Congress should immediately investigate.

FBI and CIA Hit New Low in Recruitment Drive
Looking Under a Rock
By Steven Emerson


In a frightening and bizarre turn, the two chief agencies tapped with safeguarding America’s national security have started advertising in a publication that can only be described as objectively pro-terrorism.

The online edition of the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs (WRMEA), a publication linked to former Congressman Paul Findley, who once described himself as “Yasir Arafat’s best friend in Congress,” features recruiting advertisements seeking new agents for both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.

WRMEA’s history of support for Hamas, other terrorist groups and individual terrorists is well known. Currently on the front page of its website, right in the center, is an homage, constituting of a collection of articles and hagiographies, to convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Sami Al-Arian.

Al-Arian was investigated by the FBI for a decade and finally brought to trial in 2005, prosecuted by the Department of Justice in Tampa. In April 2006, Al-Arian pled guilty to one count of “Conspiracy to make or receive contributions of funds, goods or services to or for the benefit of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), a Specially Designated Terrorist.”

This is the same Al-Arian who once told an audience of Muslims, “Let us damn America. Let us damn Israel. Let us damn their allies until death. Why do we stop?”

And yet, the same FBI that sought to convict him as a terrorist is now advertising for recruits on a pro-Al-Arian (and pro-terrorist in general) website. The pro Al-Arian orientation is part of a long and documented history of pro-Islamic terrorist features published by WRMEA during the past 15 years. Reviewing just about any issue of this Saudi-financed magazine would clearly determine its pro terrorist bias.

It is the same lack of judgment that led the Department of Justice to set up a recruitment booth and serve as a co-host for the annual Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) convention in September. Four months earlier, the same Justice Department designated ISNA as an unindicted co-conspirator in Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) case as part of the Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy in the United States. U.S. Reps. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., and Sue Myrick, R-NC, protested the Justice Department’s recruitment effort with ISNA in a letter to then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asserting that ISNA is a Jihadi organization.

The Justice Department blithely dismissed the concerns, saying other organizations did it, too. That was true. That willful blindness was evident in the fact that, in 2006, the Department of Defense dispatched Deputy Secretary Gordon England to an ISNA conference and sent another representative to the annual conference in 2007. The Department of Homeland Security was there, too, with its recruitment booth adjacent to the Hizb ut-Tahrir, a radical movement which endorses the use of violence and is devoted to establishing a global Islamic state governed by Shariah law.

After that embarrassment, the FBI placed a full-page recruiting ad in the November 2007 issue of ISNA’s magazine Islamic Horizons. “Help us light the way to a new era of understanding,” the ad reads.

Just what types of recruits are the FBI and CIA looking for? Apparently, these agencies do not learn from experience, even recent experiences. Just last November, former FBI and CIA agent Nadia Nadim Prouty was arrested and pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining American citizenship through a sham marriage, and using her illegally acquired status to attain employment with both the FBI and CIA. Prouty is the sister of Elfat Al Aouar, who is the wife of Talal Chahine – the Detroit-based restaurateur linked to Hizballah.

While it is too soon to determine where the breakdown occurred in allowing a Hizballah operative to infiltrate the FBI and the CIA, it is clear that these ads fall into the disturbing pattern where background checks of Islamic militants are not being pursued properly.

Prouty used her security clearance, in violation of the law and her job responsibilities (for which she also pled guilty), to do background searches into the FBI investigation of her sister and brother-in-law. But that hasn’t stopped the FBI – or the CIA for that matter – from reaching out to a pro-terrorist crowd for its next batch of recruits. And it is Americans who will likely pay dearly for the fact that the FBI and CIA have failed to learn the obvious lesson from the Prouty case. And Prouty aside, the fact that the CIA and FBI are advertising for employment on a site that lionizes an Islamic Jihad kingpin and other terrorist groups should frighten everyone.

Congress should immediately investigate.