by Philip Haney
However, in the days just before the summit was scheduled, February 18, 2015, leaders of all three “model communities” held press conferences and renounced the program, expressing “grave concerns” and charging it “is rooted in the flawed ‘radicalization theory’” which “claims that there is a fixed trajectory to radicalization with indicators that, if detected early on, can be interrupted through intervention. Examples of indicators used in this theory as signs of radicalization include growing beards, increasing involvement in social activism and community issues, and wearing traditional Islamic clothing.”5
POSITIVE MATCH
In the meantime, the Alharbi saga provides irrefutable evidence that the political authorities charged with protecting our national security are conflicted not only by domestic influences but also by longtime foreign alliances.
As NTC officers were creating an event file on Abdul Rahman Ali Alharbi early in the morning of April 16, the Saudi national was also being designated a “Bravo 10,” the highest designated threat to national security.
Further, contrary to the insistence of DHS Secretary Napolitano and her colleagues in ICE, the NTC event file showed that the State Department liaison in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, had been notified by the afternoon of April 16 that Alharbi was to be deported on 3-B, or terrorism-related, charges.
After inspecting his apartment from about 9 p.m. until nearly midnight on April 15, FBI field agents reported their findings to their superiors, who then coordinated with the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, where officials and analysts at the highest level agreed that the man detained by law enforcement officers at the Boston Marathon finish line should be designated as a potentially armed and dangerous individual.
Operating in close coordination with this internal stream of activity, the Terrorist Screening Center maintains the US government’s consolidated terrorist watchlist of those known or reasonably suspected of being involved in terrorist activity. In turn, these officials and analysts cooperate and share information with the NTC, where the events are created and vetted for any additional secret-level, derogatory information.
In the Alharbi case, all of this was done in the hours immediately after the bombing, and by 6 a.m. on April 16, 2013, the next day, a picture had emerged.
But other, still-unknown forces and influences suddenly entered the process, and by the time Napolitano testified on the afternoon of April 18, the picture had changed: Napolitano basically was telling the nation, and the world, that we in the law enforcement community didn’t really know what we were doing and that we should all just move on.
There was nothing to see here.
Some of us saw something and said something, but she denied we had even spoken.
Meanwhile, reports of closed-door meetings with President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Saudi Arabia’s highest officials suggested the Alharbi case was an urgent state-level matter.
Unexpectedly, Kerry’s April 17 meeting with Saudi Arabian foreign minister Saud Al Faisal was abruptly closed to media.
On the day of the House hearing, April 18, 2013, Obama had another unscheduled meeting with Saudi foreign minister Prince Saud at the White House.
On April 19, 2013, Reps. Michael T. McCaul, Jeff Duncan, Peter King, and Candice Miller sent a signed letter to Napolitano asking for a classified briefing on DHS information and actions related to the case, noting that despite her testimony, “media reports have continued to raise concerns about this individual and adjustments that may have been made to his immigration status, including possible visa revocation and terrorist watch-listing, in the days following the bombing.”6
To the best of my knowledge, this request was never granted.
Back at the NTC, Alharbi’s event file was updated. Fewer than twenty-four hours after the initial notification of deportation, the order was rescinded.
Another important but largely overlooked fact is that Alharbi was “out of status,” according to the terms of his F-1 student visa, and was deportable on that basis alone.
Meanwhile, along with Secretary Napolitano, an ICE official claimed that Alharbi had never been in custody and that reports by Glenn Beck’s TheBlaze news website that the DHS had opened an event on him and planned to deport him on 212 3(B) charges were “categorically false.” In fact, said the official, TheBlaze’s “alleged source has no idea what they are talking about.”7
The simple fact, however, is that NTC officers create events only when they are asked to provide them.
Such a request may come from an officer at a port who is interviewing someone in secondary or from an analyst who is seeking additional information on a case, or, as in the Alharbi case, from another branch of the government.
For the Alharbi record to be created, the officers who questioned the Saudi national in the hospital, then inspected his apartment and belongings, would have to determine whether or not some kind of law enforcement action was warranted. Then, after all of the evidence was reviewed, in cooperation with the National Counterterrorism Center, a request to create an event would be sent to the NTC. At that point, the NTC officers would begin collating the information, both classified and nonclassified, into a standard template format, called a targeting framework, or a TF event.
In other words, they would start “filling in the blanks” until they compiled as much relevant information as possible.
After this, the same group of CIA, FBI, JTTF, NCTC, NTC, State Department, or executive branch officials and analysts who originally requested the event would review the information and make a final decision, which in this case was: deport him.
For Alharbi, the process was set in motion and the consulate liaison at the US embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, was notified that one of their citizens was about to be deported from the United States.
But just twenty-four hours later, someone at NTC was instructed to send an e-mail to the State Department, rescinding the visa revocation request and pending deportation.
What happened in the twenty-four-hour period between Monday evening, when the deportation order was made, and Tuesday evening, when it was rescinded?
About three weeks later, this strange case became even more mysterious.
On May 8, 2013, a record was entered into the system indicating that Alharbi’s F-1 student visa was no longer valid. The instruction to frontline CBP officers was to notify NTC-ICE immediately if he tried to enter the United States.
What is going on here? I thought as I examined the record.
Alharbi presumably was not deported, but this new record indicated that he was no longer in the United States.
Three weeks after the bombing the Saudi national, who was never a person of interest, never a subject of interest, and never scheduled for deportation (according to Napolitano), and who was really someone else (according to ICE), was gone.
ON CAPITOL HILL
By this point in my career, I was becoming familiar with the consequences of saying something after I had seen something. Now my colleague, congressional liaison Raymond Orzel, was about to learn the same lesson.
Within fifteen minutes of the end of Napolitano’s April 18, 2013, testimony, Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff, Connie Hair, called me. “You’ve got to go get the records and fax them to Ray,” she said, “because they’re going to fire him.”
Orzel was caught with an M50 pointed at him. If he couldn’t produce the evidence, he would have been discredited right then and there.
After all, Napolitano had just made her infamous declaration, which I call “the Three Nos”: no person of interest, no subject of interest, no deportation.
It was my day off, but I got dressed and went to a secure location near the airport and printed off copies of the files.
At about 4:45 p.m., I faxed the files to the secure number at the House Homeland Security Committee offices in the Ford Building.
With Orzel on the phone to confirm each page as it arrived, all I could hear him say was, “Thank God, Ph
ilip, thank God.”
As soon as I knew he had everything, I shredded my copies and went back home.
While I was driving home, Orzel presented the documents to the committee, confirming that Napolitano had either just lied, or at the very least grossly misstated the facts of the case.
And now they had the evidence.
Within the next few days, someone, presumably from within the committee, provided copies of the documents to Beck at TheBlaze and Baier at Fox News.
Within a month, Orzel was pulled off the committee and reassigned to a cubicle in the corner of the ICE building. In less than three months, DHS Internal Affairs was targeting me in an investigation of who leaked the Alharbi information to the two newsmen.
BECK LAWSUIT
For Glenn Beck, saying something resulted in a civil lawsuit filed on March 28, 2014, by Alharbi in federal court in Massachusetts, against him, TheBlaze Inc., Mercury Radio Arts, Inc., and Premiere Radio Networks Inc., alleging assault, libel, and slander:
Plaintiff Abdulrahman Alharbi alleged that Defendant Glenn Beck repeatedly and falsely identified Mr. Alharbi as an active participant in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, repeatedly questioned the motives of federal officials in failing to pursue or detain Mr. Alharbi, and repeatedly and falsely accused Mr. Alharbi of being a criminal who had funded the attacks.8
On a side note, allowing a foreign national from an Islamic country to sue an American citizen for slander sets a dangerous precedent with respect to First Amendment rights of free expression.
According to Islamic law, slander, or ghiba, is considered a capital offense. In Islam, slander is much more complex than the standard Webster’s Dictionary definition, which is to make a false, libelous remark about someone.
In Islam, you can slander someone even when you are telling the truth about him. Or, as written in the Hadith, the sayings of Muhammad, “If what you say of him is true, you have slandered him, and if what you say of him is not true, you have reviled him.”
Also, from an Islamic perspective, actions such as the targeting of Muslim communities by law enforcement officers to find violent jihadists is seen as a form of persecution, also known as fitna, meaning opposition or oppression. Causing any kind of fitna within the Islamic community is also seen as a capital offense.
The lawsuit claimed that Beck had made repeated false statements about Alharbi on Beck’s radio show. Alharbi charged that the statements had damaged his reputation and subjected him to public messages, via the Web, calling him a murderer, child killer, and terrorist.
On broadcasts following the bombing, Beck said Alharbi was an al-Qaeda “control agent” or moneyman who recruited the Tsarnaev brothers to carry out the bombing.9 He also contended that Alharbi was designated as a 212 3(B) subject after being interviewed and having his apartment searched, but a retired Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) special agent, Bob Trent, told Beck in a TheBlaze television interview that the 3(B) designation is applied only to foreign nationals before entering the country.10
To date, no evidence has surfaced that would link Alharbi to the Boston bombing plot. Nor is it certain exactly when the 212 3(B) designation was given to Alharbi.
Was he already on the law enforcement radar before the Boston Marathon attack? But with that designation, he should have either never been allowed to enter the country in the first place, or been deported and barred from ever reentering the country again.
His proximity to one of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil would warrant the suspicion of any reasonable law enforcement officer or public official.
Somewhere amid the fog of denials and disinformation, there are still some facts about the Alharbi case that remain inescapable.
First, according to the terms of his F-1 student visa, he was out of status and could have been deported on that basis alone.
Second, he was scheduled to be deported the day after the bombings, apparently under the radar, in all probability because of the complicated relationship between the United States and its oil-rich Middle East ally.
In Saudi Arabia, the Alharbi family is as prominent and wealthy as the bin Laden family. At the same time, more than ten individuals from the Alharbi clan have been linked to al-Qaeda, with as many as five members imprisoned at the US facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It’s significant to note that on the day of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration precipitously airlifted from the United States to Saudi Arabia high-ranking Saudis, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, even as US airways were shut down. All this, while fifteen of the nineteen hijackers who carried out the 9/11 attacks came from the Islamic kingdom.11
Third, Alharbi actually was designated a 3(B). Afterward, decisions may have been made to change or revoke the designation, but that does not change the fact that he was designated as a 3(B).
Even if it was only for five minutes, it still happened.
If there were good reasons for the decisions that were made, it would have been simple enough for Napolitano to explain it to Congress in a closed-door session. If that had been done in a reasonable and professional manner, none of the law-enforcement sensitive information about Alharbi would have ever been made public.
But when DHS and ICE officials made their false claims in public, it became the solemn duty and obligation of individuals like me to fulfill our oath to protect our country from threats both foreign and domestic, and to do our utmost to notify someone in a position of authority.
Consider if we had simply chosen to say nothing and something even worse had happened. Would history have accepted our reasons for not coming forward and doing all we could to help protect our country?
Meanwhile, Beck appealed to federal Judge Patti B. Saris to dismiss the defamation case. But in December 2014, she allowed it to move forward, rejecting defense arguments that Alharbi was a “limited purpose” or “involuntary” public figure who failed to show that Beck acted with “actual malice”: “Choosing to attend a sporting event as one of thousands of spectators is not the kind of conduct that a reasonable person would expect to result in publicity,” Saris wrote.12
In June 2015, the judge allowed Alharbi to amend his defamation lawsuit by adding a count for unjust enrichment.13
The case is now in the discovery phase. According to legal editor Steven J. J. Weisman of Talkers magazine, “Beck’s attorneys are seeking information from the Boston Police Department, the Massachusetts State Police and 10 federal agencies, including the FBI, the CIA, and the Department of Homeland Security.”14
ISLAMIC SOCIETY OF BOSTON
Whether or not Alharbi was involved in the Boston plot, the fact remains that law enforcement officials had access to information showing that dozens of individuals associated with the Islamic Society of Boston – whose Cambridge, Massachusetts, mosque was attended by the Tsarnaev brothers – have ties to terrorism.
Remarkably, the ISB later became the center of the administration’s policy of Countering Violent Extremism, held up as “a model community” at the February 18, 2015, White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism.
But the ISB was founded by Hamas and Hezbollah supporter Abdurahman Alamoudi, who in 2004 was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison on terrorism-related charges. ISB’s Cambridge mosque is run by the Muslim American Society, which federal prosecutors say is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. Its roster of worshippers includes the infamous “Lady al Qaeda,” Aafia Siddiqui, who was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while allegedly planning a chemical attack in New York City.
Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a founding trustee of the ISB.
Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, who often spoke on behalf of the Cambridge mosque, cited “Lady al Qaeda” Siddiqui in his criticism of the antiterrorism USA PATRIOT Act, which was passed in response to 9/11 under the George W. Bush administration. “After they’re done with [Siddiqui], they are going to come to your door if they feel like it,” he said in a video obtaine
d by the counterterrorism nonprofit Americans for Peace and Tolerance.15
When Siddiqui was arrested in Afghanistan, she was in possession of a cyanide canister. In detention, she grabbed a rifle and, in the tussle, shot at military officers and FBI agents. She was convicted in New York in 2010 and sentenced to eighty-six years in prison.
Another worshipper at the Cambridge mosque was Tarek Mehanna, who was sentenced in 2012 to seventeen years in prison for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda in an attack on a Boston-area mall.
Americans for Peace and Tolerance found writings by Syed Qutb, the former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt regarded by al-Qaeda as its spiritual father, at the Cambridge mosque’s library in 2003.
The top propagandist for ISIS, Ahmad Abousamra, also was a regular worshipper at the Cambridge mosque, according to the FBI. Paul Sperry reported in the New York Post September 2014 that the FBI suspected Abousamra was operating ISIS’s sophisticated media wing promoting the group’s beheadings and other atrocities through videos posted on the Internet.16
The trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston, the North American Islamic Trust, was also designated as an unindicted coconspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case. NAIT holds title to more than three hundred mosques and has helped finance more than five hundred Islamic centers in America. NAIT’s properties include the Chattanooga, Tennessee, mosque attended by Mohammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who killed four Marines at a recruiting center in July 2015, and the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, where worshippers included two ISIS terrorists who attacked the Garland, Texas, “Draw Muhammad” event in May 2015 and planned to shoot up the Super Bowl.
TROJAN HORSE
Less than one month after the Boston bombing, CAIR submitted a report to McCaul’s House Homeland Security Committee as a supplement to a May 9, 2013, committee hearing, titled “The Boston Bombings: A First Look.” The report contended that “[v]iolent extremism is not limited to any one ethnicity, political ideology or religion” and said that al-Qaeda’s “ideology is a combination of extreme political and fringe religious views that exist outside mainstream Islamic beliefs and practices.”17