CAIR Linked to Radical Movement Working to Undermine National Security at local level
By Lee Kaplan
(This article appeared July 17, 2012 at the excellent website www.radicalislam.org )
A study into the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon determined the various intelligence agencies in the United States that had information about Al Qaeda failed to communicate with each other resulting in over 3,000 people killed. For example, Hani Hanjour, one of the 9/11 terror pilots, actually had an FBI agent seated next to him after a flight school instructor notified the FBI of a suspicious student in his class long before 9/11, info not shared with other agencies.
This lesson inspired the U.S. government to create an interagency communications intelligence network between local police departments, state police and the federal government. No matter how small your community, your local police department has at least one officer or an entire department dedicated to gathering intelligence, particularly in cases where terrorism could become an issue, such as people taking photos of elementary school exits, bridges or railroad superstructures, religious centers or other potential targets of attack.
Regional centers were set up so local law enforcement can cooperate and pool data that protects all American citizens. This data is accumulated by police on Suspicious Activity Reports (SARS), then sent to national security centers for review.
NCRIC is the anagram for the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. Its website states that NCRIC provides “intensive multi-disciplinary training to private and public safety professionals, with exercises to strengthen counter-terrorism readiness,” and, according to its mission statement: “Coordinates the exchange of criminal intelligence, threats, and hazards and facilitates regional communication among Northern California Law Enforcement, First Responders, Government and Private Sector Partners.”
NCRIC is part of other Data Fusion Centers in other parts of California and the rest of the nation to share data that could prevent a terror attack or alert authorities to drug trafficking or other types of crimes. But the principal goal of these centers is to prevent another attack such as the one carried out by Al Qaeda in the U.S. on 9/11.
Events in Berkeley, California, have led to a discovery that
the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an organization that is an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism funding trial , and is considered a terrorist front for Hamas per the Senate’s Select National Intelligence Committee members in Congress, has joined with several radical groups that routinely support Islamist goals like those of the National Lawyers Guild in trying to prevent NCRIC’s functions.The National Lawyers Guild is responsible for getting a pro-Khomeinist mullah with links to Hezbollah and the current Iranian regime readmitted to the United States contrary to the wishes of Attorney General Eric Holder, Department of Homeland Security Head Janet Napolitano and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. National Lawyers Guild members also provide free legal help to Islamists imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay who were captured fighting American soldiers.
Berkeley is renowned as a city that thinks it has its own foreign policy. It has become in fact a bit of a joke, especially since a controversial attempt to ban Marine Corps recruiters from the city as such troops are fighting militant Islamists in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the fact that Berkeley can have an effect on homeland security that endangers every man, woman and child in America is no joke.
Berkeley has a “Peace and Justice Commission” populated, among others with pro-Islamist, pro-Palestinian and pro-Iranian advocates. Nothing is strange there. However, their resolutions have to be voted on by the city council that has power over the police department. In coordination with Oakland’s version of the Occupy Movement that started on Wall Street, Berkeley’s “Peace and Justice Commission” has been posing more of a threat to homeland security than one would imagine.
A coalition of radical and pro-Islamist allies showed up at the city council meeting after the police crackdown on Occupy Oakland to press the Berkeley City Council to “sever ties” of the mutual aid between the Berkeley Police Department and other law enforcement agencies like the Oakland police, and, in particular, to stop sharing intelligence with the Data Fusion Centers.
A new group ironically calling itself the Coalition for a Safe Berkeley created a forum composed of radical leaders and Islamist supporters from groups such as the Asian Law Caucus and the National Lawyers Guild. The group’s standing-room-only event claimed to be protecting civil rights issues rather than tying the hands of law enforcement through keeping it from gathering intelligence on probable terrorism acts or criminal activity.
This cabal then got the Berkeley City Council to opt out of the Secure Communities Program set up by the government to protect the community-at-large. Among those attending were the leader of the anti-Israel group “Tikkun” and their self-styled radical “Rabbi,” Michael Lerner, and representatives from International ANSWER, an anarchist-communist group supported by North Korea and Cuba. Lerner was accompanied by other religious leaders from New Theology churches in the Bay area that embrace boycotting Israel and Jewish businesses in support of Muslim irredentists, some even teaching that Jesus was a Palestinian, not a Jew. Lerner and this crew call themselves the Network of Spiritual Progressives.
Scene from Occupy OaklandIf one followed the activities at Occupy Oakland, one could also see the links between that event and Berkeley’s City Council hearing attacking the police for sharing of security information. The Occupy Oakland contingent of the nationwide Occupy movement was the only one to adopt support of the boycott, divestment and sanctions program against Israel and Jewish businesses that is pushed by the Arab League and US based Muslim groups. Black Muslims in control of Berkeley’s normally staid NAACP chapter and Latino community radicals who oppose immigration control also attended. This occurs right on the heels of the capture of a Hezbollah operative who snuck into the United States from Mexico in order to assassinate the ambassador from Saudi Arabia in New York. The capture of this assassin was attributed by homeland security to the data sharing and communication between government agencies such as Data Fusion Centers and NCRIC provide.
Conversely, the killing of U.S. soldiers at Fort Hood by a militant Islamist who was serving in the Army has been attributed to a lack of such communication between the FBI and the military. In fact, these minority groups that met in Berkeley have been infiltrated by radicals who care less about national security than their own agendas of bringing down the US government they consider their enemy.
Other players active in trying to stifle interagency communication between local police departments and the Berkeley police at the city council meeting were the National Lawyers Guild, East Bay Sanctuary Covenant (a movement in support of illegal immigration), the NAACP, the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, the ACLU, the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, CAIR, the Berkeley Fellowship of Unitarian-Universalists Social Concerns Committee that supports Hamas and the Asian Law Caucus.
(It is interesting to note that California Governor Jerry Brown recently appointed a former member affiliate of the Asian Law Caucus to the bench in California who was a founder of a Muslim Students Association (MSA) chapter at Pomona College. The MSA is a known Muslim Brotherhood front group founded and funded by Saudi Arabia.)
Together with the demand that police stop sharing information with other agencies was another demand made by this coalition that police could not gather intelligence on planned “nonviolent civil disobedience” such as the Occupy Oakland movement. As practiced today, such movements calling themselves nonviolent engage frequently in violence. Fires are started and windows are broken. In San Francisco, bricks were dropped from a high building on people below, police have been sprayed with paint and had rocks and other projectiles thrown at them. In 2011, the Berkeley KPFA radio channel broadcast an interview with an Occupy protestor who admitted rocks were thrown first at Oakland police before police fired teargas canisters. (Mainstream media ignored the story.)
The Coalition for a Safe Berkeley is actually the result of a national campaign, headquartered in Northampton, Massachusetts, using the title, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, and is an organization funded by the Tides Foundation and George Soros. Contrary to being a bastion of preserving civil rights, the organization works to break up national security. Among its funding and support groups CAIR is prominently listed, and its director is a former CAIR executive.
Even more disturbing is the fact the Bill of Rights Defense Committee has actually had successes in other cities in the United States. Portland, Oregon’s mayor recently sent a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle urging the city to be the next to take up the policy of not sharing intelligence information between other police agencies, which is now on San Francisco’s agenda.
The City of Santa Clara, California, and another in Illinois also have adopted such a policy. Berkeley follows. Portland’s mayor explained that the FBI grumbled a bit, but all was OK. Of course, that is until the next terror attack that could have been prevented.
