FBI, CIA recruiting among terrorist sympathizers?

Are you an American terrorist sympathizer but don’t know how to strike back at the Great Satan? Afraid of getting arrested while your plot to blow up something or other is still half-baked? You don’t have to worry anymore. Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency want to hire you.

Both the FBI and CIA are running recruitment advertising with a pro-terrorist magazine, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. The magazine is well known for its anti-Israel, pro-terrorist writing, except, it seems, to the human capital managers. One glance at the magazine’s homepage today reveals, for instance, five articles on “The Ordeal of Dr. Sami Al-Arian,” who pleaded guilty in 2006 of conspiracy to provide funds to the terrorist organization Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

It’s as if they’re inviting the terrorists to infiltrate. If you are one, you may as well go ahead and infiltrate now, because it’s going to take a couple of years for these thickheaded government human capital managers to catch on.

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 (PDF) 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 (PDF) 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 (PDF) 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. — The Investigative Project on Terrorism

That’s right. It’s not just the FBI and CIA. It’s Homeland Security too. And the State Department will get 1,000 new diplomats in President Bush’s 2009 budget. How many terrorist sympathizers will they hire? Government is growing so fast and in so many different directions that the opportunities to cause mayhem from within — or just to run interference so your buddies can carry out their next attack — grow by the day.

Steven Emerson from IPT closes by saying that “Congress should investigate immediately,” but really, will that help? Congressional hearings take months to set up, and months more to accomplish anything. By the time they call these wayward human capital managers onto the carpet, who knows how many enemies of the state could be in the pipeline? And that’s assuming Congress bothers to do anything. Maybe they just won’t see a problem.

So, let’s get serious. The federal government’s own internal security is so bad that it’s recruiting among the “enemy.” You expect these idiots to keep you safe? They can’t. They never could, and they never will.

Homeland Stupidity