Prison plot evidence of the “enemy within”

Revelations of an alleged terrorist plot hatched by Islamist converts in a California State Prison facility underscore a danger about which the Center for Security Policy has long warned: Opportunities that have been afforded organizations funded by or otherwise sympathetic to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabist ideology to proselytize and recruit felons in the American penal system have apparently begun to translate into a formidable domestic threat to this country and its people.

In an article distributed today by FrontPageMagazine entitled "The Enemy Within", Center President Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. pointed to testimony delivered in October 2003 before Sen. Jon Kyl’s Senate Terrorism Subcommittee by a top FBI official, John Pistole: "Terrorists [like those associated with al Qaeda] seek to exploit our freedom to exercise religion to their advantage by using radical forms of Islam to recruit operatives. Unfortunately, U.S. correctional institutions are a viable venue for such radicalization and recruitment."

Mr. Gaffney’s article also points out that:

Another witness at that hearing, J. Michael Waller, the Annenberg Professor of International Communications at the Institute of World Politics (who also serves as a Vice President of the Center for Security Policy), identified for the Senate a number of the individuals and organizations who have been involved in Muslim prison proselytizing. (Interestingly, some of them and/or their leaders were prominent signatories of the recent highly publicized fatwa that purportedly denounced terror.) As Dr. Waller noted, they have also been publicly linked to Islamist causes and sympathies.

Some of these organizations, led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have scheduled a 20 August press conference in Los Angeles – presumably to try to obscure the evident links between the alleged New Folsom Prison plot and their ministering to felons. It can only be hoped that those covering this still-unfolding, and increasingly ominous, story will expose themselves to the evidence of what Wahhabi-associated organizations are doing in America’s prisons (and in the U.S. military!), not just purvey their "spin."