Terrorism and the Times: What's Not Fit To Print

Sent to us by AZ GOP National Committeeman BRUCE ASH:

by Steven Emerson

IPT News Service

December 18, 2007

http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/576

On Friday, two Islamic converts, radicalized while in prison, pled guilty to terrorism charges, after admitting plots to attack "United States military operations, "infidels," and Israeli and Jewish facilities in the Los Angeles area."

The cell leader, Kevin James, founded Jam'iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS) while incarcerated in Folsom prison, and began recruiting other converts. Levar Washington pled guilty, along with James last week, and a third cell member, Gregory Patterson, pled guilty on Monday.

A fourth JIS member, Hammad Samana, has been found unfit to stand trial, but is accused of having researched "targets and prepared a document called ‘Modes of Attack.' The document listed ‘LAX and Consulate of Zion,' ‘Military Targets,' ‘Army Recruiting centers throughout the county,' ‘Military base in Manhattan Beach' and ‘Campsite of Zion,'" on behalf of the cell.

The JIS plotters face 20 to 25 years in prison. The plots and guilty pleas come as no surprise to those who have closely followed prison chaplaincy programs, as all too often, those in charge of selecting imams have Wahhabist and radical links. Former NYC prison chaplain

Warith Dean Umar has stated that the 9/11 hijackers should be remembered as martyrs, and Umar Abdul-Jalil, top Imam of the New York City Department of Corrections, has his own radical views. As reported by the NY Post, citing tapes provided by the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), Abdul-Jalil spread his radical views at a Muslim Students Association conference in Arizona:

At one conference session, Abdul-Jalil charged that Muslims jailed after the 9/11 attacks were being tortured in Manhattan, according to the tape. "They [some Muslim inmates] are not charged with anything, they are not entitled to any rights, they are interrogated. Some of them are literally tortured and we found this in the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in Manhattan. But they literally are torturing people," Abdul-Jalil said.

Abdul-Jalil also accused the Bush administration of being terrorists, according to the tape. "We have terrorists defining who a terrorist is, but because they have the weight of legitimacy, they get away with it . . . We know that the greatest terrorists in the world occupy the White House, without a doubt," he said.

At another session, Abdul-Jalil urged American Muslims to stop allowing "the Zionists of the media to dictate what Islam is to us" and said Muslims must be "compassionate with each other" and "hard against the kufr [unbeliever]."

And still, despite deadly terrorist attacks perpetrated on U.S. soil, and the all too frequent instances of anti-American sentiment voiced by jihadists, the various usual suspects are intent on either underplaying the threat or pretending that none exists.
In a front page story in October 2006, titled, "

F.B.I. Struggling to Reinvent Itself to Fight Terror," the New York Times dismissed out of hand the dangerous nature of the JIS cell in California (and called into question the validity behind other instances of U.S. based-terrorism cells), writing:

In that case, three men are charged with committing robberies to raise money for jihadist attacks on synagogues and military recruiting stations, in what Director Mueller has described as a bid to create "Al Qaeda in California." Their actions are said to have been directed by Kevin James, who headed a Muslim group behind bars.

But agents checked on more than 100 prisoners with links to Mr. James and charged none. And though Mr. James has been portrayed as the mastermind, reporters for The New York Times and "Frontline" were repeatedly able to visit him in jail in Santa Ana, Calif. Such access is almost never granted to people accused of terrorism because the authorities fear that they could direct a plot from prison.

In an effort to downplay the threat, the Times concludes that there must be some kind of conspiracy, when a more plausible explanation – mere incompetence – exists.
A month before, the Times was already on record downplaying the nature of the JIS threat, selectively seeking out experts to belittle the dangerous character of the plot.

And the Times, found Thomas Kean, former Chairman of the 9/11 commission, who "said the (JIS) case threatened small-scale violence and should have been a routine police concern."

Yet what should concern everyone is not just the Times record of downplaying actual terrorist threats, even as yet again the Times editors find themselves with egg on their faces as the JIS plotters plead guilty, but that the Times consistently apologizes for radical Islam by flacking for domestic Muslim Brotherhood groups with a history of extremism. As I have

documented in the past, the New York Times is a serial offender when it comes to giving an uncritical voice to the nation's most virulent Islamist fronts.
Monday's edition, unsurprisingly, has yet another glaring example, titled, "Boycotted Radio Host Remains Unbowed." The article quotes Ahmed Rehab and his organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), on radio host Michael Savage's lawsuit against CAIR. While the Times informs its readers that CAIR's "stated mission includes correcting mischaracterizations of Islam," it, of course, fails to tell its readers of CAIR's long history of extremism, support for terrorism and anti-Semitism, let alone CAIR's documented history as part of the Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood infrastructure in the United States.

Rehab himself is on the record

refusing to condemn Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups and supporting Hamas-linked defendants. CAIR-Chicago, Rehab's home branch, referred to the cases against Hamas operative Mohammed Salah as a "political persecution" and stated that Salah, and his codefendant and another Hamas operative, Abedelhaleem Ashqar, were "targeted" by "the Bush administration has attempted to criminalize charitable aid to Palestinians." Salah is serving nearly 2 years in prison for obstruction of justice for lying under oath about his Hamas connections in a civil trial, and Ashqar is serving 11 years in prison, for obstruction of justice and criminal contempt, for his refusal to testify in front of a grand jury investigating Hamas front groups in the U.S.

But when the Times reports on CAIR, you won't read about such instances. Nor does the Times, in this specific article and almost all others which mention the group, inform its audience that CAIR has been named by federal prosecutors as an

unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terrorism financing case in U.S. history, named as a member of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that the same prosecutors have officially stated that CAIR is "affiliated" with the terrorist group Hamas.

And on Saturday, after Kevin James and Levar Washington pled guilty, the Times, after twice downplaying the JIS cell as not dangerous and nothing more than a criminal endeavor more than a year earlier, printed a very short, 100 word account lifted from the

Associated Press:

Two men accused of plotting in prison to attack military sites, synagogues and other targets pleaded guilty to conspiring to wage war against the United States. The men, Kevin James, 31, and Levar H. Washington, 28, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy charges. Mr. Washington also pleaded guilty to using a firearm to further that conspiracy. The authorities say Mr. James, Mr. Washington and two others were part of a California prison gang cell of radical Muslims. The police said they uncovered the plot in July 2005 while investigating gas station robberies that they say were committed to finance the attacks.

Even though James and Washington pled guilty, and copious information about the JIS plots have emerged, the Times still uses the phrases "authorities say" and "police said" to describe their actions. In reporting on Gregory Patterson's guilty plea, the Times yet again just picked up the

AP story, also using the language "prosecutors said" and "officials said," rather than straight reporting on what the men have confessed to plotting. Despite the Times' motto, some news is apparently not fit to print, and sadly that includes not just information about the inner workings of a home grown terrorist cell, radicalized in prison, but any information that tarnishes America's "most prominent" Muslim Brotherhood front group.

The IPT accepts no funding from outside the United States, nor from any governmental agency or political institution. Your support of The Investigative Project on Terrorism is critical in winning a battle we cannot afford to lose. All donations are tax-deductible. Click here to donate online. The Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation is a recognized 501(c)3 organization.

The Investigative Project on Terrorism: Jury Nullification For Terrorists

Special Thanks to BRUCE ASH for sending this:

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

December 17, 2007

http://www.investigativeproject.org/article/573

Terror Financing: After the Holy Land Foundation case ended in a mistrial, Muslim groups cheered and scolded the U.S. for a witch hunt. But defendants got some help from the inside.
It turns out that a Hamas-sympathizing juror sabotaged the biggest terror-funding case in U.S. history by bullying jurors who favored convictions.

According to interviews conducted since the October mistrial, juror William Neal intimidated colleagues into voting for acquittals of Holy Land leaders accused of funneling millions to Hamas suicide bombers and their families.

Neal, a Dallas graphic artist who voted not guilty across the board, launched into obscenity-laced tirades against jurors whenever they tried to argue for conviction. "F--- your opinion," Neal, 33, allegedly shouted at 49-year-old juror Kristina Williams.

Two other jurors leaning toward guilty verdicts corroborated the account in interviews with Steve Emerson's Investigative Project. Sylvester Holmes, for one, says Neal trashed any evidence presented by the government and "took control of that jury room."

Neal convinced jurors it was a "waste of time" to view key surveillance videotapes of defendants scheming to disguise terror payments as charity. He discredited prosecution witnesses as Israeli tools. And he dismissed as "an exercise in free speech" a fundraising skit in which one Holy Land defendant is shown lionizing a Hamas terrorist for killing an Israeli.

By his own admission, Neal says he tricked prosecutors to get on the jury and torpedo their case. He says he led them to believe, during the jury-selection process, that he was pro-war and sympathetic to their case.

"My answers looked like I was a pro-American, you know, flag-waving American," he said in a Dallas radio interview. "They thought I was not going to be able to think for myself and just go on the facts that these were Muslims."

In truth, Neal resented the U.S. government for backing Israel against Palestinian terrorists and, according to another juror, had his mind made up from the start to nullify its case against the U.S.-based Hamas front.

In fact, he refused to even recognize Hamas as a terrorist group, even though the U.S. has listed it as one for the past decade.

"It's a political movement . . . an uprising," he told the Dallas Morning News, adding that the Palestinians "are oppressed by the Israeli government."

Instead of showing Hamas "bomb belts," he told a local TV station, "you should show what Israeli people are doing to Palestinian people."

In the radio interview, Neal complained that his fellow jurors were ignorant about Mideast affairs and needed to be set straight.

"A lot of these people are blue collar — you know, working UPS, working food, cafeteria cashier," he said. "They had no idea of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict."

Which is precisely why they should have been impaneled. Their lack of pre-existing bias made them more likely to examine the evidence objectively. Neal's intense bias, on the other hand, closed his eyes to it.

He never should have been picked. He was an anti-Israeli activist masquerading as an otherwise disinterested citizen. Neal even claimed credit for steering jurors away from convictions. "If I hadn't been on that jury," he gloated, "this would have been a different case."

Indeed, justice based on the evidence would have been served, rather than the jury nullification based on politics that the public got.

If if weren't for the guts of browbeaten juror Williams, who stood up to say, trembling, that she disagreed with some of the acquittals being read during the verdict, the judge wouldn't have declared a mistrial. And federal prosecutors wouldn't have another shot at the terrorist defendants.

Let's hope when the feds retry this important case next year that they do a better job of challenging biased prospective jurors during the pretrial hearings.

The IPT accepts no funding from outside the United States, nor from any governmental agency or political institution. Your support of The Investigative Project on Terrorism is critical in winning a battle we cannot afford to lose. All donations are tax-deductible. Click here to donate online. The Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation is a recognized 501(c)3 organization.