Sunday, February 23, 2014

The FBI’s Two Faces on US Terror Compounds

creeping
Patrick Poole (@pspoole) follows up on Ryan Mauro’s expose on Mahmoudberg and the Islamic groups behind it. via The FBI’s Two Faces on US Terror Compounds
During the 1980s and 1990s, federal law enforcement authorities considered Jamaat al-Fuqra to be one of the most active domestic terrorist groups in the country.
Operating in the U.S. as “Muslims of America,” annual State Department terrorism reports up until Sept. 11, 2001 described the group as “an Islamic sect that seeks to purify Islam through violence.” Dozens of Fuqra members have been arrested for more than a dozen murders, firebombings, gun running, drug trafficking, defrauding government agencies, amongst other crimes. In 1993, the Anti-Defamation League published a report chronicling the group’s continuing terror campaign.
But an ongoing ”For The Record” investigation has discovered that the FBI and other government agencies have been playing a longstanding double-game with Jamaat al-Fuqra.

Documents obtained from the FBI on al-Fuqra by national security analyst Ryan Mauro, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and first made public in this week’s episode of “For the Record,” show that at the same time that FBI special agents were picnicking and hosting award ceremonies with members of the group at their Hancock, N.Y. headquarters, internally the FBI continued to acknowledge that the group remained an active terrorist threat.
Back in 2009, Mauro also received from a law enforcement source a video showing women at that same Hancock compound conducting training sessions on martial arts, weapons handling and military movements.

I showed this video and the internal FBI documents describing al-Fuqra’s past terrorist activities to a nationally-recognized law enforcement expert on Neo-Nazi groups, who told me:
If we were handed a video like this showing this kind of training by any group, regardless of whether it was skinheads or militia groups, we would be opening an active investigation, conducting regular surveillance and trying to recruit sources to gather intel about what was happening inside. If the group had a history of hate crimes or terrorist acts, we would actively look for parole violations by members of the group and look for possible RICO predicates. You sure wouldn’t find us sitting down and having a picnic with them.
But that’s in fact what representatives from the Binghamton, N.Y. FBI field office did in June 2005.
Following the FBI’s picnic, Agent Irizarry sent a note of thanks to the group, which was quickly posted, along with photos of the event, on the group’s website.
And yet just a few months before, the Department of Homeland Security had identified Jamaat al-Fuqra in an internal report as possible sponsors of terror attacks targeting the U.S. As the New York Times reported [emphasis added]:
This is the first time the two-year-old department has prepared what will now be an annual Integrated Planning Guidance Report, a document that is listed as “sensitive” but not classified, meaning it was not intended to be released publicly…
Al Qaeda, not unexpectedly, tops a list of adversaries in the report, although the authors question if the group can still pull off attacks similar in scale to those of Sept. 11, 2001.
Other predicted possible sponsors of attacks include Jamaat ul-Fuqra, a Pakistani-based group that has been linked to Muslims of America; Jamaat al Tabligh, an Islamic missionary organization that has a presence in the United States; and the American Dar Al Islam Movement. Representatives for the organizations could not be reached Wednesday for comment or did not respond to telephone or e-mail messages.
Much more at TheBlaze.com.

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