Fox News is reporting on the state of relations between the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the FBI. According to the report:
“Normal relations” remain out of reach for the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the FBI, officials on both sides say, despite early optimism by the nation’s largest Islamic advocacy group that a new administration in the White House would change their strained relationship. “It has not changed,” an FBI official said of his agency’s relationship with CAIR. “We’re still not maintaining formal liaison relationships with them.” The federal official said a “normal” relationship “could be re-established, but has not yet.” “They’ve been kind of in stasis, to use a sci-fi term,” Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s national communications director, said of the FBI. “(Relations) haven’t gotten worse, haven’t gotten better.” Late last year several FBI field offices across the country notified local CAIR chapters that the FBI would be limiting “formal contact” with them because “certain issues must be addressed,” as an October 2008 letter to a CAIR office in Oklahoma City stated. Among the issues, FBI officials were concerned about CAIR’s possible ties to Hamas, the militant Palestinian group…. “(Law enforcement officials) have a duty to be judicious in our activities as representatives of the federal government,” reads the letter to CAIR’s office in Oklahoma City. “As a result, if CAIR wishes to pursue an outreach relationship with the FBI, certain issues must be addressed to the satisfaction of the FBI.” “We wanted them to basically sit down and say that they didn’t support (Hamas) and they intended to refrain from future support,” the FBI official said. “That’s really nothing fancy, other than an ideological rejection of Hamas. They don’t want to (do) that.” The FBI official characterized CAIR’s role as an “indirect link to Hamas.” CAIR officials deny any wrongdoing and blame the Bush administration for giving the group a bad rap…But the strained relationship doesn’t rule out contact or cooperation between the agency and the advocacy group. The limited relationship with CAIR “doesn’t mean we won’t talk to them,” the FBI official said. “It doesn’t mean they can’t come to us with a civil rights complaint,” the official said. “(And) if they have a problem or identify somebody that has a problem or a complaint, they would come to us, and we would listen to them and take their complaint. We wouldn’t shut the door in their face and say we can’t talk to you.”
Documents released in the Holy Land Trial have revealed that the founders and current leaders of CAIR were part of the Palestine Committee of the Muslim Brotherhood as well as identifying the organization itself as being part of the U.S. Brotherhood. A recent post discussed an interview with the Deputy leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in which he confirms a relationship between his organization and CAIR. Investigative research posted on GMBDW had determined that CAIR had it origins in the U.S. Hamas infrastructure and CAIR and its leaders have a long history of defending almost all individuals accused of terrorism by the U.S. government, frequently calling such prosecutions a “war on Islam.”