,” Ms. Hollander said. “They were not allowed to go back and review them. There were statements from alleged co-conspirators that included handwritten notes. Nobody knew who wrote them; nobody knew when they were written. There are a plethora of issues.”

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, has called the Holy Land case an "example of excessive and vexatious prosecution." The intention was to chill Muslim charities in the U.S., and that is exactly what happened, he said.

List of unindicted co-conspirators created a legal entanglement
and ammunition to anti-Muslim activists.

The Holy Land trial created another legal entanglement with the 11-page list of more than 300 individuals and American Muslim organizations named as “unindicted co-conspirators.” The list was leaked by the Department of Justice to the media. 

On August 16, 2007, CAIR filed an amicus brief asking the court to remove its name, and that of several hundred other Muslim individuals and institutions, from a list of so-called “unindicted co-conspirators.” The CAIR brief in part said:

“The Fifth Amendment was violated because the public naming of the unindicted co-conspirators damaged their reputation, good name, and economic well-being, without offering a forum for vindication, and without a legitimate governmental reason for doing so. The First Amendment was violated because the governmental action of publicly naming the unindicted co-conspirators chilled the expressive associational activities of the unindicted co-conspirators and the government does not have a substantially related compelling interest for their action. . .

“Undoubtedly, the practice of naming unindicted co-conspirators needs to be proscribed from the outset. Such a practice should be per se unconstitutional, because once the government publicizes the names of the unindicted co-conspirators, the damage to their reputations, economic well-being, and expressive associations is done. . .

“In this case, the government had nothing to lose by violating the Department of Justice guidelines and the Constitution, as their stigmatizing of these ‘unpopular’ groups and persons could not be undone. . .”

In June 2008 the American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Texas filed a motion seeking to remove the names of two Illinois Islamic Charities -- the Islamic Society of North America, in Plainfield, Ill., and the North American Islamic Trust, in Burr Ridge, Ill., removed from the list of unindicted co-conspirators. 

"By publicly branding these groups as criminals without providing a forum for them to defend themselves or clear their names, the government has acted with blatant disregard for their constitutional rights," said Hina Shamsi, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.

"The government's action is especially shameful because the charge it makes is so inflammatory - it has caused each organization's reputation and good name to be dragged through the mud. The government has a constitutional obligation to correct the record and clear the names of ISNA and NAIT."

Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, is right when she says that for many people, when they hear the designation ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ what they really hear is just ‘conspirator and this makes it very difficult for ISNA to continue to have relationships that are built on trust.

Additionally the government action has put a strain on fund-raising efforts of the Muslim groups.  At the same time the legal entangling is draining their resources as they have to spend money for legal defense.

It will not be too much to say that the American Muslim community faces a COINTELPRO operation similar to the 1960s operation against the African Americans. COINTELPRO is the acronym for a series of FBI counterintelligence programs designed to neutralize political dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s. The program was directed against the civil rights movements, especially against the community leadership of African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans. In the 1980s similar program was used against Central American solidarity groups.

According to attorney Brian Glick, the author of War at Home, four methods were employed by the FBI at the height of the Cointelpro operation during 1960s and the same methods are being employed now which include: (1) Infiltration in the community. (2) Psychological warfare from outside. (3) Harassment through the legal system. 4) Extra legal force and violence. We see all the four methods being applied against the Muslim community.

The Los Angeles Times (February 24, 2009) revelation was a shock to the community that the FBI used paid informants in mosques to spy on the community. The case of Ahmadullah Niazi in Tustin, CA brought to light evidence of an all too familiar trend in law enforcement activity within the American Muslim community. The FBI sent a convicted criminal, Craig Monteilh, to pose as an agent provocateur in several of California’s mosques. A FBI agent allegedly told one of the mosque attendees that the agency would make his life a "living hell" if he did not become an informant.

In 2007, Niazi reported suspicious behavior by a new Muslim convert in his mosque, who he said was talking about jihad and suggested planning a terrorist attack in conversations with others at the Islamic Center of Irvine. He and a mosque official filed a report with the Los Angeles field office of the FBI. The FBI then told mosque officials that they were investigating the matter, and the mosque successfully got a three-year restraining order against the individual. Niazi reported that FBI officials later contacted him to ask him to be a paid informant. When he refused, he said they threatened to make his life "a living hell." Niazi was arrested earlier in February 2009 on charges related to lying on his immigration documents and was later released on $500,000 bail.

Niaz’s case is just one example of FBI’s infiltration in the Muslim community. At the same time a psychological warfare rages, through headline grabbing high profile arrests and trials. There is harassment through the legal system, with trial of Muslim charities in the name of fighting terrorism. The use of extra legal force is draining resources of the community on prolonged trial in which most of the evidence is “secret” and the defendants are unable to properly defend themselves. Trials of Holy Land Foundation and Dr. Sami Al-Arian are just two examples.

All this is bringing the desired results - intimidation of the Muslim community, defaming their faith (which is linked to acts of terrorism) and straining its financial resources because million of dollars are paid by the community in defense expenses. 

In the final analysis, there cannot be two opinions on the priority of the security and safety of the nation but one wonders if such measures as including more than 300 Muslim individuals and organization as non-indicted conspirators made the nation more safe or they are being used to maintain a state of fear among the masses and usurp their civil rights in the name of national security.

Authors Bio:
Author and journalist.
Author of
Islamic Pakistan: Illusions & Reality;
Islam in the Post-Cold War Era;
Islam & Modernism;
Islam & Muslims in the Post-9/11 America.
Currently working as free lance journalist.
Executive Editor of American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com