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>> 157 9 Terrorist Kingpins and the De-Radicalization Movement Terrorist Kingpins On March 6, 2011, some sixty days before American forces killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the Obama administration issued a warning that al-Qaeda is “increasingly attempting to recruit and radicalize people to terrorism here in the United States. . . . The threat is real and it is rising. [Al-Qaeda] is trying to convince Muslim Americans to reject their country and attack their fellow Americans.”1 Based on this assessment, in June the House Committee on Homeland Security held hearings on the threat of Islamic radicalization in U.S. prisons. “The Obama administration recognizes prison radicalization is a serious threat and that prisons are a fertile ground for recruitment,” said the committee’s controversial chairman, Peter King (R.-N.Y.), in his opening remarks. “A number of cases since 9/11 have involved terrorists who converted to Islam or were radicalized to Islamism in American prisons then subsequently attempted to launch terror strikes here in the U.S. upon their release from custody.”2 What happens inside American prisons had become a matter of national security. The hearings focused mainly on Kevin James and JIS, though no mention was made of the dangerous conditions of confinement at New Folsom that led to the terrorist plot. The committee also heard testimony on the importance of vetting prison chaplains because, in King’s words, “too many prison chaplains [have] radical and/or serious criminal backgrounds.”3 This claim had been floating around Washington for some time. Back in 2006, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security heard testimony from an FBI official who attributed the radicalization problem to “anti-U.S. sermons provided by contract, volunteer or staff imams.”4 Testifying in support of the threat this time around was Patrick Dunleavy, a former Deputy Inspector General of the Criminal Intelligence Division in the New York State prison system. Dunleavy, however, provided evidence of only one prison chaplain who had a “radical and/or serious criminal background”: Warith Deen Umar (Wallace Gene Marks), a former Nation of Islam prisoner who went on to become the head of Ministerial Services for the New York Department of Corrections. In 2003, Umar gained notoriety when he told a reporter from the Wall Street Journal that the 9/11 hijackers should be considered martyred heroes. Umar was banned from entering New York prisons for life and the U.S. Justice 158 > 159 tapes.”8 Yet the senator failed to identify who was doing the radical preaching. Was it prison chaplains, religious volunteers, or prisoners? Nor did Schumer explore the possibility that inmate communication systems were used to distribute the extremist materials or that there was a countervailing effort being led by prison chaplains and inmate leaders, as surely there was. Confirming the assessment on Wahhabi clerics was the security expert Michael Waller who testified that “Radical Islamist groups, mostly tied to Saudi-sponsored Wahhabi organizations suspected by the U.S. government of being closely linked to terror financing activities, dominate Muslim prison recruitment in the U.S. and seek to create a radicalized cadre of felons who will support anti-American efforts.”9 But Waller also failed to identify precisely how this radicalization was being conducted and which prisoners were most likely to join the “radicalized cadre.” One analyst told Congress that the Saudis were supplying “money that has been spent on funding leading terrorist and other extremist organizations that disseminate hatred in ‘education centers,’ charities, mosques, and even prisons— including many here in the United States.”10 Another expert claimed that nearly ten thousand copies of the Wahhabi Koran had been distributed to American prisoners.11 Once again, these experts could not identify who was disseminating the materials and how. Echoing the alarmist view of prisoner radicalization, the Washington-based Center for Security Policy went so far as to charge the Saudi government with “efforts to recruit convicted felons in the U.S. prison system as cannon-fodder for the Wahhabist jihad.”12 The goal here, so went the argument, was the conversion of large numbers of African American prisoners to Wahhabism and its radical Islamist agenda.13 When released back into the community, it was predicted that these Black Muslims would support terrorist goals, “murdering their own countrymen in a kind of ‘payback’ for perceived injustices done to them by ‘white America.’”14 This was perhaps the wildest assertion because it ignored the well-researched facts that terrorist groups seek a small number of...

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