As I have pointed out previously, there are two other benefits to be gained by requiring visas from aliens who seek to enter the United States. The visa application can provide special agents conducting an investigation of a criminal or terrorist alien with a wealth of information. I often would attempt to secure these applications during the course of conducting investigations when I worked for the former INS as a special agent. Finally, the law makes visa fraud a crime. When such fraud is committed in conjunction with drug trafficking the penalty can be as much as 20 years of incarceration. When the fraud is carried out in support of terrorism, the penalty increases to a maximum of 25 years in jail. However, when an alien enters the United States in conjunction with the Visa Waiver Program no such prosecution is possible. Often the easiest law violation to prosecute where terrorists and criminal are concerned are immigration law violations.

There are those who will say that the visa requirement creates an inconvenient situation for would-be tourists. Yet, our nation appears to not be concerned about inconveniencing American citizens within their own cities in the United States when we have our backpacks and briefcases searched by police officers. We are now finding it harder to obtain driver's licenses to make certain that individuals are not creating false identities for themselves. Vehicles are often searched before they cross bridges or enter tunnels to make certain they don't conceal explosives. All the while we are told that we are fighting the terrorists overseas so that we will not have to fight them here! The truth is that we need to take the measures that we are domestically to secure our nation against terrorists. We have no choice. But make no mistake, we are, indeed fighting the war on terror within our borders, otherwise we wouldn't need to resort to these tactics. Aliens have no inherent right to enter the United States anymore than a visitor has no inherent right to enter our homes. The responsible home owner looks through the peephole to make certain that the person knocking on the door seeking admission is not a threat to his/her safety. The United States needs to exercise similar caution. The visa requirement provides a peephole to our officials charged with securing our nation's borders.

The second issue is the issue of the discussion of the guest worker program that is so popular among politicians today. The way that many of these British subjects who were involved in the bombings in London came to be born in London is that their parents had originally come to England seeking to earn some money. It was believed that they would ultimately return to their home countries, but obviously this never happened.

I am of the belief that at present there is really no such thing as a temporary guest worker. Anyone who wants to enter the United States to seek employment is likely to remain forever. That is, in fact, the current situation in the United States. That is why the Amnesty of 1986 that took some 3.5 million illegal aliens "Out of the shadows" has resulted in some 15 million or more, illegal aliens slipping into those very same shadows. We lack the resources, resolve and commitment to remove but a small fraction of the number of illegal aliens who gain entry into out country each year. Last year, throughout the entire United States only one company, Walmart, was fined for knowingly hiring illegal aliens! Furthermore, if it is the prospect of employment that draws so many illegal aliens into our country each year, it is immigration benefit fraud that enables them to remain here and obtain resident alien status and ultimately United States citizenship. The task of restoring integrity to the immigration system falls to far too few agents who are provided with scant resources and no leadership to carry out their duties.

Today, sadly, commonsense and a commitment to the security of our nation is being trumped by corporate greed that is aided and abetted by politicians seeking the two elixirs of politics; campaign funds and votes. They want those who send them campaign contributions to send more money for providing them with cheap labor and they want the newly arrived aliens to ultimately vote for them.

I have often made the point that you only get one opportunity to make a first impression, and the first set of laws aliens entering the United States or seeking to enter the United States are the immigration laws. We need to do a far better job of making the proper first impression. We need to make certain that we are mindful of the national security implications inherent in the enforcement of the immigration laws. No less than our country's future depends on it.

Here is the full text of the NYT article:

July 31, 2005
British Bombers' Rage Formed in a Caldron of Discontent

By AMY WALDMAN

LEEDS, England, July 30 - Mohammad Sidique Khan was never on the corner, a detail friends offer as a compliment. In a neighborhood where many young South Asian men had lost their way, or foundered into drug dealing, Mr. Khan's peers admired his focus on family, work, working out, and Islam.

The discipline of Mr. Khan, 30, was shared, and not just with his friends Shehzad Tanweer, 22, and Hasib Mir Hussain, 18, who joined him on a murderous assignation in London on July 7. The three men and Germaine Lindsay, 19, detonated four bombs that killed 56 people, including themselves.

Mr. Khan, Mr. Tanweer and Mr. Hussain were part of a larger clique of young British-raised South Asian men in Beeston, a neighborhood of Leeds, who turned their backs on what they came to see as a decadent, demoralizing Western culture. Instead, the group embraced an Islam whose practice was often far more fundamentalist than their fathers', and always more political, focused passionately on Muslim suffering at Western hands.

In many ways, the transformation has had positive elements: the men live healthier and more constructive lives than many of their peers here, Asian or white, who have fallen prey to drugs, alcohol or petty crime. Why Mr. Khan, Mr. Tanweer and Mr. Hussain in particular crossed a line that no one had before, how they and Mr. Lindsay linked up, or whether their plot was homegrown or steered from outside, remain mysteries, at least to the public.

But the question asked since their identities were revealed after the bombings continues to resonate: what motivated men reared thousands of miles from the Muslim world or any direct experience of oppression themselves to bomb fellow Britons, ushering in a new chapter of terrorism.

Many here see answers in the sense of injustice at events both at home and abroad that is far more widespread among Muslims than many Westerners recognize; in the rigid and deeply political form of Islam that increasing numbers of educated European Muslims are gravitating to; in the difficulty some second-generation immigrants in Europe have had in finding their place or direction.

Theirs is a broader narrative being played out by such immigrants across Britain, and Western Europe. The young men have grown up brown-skinned in white Britain, in a blighted pocket of Leeds straddling their parents' traditional values and the working-class culture around them. They have been reared shoulder to shoulder with old stone churches and young hooligans, and face to face with attitudes toward family and morality different from those taught by their parents.

"They don't know whether they're Muslim or British or both," said Martin McDaid, a former antiterrorist operative who converted to Islam, taking the name Abdullah, and worked in the neighborhood.

They are alienated from their parents' rural South Asian culture, which they see as backward. Reared in an often racist milieu, they feel excluded from mainstream British society, which has so far not yielded to hyphenated immigrant identities as America has. They have come of age in an era marked by conflicts between Muslims and better armed powers - India, Serbia, Russia, Israel, America and Britain - and the rise of an ideology that sanctifies terrorist attacks against the West in response.

So some young men have solved the "don't know" riddle by discovering a new assertive and transnational identity as Muslims. The change has played out within families in the small, brick "back-to-back" terraced houses of little Beeston's lattice of down-at-the-heels streets.

In one corner shop sits Ejaz Hussain, 54, who came from a Pakistani village in his teens, and has reared eight children in Britain. The bombers' fathers and he worshiped at the same mosque; their sons left, rejecting both the mosque's form of Islam as incorrect and its determination to keep politics outside the mosque's doors as unjust.

Walk down Stratford Street, past another mosque of the elders the bombers and their cohort rejected, to the store of Mohammad Jaheer, a burly Bangladesh-born shopkeeper who has adopted the dress of the prophet since going "religious," as young men here say, 10 years ago at 16. Islam has saved him from what he calls an animal-like life as a Western businessman spending time at clubs, he said. He helped form the Iqra Learning Center, an Islamic bookshop, five years ago, to educate Muslims and non-Muslims about the faith.

That bookshop, just a few blocks from his shop, was raided by the police because of its possible links to the bombers. Over time its education came to include provocative material that some contend was meant to inspire jihad. But Mr. McDaid, who worked at the bookshop, said it was intended only to awaken awareness and raise passions - among Muslims and the British establishment alike - about the oppression of Muslims around the world.

Passions have been raised, among the bombers most radically, but among many others here and across Europe. Mr. Hussain, who helped organize two peace marches in the bombings' wake, rejects the notion that an outsider from Al Qaeda recruited the men, although others disagree.

He pointed to his head and said in reference to the bombers, and other young Muslims, "Al Qaeda is inside."

An Epic Migration

Ejaz Hussain was 16 when he left his 40-household village in Pakistan and came to Britain in 1967. Everybody was going; no one planned to stay long. He did not realize that he and so many others were part of an epic, and permanent, migration that would reshape Britain in so many ways, the events of July 7 being just one.

The British Raj officially ended on Aug. 15, 1947, but its relationship to its subjects did not. In the following decades men of the Indian subcontinent came to Britain en masse to supply cheap, unskilled labor for factories, foundries and, especially, textile mills in northern Britain.

The majority of them were farming Muslims from the Mirpur region of Pakistani Kashmir. Others came from Gujarat in India, or what is now Bangladesh, or, as with the bombers' families, Punjab Province in Pakistan. Most were poor, of rural backgrounds and often uneducated, although Mr. Hussain, the thoughtful, genteel son of a policeman, had more education than most.

They started with perhaps �5 in their pocket, and worked 16 to 18 hours a day, with a beaverlike determination to earn and build something for the next generation. Mr. Hussain, now 54, worked in factories and mills, drove a taxi, and has run a corner minimart for 15 years, raising eight children along the way.

Integration was minimal, thanks to barriers of race and language, culture and religion. The migrants were the colonized who came to live among their former colonizers. "When we came we were like servants," Mr. Hussain said. Even though they had time for little beyond Friday Prayer, if that, they were Muslims still, for whom true assimilation into Western ways, like drinking, would inevitably be irreligious.

Many, Mr. Hussain among them, thought they would earn and then go home. Instead, they eventually brought over wives or young families, forming insular communities in which English fluency was dispensable.

In the late 1980's, most of the mills and factories closed. Men began driving taxis, or opened shops or other family-run businesses that require round-the-clock tending by an extended family. Others simply retired.

The first wave's attitude was, and largely still is, one of gratitude toward Britain, which offered a livelihood and left them alone to practice their religion.

"Britain is the greatest country in the world" for those reasons, boomed Arif Butt, a forceful figure in Beeston who runs one of its mosques and has clashed with its youth.

Arshad Chaudhry, an accountant and member of the Leeds Muslim Forum, sees it differently. "They were very timid," he said of the first wave.

Beeston Hill, where Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer were raised, and nearby Holbeck, where Hasib Mir Hussain grew up, have a dreary, dissolute air. The houses somehow seem shrunken in scale, and the dreams of many youth seem to have been sized to match.

The two neighborhoods are about 77 percent white and 18 percent "Asian or Asian British," according to the 2001 census. Almost half the population is under 30.

Many white residents of Beeston tend toward tattoos and pit bulls. The drinking starts early, and openly. Trash and furniture clot some streets. Faces have been ravaged by drugs, whose use peaked a few years ago when legions of zombielike heroin addicts wandered the streets.

More than 10 percent of houses are vacant. Nearly a third of the population of about 16,000 receives "council-administered benefit," the British-equivalent of welfare. Unemployment is nearly 8 percent, more than double the rate for the rest of Leeds.

Whites and Asians live politely, but distantly, adjacent. Both groups say that South Asians have actually prospered more than whites, which has generated some resentment. Plenty of British Muslims face staggering poverty and unemployment, but the bombers and their immediate circle were not among them. At least some youth seem more directionless than deprived.

In some ways, Mr. Hussain and other elders say, the young people have had it easy. At the age when their fathers worked like mules, the sons are playing cricket, studying, hanging out. Compared with their parents, they are well educated, thoroughly literate, fluent in English and the Internet.

Some know family businesses are waiting for them to take over. Some go on "benefit" as soon as they reach adulthood. Some sell drugs. "They are getting lazy, getting spoiled from the government," said Abu Hanifa, 60, another shopkeeper who works around the clock.

And yet Mr. Hussain and others think the young have also had it harder. In an alien culture, work ballasted the migrants, as did the traditional values they had imported from home. The young have no such anchors; they sometimes seem to be living in rooms without walls.

Mohammad Sidique Khan's generation was the first to be educated entirely in Britain. The schools they attended made almost no accommodation to their presence. They learned almost nothing about Pakistan or Islam's history and traditions.

Instead, they were expected to become British, and many have tried. But in areas like Beeston, young men say, that has also meant learning how to drink and do or sell drugs at an early age, how to lose your virginity by 14.

They grew up in rough inner-city neighborhoods where "hardness" - the ability to fight anyone, at any time - was essential, said Mr. Hussain's son Nadeem Ejaz, now 30, who runs the family's green grocer shop. He still has vivid teenage memories of the red shoelaces favored by young racists from the National Front etched in his brain.

Many young Muslims, Mr. Khan among them, turned to martial arts or boxing partly to ensure combat readiness.

At local high schools, boys have regularly divided into white and Asian gangs. In April, a 15-year-old boy was stabbed to death by a member of an Asian mob that pursued him.

The second generation does not have the servility, the passivity, of its progenitors, said Ejaz Hussain. Raised in Britain, they want their rights, even if they have to fight for them. In him, this inspires both pride and fear.

Mr. Hussain sees a continuum of self-destruction between this month's bombings and race riots that occurred just 10 miles away in 2001 - seemingly disconnected rage. "Why this damage to their own streets, their own cities, their own communities?" he asked of the Asian youth who participated in the riots, echoing those who now ask how the bombers could turn on their own society. "Maybe if we had paid attention then this wouldn't have happened."

A good many young Asian men here are, in British social welfare parlance, "NEET": Not in Education, Employment or Training. Here and in other South Asian communities over the past 15 years, they have begun to out-English the English, selling drugs and serving prison terms at alarming rates.

In Stratford Street, a Bengali-British drug dealer with a gold tooth and a practiced air of menace sits on a stoop. Mr. Jaheer, the Bengali-British shopkeeper, passes him by. As Mr. Jaheer and his friends see it, the critical battle here has been between those who have succumbed to their milieu, dragging their community down, and those who have sought to rescue and uplift it.

In that effort to fight Beeston's addiction, violence and aimlessness, they say Islam has proved an invaluable ally. To those who say Islam turned the bombers against Britain, they answer that Islam also saved youngsters from Britain.

The Draw of Religion

Mr. Jaheer was among the first to become religious, and others soon followed. One by one, young men who regularly slept through namaz, or prayer times, awakened. Mr. Khan was among them; so, later on, were his fellow bombers, Mr. Tanweer and Mr. Hussain.

The group was always a small minority among Beeston's youth, but an influential one. The pioneers coached those who followed them in how to live as Muslims in the West, bringing a new social conservatism to bear. It is permissible to look once at scantily clad women in summer, they would tell youth. After that it is a sin. Young men put away their televisions, saying there was no appropriate programming for Muslims, and sometimes imposed new restrictions on their wives.

"They were doing quite well with the young brothers," said Nadeem Ejaz, crediting Mr. Khan and others from weaning some youth from drugs. "It was smack city around here. These people took on the initiative to clean up the community."

The group of friends created a network of organizations to lure Asian youth off the streets through sports, nature outings and extra education. For the Leeds City Council, desperate to counter the social ills present in Beeston and similar communities, the men were an ideal conduit. Over the years the council funneled grant after grant to the organizations they worked with, and say some of their efforts showed success.

Mr. Khan was among the grantees. Under the auspices of the South Leeds Asian Youth Association, he twice applied for, and won, grants of about �2,000 apiece for gym equipment at two different locations, according to council records.

At the same time, the group's newfound faith was distancing them from their peers, and sometimes bringing them into conflict with the choices of their parents.

One of Ejaz Hussain's sons became very religious five years ago. He works at his father's corner shop, joking with customers, calling the women "luv," the standard Yorkshire greeting. But the shop sells cigarettes, bacon and tinned pork, girlie magazines.

To him, the shop - the fruit of his father's decades of work - violates his faith, and he has unsuccessfully tried to persuade the family to give it up.

Religiously, the young men came at Islam like converts - questioning everything, accepting nothing. If they were going to practice, they wanted to do it in what they considered the right way. If they wanted to go to heaven, they felt, they had to find the purest form. They wanted evidence for whatever they did in the Koran.

All of the young men quickly rejected the Islam of their parents, who practice a Sufi-influenced strain of the subcontinent called Brelvi. Shaped partly by Hindu and folk customs, it believes in the power of pirs, or holy men, and their shrines.

The youth, Mr. Khan the most vocal among them, labeled such beliefs the contamination of Islam by "innovation."

They stopped praying at their parents' mosque, even as they used its basement gym to warn youth against the type of Islam their parents practiced upstairs.

The young men turned, instead, to the more rigid, orthodox Deoband school of Islam, which also had a small mosque in town. The adherents of Deobandism include the Taliban of Afghanistan; they take what they see as a highly literal approach to the faith. In Britain, as in Pakistan, it is this school that is fast-growing - starting seminaries, producing English-speaking preachers, and drawing young people away from the more liberal Islam of their parents.

Eventually Mr. Khan and his friends left the Deoband mosque, too, saying its approach to outreach was too narrow, its focus too apolitical. And the young zealots felt only frustration and contempt for the imams of the mosques, who were often brought from the subcontinent, spoke minimal English, knew nothing of the moral maze young British Muslims face, and abided by an injunction by mosque elders that politics or current events involving Muslims should stay outside the mosque.

A Politicized Islam

For the young, Islam was politics. "There is a lot of hatred" because of Iraq, Kosovo, Kashmir, Mr. Ejaz said. If the mosque makes subjects like that taboo, if their doors are closed, he said, young people are going to go somewhere else.

In Beeston and across Britain, that is exactly what they are doing, which is why Prime Minister Tony Blair's call for mosques to preach against extremism may be an exercise in futility.

Educated second-generation Muslim immigrants are finding their way to an extreme form of Islam spreading not through mosques but through Islamic bookshops, the Internet and university societies, said Roger Ballard, an anthropologist in Manchester who specializes in Pakistani Muslims in Britain.

The form is called Salafism, taking its name from the term for the Prophet Muhammad's companions, although its adherents often reject any label. It originated in 19th-century Saudi Arabia, and has helped inspire groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda.

The Salafi demand for purity and rejection of any Islam except that of the early years can lead to deep intolerance even for fellow Muslims like Shiites.

Salafis see politics as embedded in the DNA of Islam, which was founded to restore social justice to seventh-century Arabia. They take to heart the injunction that the ummah - the global community of Muslims -is "like one body": if one part is suffering, the rest will be in pain as well. They believe, therefore, in an obligation to physical jihad, or struggle, under the right conditions.

For educated young European Muslims who learned nothing of their own history in school, Salafism is a natural fit, Mr. Ballard said. It provides unequivocal answers. And, he said, it is largely "do it yourself."

In Beeston, the young men did do it themselves. After they left the mosques they gravitated to the Iqra Learning Center, the bookshop Mr. Jaheer and friends founded in 2000. Here, they were free of their elders and their old ways. They held studied, debated and produced literature and videos, set up computers, all of it with an agenda that was political as much as religious.

Their effort to create an Islamic identity in young British Muslims has been fueled by the belief that the west is waging a war - a "crusade," the word President Bush used in 2001 - not against terrorism, but against Islam, a notion powerfully strengthened by the invasion of Iraq.

This notion has become a recurring motif in the materials circulated by Islamic bookshops like Iqra. CD's produced and distributed by Iqra juxtapose images from the Crusades with horrifying images of war-mutilated Muslim babies. They superimpose a cross dripping blood over Iraq and Afghanistan. At the end of the video are images of what Mr. McDaid called "mujahedeen," Muslim soldiers fighting back in an array of conflicts, but he insisted those images were not on the copies given away.

Under new laws Britain is weighing against "indirect incitement" to terrorism, all of the material on the CD's could become illegal. To the young men here, that is perplexing and wrong. One Briton's propaganda, they point out, is another's truth. The bloodshed in places like Iraq is not their invention, they say. "How can it be incitement if it's facts?" Mr. Jaheer asked.

In his corner shop, Ejaz Hussain, whose Islam his children rejected as too liberal, opens the newspaper and sees a report, pushed inside by more reports about the London bombers, about 25,000 civilian dead in Iraq in two years.

"People keep asking what was in their heads," he said quietly.

Mr. Hussain changed worlds by coming to Britain, and now the world he made there has been irrevocably changed by its youth.

It remains to be seen if the new, more expansive definition of �...individuals...or entities associated with al-Qaida..." and the Taliban will result in any significant additions to the UN list of designated individuals and entities. The new terms appear to be intended to �clarify� those entities and individuals that require to be designated for their association with, or support for, al-Qaida. The Consolidated List continues to represent but a small sub-set of the al-Qaida network as a whole and many of its supporters and sympathisers remain subject to none of the required measures. Instead of spreading the net, the wording may only encourage those states reluctant to designate to be even more specific and pedantic in their approach, thus enabling those who finance, recruit and/or train to continue with impunity.

Two paragraphs in the latest resolution make reference to Interpol. In the preamble states are encouraged ��to work in the framework of Interpol�" in regards to that organisation's database of stolen and lost travel documents. The requirement would seem to be such a basic adjunct to good police work, especially when dealing with a trans-national terrorist threat, that one questions why it is not happening already, that is if it is not?

But, perhaps the greatest lacuna in �1617� is that there is still no return to the accountability or 'name and shame� authority as was contained in earlier resolutions that empowered an independent monitoring to group to oversee and report on what countries were actually doing to carry out the Security Council directed measures. Full compliance has always been a touchy subject in the UN system. Past experience has shown that when a state has been named in an open report to the Security Council for failing to fully implement sanctions related to Al-Qaida and its associates, even though they might try and explain the charges away, they do, quite often, take steps to remedy ��any incomplete implementation of the [required] measures�� Unfortunately the current Monitoring Team�s mandate precludes such intrusive activity, especially as its guidelines require it to clear any aspect of a report with the State concerned before the report is submitted to the �1267� Committee.

Coming as it does on the heels of the London Bombings, and an almost daily round of horrendous terrorist atrocities in Iraq linked through Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to al-Qaida, we had the right to expect a much tougher resolution.

What is a victory for al-Qaeda is the fact that Somalia remains a country without real civilization controlled by warlord factions ruling by the gun. The fact Somalia is mostly Muslim, controlled by violent warlord thugs who are Muslim, and violence and lawlessness is widespread throughout the country, perhaps should say something to other African countries flirting with the idea of doing business with radical jihadists.

The London attacks will no doubt have European Intelligence and law enforcement authorities looking more closely at their immigrant Somali populations for the hopefully small number who have succumbed to the side of extremism and violence. American authorities should reinforce their efforts in that regard, as well. Along those lines, perhaps this is a good time to recall a January 12, 2005 Supreme Court decision, JAMA v. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which I described in a CT Blog article dated January 27.

That decision allows the US Government to deport Somali illegal aliens under final removal orders back to Somalia, even though there is no organized, central government there to accept them back. The decision would apply to other similar countries, but the case specifically dealt with Somalia. Ironically, and interestingly, in April ICE attempted to deport Keyse Jama, the Somali criminal alien who was the subject of the noted Supreme Court case. The Government got Jama all the way back to Somalia, but conditions at the airport were so insecure and unsafe, the escorting security officers could not safely deposit him on the ground, so they turned around and brought him back to the US. I discussed that issue in another Blog article dated April 25.

Given the discovery of the Somali radical Islamic terrorist connections in the London attacks, and the well-established history of radical Islamic terror violence linked to al-Qaeda in Somalia and among Somali aliens who emigrate to the West, the 3500 Somali aliens within the United States who are under final deportation orders should perhaps be given greater scrutiny. Notwithstanding the difficulties that may be faced with physically removing those aliens, at least the minority who are known or believed to be potential security threats should certainly be detained and every effort made to remove them from the United States.

  CAIR MUST CONDEMN AL QAIDA AND JIHADISM..

Walid Phares

In a public relations campaign triggered today, an active American Muslim organization, the Council for American Muslim Relations CAIR released a political commercial (PSA) on national networks responding to what it believes has become surging inquiries about violence and religion. The ad airs seven sentences:

1) The first sentence starts with a young woman wearing a scarf stating: �We often hear claims Muslims don�t condemn terrorism.� The question is about the �we.� Who is it? Is it the organization? Or is it Muslims at large? Or is it an assumption that all Americans hear such a statement and find it offensive? It is important to understand who the �we� is. For if it is CAIR only, it would indicate that the organization, not necessarily the whole community is not satisfied with the issue: The difference is important as many Muslim citizens and a growing number of Muslim organizations are indeed claiming that there are not enough condemnations by the community�s clerics. If the PSA hint at community wide position, it then should be signed by the many organizations that represent the millions of Middle Eastern, Arab and Muslims in the United States. This will in turn open the question of who represents the 4 or more million Muslims in this country. Is it CAIR, the fundamentalists in general or is the community deeply diverse? Hence, would the majority of the various tendencies agree on CAIR�s assumptions that the community is frustrated by calls to condemn Terrorism?

This first statement is indicative of the aim of the ad: It attempts to position all Muslims as victims of a campaign pressing them to state what is obvious, that all Muslims condemn Terrorism just as all other Americans do. The philosophy of this ad is clear: Muslim Americans are unjustly �seen� by others as not doing enough to combat Terrorism, which would be unfair. And CAIR, the legitimate representative of more than 4 million Americans is fixing the problem. That�s what the PSA is designed for.

2) Second sentence: An African American male says: �And that Islam condones violence.� Heard without any explanation or historical background, the sentence leads the average viewer or listener to believe that there is a conspiracy by unrevealed parties to depict Islam as a religion that �condone� violence. The actual issue is not addressed and the subject of debate is over-generalized. Neither the PSA indicate who is portraying Islam as endorsing violence, nor does it explain how. It simply bypasses the elephant in the room: Jihad. If there is an issue to address it is how Islamists claim Jihad as a religious duty. Unfortunately the PSA fails to mention it.

3) The third sentence shows a Muslim woman saying: �As Muslims we want to state clearly� followed by a fourth sentence by the African American male: �that those who commit acts of terror in the name of Islam are betraying the teachings of the Koran and the Prophet Muhammad.� That statement taken alone would be very valuable if confirmed as the center of the political philosophy. If strengthen with Koranic verses and references and made into the response to any act of Terror committed by al Qaida and the Jihadists, one could see the early signs of a reform. That would be encouraging. One would project that the ad would at some point conclude in that direction. But as it unfolds, it doesn�t.

4) The fifth sentence is uttered by a woman: �We reject anyone of any faith who commits such brutal acts.� It is followed with a sixth sentence by the same male stating: �And we�ll not allow our faith to be to be hijacked by criminals.� The readers and listeners would then wait for the next sentence and most important conclusion that is �who?� Indeed, rejection of brutal acts and obstructing criminals from hijack is a universal principle. It could apply to common criminals, dictators and all sort of theological extremists too, depending on the circumstances. But the particular statement Americans, and now all democracies are waiting for, is an unequivocal condemnation of Jihadism as a legitimate political tool, and the Jihadists as an acceptable force: At least a clear condemnation of al Qaida and its ideology, because of whom and which many have been questioning the link to the religion. The PSA is strangely silent about it. 

5) The last sentence could have done it and served the cause of Muslim visibility much better: It could have simply said, we condemn al Qaida, we condemn Osama bin Laden, al Zarqawi, the Jihadi clerics. The PSA could have stated that al Qaida is about hatred and violence while Muslims seek peace. Instead a woman concluded: �Islam is not about hatred and violence. It�s about peace and justice.� It would be the equivalent of a saying in Arabic: man daraba al ma�a bil ma�a. (treating water with water), meaning no tangible results achieved.

In the final analysis, CAIR�s initiative could have been a basis for a strategic resistance to the Jihadists in general and al Qaida in particular. Language is everything here. While I�d leave the political intentions behind the campaign to others for now, it is clear to connoisseurs in Islamic politics that the PSA aim at shielding a political lobby from growing public inquiries rather than triggering an anti-Jihadist campaign. All what the lobby writers had to do was to call al Qaida and Bin Laden by the name: Terrorist. One, not seven sentences would have sent a huge message to the American public. And that is not so difficult, if the intentions were available. Other Muslim groups have done it, such as Free Muslims against Terrorism and American Islamic Forum for Democracy. The difference is this: The latter have the intentions of fighting real Terrorism, but they don�t have the money. See CAIR backing of American Fatwa)

                                                  ***********

Dr Walid Phares is a Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in Washington and a Professor of religions and world politics

Officials of both groups have been linked to various terrorist organizations:

The Chairman of the Fiqh Council, Taha Jaber Al-Alwani, is an unindicted co-conspirator in the case against Sami al-Arian, the alleged North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, whose trial began in June 2005 in Tampa, Florida. Mr. Alwani has been named in court documents as an official of several entities in northern Virginia suspected of being connected to terrorist financing. Documents released in the Al Arian trial show that Alwani funded the Islamic Jihad front groups in Tampa.

Another past trustee of the Fiqh Council, Abdurrahman Alamoudi, is serving a 23-year prison sentence for illegal financial dealings with Libya and immigration fraud, has admitted to his part in a plot to assassinate the Saudi Crown Prince, and has vocally announced his support for the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. Additionally Alamoudi was just named by Treasury as having been a financier for Al Qaeda.

In 1998, Fiqh Council member Sheikh Muhammad al-Hanooti, gave a speech calling for jihad against the United States and the United Kingdom, saying that �Allah will curse the Americans and British� and �Allah, the curse of Allah will become true on the infidel Jews and on the tyrannical Americans.� Additionally, Hanooti is strongly linked to Hamas, having served on the board of the Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP). A 2002 INS memo extensively documented IAP�s support for HAMAS and noted that the �facts strongly suggest� that IAP is �part of HAMAS� propaganda apparatus.�

On October 28, 2000, Muzammil Siddiqui, the President of FCNA, at a rally in Lafayette Park in Washington D.C., said, �America has to learn -- if you remain on the side of injustice, the wrath of God will come!"

In the past 4 years, several CAIR officials have been convicted of or charged with various terrorism-related offenses.

CAIR has championed and defended officials of Islamic terrorist groups including Hamas leader Musa Abu Marzook, Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian, Palestinian Islamic Jihad fundraiser Fawaz Damra, and the radical Egyptian cleric Wagdy Ghoneim.

CAIR has repeatedly attacked the prosecutions of Islamic terrorists arrested and/or convicted since 9-11 and has attacked the government�s freezing of Islamic terrorist fronts as part of a �war against Islam� by the United States.

CAIR has led protests against the deportation of radical Islamic clerics who have called for Jihad or who have been fundraisers for Hamas.

CAIR has asserted that the indictment of Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami al-Arian on conspiracy to murder more than 100 people was �politically motivated� and instigated by �the attack dogs of the pro-Israeli lobby."

CAIR has been named as a defendant in a civil lawsuit filed by the family of former FBI official John O�Neill, who was killed on 9-11.

One of the signatories to today�s fatwa is Fawaz Damra who was convicted of immigration fraud related to his ties to Palestinian Islamic Jihad and denaturalized. He is currently awaiting a deportation hearing.

Another signatory, the Muslim American Society, is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood in the United States and whose publications have repeatedly supported suicide bombings.

For a comprehensive background paper on the links to Islamic terrorist and extremist groups, please click here.

Chairman Chris Cox
Committee on Homeland Security
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20540

Ranking Member Bennie G. Thompson
Committee on Homeland Security
101 Independence Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20540

Dear Chairman Cox and Ranking Member Thompson:

On Thursday, July 28, 2005, the Subcommittee on Economic Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Cybersecurity of the Committee on Homeland Security will hold a hearing entitled �Improving Management of the Aviation Screening Workforce.�

I would like to have my thoughts on this critical issue be considered by the members of the Subcommittee as they deliberate the issue of the privatization of the screeners. I spent some 30 years with the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) before my departure from that agency in February 2002. For the sake of expedience, I am attaching a current copy of my bio to this document to provide some insight into my background to help establish my credentials as an expert on law enforcement issues. I respectfully request that this letter and my bio be submitted for the record.

Prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001 many people in and out of government lived in a state of denial. They apparently found it preferable to believe that while terrorist attacks plagued many countries around the world, the risk that a devastating attack could happen within the borders of the United States was minimal. I say this because although a number of terrorist attacks had already been carried out within the borders of the United States, little was done of consequence to protect our nation from within its borders. This attitude was dangerous and in my opinion, left our nation vulnerable to the attacks of September 11, 2001 even though a number of deadly attacks had been carried out within our borders and other attacks against targets readily identifiable as being United States related targets were also launched with the result being the loss of human life and the great destruction of property. Additionally, other terrorist plots were averted through actions by law enforcement personnel.

On February 26, 1993 the bombing of the World Trade Center complex resulted in the death of 6 innocent civilians, the injury of many employees and visitors at the World Trade Center and the damage to that complex that was estimated to be in the vicinity of one half billion dollars. A bomb was placed in a garage located beneath the World Trade Center. According to members of the investigative teams with whom I spoke during and after the ensuing investigation told me that they believed that had the truck containing the bomb been parked against a different wall in the parking complex, or had the truck contained more explosives, the World Trade Center Tower above the truck might well have toppled sideways. Should this have happened, many more lives would have arguably been lost than perished as a result of the attacks of 911 because evacuation would have been impossible in light of the speed with which the tower would have fallen. Additionally, the other buildings might have been struck by the falling tower that stood approximately one-quarter mile high. It was also possible that the falling tower might have ruptured the sea wall structure that kept the water from the Hudson River out of the foundation of what had been the World Trade Center, flooding lower Manhattan.

Certainly, the potential for extreme devastation both from a human perspective as well as from a financial perspective was incredibly high. Nevertheless, in the interest of commerce, our nation essentially conducted �business as usual� in the wake of this and subsequent attacks. As I said at the outset of this letter, we were conducting ourselves as a nation in a state of denial.

This manifested itself in a number of ways including the continuation of the Visa Waiver Program, the continuation of the Transit Without Visa Program, the failure to enforce the immigration laws from within the United States to better secure our nation�s borders or take other measures to secure critical infrastructures. Passengers boarding airliners were screened by civilians who were employed by the airlines that were at least as motivated by concerns about frightening off paying passengers as they were about security. Public relations was a consideration of these employees who knew that they were being paid by an industry that did not want to discourage passengers from boarding airliners.

After the attacks of September 11 it was impossible to conduct �business as usual.� The government apparently understood that the public would feel most comfortable about boarding an airliner if the screeners whose job was to prevent hijackers from gaining access to airplanes and to prevent potential weapons from being brought on board airplanes were federal employees who were dedicated to the critical mission of airlines safety. It was this apparent motivation that caused the United States government to take over the business of screening passengers and ensuring not only the safety of the flying public but the non-flying public who were concerned that airplanes could be utilized as weapons as we saw on 9/11. This strategy makes sense not only for the superficial reason of reassuring our citizens and tourists that federal employees operating in a quasi law enforcement manner would help to ensure the safety of air travel, but because in my opinion, these employees were better motivated to carry out their critical duties. Employees of a private company who are hired by either an airline company or an airport do not generally see themselves as working towards a career but rather see themselves as simply earning a paycheck to pay their bills. Certainly most employees in most industries ultimately go to work to earn a paycheck, however, for those federal employees who work as screeners, many may well harbor aspirations of moving on to other jobs within the law enforcement profession and are very much aware that the time they spend with the TSA would be credited towards any federal job they may ultimately take with the federal government. Each day on the job therefore potentially puts them further along the path towards a rewarding career with any of a number of federal law enforcement agencies that may require law enforcement background or at least would look more favorably upon an applicant who had spent time working for the TSA.

The job of a screener can be monotonous and mind-numbing, searching bag after bag and person after person, hoping to find the proverbial �needle in the haystack� either a passenger who should be barred from gaining access to an airplane because he or she is on the so-called �no fly list� or because the passenger in question has attempted to surreptitiously bring a weapon on board. In such a difficult job motivation is critical. It is my understanding that attrition rates for privately hired screeners prior to 9/11 was a multiple of what it is for TSA employees. This should not surprise anyone. The TSA employees, as I pointed out previously, may be hoping to use the job with the TSA as a springboard for employment by any of a number of federal law enforcement agencies while the privately hired screener is simply seeking a paycheck.

In my career as a special agent of the INS I worked closely with law enforcement representatives from a number of other countries in working on investigations of mutual interest. Among these people with whom I worked were members of the Israeli National Police (INP). As you may know, Israel has an enviable record of preventing aircraft hijacking notwithstanding the fact that they are often targeted by terrorist organization bent on the destruction of that country in that volatile part of the world. I have had some interesting conversations with a number of high-ranking officials of the INP. They explained to me that they have been successful for a number of reasons. They pay their screeners the highest salary they can possibly pay them to help keep their morale up. They also give them constant training and they do not allow them to serve as screeners for more than a few years and then move them on to other careers within the government. This further helps to motivate them and keeps them from �burning out.�

Now it appears that we have come full circle. Our government is now considering the privatizing the critical missions of screening baggage and passengers. This would, in my opinion, put us back to where we were prior to 9/11. Employees would be hired to help prevent the hijacking of airliners and the potential for devastation that such a crime could cause, yet these employees, like those hired prior to 9/11 would be simply seeking a paycheck and not be motivated as are those who are employed by the federal government.

The �All Clear� has not sounded. Within the last couple of weeks we have witnessed two terrorist attacks in England and one in Egypt. The war on terror continues yet it would appear that proponents for privatizing the screeners are trying to return to the pre- 911 attitudes. Interestingly, the President and Vice President of the United States are not protected by private security guards who have taken a leave of absence from a department store. They are protected by sworn, dedicated, highly trained and highly motivated members of the United States Secret Service. Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary of State is similarly protected by special agents of the DSS. I could go on listing the various federal agents who protect the heads of various federal agencies. While the agencies are all different, none of these high-ranking officials are protected by private security guards, they are all protected by sworn, federal agents who are highly motivated and highly trained. The traveling public and the citizens of our nation deserve no less protection.

Sincerely,

/s/

Michael W. Cutler,
Former Senior Special Agent,
Immigration and Naturalization Service

Consider the case of Mohammed Qassem Sawalha, a Hamas activist, who was appointed as a "moderate" trustee of London's Finsbury Park mosque in February. The mosque was closed in 2004 because it had come under the influence of Abu Hamza al-Masri, a radical Islamic cleric arrested in Britain and charged with 16 terrorism-related offenses. Mr. Sawalha was named one of five trustees of the mosque when it was reopened in early 2005. But Mr. Sawalha's own decade-long history of supporting Hamas terrorist operations differs from Mr. al-Masri's only in terms of the nationality of the population targeted in otherwise identical attacks like suicide bombings, kidnappings, shootings and more.

Mr. Sawalha was named as a co-conspirator in an Aug. 2003 indictment brought by federal prosecutors in Chicago against Hamas activists in the U.S. and accused of assisting Hamas activists planning terrorist attacks. According to the indictment, before Mr. Sawalha moved to London in the early 1990s he was a Hamas leader in the West Bank. The indictment goes on to cite several cases in which Mr. Sawalha allegedly conspired with others to support Hamas terrorist operations. For example, while in London Mr. Sawalha met with Mohammad Salah (one of the defendants) and Mohammad Jarad, who were passing through London on route to Israel. According to the indictment, Mr. Sawalha provided the two men with instructions on "Hamas-related activities they were to carry out while in Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip." The indictment further describes how, in Aug. 1992, Mr. Sawalha met with Hamas leader Mousa abu Marzook and Mr. Salah to discuss the need to "revitalize Hamas terrorist operations in the West Bank." At that meeting Mr. Sawalha suggested specific Hamas members in the West Bank on whom Messrs. Salah and Jarad might rely to help energize Hamas's terrorist activities. Less than six months later, in January 1993, Messrs. Sawalha and Salah met yet again in London. At this meeting Mr. Sawalha specifically directed Mr. Salah to "provide money to various Hamas members in the West Bank and Gaza Strip."

Also in London, Interpal, a purportedly charitable organization designated as a Hamas front organization by the U.S. Treasury Department, continues to fund Hamas institutions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Despite a plethora of evidence gathered by the U.S., Israel and other governments demonstrating its ties to Hamas, Interpal was given a clean bill of health by the British Charity Commission in Sept. 2003. (The Commission was aware, for example, that the FBI had already determined that Hamas members in the U.S. sent funds to Hamas in the West Bank and Gaza through Interpal). Strangely, the Commission itself acknowledged that Interpal transferred funds on behalf of the al Aqsa International Foundation, a Hamas front organization banned in Britain, the U.S., Germany and elsewhere, but determined anything short of ties to Hamas military or political activists to be insignificant. But only a few weeks earlier the EU banned all of Hamas, including activity supporting any of its military, political or social branches.

More recently, Sheikh Mohammad al Moayad and his assistant, Sheikh Mohammad Zayed, two Yemeni clerics, were convicted of funding both al Qaeda and Hamas through associates in New York. Their trial produced still more damning evidence of Interpal's role in financing terrorism. Unaware he was talking to an FBI informant merely posing as a terror financier, Sheikh Moayad produced a receipt showing that he had transferred $70,000 to Interpal as proof of his ability to, as he put it, "get money to the Jihad." In the context of this and other receipts, the cleric told the informant he had provided millions of dollars to Hamas and al Qaeda.

Efforts to establish a global anti-terrorism treaty date back to 1996, but have stalled for years in the face of objections from several Arab and Muslim countries over the classification of suicide bombers engaged in "resistance to occupation." According to these member states, suicide bombings should not be considered acts of terrorism -- even if they target civilians and non-combatants -- if conducted for a sufficiently legitimate cause. Still others believe that groups that carry out acts of terrorism are not to be considered terrorists if they also participate in the political system or provide social-welfare support. Thus, several European states have long opposed including Hezbollah on the EU's terrorism list because of that group's social activities and participation in Lebanese politics. Others, including Britain, have tolerated the presence and activities of groups like Hamas even as they crack down on other groups engaged in similar acts of terror in the name of apparently less compelling causes.

But as recent attacks in Britain, Turkey, Israel, and Egypt all attest, these are morally bankrupt positions. The international community must stand firm in its condemnation of all acts of terror, no matter what cause or injustice such attacks are intended to remedy and no matter what other political or humanitarian activities these groups engage in. Indeed, the U.N. and individual member states both should make clear once and for all not only that no cause legitimizes terrorism, but that terrorism undermines the legitimacy of otherwise legitimate causes. Let's say it openly and honestly: nothing undermines the legitimate goal of establishing a secure and independent Palestinian state that lives in peace side-by-side with its neighbors more than Palestinian terrorism. There is no excuse for terror.

For related material, see "Hamas from Cradle to Grave"

It�s not clear just what obligations EU banks will have under the new regulations to provide similar information when transferring funds overseas. This issue is complicated by EU privacy restrictions. It appears that such information would be the norm unless there were reasons to believe that the recipient banks would not afford appropriate confidentiality of such information which should only be made available to authorized investigators and judicial authorities.

These new measures represent a �giant leap� beyond Europe�s current �know your customer� rules now in place. �Know Your Customer� puts the onus on the bank making the transfer to establish the bona fides of its own clients. The originating bank is also required, in most cases to retain records related to the transaction. The EU commission is treating the proposal as �draft legislation� and has called on EU member governments to approve the measure by December 2005. It would then have to be approved also by the European Parliament and, if approved on that timetable, would come into effect in January 2007.