2-FACED 'FRIENDS' OF FBI
By NILES LATHEM
NY POST
July 4, 2005 -- WASHINGTON — A nationwide FBI project designed to improve ties between the Islamic and law-enforcement communities went horribly wrong when it was revealed the organizations have issued incendiary statements against the United States, The Post has learned.
Questions are being raised by counterterrorism officials — including FBI field agents — over the bureau's high-profile involvement in a program called Partnering for Prevention and Community Safety Initiative, which is being run out of Northeastern University.
Among the groups participating in the project is the Muslim Public Affairs Council — an organization whose members have claimed Israel was to blame for 9/11, have opposed freezing the assets of Islamic charities linked to terrorism and have denounced several FBI arrests of suspected terrorists in the United States.
Steven Emerson, whose Investigative Project think tank studies Islamic extremism in the United States, released a tape of a speech MPAC National Director Ahmed Younis gave in Irvine, Calif., on July 14, 2002, in which he directed incendiary comments at then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.
"I am a person who believes that if Thomas Jefferson or Madison or the like were alive today, they would go to John Ashcroft's house and just shoot him," Younis said, according to the tape.
Emerson called the FBI's partnership with these groups "a slap in the face of FBI agents and victims of terrorism."
"Getting together in campfire, roast-marshmallow sessions with these bad groups only empowers them and legitimizes them," he said.
The project, which started in 2002, stated its goal was to create a "basic curriculum for future law-enforcement training activities."
Michael Rollins, the FBI special agent in charge of counterterrorism in the Washington Field Office and the bureau's point man on the project, admitted that some groups involved are potentially objectionable, but added that if the program gets off the ground, "the FBI will have veto power over who participates."
"If you say one thing to us and then go back to your group and make anti-American statements, you will not be at the table," he said.
Directors of the project at Northeastern University referred calls about the project to the FBI.
Younis did not return calls to his D.C. office.
AI
