by Philip Haney
As I always did, I brought along an outline of my proposed talking points and gave a copy to Kremer. Then I went through my points, summarized under the headings “Past,” “Present,” and “Future.” In particular, I talked about the Quranic Prism case, mentioning that according to my JTTF colleague, along with additional NTC confirmation, it appeared to be the first case in Atlanta that linked potential terrorism to shipments of cargo.
After a half hour or so, we had covered all the talking points in the outline, and everything seemed to be okay, until just before the meeting was about to end.
Suddenly, Kremer asked, “How’s your case with Ingrid Mattson, Mr. Haney?”
I was surprised, but said, “It’s watertight, sir.”
At the time, Mattson was president of the Islamic Society of America (ISNA), the largest Muslim organization in America. But it also was a known Muslim Brotherhood front group that recently had been designated an unindicted coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case.
And that was it. Or so I thought, until a week or so later, when I was working on an outbound inspection detail with ATU team members and Harer handed me his duty phone.
“It’s Mr. Kremer,” Harer said. “He wants to talk with you.”
“We have a new project for you,” Kremer told me. “We’re going to use it as a learning opportunity.
“We’re going to reassign you back to PAU, and you’re going to start modifying all of your TECS records. We’ve been directed from headquarters that we can’t have any information in TECS that has to do with terrorism, so you’re going to have to go in and change all of your records.
“This comes right from the top,” he emphasized.
REMOVE THE DOTS
I was stunned. By order of DHS headquarters, I was about to remove valuable intelligence information – the “dots” – from every one of the records I had ever put into TECS.
There were hundreds of these records, which had taken years of painstaking research and careful attention to detail. Most of the records were linked to the Hamas Network investigation, but some of them were part of the Tablighi Jamaat case, which was not yet as well developed as the Hamas report but still was a solid case.
For three years now, I had been targeting the leaders of all the major Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the United States, some of whom were becoming closely affiliated with the administration, the DOJ, and with law enforcement agencies such as the FBI. Eventually, I documented more than fifty meetings between 1998 and 2009 between leaders of Muslim Brotherhood front groups and members of the executive or legislative branches of the US government.
Now, we had come to the point where DHS and the State Department, with influence from the DOJ, had to make a moral decision about how to deal with the information that officers like me had put into the system.
The choice they faced was either to respond to the information in a law-enforcement manner and begin to prosecute these Muslim Brotherhood–linked individuals and organizations, disregard it, or eliminate it.
In this instance, they chose the last option, elimination.
TRAUMATIZED
By this time, late in October 2009, it had been only a year since US attorneys in federal court had proven beyond reasonable doubt that American Muslim organizations such as CAIR, ISNA, and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) were not only operating as front groups for the Muslim Brotherhood but had direct ties to Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations such as Hamas.
However, it was also obvious that a discernible shift in attitude was taking place within DHS and in other law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI.
Instead of a counterterrorism policy built on a facts-based analysis of the threat that follows through with strong, law-enforcement actions, the emerging civil rights and civil liberties–based approach essentially afforded foreign nationals – including members of known violent Islamic groups – the same constitutional rights as US citizens.
I was now faced with another great moral crisis. It was not the first one since joining CBP and certainly would not be the last.
I was also badly traumatized, both professionally and personally, to the point that sometimes I had to remind myself to take the next breath.
How could I remove years of work on groups like Hamas and Tablighi Jamaat that clearly posed a threat to national security? On the other hand, how could I refuse to comply with a direct order?
So, I decided to do two things. First, inside the agency, I would begin documenting all of my concerns in writing, and second, I would seek legal advice and help outside of Customs and Border Protection.
On Thursday, November 5, 2009, I took some annual leave from work and drove from Atlanta to the nation’s capital to meet the following day with my colleague Stephen C. Coughlin in his office in Crystal City, Virginia. This was the same day that Nidal Malik Hasan shot forty-three people at Fort Hood, Texas, killing thirteen. In light of what I had just been ordered to do back at the port, imagine my sense of urgency during that twelve-hour drive as I listened to news reports on the radio about a person named Hasan who shouted, “Allahu Akbar!” as he killed his own colleagues and countrymen.
The meeting was arranged by Jeffrey M. Epstein, a counterterrorism activist who produced a number of symposiums drawing experts in the field. None of us had ever met in person. Coughlin is a former Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence analyst who was fired by the Pentagon at the request of Hesham H. Islam, who has since been suspected of being an Islamic terrorist sympathizer.12 Coughlin’s warnings that ISNA was a Muslim Brotherhood front group led Mr. Islam to call Coughlin “a Christian zealot with a pen.”13
Subsequently, the Joint Chiefs of Staff did not renew Coughlin’s contract as an intelligence analyst.
Our meeting went well. Coughlin is a consummate professional, and we had both suffered professional and personal damage for speaking the truth about the nature of the threat we face.
At the end of the day, I was encouraged and believed that we possibly had found an avenue to safely go outside the agency but still remain within the chain of command. In other words I was advised not to go public, as Edward Snowden had done, but to follow the process and stay within the structure of the US government.
The meeting also started the process of finding legal counsel. I’ll address this issue in more detail as the story unfolds, but for now, let’s just say that finding a good lawyer for a whistle-blower could easily be an entire book in itself.
Back at work, I had already started putting my concerns in writing, producing what became a series of twelve memos to management. The most important memo was the tenth, dated November 18, 2009, in which I expressed concern about the impact of “modifying” records:
The questions arising from the Ft. Hood shooting incident have direct bearing on our [Modification] Project, because, for the last five years, I have been working hard to (1) “connect the dots” regarding Individuals & Organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood network here in the US, and (2) describe the strategy and tactics of the Muslim Brotherhood in the US, as based specifically on Sharia law.
This “connect the dot” approach has been borne out by the successful conclusion of the Holy Land Foundation trial in 2008, which led to the conviction of five Individuals on 108 counts of providing at least $12 million in material support to Hamas, a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organization (“SDGTO”).
In fact, the legal team for the Holy Land Foundation was provided with all of the information contained in “The Hamas Network in the United States,” as per JTTF.
… Thus, my concern at the present time is that the process of modifying my records will undo thousands of hours (years) of work, specifically designed to “connect the dots,” and/or to describe the Sharia-based strategy and tactics of Muslim Brotherhood front-groups operating in the US.
In addition, the information in these records is based on careful, detailed analysis that is not otherwise available in the TECS system.<
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The same day, I was called in for a meeting with my immediate supervisor, Bill Green (not his real name). As we sat down and began the meeting, he laid a copy of my tenth memo on the table between us and underlined the portion that read, “Thus, my concern at the present time is that the process of modifying my records will undo thousands of hours (years) of work, specifically designed to ‘connect the dots.’”
I know shorthand, having taken it in high school on the advice of my father, and as we sat at the table, I began writing down every word Supervisor Green said.
He looked at me and said, “What are you writing, Mr. Haney?”
I replied, “Everything you’re saying.”
But he didn’t stop talking, and I kept writing.
In response to my concerns, not only as expressed in that memo, but also in the previous one, I was told, according to my notes:
No CBP Officer was ever supposed to be creating these [kinds of TECS] records in the first place; people who do this kind of work are not CBPOs at [ports of entry].
We’re not really undoing years of your work … It is a procedural issue … No one is saying you haven’t done good work … We like what you are doing … You just did it wrong … You can still nominate the records for B10 status [known affiliation with terrorism].
This agency has established channels for doing this kind of work, but you have been creating your own individual channel. You seem to believe that no one can do this job as well as you do, and you don’t trust that others are as capable of doing it as you.
You have no statutory authority to do the work you have done.
Green closed the meeting by reiterating that no CBP officer is allowed to create TECS records that are related to terrorism, while adding that my career in research and creating reports was over and that the agency would no longer be giving me any “special consideration.”
AS SEEN ON TV
After the meeting, I went back to work on the modification project, which took until March 2010 to finish.
On December 10, 2009, I received my ten-year pin and certificate for “recognition of service in the Government of the United States of America.” With a decade of government service now officially in the books, I recall wondering where I might be ten years later and where our country might be in the year 2019.
A couple of weeks later, on December 25, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab attempted to detonate plastic explosives hidden in his underwear while on board Northwest Airlines Flight 253, en route from Amsterdam to Detroit.
Within moments, I ran some queries and discovered that Abdulmutallab was not only linked to Anwar al-Awlaki, the senior al-Qaeda recruiter, but was also president of the University College London’s Islamic Society.14 He was the fourth president of a London student Islamic society to face terrorist charges in the three years prior to 2009.
I also found that some of the individuals and organizations linked to Abdulmutallab were already part of the Hamas Network case, or would subsequently be linked to either the Tablighi Jamaat Initiative, or to the sixty-seven records in the Islamic Institute of Education report that were deleted in September 2012.
Additionally, I discovered that Abdulmutallab had received a multiple-entry visa from the American embassy in London, valid from June 12, 2008, to June 11, 2010, which he used to visit the Al-Maghrib Institute in Houston, Texas.
The Al-Maghrib Institute already had ties to other organizations in the Hamas network, and an Al-Maghrib leader would later be linked to the Dar Al Uloom al Islamiyah of America mosque in San Bernardino, California, attended by San Bernardino killer Syed Rizwan Farook.
The small office where I worked on the modification project had a TV, and I followed the Abdulmutallab case from the original news reports to the congressional hearings on C-SPAN.
As one member of Congress after another expressed concern about the radicalization of American citizens and permanent residents, and the failure to connect the dots,15 I was literally removing those very dots from TECS, the system we all used to track the activities of individuals and organizations with known or suspected ties to terrorism.
6
A NEW RELATIONSHIP
On January 20, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed a special order allowing Tariq Ramadan – the grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna – and Adam Habib, both previously suspected supporters of Islamic jihadists, reentry into the United States. In fact, after consulting with DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, Clinton invited them to apply for a visa.
While publicly claiming she was simply exercising her exemption authority, it appears that Clinton’s highly visible move was actually designed to draw attention to President Obama’s 2009 Cairo pledge to pursue “a new relationship with Muslim communities based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”1
The visas were granted in spite of major opposition from the law enforcement community and with total disregard to the fact that since 2004, the State Department had repeatedly denied previous visa requests from Ramadan and Habib, arguing they both presented a national security threat.
The Clinton–Napolitano special order read:
INA§212(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI)(dd)2 shall not apply, for purposes of any application for nonimmigrant visa or for admission as a nonimmigrant, to Mr. Tariq Ramadan, relative to donations made to the Comite de Bienfaisance et de Secours aux Palestiniens and the Association de Secours Palestinien prior to 2003.3
The two groups named in the special order, the Comite de Bienfaisance et de Secours aux Palestiniens and the Association de Secours Palestinien, not only remain affiliates of Hamas to this day, but were named as unindicted coconspirators in the Holy Land Foundation case.
Then, on January 27–28, 2010, the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties hosted a controversial “inaugural meeting” between American Muslim leaders and DHS Secretary Napolitano. Held two years after the release of the “Words Matter” memo and just over a year after the November 2008 Holy Land Foundation verdicts, the invitation-only, two-day conference in Washington, DC, included known affiliates of two of the Muslim Brotherhood front groups named as unindicted coconspirators in the HLF trial. A third invited group, the Muslim American Society (MAS), was also a known Muslim Brotherhood affiliate.
The documents related to the meeting became public on July 29, 2010, but only because a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request had been filed by Judicial Watch.
We learned from the FOIA documents that one of the front groups invited was the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which was founded in 1981 by students at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign who were members of the Muslim Students Association (MSA).
ISNA was listed in the 1991 Muslim Brotherhood “Explanatory Memorandum” as among the “members of the US Muslim Brotherhood.”4 The MSA was the first Muslim Brotherhood front group founded in America, in January 1963.
Another front group invited to the meeting was the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), founded in 1988 as an offshoot of the Islamic Center of Southern California (ICSC) by brothers Maher and Hassan Hathout, both well-known, self-declared Muslim Brotherhood members who were heavily influenced by the teachings of founder Hassan al-Banna.
One prominent invitee to the meeting was Hassan Al-Jabri (aka Hossam AlJabri and Hossam Jabri),5 former executive national director of MAS. Al-Jabri was both the imam and one of three original leaders of the Islamic Society of Boston, which is closely linked to several front groups, including ISNA, the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), and the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), as well as the Holy Land Foundation and the five defendants in the HLF case.
Other invitees included Salam Al-Marayati, president of MPAC; Mohamed Elibiary, president of the Freedom and Justice Foundation; Mohamed Magid, past president of ISNA and imam of All Dulles Area Muslim Society; Ingrid Mattson past president of ISNA; and Dalia Mogahed of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies.6
In essence, DHS-CRCL actively recruited
and “vetted” prominent leaders of at least three well-known North American affiliates of the international Muslim Brotherhood organization – which maintains a clearly stated strategy of promoting the supremacy of Islam in America – to attend the meeting and help develop the nation’s counterterrorism policy.
On January 28, 2010, Napolitano and her senior staff had met privately with a select group of Muslim, Arab, and Sikh organizations, including three directly associated with Hamas, an outlawed terrorist entity.7 PJ Media reported that Napolitano briefed the leaders on DHS counter-radicalization and antiterrorist programs. The story also quoted Walid Phares, then director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who criticized the partnership concept.
“Through the so-called ‘partnership’ between the jihadi-sympathizer networks and US bureaucracies, the US government is invaded by militant groups,” he said. He further stated that this Obama-embraced policy is “how American national security policy has been influenced” by Muslim groups, who, he warned, are duping administration officials.8
Finally, the DHS-CRCL meeting, which was convened to “ask for their help with membership in the upcoming DHS faith-based information sharing task force,” led to the formation of the Countering Violent Extremism Working Group in the spring of 2010.9
Meanwhile, on the weekend of March 12–14, 2010, I took some R & R and met with some friends in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
After more than three months, I was still working on the “modification” project. As I left my friends and drove south toward Atlanta that pleasant Sunday afternoon, I was doing a lot of talking out loud and praying as I searched for the right thing to do.
I knew something bad would happen, sooner or later, and that the information I was deleting would eventually connect in one way or another to individuals with known or potential ties to terrorist activity.
THE WORD IS OUT
The next day was Monday, March 15, 2010. I went back to work, and, after getting settled in, checked my e-mail.