And unlike a criminal defense attorney, whose job begins and ends with making sure the state proves its case, CAIR keeps on defending terrorists even when juries return unanimous and overwhelming verdicts of guilt, as one did in 2008’s Holy Land case—guilty on all 108 counts.
Moreover, CAIR’s internal documents betray Saylor’s explanation. They make it plain that his attempt to compare CAIR’s motives to those of a Founding Father is just more patriotic eyewash designed to conceal from the public CAIR’s true seditious agenda.
Privately, CAIR believes that it doesn’t matter if terrorist suspects are guilty as charged. If they are Muslims accused by non-Muslims they are automatically innocent—and must always be defended and supported.
Witness a talking points memo found among Awad’s files, and written in 2004—as the cases of Ismail Royer and his terrorist co-conspirator Masaud Khan were going to trial. It discusses the duty of Muslim leaders to do all they can to release imprisoned fellow Muslims.
“Give this talk as if it were your last before meeting Allah,” the document says. “Discuss verses from the Quran and ahadith regarding the degree previous Muslim leaders went through to release fellow Muslim prisoners.”42
The memo, which cites the Royer and Khan cases by name, goes on to praise Muslims who don’t plea bargain and refuse to rat out other Muslims.
“Relate the difference between the brothers that have turned on their brothers by pleading guilty,” it says, “and why we should come to the aid of those who are standing firm because of their conviction and iman,” or faith.43
The memo ends by noting that CAIR is “working to build a legal fund for the purpose of providing high quality legal representation for current and future litigation against our brothers and sisters.”
“Our community is under direct attack,” it warns, “and we must join hands to defend ourselves in this time of uncertainty.”44
U.S. AND ISRAELI ‘TERRORISM’
CAIR also believes the only real terrorism is committed by Israel and the United States—in response to Muslim terrorism, ironically enough.
In fact, one of CAIR’s in-house lawyers fired off a memo to top CAIR executives proposing the organization file a lawsuit against the U.S. and Israel “for conspiring to commit murder, kidnapping, property damage, and acts of terrorism.”45
The alleged crime? Israel’s counteroffensive against Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon who in 2006 launched unprovoked and relentless rocket attacks against Israel.
“Defendants would include the United States and certain officials in the Bush administration and Israel and certain officials in its administration,” wrote CAIR’s Omar T. Mohammedi in an August 2006 memo to Awad and then-CAIR Chairman Parvez Ahmed.46 And the plaintiffs, he suggested, would include Muslims harmed by Israel’s military counterstrikes against Hezbollah positions, ostensibly including the terrorists themselves.
More galling, Mohammedi proposed filing the claim under the same federal racketeering and corruption statute, known as RICO, that the FBI and U.S. attorneys have considered using to prosecute CAIR and other fronts in the Muslim mafia.
With the revelation of such a brash legal stroke on behalf of Hezbollah, it should come as little surprise that CAIR also refuses to condemn Hezbollah as a terrorist group. Hamas, al-Qaida, Hezbollah…to CAIR, they’re all victims—martyrs for “justice”—and we’re the terrorists.
The only thing worse than supporting all these bad guys is supporting bad cops who spy for them. CAIR’s done that, too, as we document next.
CHAPTER FIVE
CAIR’S BAD COP
“The Muslim is the brother of the Muslim. He does not betray him, lie to him, or hang back from coming to his aid.”
—Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law
“Employment by a non-Muslim government of a Muslim investigator to investigate other Muslims places the investigator in the position of violating the tenets of his beliefs and may force his recourse to deception, lying, and/or the giving of misleading impressions.”
—Declassified Pentagon counterintelligence briefing1
FORMER POLICE SERGEANT Mohammad Weiss Rasool took an oath to protect this country several years ago when he joined the Fairfax County Police Department, which is the largest force in Virginia and a key partner with the FBI in investigating major terrorism cases in the Washington area, including the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon.
But Rasool, an Afghan immigrant, got wrapped up with CAIR and put his religion ahead of his adopted country. In fact, he betrayed it.
A devout Sunni Muslim, he worshipped at an area mosque with at least one fellow Muslim who found himself under surveillance in a major terrorism investigation and approached his pal Rasool with concerns about unmarked cars that had been following him. Rasool agreed to help him by searching a classified federal police database. After confirming that FBI agents were tailing him, the sergeant tipped his Muslim brother off in a phone call.
When agents one morning went to arrest the terrorist target in a predawn raid, 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 Muslim police officer had breached their database at least fifteen times to look up names of other Muslim contacts, including relatives, to see if they showed up on the terrorist watch list. And he learned that indeed some were on it.2 (Thanks to post-9/11 data sharing, local police now have access to classified FBI files on terror suspects maintained within the NCIC, or National Crime Information Center system.)
Prosecutors say Rasool’s unauthorized searches “damaged the integrity of the NCIC system and jeopardized at least one federal investigation,” according to papers filed in federal court.3
“The defendant’s actions could have placed federal agents in danger,” prosecutors argued. “The FBI has had to undo the harm caused by the defendant.”
Rasool, 32, at first denied knowing the terrorist target. He confessed only after hearing an intercepted recording of his message for the suspect, a cleric in his local Taliban-sympathizing mosque. Rasool finally pleaded guilty to illegally searching a federal database.4
“He’s a habitual liar and a traitor,” a senior FCPD official says. “He disgraced the uniform.”5
CAIR’S ‘PLANT’
Despite confessing to a serious security breach, Rasool will do no jail time. He was sentenced instead to two years of probation.
And he continued to collect a paycheck from taxpayers several months after his conviction. Fairfax County left him on the force pending the outcome of an internal investigation. He wasn’t forced to resign until the summer of 2008.6
“It took them a very long time to finally do the right thing, but it got done,” says a veteran FCPD detective. “It was embarrassing.”7
The leniency afforded Rasool was unprecedented, given how he copped to the crime—and not just any crime, but one that betrayed his fellow officers and country.
Rasool, however, had a powerful patron in Washington—the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which lobbied on his behalf during his prosecution.
“I have always found Sergeant Rasool eager to promote a substantive relationship between the Fairfax County Police Department and the local Muslim community,” wrote CAIR Governmental Affairs Coordinator Corey Saylor in a letter to the federal judge, who ended up denying prosecutors the jail time they requested for Rasool.
“His efforts played a significant role in improving trust in a time when mutual misunderstanding could easily severe [sic] all positive ties between these two groups,” Saylor added.8
But if there was a “substantive relationship,” it was between Rasool and CAIR.
“He was deeply embedded with CAIR,” the department official says. “He was the spokesman to the department for CAIR.”9
As CAIR’s representative on the police force, Rasool actually took
direction from CAIR’s headquarters, even traveling into the District of Columbia to meet with CAIR Executive Director Nihad Awad, according to copies of the visitors register CAIR kept at its front desk at the time. Rasool, in fact, had several meetings at CAIR’s headquarters between 2005 and 2008.10
He also arranged meetings between CAIR and Fairfax County’s police chief to complain about surveillance of mosques and demand Muslim sensitivity training of officers, reveal emails obtained from CAIR’s executive files.
“Our topics of discussion will be: Educational programs for the officers on the department about Islam and Muslims; presence of officers at the holy Muslim holidays for recruitment into the police departments; inmate assistance program with their respective mosque imam; youth group tours of police facilities; and a few other ideas and focal points,” Rasool wrote in a 2006 email to Awad and other CAIR officials outlining the agenda of a forthcoming meeting at police headquarters.11
He reminded them to appear “friendly” and to avoid creating too much tension, so they can come back with more demands later on. “This will not end here,” he assured them.
Rasool also told CAIR that he would give the police chief a copy of a report advocating kid-glove treatment of Arabs and Muslims by law enforcement.
“He was their plant,” the official says. “We were convinced he was recruited by the Muslim Brotherhood.”12
RED FLAGS
Veterans of the police force are scandalized by the security breach. They call Rasool an Islamic “spy” who committed treason for the enemy in the middle of a war on Islamic terrorists.
“He’s a spy. I don’t know how he qualified to be hired in the first place,” says retired FCPD officer Vernon Zick, a thirty-four-year veteran of the department. “The feds should revoke his citizenship for his treasonous activity, and send him and his family back to Afghanistan.”13
The department official says there were red flags raised during Rasool’s application process, but they were overlooked as the department sought to diversify its work force and better reflect the county’s burgeoning Muslim population. He also had a friend – a Muslim brother in blue – inside the department, who vouched for his loyalty…an officer who’s not only still on the force, but closely collaborating with CAIR (more on him later).
Rasool in his seven years on the force managed to do other damage besides spying for terrorists.
He and other Muslim officers also worked with CAIR to kill a successful counterterror-training program within the department—a program that was designed in part to help police ferret out moles like Rasool.
The action casts further doubt on claims by CAIR and other Muslim groups that they seek cooperation with law enforcement to help apprehend terrorists. As we’ll see next, their claim of cooperation is actually one of the biggest frauds perpetrated on the American public since 9/11.
CHAPTER SIX
COOPERATION? WHAT COOPERATION?
“They were warned by CAIR that we were coming to do a search warrant. We were pissed. It was obvious to us they knew we were coming.”
—Senior investigator, FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington, recalling blown raid of a Saudi-controlled jihadi seminary 1
THE WASHINGTON-BASED HIGGINS CENTER for Counter Terrorism Research has trained more than eight thousand law enforcement officers in counterterrorism methods. They include hundreds of detectives and patrol officers from the Fairfax County Police Department, which works with the National Counter Terrorism Center and has originated or aided many of the FBI’s major terrorism cases in the Washington area. Its jurisdiction includes Falls Church, Virginia, an al-Qaida hotbed.
The large northern Virginia police force contracted with the Higgins Center for training for several years without a complaint. The courses were taught by respected instructors Brian P. Fairchild, a former CIA officer who operated against radical Islamic targets in Southeast Asia and Europe, and Peter M. Leitner, a former Pentagon official who has taught at George Mason University’s National Center for Biodefense.
But in 2006, the Fairfax County PD suddenly canceled the courses and did not invite the instructors back.
“We were essentially blackballed,” Leitner recalls.2 He cites complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations—which like many Muslim Brotherhood front groups, publicly appears eager to cooperate with law enforcement officials while sabotaging their efforts behind the scenes.
CAIR claimed that one of the courses taught by the Higgins Center portrayed Islam in a bad light, police sources say. In at least two phone conversations, CAIR officials complained directly to Fairfax County Police Chief David Rohrer, and the chief eventually canceled the training in 2006.3
That same year, Rohrer spoke at CAIR’s annual fundraising dinner in Washington, crediting the group with “helping police departments to better understand the Muslim community.”
But the chief was being used—by the Islamist enemy. While he was breaking bread with CAIR, one of his officers working with CAIR at the time was under federal investigation for aiding and abetting terrorists.
And so was CAIR—the group from whom Rohrer was accepting phone calls and on whom he was conferring legitimacy. In fact, U.S. prosecutors at the time were adding CAIR to a list of co-conspirators in a terror scheme to funnel more than $12 million to Hamas suicide bombers and their families.
Yet CAIR persuaded the politically correct Rohrer to nix the anti-terror training, which included counterintelligence measures to help police guard against the very infiltration from terror supporters and facilitators that has taken place on Rohrer’s watch.
In fact, CAIR had help on the inside. “CAIR was successful through two Muslim officers in getting the Higgins group removed from our training curriculum,” a high-ranking FCPD official says.4
One of them was Fairfax County police sergeant Mohammad Weiss Rasool, who in 2008 pleaded guilty to illegally accessing a classified federal database to tip off a Muslim friend under surveillance as part of a terrorism investigation.
“This is precisely why Fairfax PD needs our training,” Leitner says. “They need to learn about Fifth Column activities and penetrating agents.”5 Sadly, he says, the chief appears more concerned with protecting the force from charges of “Islamophobia” than Islamist penetration.
“Let us choose tolerance over intolerance, acceptance over prejudice, and understanding over ignorance,” Rohrer intoned at CAIR’s banquet, which raised more than $600,000 and only made the job of his detectives that much harder.
Such funds aren’t used just to raise “cultural awareness,” as CAIR would have the public believe. They’re also used to raise the banner of jihad overseas, while blocking counterterrorism training and investigations at home. The chief unwittingly helped the bad guys stay in business while denying his squad valuable training.
And contrary to CAIR’s bellyaching, the Higgins Center did not teach anti-Islamic propaganda, insists the high-ranking FCPD official, who wished to go unnamed. The instructors keyed in on the militant part of Islam that’s promoting terrorism and never bashed the faith or Muslims in general.
“They came in and talked truth,” he says, noting that the human resources office had approved the course content. “They didn’t follow some PC check-off list.”
CAIR simply had an ax to grind, he says. The police department has actively worked cases against CAIR, including the investigation of former CAIR official Randall Ismail Royer, now serving twenty years in prison on terrorism-related charges.
The official says the Higgins Center’s instruction in counterterror methods, which began in 2003, was valuable to patrol officers and detectives.
“If the Fairfax County police can’t hear this,” he says, “we are diminishing our ability to be effective in this particular environment.”
WASHINGTON AND NEW YORK WILL ‘TREMBLE’
Leitner points out that one Muslim cop who complained about the training felt compelled to defend Islam’s peaceful and
tolerant nature. But in doing so, ironically, he quoted a notorious Islamic extremist. He says the unidentified officer praised Maulana Maududi, the late violent Pakistani radical who preached that Islam will destroy the West.
“The objective of Islamic jihad is to put an end to the dominance of the un-Islamic systems of government and replace them with Islamic rule,” wrote Maududi, founder of Pakistan’s religious party Jamaat e-Islami.
“A time will come when capitalistic democracy will tremble for its safety in Washington and New York,” he ominously warned before the 9/11 attacks on those cities.
CAIR actually uses works by Maududi for internal training, and recommends his books as “sources of dawah training material,” according to a document found at its headquarters.6 Dawah is the Muslim mission to convert others to Islam (others such as Royer, unfortunately).
The other Muslim officer who worked with CAIR to kill the Higgins Center training course happens to be from Pakistan. His name is Sergeant Naveed I. Butt, and he was Rasool’s partner on the inside. In fact, it was Butt who conducted the original employee background investigation of Rasool, who was easily hired on his recommendation.7 Essentially, a Muslim spy for the enemy was vetted by another Muslim, who as it turns out is equally suspect.
While Rasool is gone, Butt remains on the force. The son of a Pakistani government diplomat, he’s also deeply embedded with CAIR, the department official says, and openly brags about his contacts with the group.
CAIR’s guest register shows Butt traveled with Rasool to CAIR’s headquarters at least twice to meet with officials there, once in 2007 and again in 2008.8
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