Why Wasn't One of Imams in Database?

Editor's Note: Read the airport police report. Read statement by one of the US Airways passengers.

WASHINGTON, DC, NOV. 27, 2006 - As some news organizations’ commentators and pundits raised the boogeyman of “racism” – one even over-reaching to draw a comparison between the group of Imams’ who were removed from a US Airways flight last week for justifiable concerns to the historic and truly legitimate civil rights action of Rosa Parks – 

The six Imams had cleared security. None was listed on the “No-Fly” list.

But “if everything had been working as it should, the whole group should have been red-flagged for closer scrutiny to begin with,” a veteran CT intelligence official told HSToday.us. “And it has nothing at all to do with racism, never mind that religion isn’t a race at all.”

Indeed. Beneath the hoopla over what at first blush seemed to indeed be a hysterical reaction to a group of obviously Muslim faith men trying to board a flight disgorges plenty of rational national security reasons for why the Imams were eventually inconvenienced - as distasteful as it may seem – during the final boarding process; the point at which the questioning of their behavior was much too late, counterterror authorities told HSToday.us.

One of six Imams pulled from the US Airways flight in Minneapolis by federal authorities is affiliated with a Hamas-linked organization and has acknowledged a connection to Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. Furthermore, according to official reports, three of the men had one-way tickets and no checked baggage, a circumstance that frequently, and rightfully, triggers TSA authorities to subject such passengers to closer scrutiny.

Two of the Imams – who said they were traveling together - instead were seated at the front, while two others were seated in the middle and two others were seated at the back of the aircraft. This was a seating arrangement that, uncomfortably similar to the 9/11 hijackers and given all the other factors, could hardly go unquestioned. Witnesses said the men were overtly praying in an intimidating manner and making critical comments about the war in Iraq. One passenger said he sat next to one of the clerics who spoke of the importance of living under Islamic law.

One of the Imams, who has called for a boycott of US Airways, insists that his group’s removal from the flight and subsequent questioning constituted “prejudice. This is obvious discrimination. No one can argue with this."

“All six claim to be Americans, so clearly they were aware of heightened security. Surely they knew that groups of Muslim men flying together while praying to Allah fit the modus operandi of the 9/11 hijackers and would make a pilot nervous. Throw in anti-US remarks and odd demands about seat belts, and they might as well have yelled, ‘Bomb!’ Yet they chose to make a spectacle,” commented an Investors Business Daily editorial.

With the circumstances pooled, authorities justifiably erred on the side of safety and security, CT authorities say. The Washington Post also reported that an airport police officer and Federal Air Marshal “agreed the combination of circumstances was suspicious.”

"Having read the passenger and crew reports on the incident, I am 100 percent certain that the airline and law enforcement did everything right. We have been encouraging passengers to be on the lookout for suspicious activity - even though it turned out to be benign - and that is exactly what the alert passengers did," Steven Emerson, Executive Director of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, told HSToday.us. "I applaud US Airways for taking this stance."

But the red flags should have began to be raised at the ticket counter, not at the boarding gate, and that indicates a breakdown in security protocols, security authorities told HSToday.us.

This week, Imams, ministers and a rabbi staged a "pray-in" demonstration Monday at Reagan Washington National Airport and demanded an apology from US Airways for barring the six Muslims from their Minneapolis to Phoenix flight last week.

Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) – a group with its own questionable ties to terrorist organizations – has called for congressional hearings on religious profiling.

CAIR condemned US Airways for "prejudice and ignorance,” adding the Imams told CAIR they were removed from the US Airways flight "for no reason."

One CT authority responded telling HSToday.us “there was, obviously, every reason,” saying prejudice had nothing to do with the red-flagging behavior of the Imams. And the only ignorance that was involved, they said, was the legitimately disconcerting affiliations of one of the Imams that “definitely” should be in the “No Fly” database.

Counterterror and aviation passenger screening authorities told HSToday.us in response to the protest that they are more concerned about the apparent breakdown in screening that occurred rather than the outrage that’s been expressed over the Imams having been detained following passenger and others’ complaints.

“Now that’s the real issue here as far as I’m concerned,” one of the veteran terrorist hunters who HSToday.us regularly talks to said, pointing to the circumstances that led to the Imams’ temporary removal from the flight to begin with. Circumstances which in some countries routinely flags passengers for closer scrutiny.

The six Imams were taken off the plane and interviewed separately for five hours by airport police, air marshals, FBI and Secret Service agents before being released – just as they should have been, counterterror authorities said.

“But somewhere in the process of checking these men in, all the red flags should have been correlated and recognized at the outset; it shouldn’t have been allowed to go as far as it did, where it took passengers raising the questions,” one of the terrorism officials said. “That’s where the system needs to be fixed, not whether profiling is something that should be done or not.”

Nevertheless, the Department of Homeland Security is reviewing the conduct of its employees who were involved in the removal of the six Muslim Imams. DHS press secretary Russ Knocke told USINFO the department is “opposed to the concept of racial profiling,” that its profiling techniques are based on suspect behavior rather than targeting ethnicities or faiths.

“But it didn’t catch all the red flags in this instance, did it,” quipped one of the counterterror officials.

Indeed. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff himself had earlier stated on NBC's Meet the Press that “if we can't get a reasonable amount of information on people who are getting on airplanes, and if we can't get it in a timely fashion, we are tying our hands against what is still a very serious threat."

TSA currently is testing the Screening Passengers by Observation Technique, or SPOT at about a dozen airports. Trained SPOT teams carefully observe passengers waiting in security lines and elsewhere. The specially trained teams are on the look-out not only for obvious things like a person wearing a heavy coat on a hot day, but also for much more subtle body language indicative of someone trying to disguise emotion or physical responses.

The TSA SPOT teams studies passengers against a list of dozens of questionable behaviors which is assigned a numerical score. If someone scores high, a TSA officer approaches the person to ask specifically designed questions.

CT officials with whom HSToday.us spoke said other suspicious factors like one-way tickets and no baggage, a group’s seating arrangements, previous travel patterns, etc., all must be taken into consideration in order to arrive at a valid justification for taking a closer look at specific passengers.

“All this information has got to be correlated in some way to trigger red flags,” one of the officials explained, adding without apology, “if this smacks of arbitrary racial profiling, then so be it. It’s unfortunate that a particular group of peoples’ faith necessitates this, but if we don’t, we’re setting ourselves up for a possible catastrophe. And if we don’t, and something catastrophic does happen, then we’re going to be criticized for having not done it. It’s damned if we do, damned if we don’t. At some point we’ve got to face facts and stop coddling political correctness. In this day and age, political correctness can kill us – and on a potentially horrific scale.”

“If we do not introduce some form of profiling, we will just be continuing to look for needles in a haystack and, as a consequence, the entire air travel industry could remain in crisis,” said Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International and managing director of security consultants, Green Light. Unfortunately, “we all know the current threat comes largely from Islamic militants and it is ludicrous not to single out and scrutinize those passengers who appear to conform to this group.”

But the more important question is why wasn’t one of the detained Imam’s name in the ‘No Fly’ database?

That Imam is Omar Shahin, some of whose associations should have put him on the list, some CT authorities said.

For starters, in a September 28, 2001 story in the Arizona Republic, "Arizona Was Home to bin Laden 'Sleeper Cell,’ ” Shahin acknowledged a connection to Osama bin Laden in the 1990s.

Shahin also was a representative of the Kind Hearts Organization, which is affiliated with the Holy Land Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, both of which attempted to mask their support for terrorism behind the façade of charitable giving," said Stuart Levey, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

According to the government, “Kind Hearts officials and fundraisers have coordinated with Hamas leaders and made contributions to Hamas-affiliated organizations.”

The Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was shut down in 2001 after the government accused it of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. The Treasury department's Office of Foreign Asset Control designated Holy Land Foundation as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist. The group also has been designated as a terrorist organisation by the European Union.

Among the founders of the Holy Land Foundation is Mousa Mohammed Abu Marzook, former Chief of Hamas’ Political Bureau who provided substantial funds to the Holy Land Foundation in the early 1990s. In 1994, Marzook (who was named a Specially Designated Terrorist by the Treasury Department in 1995) designated the Foundation as the primary fund-raising entity for Hamas in the United States. He was deported from the United States to Jordan in 1997 and indicted on August 20, 2004 by a federal grand jury in Chicago. He and two other individuals were charged with a 15 year conspiracy to raise funds for terrorist attacks against Israel.

On July 13, 2005, Emerson testified before the Senate banking committee that Shahin served as the Imam at the Islamic Center of Tucson (ICT), a group that hosted Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP) conferences and raised thousands for the Holy Land Foundation. According to tax exemption filings, Kind Hearts also named IAP as its “Fundraiser Organizer.”

In the mid-1980s, the ICT was one of the US satellite offices of the Bin Laden-founded Al Qaeda precursor organization, the Afghan Service Bureau, also known as MAK from its Arabic name, Maktab al Khidmat lil Mujahidin al-Arab). MAK was founded in Peshawar, Pakistan in 1984 by Wael Julaidan, Bin Ladin and Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, Bin Ladin’s mentor.

A 2001 Immigration and Naturalization Service memo (in the matter of Hasan Faisal Yousef Sabri, Notice of Revocation of Petition for Amerasian, Widow, or Special. Immigrant (Form I-360), extensively documented IAP’s support for Hamas, noting the “facts strongly suggest” IAP is “part of Hamas’ propaganda apparatus.”

Indicted Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook served on the IAP Board of Directors in 1989 and raised funds for IAP with funds. In August, 2002, a federal judge ruled there was evidence that “the Islamic Association for Palestine has acted in support of Hamas" (Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development v. Ashcroft, 219 F. Supp. 2d 57, 70 (D.D.C. 2002). Then, in November, 2004, a federal magistrate judge held (Boim v. Quranic Literacy Institute, et al. NDIL 00-CV-2905 “Memorandum and Order.” November 10, 2004) that IAP was civilly liable for $156 million in the 1996 shooting of an American citizen by a Hamas member in the West Bank. That same month an immigration judge labeled IAP a “terrorist organization” and noted its “propensity for violence.”

So why wasn’t Omar Shahin on any of the watch lists? TSA and DHS were unwilling to comment. However, as Joe Trento, author of, “Unsafe at Any Altitude,” found while researching his book, not all suspected terrorists are on the government’s “No Fly” List.

"Now Dawud Sallahuddin, real name David Belfield, lives in Tehran. He carried out the first assassination in Washington on behalf of Ayatollah Khomeini. Dress up as a mailman and shot somebody. He's allowed to fly," Trento says.

Neither are any of the original eleven British suspects recently charged with plotting to blow up ten commercial airliners with liquid explosives on the list, which Trento obtained a copy of.

Intelligence officials have indicated that some people who it would seem logical should be on the “No Fly” and watch lists aren’t because of concerns that to do so would tip them off to being under surveillance. Intelligence authorities also explained that to identify these individuals would possibly give a hint to the sources and methods used to monitor them.

"Shahin, in my mind, is definitely an ideological extremist," Emerson said, but added, "I would be unprepared to call him a terrorist."

The Supreme Court has ruled against The New York Times , refusing to block the government from reviewing telephone records of two Times reporters in a leak investigation concerning a terrorism-funding probe of Islamic charities mentioned in the above report..

The one-sentence order came in a First Amendment battle that involves stories written in 2001 by Times reporters Judith Miller and Philip Shenon. The stories revealed the government's plans to freeze the assets of two Islamic charities, the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation.

Muslims seek prayer room at airport

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