The Agent Who Wouldn't Wear a Wire
For almost a year now, a handful of current and former federal investigators and prosecutors based in Chicago have been complaining that an unnamed "Muslim FBI agent" had stymied their pre-9/11 probe of businesses associated with Saudi multimillionaire Yassin Al-Kadi.
Sometime in 2000, according to his accusers, the agent in question refused to wear a wire for electronic surveillance in the Al-Kadi investigation, on grounds that "Muslims do not eavesdrop on other Muslims"--that sort of thing. These people further contend that they reported the matter through channels to FBI headquarters at the time, but senior Bureau officials unaccountably backed up their recalcitrant Muslim employee--and ordered that the probe of Al-Kadi, who has ties to the Saudi royal family, be shut down. Weirder still, the refusenik agent was subsequently promoted and reassigned to a sensitive post as an attaché to the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. Where he remained until very recently, even though the State Department long ago--just a few months after the World Trade Center attacks--did indeed wind up formally identifying Al-Kadi as a major al Qaeda financier.
Over the past two weeks, however, ABC News and the Tampa Tribune have reported that the "Muslim FBI agent," whose name turns out to be Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, has been recalled from Saudi Arabia and suspended from duty by the FBI. And while the Justice Department, citing pending litigation and ongoing internal reviews, declines to talk about the matter in public, it appears that the job action against Abdel-Hafiz may actually be related to . . . University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, a favorite Weekly Standard subject and, since February 20, a federal prison inmate awaiting trial on a 50-count terrorism-conspiracy indictment.
Tampa Tribune correspondent Michael Fechter--whose dogged, years-long coverage of Al-Arian surely deserves a Pulitzer Prize--reports that Abdel-Hafiz, attending an unspecified "conference in Washington" in 1998, two years before the aborted wiretapping incident in Chicago, was approached by Al-Arian, who asked him for inside information about the FBI's Tampa-area terrorism case files. Fechter further reports that Barry Carmody, lead Bureau investigator on the Al-Arian case at the time, later asked Abdel-Hafiz to place a bugged, follow-up phone call to Al-Arian--but that Abdel-Hafiz refused to do it. Carmody tells the Tribune that Abdel-Hafiz's suspension is "long overdue" and says "I don't think he should have gone to Riyadh in the first place."
No, probably not. Couldn't have been much for the man to do there, after all, if investigating fellow Muslims wasn't going to be part of his job description.
"France is stuck"
After September 11, we had a semi-regular feature on this page, chronicling the "Surprisingly Good Guys"--i.e., lefties who played against type and supported the war on terror. This week, we inaugurate the French edition with Bernard Kouchner's March 3 interview in Le Monde. Kouchner was one of the founders of the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders and served in the last Socialist government.
Iraq is scrapping its missiles. Isn't this proof that the inspections are working?
It's proof, first of all, that they had the missiles and, on top of that, that they had anthrax and biochemical weapons.
Is it credible that Iraq would use these weapons? And, if so, against whom?
Unfortunately, it is credible, since all these weapons have already been used, and against the Iraqi people themselves.
You're pro-war?
I detest war, and over the past 40 years I've come to know war better than anybody. War is a very bad solution. But there's something worse than a very bad solution, and that's leaving in place a dictator who massacres his people. I hope we can listen to the most important actors in this whole drama, the first in the line of fire: the Iraqis who are suffering under this dictatorship.
So toppling Saddam Hussein is more important than disarming him?
Yes, it's the main goal. The weeks, the days, are running out. There's maybe a 10 percent chance that war can be avoided. By combining a military threat--which wouldn't inevitably have to be carried out--with diplomatic and public pressure, I think we could still come up with a common front that would get Saddam Hussein out of there.
Why would he go?
For now, what's keeping him there, what's giving him aid and comfort, is the fact that we in the West are divided.
So France is wrong to oppose the United States?
France's first diplomatic move was perfect--bringing the Americans back into the framework of the U.N. In the second part of the showdown, which was way too macho, France's pushing got out of hand. At one point we even brandished our U.N. veto. This causes me infinite regret. It was extremely harmful.
So France is stuck?
Yes, we're stuck. We broadened the rift in Europe, rather than healing it. Yoking ourselves to German pacifists was a mistake. We bullied the Eastern European countries that are just emerging from their own dictatorships. That was another mistake. And finally we've opened a big rift with the United States. I blame [President Chirac] for that.
How about your Socialist friends?
Them, too. The role of France, above all, is to involve itself where there are violations of the rights of man, and to fight dictatorships.
Hollywood Diversity
Just as there's an occasional outbreak of common sense in the pages of Le Monde, so too the entertainment world is not quite unanimously antiwar. Vince Vaughn, currently starring in the hilarious "Old School," spent time in England working on his next project. He was inundated with antiwar talk from the Brits. He describes it this way: "I'd say one in three conversations wound up the same way, basically that 'America is the devil.' So I'd ask folks to think about the Marshall Plan a bit and get back to me." Meanwhile, Jean Claude van Damme--aka the Muscles from Brussels--says that clueless movie stars who oppose the war "are part of the axis of ignorance."
Filibustering for Wimps
Funny thing about the Miguel Estrada filibuster: If you tuned in C-SPAN in the wee hours in recent weeks, you didn't get to see, as in filibusters of yore, Joe Biden or Chuck Schumer reading from the phone book. That's because Senate comity lives, rumors of its demise to the contrary notwithstanding, and the Republican leadership has been unwilling to stay up all night and force the filibusterers to follow the example of, say, Strom Thurmond, who once orated for 24 straight hours.
Washington PR king Hugh Newton, for one, is miffed, and thinks the Bush judicial nominee is worth making opponents mount a real filibuster, a subject he knows something about as one of the organizers with Reed Larson of the epic 1965-66 Dirksen Right to Work filibuster. Thurmond, he says, was one of the "stalwart" participants, "even demanding something to help him stay on the floor for ten or so hours--we got him a 'motorman's friend.'" As The Scrapbook has noted before, this "motorman's friend" was something used by trolley operators in the early 20th century in lieu of bathroom breaks.
Could the Democrats possibly be prepared for such an ordeal? Do they have the mental tenacity to keep it going for hours? And most important, what brave assistant would be willing to help out, say, Ted Kennedy with the "motorman's friend"?