While the FBI has knocked out several leaders on various charges, the investigations have come in fits and starts. The Justice Department, politically risk-adverse as it is and still locked in a pre-9/11 mentality, remains reluctant to roll up the entire syndicate under racketeering and conspiracy statutes known as RICO—a broader and more aggressive approach favored by case agents and some prosecutors.
Congress enacted the RICO law to remove the tentacles of organized crime from legitimate enterprise. Too often the mob was able to infiltrate legitimate operations, giving a veneer of legality while secretly engaging in a pattern of criminal behavior.
Likewise, the Muslim mafia engages in a pattern of criminal conduct, laundering illicit funds through a network of legitimate-sounding front organizations. Even worse, this mafia uses religious sanctuaries to solicit holy war and treason against the U.S. government and military.
“The patterns are quite clear,” Sadler says. “Certain members of these organizations are known offenders tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. And birds of a feather flock together.”
The FBI has known the Brotherhood was a threat since at least the 1980s, and some of the same leaders under investigation then remain under investigation today. Recently declassified case files marked “SECRET” reveal that the bureau identified Jamal Barzinji, as well as Hisham Altalib, Mohammed Shamma, and Ahmad Sakr, as “members of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
“These individuals are in a position to direct the activities and support of Muslims in the U.S. for the Islamic Revolution,” the FBI report warned decades ago.8
Some say it may be too late to go after the Brotherhood now as a criminal conspiracy due to its deep entrenchment in U.S. society. Because law enforcement allowed the Brothers to conduct their organizational jihad virtually unchallenged and unexamined for decades, they have had time to build up an impressive institutional bulwark.
In fact, their organizations now represent the entire Muslim establishment in America. And few in Washington have the political will to dismantle it.
The Brotherhood has become so brazen that it recently declared war on the FBI over its cancellation of formal outreach with CAIR. It’s also targeted prosecutors such as assistant U.S. Attorney Gordon Kromberg for harassment, personally singling out him and his family. Kromberg’s district covers Northern Virginia—the base of operations for the Brotherhood—and he has prosecuted many of its leaders.
Kromberg is a threat to the Brothers because he understands their conspiracy and he knows CAIR is integral to it. In a recent terrorism case, he submitted that “from its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists.” He added that “the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.”
Many counterterrorism experts warn that dismantling this infrastructure of support for terrorists remains an unfought battle in the war on terror. Reason: the syndicate that erected it is religious in nature and protected by political correctness.
Guandolo says this is the main reason he resigned last year from the bureau. He says he was frustrated by the PC handcuffs headquarters put on him and other agents trying to make solid cases against Brotherhood fronts and leaders. He says he was threatened with his job no less than three times by FBI brass who complained that “we were creating waves in the Muslim community.”
Guandolo says the Muslim Brotherhood is like “a cancer,” and Washington is just feeding it with its PC outreach. The Justice Department has held some seventy-five meetings with Brotherhood front groups who claim to represent the Muslim community, and officials still hold bimonthly meetings with them.
While the FBI has severed formal ties to CAIR, thanks to pressure from Guandolo and other case agents, the agency is still conducting outreach with another dangerous Brotherhood front considered “a nucleus” of the movement in America.
* * *
SUSPECTED U.S. MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD FIGURES9
Omar M. Ahmad (aka Omar Yehia aka Omar Yeheya)
Nihad Awad (aka Nehad Hammad)
Mohamed Nimer
Nabil Sadoun
Ishsan Bagby
Rafeeq Jaber
Mohammed al-Hanooti
Muhammad Salah
Jamal Badawi
Ismail Jaber
Shaker al-Sayyed
Jamal Barzinji
Mousa Abu Marzook (aka Abu Omar)
Muhammad Akram
Mohammad Jaghlit
Hamid al-Ghazili
Muzzamil Siddiqi
Bassam Osman (aka Bassem Othman)
Ahmed Osman
Louay Safi
Sayyid Syeed
Irfan Totonji
Ahmad Totonji (father of Omer Totonji)
Iqbal Unus
Mahboob Khan (late father of Suhail Khan)
Samir Salah
Abdurahman Alamoudi
Sami al-Arian
Gaddor Ibrahim Saidi
Nizar Minshar
Raed Awad
Tareq Suwaidan
Ahmad Yousif
Yasser Bushnaq
Mohammed el-Mezain
Ismail Elbarasse (aka Abdul Hassan aka Abd el-Hassan)
Ghassan Dahduli
Abdelhaleem Ashqar (aka Abdel Hassan)
Soliman Beheiri
Ghassan Elashi
Issam el-Siraj
Omar al-Soubani
Ismail Jabir
Muhammad Abbas
Fawaz Mushtaha (aka Abu Mosab)
Izat Mansour
Hammud Salem
Nadir Jawad
Rashid Qurman
Shukri Abu Baker
Muhammad Abu Amriya
Jamal Said
Anan al-Karmi
Ayman Saraj al-Din
Ahmad Agha
Akram al-Kharoubi
Walid Abu Sharakh
Mahdi Bray
Walid Ranu
Ayman Sharawi
Hazim Elashi
Basman Elashi
Haitham Maghawri
Akram Mishal
Mufid Abdulgader
Abdulrahman Odeh
Ayman Ismail
Ayman Siraj Eddin
Bayan Elashi
Dalell Mohamed
Fayez Idlebi
Hassan Sabri
Ibrahim al-Samneh
Islam Siam
Izzat Mansour
Kifah Mustapha
Mohamed Abu Amaria
Mohamed el-Shorbagi
Mohammed Akram Adlouni
Mohamed Qassam Sawallha (aka Abu Obeida)
Munzer Taleb
Muin Shabib
Nader Jawad
Omar el-Sobani
Rashid Qurman
Rasmi Almallah
Walid Abu Sharkh
Walid Ranu
Yousef Saleh (aka Ahmed Yousef)
Zaher Salman (aka Osama Abdullah)
Khalid al-Masri
Kamal al-Tamimi (aka Abu Islam)
Esam Omeish
Mohamed Omeish
Shaker Elsayed
Hamza Yusuf
Zaid Shaker
Siraj Wahhaj
Johari Abdul-Malik
Mohamad Adam el-Sheikh
Samir Abou-Issa
Anwar Auluqi (aka Anwar al-Awlaki)
Abdulhamid Abusulayman
Taha al-Alwani
Hisham Altalib
M. Omar Ashraf
Muhammad Ashraf
Bassam Estwani
Jawad F. George
Yaqub Mirza
Tanveer Mirza
Fawaz Mushtaha
Cherif Sedky
Khaled Saffuri
Mohammed Cheema
Ali al-Timimi
Osama M. Kandil
Ashraf Nubani
Abdulwahab Alkebsi
Rabih Haddad
Omar Abdul Rahman (aka Blind Sheik)
Gaddour Saidi
Ahmed Elkadi
Hamed al-Ghazali
Zeid al-Noman (aka Zaid Naman)
Jihad Fahmy
Khalid Iqbal
Hani Sakr
Ziad Abu-Ghanimeh
Mohammed M. Shamma
Mahdi Bhadori
Ilyas Ba-Yunus
Moinuddin Siddiqui
Mahmoud Rashdan
Talat Sultan
Ibrahim Hassaballa
Syed Imtiaz Ahmad
Haroon Qazi
Anwar Ibrahim
Mohamed Hadid
Bassam Othman
Hammad Zaki
Ahmed Elhatab
Mohammed Elharezi
Abdel Jabbar Hamdan
Ghassan Saleh
Riad Ahmed
Abdul-Rahman Baraksi
Akram Kharroubi
Amin Ezziddine
Souheil Ghannouchi
Dawood Abdulrahman
Oussama Elbaba
Abdulkareem Jama
Ali Mohamed
Abdalla Idris Ali
Abdullah bin Laden
* * *
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NUCLEUS: ISNA
“A logical investigation will confront why four foreign students from Southern Illinois University came to Plainfield [Indiana] to buy a large land mass and build a multimillion-dollar mosque where there were no Muslims within hundreds of miles.”
—Tim Pitchford, retired FBI agent, Indianapolis field office1
IF THERE ARE ANY DOUBTS about the financial might of the Muslim mafia, stop by the headquarters of the Islamic Society of North America next time you’re in the Indianapolis suburbs. It reeks of money.
You can’t miss it: There, towering above the prairie, looms a mammoth all-brick structure with two rows of tiny slots for windows. The geometric cluster of cavernous buildings resembles an Islamic fortress, and it’s surrounded by a fiefdom of privately held land.
More than thirty years ago, a handful of Muslim college students and engineers from the Middle East acquired 124 acres of farmland near the Indianapolis airport and moved the offices of the Muslim Students Association there, forming the roots of ISNA.2
They soon announced plans for a forty-two-acre compound on the Plainfield, Indiana, site to include a $3.5 million mosque, along with classrooms, residences, a gym, and a recreational area. Today, the sprawling ISNA campus also includes an eighty-thousand-volume library and a research facility.
Where did these foreign students get the money to erect such an extravagant religious monument?
“Where they got the money is a key question,” says Tim Pitchford, a retired FBI agent who worked terrorism and counterintelligence cases in Indianapolis. “It came from overseas banks, and the FBI never was able to investigate, as we were talking about a ‘religion’ and bank records,” and religious institutions are generally considered off-limits and bank records the domain of the Treasury Department.3
However, such restrictions may be easing, he says, now that ISNA has been named a co-conspirator in the war on terror and now that FBI headquarters is better educated regarding the Muslim Brotherhood threat.
“A logical investigation will confront why four foreign students from Southern Illinois University came to Plainfield to buy a large land mass and build a multi-million-dollar mosque where there were no Muslims within hundreds of miles,” Pitchford says.4
Like CAIR, ISNA was developed as a front for the radical Muslim Brotherhood and bankrolled by shady, terror-tied partners in the Middle East.
The massive ISNA complex was funded with a whopping $21 million raised in part from radical Brotherhood figures Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Saudi-tied Youssef Nada, as well as the emir of Qatar, where Qaradawi is based.5
Nada, a Brotherhood bigwig originally from Egypt, founded Bank al-Taqwa (“Fear of Allah”), which funneled money to Hamas and al-Qaida through a close associate of Osama bin Laden. Nada is a specially designated global terrorist.
Saudi money also was funding ISNA from the very beginning of the organization.
Muslim Students Association co-founder Jamal Barzinji was business partners with Nada and was working for one of his companies in Saudi Arabia during the time ISNA’s headquarters was being planned, funded, and built. Barzinji also headed the financial arm of ISNA—the North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT.
In 1981, ISNA was founded as “a nucleus for the Islamic Movement in North America,” according to an internal Muslim Brotherhood document.6
It’s now the umbrella organization for the Brotherhood, controlling several front groups and hundreds of mosques and schools. While CAIR enjoys more notoriety and is more visible in the media, ISNA is more venerable and ingrained in U.S. society.
Its predecessor, the Muslim Students Association, still serves as the main recruiting tool for the Brotherhood in the U.S.
MSA’S CAMPUS JIHAD
With 150 campus chapters, MSA is one of the nation’s largest college groups. CAIR chief Nihad Awad, for example, got his start as an MSA activist at the University of Minnesota.
MSA also organizes anti-Israel student rallies and hectors college administrators into Islamizing campus facilities.
MSA chapters from New York to California have extolled suicide bombers and other terrorists as “martyrs” and the “only people who truly fear Allah.” And they are a big reason why, according to a recent Pew Research poll, one in four college-age Muslims in America support suicide bombings.
MSA is also the catalyst behind Shariah creep on college campuses.
The militant group has set up a national task force to pressure college administrators into accommodating Muslim students with, among other things:
Islamic prayer rooms;
Paid campus imams;
Special restroom facilities, such as footbaths, for ritual washing;
Separate food and housing for Muslim students;
Campus-wide observance of Islamic holidays; and
Separate athletic hours for Muslim women.
ISNA’S ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
After MSA and ISNA established their beachhead in Indianapolis, Pitchford says he noticed that immigrants from the Middle East began pouring into the state. He and other agents observed a pattern: many of the immigrants were in the country illegally, and they were sponsored by ISNA.
“Six-month visitor visas started coming into Indiana sponsored by ISNA by the thousands over the years,” Pitchford says in an exclusive interview.7
Unfortunately, “the visa fraud cases we presented were not prosecuted by Washington,” he says. “These same visa visitors are still here illegally.”
ISNA denies any wrongdoing. And it has fought its recent inclusion on a list of co-conspirators in the terrorism case against the Holy Land Foundation. ISNA argues it was “unjustly branded by the government,” a move that has “profoundly harmed” its reputation and “adversely impacted the organization’s efforts to advance its mission.”8
The blacklisting may indeed have hurt ISNA. Attendance at last year’s ISNA convention was low, and even ISNA’s flagship mosque in Plainfield has been drawing fewer and fewer Muslims. Attendance at Friday services is down sharply, local observers say.
ISNA, which promotes itself as a voice of moderation, insists it “has not now or ever been involved with the Muslim Brotherhood, or supported any covert, illegal, or terrorist activity or organization.”9
In a separate statement on its Web site, the group goes even further, arguing it has never been “influenced” by the Muslim Brotherhood.10
Of course this is a blantant falsehood. The evidence designating ISNA as a leading branch of the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood is overwhelming, and ISNA’s links to fundraising on behalf of Hamas are equally strong.
TWO DOZEN COURT EXHIBITS
In 2007, the Justice Department officially labeled ISNA and its financial subsidiary NAIT a U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and listed both entities as co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terror case. When IS
NA protested, federal prosecutors pointed to nearly two dozen court exhibits that establish:
Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That's Conspiring to Islamize America Page 28