American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us Read Online Free PDF

acting on a tip, foiling his plan to bomb the city subway system. Abu Mezer had no business being in this country; he had been apprehended on three separate occasions by the Immigration and Naturalization Service within little more than a year prior to his arrest, each time for illegally entering the country from Canada. The INS had begun deportation proceedings, a lengthy process during which abu Mezer was free on bail. He had complicated the matter by applying for political asylum on the grounds that he was in danger of arrest by Israeli law enforcement thanks to his membership in the Hamas organization. 1
    As abu Mezer’s example demonstrates, visa fraud is a messy business for terrorists—it is possible, and sometimes even easy, to avoid detention and INS proceedings for months and even years, but if your real name is on a list of suspected terrorists, you must operate clandestinely. Even if the wheels of justice grind slowly, they do grind. Far better, then, for the terrorist organizations is to recruit members who hold American passports. For example, Hamas used Mohammad Salah, an American naturalized citizen, to travel to Israel using his American passport, in order to enter Palestinian territories carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars—primarily from the head of the Hamas Political Bureau in the United States, Musa abu Marzook—to be distributed to Hamas military leaders in the Palestinian territories to help build the military/terrorist infrastructure there. Salah, also known as Abu Ahmed, is a Chicago-based car dealer who was arrested by the Israelis in 1993 while funneling these monies to Hamas terrorists and who was subsequently released in 1997 ultimately to return to Chicago. While he was detained in Israel, he was declared a Specially Designated Terrorist by the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and his assets were frozen in 1995. 2 On June 8, 1998, his assets, and those of the Quranic Literacy Institute in Chicago, were seized in a civil forfeiture action by the U.S. Government as proceeds of a Hamas money-laundering operation. 3
    Another example is that of Wadih el-Hage, a forty-year-old naturalized American citizen from Lebanon who worked for al Qaeda and who was convicted in 2001 for the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. FBI Special Agent Robert Miranda testified in 2001 at the trial of Wadih el-Hage and others for their roles in the bombings regarding an interview he conducted with el-Hage on August 20, 1998:
     
    Q: Did he indicate to you why it was that he was asked to work for Usama bin Laden?
    MIRANDA: Yes. He said that because he had an American passport, Usama bin Laden wanted him to work for him because he could travel more freely and buy things for bin Laden. 4
     
    One of Wadih el-Hage’s attorneys, Sam Schmidt, emphasized this point even further at the same trial by stating:
     
    The evidence will show that Wadih el-Hage was hired by bin Laden to work in the Sudan, not only because he was well-educated, a hard worker, honest, responsible and a devout Muslim, but, yes, he was an American free to travel throughout the world on an American passport. 5
     
    Wadih el-Hage served as Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary in the early 1990s. In 1994, el-Hage moved to Kenya to set up businesses for bin Laden to be used as terrorist fronts. Mr. Hage’s business card shows him as a director of Anhar Trading, a company with addresses in Hamburg, Germany, and Arlington, Texas.
    One last example of al Qaeda’s use of a U.S. passport holder shows how American residents can use their mobility and access to technology to promote evil. On December 29, 1999, Jordanian authorities arrested “Khalil Ziyad,” identified by the FBI as a Florida-based “procurement agent” for Osama bin Laden. 6 His arrest was not publicly revealed by Jordanian authorities and he was later released. But according to U.S. government sources, “Khalil Ziyad” is most