9/11, Debra Burlingame, El-Gamal, Ground Zero, Imam Rauf, mosque, Park51, September 11, Tim Brown, Tim Sumner

9/11 families and first responders: America didn’t ask for a Ground Zero mosque in NY rebuilding fund

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Media@911familiesforamerica.org
9/11 families and first responders: America didn’t ask for a Ground Zero mosque in NY rebuilding fund

When the American people forked over $20 billion to New York to rebuild, they answered the human carnage wrought by radical Muslim terrorists with compassion for the living and respect for the fallen. They could not have foreseen a “community center” being built with their money, just past the smoke, to explain the virtues of Islam.

Yesterday we learned the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation will grant $17 million for “community and cultural enhancement.” The Park51 developers have asked for $5 million of that September 11 federal funding; they do not know the meaning of the word “insensitivity.”

John Avlon of The Daily Beast reports:

While news of the application has not previously been made public, developer Sharif El-Gamal outlined it in closed-door meetings, according to two individuals he spoke with directly. The thirtysomething, Brooklyn-born El-Gamal is motivated more by real estate ambition — one of these sources describes him as aspiring to be the next Donald Trump — than Islamic theology or ideology.
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Part of the strangeness of the application is that it blows past the suggested range of $100,000 to $1 million that these grants are supposed to fall to within (I’m told the entire pool for this round of cultural funding will come in under $20 million). According to the two sources knowledgeable about the thinking behind the proposal, the strategy behind the $5 million ballpark was trying to yield a higher figure in the end.

But the project likely doesn’t qualify for a grant in the first place. Specifically, the grant criteria mandate a demonstration of a project’s financial feasibility, based on benchmarks set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The government will help complete development projects — but it does not provide seed capital. And in their last public financial statement, Park51 was found to have less than $20,000 in the bank for a project with a slated cost of $100 million.

Imam Rauf touts the center as a place for “interfaith dialogue” yet advocates for discriminatory sharia law to be imposed here. Dozens of other organizations have waited years to apply in the hope of completing viable and appropriate projects; the LMDC has a prior responsibility to them.

The New York Post reports:

“Why would we give them money ahead of so many other worthy groups?” fumed Tim Brown, a retired firefighter and first responder on 9/11 and a leading opponent of plans for a mosque two blocks north of the World Trade Center. “It’s so upside down,” Brown said of the project, which is a joint venture of real-estate developer Sharif El-Gamal and Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. “They are the ones who insist the project is not at Ground Zero and then the next thing you know is they want to leverage 9/11,” Brown said.

Debra Burlingame, whose brother was a pilot on one of the hijacked airliners, cautioned against the use of any 9/11 funds for the mosque. “This is federal money, it was not intended to fund a propaganda issue,” said Burlingame. “If the LMDC gave them a penny, it would enrage everyone in lower Manhattan.”

Such grants require organizations to show “experience with comparable projects,” to demonstrate feasibility, and to have shown responsibility.

The Park51 developers owe $224,000 in unpaid property taxes on the existing building. A New Jersey judge recently ordered the low-income apartments Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf owns into temporary receivership due to infestations of bedbugs, roaches, and rats, despite Rauf having received $2 million in grants to fix up and maintain his buildings. In 1998, Rauf and his wife Daisy Khan were granted tax-free status to conduct religious service for “400 to 500” people at an address which turned out to be an 800-square foot apartment in Manhattan. The 37-year old property developer Sharif El-Gamal has been arrested seven times, including for assault in 2005. The main financial backer of Park51 donated thousands to an Hamas front group as he thought it “was going to an orphanage.”

In June, the Community Board 1 voted 29-to-11 to give Park51 their blessing. While CBI Chairwoman Julie Menin has a responsibility to the local community, she also serves the interests of the Nation as a LMDC board member which, in 2002, issued this statement:

“In the aftermath of September 11, the entire nation has embraced New York, and we have responded by vowing to rebuild our City – not as it was, but better than it was before. Although we can never replace what was lost, we must remember those who perished, rebuild what was destroyed, and renew Lower Manhattan as a symbol of our nation’s resilience. This is the mission of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.”

The American people shouldn’t have to help Imam Rauf promote sharia law overlooking Ground Zero or to further Sharif El-Gamal’s career.

Tim Brown
theBravest.com

Debra Burlingame and Tim Sumner
Co-founders, 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America

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9/11, al Qaeda, Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Ghailani, Gitmo, Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, KSM, Military Commissions, Nashiri, USS Cole

Try KSM and al Nashiri at Gitmo now for their war crimes

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President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder believe the enemy has Constitutional rights. So far, the Supreme Court has not agreed with that assertion. We should put the theories to the test by trying al Nashiri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at Gitmo now.

When Holder brought Ghailani to federal court for trial, he did so knowing a federal judge might not allow the seller of the TNT to testify as he was first identified during Ghailani’s detainee interrogations. Instead of railing against bestowing Constitutional rights upon non-U.S. persons who wage illegal war, Benjamin Wittes and Jack Goldsmith seem to argue we should just wait the enemy out in their op-ed today in the Washington Post:

The government had a difficult time convicting Ghailani in large part because presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan excluded a key witness that the government had acknowledged it knew about through coercive interrogations. Many critics of civilian trials claim that this problem would not have occurred in a military commission, but that is very probably wrong. The legal standard for excluding such evidence in military commissions would depend on the military judge’s sense of the “interests of justice.” The government would be foolish to rely on military judges’ willingness to admit evidence obtained – even in a derivative fashion – as a result of coercion. There is not much reason to think that the government would have had an easier time against Ghailani on this score if it had proceeded in a commission.
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Imagine that Ghailani had been acquitted on all counts. The administration would then have faced a terrible choice between releasing him or — as the attorney general and Judge Kaplan have said is possible — continuing to hold him in military detention indefinitely despite his acquittal. The first option would be unsafe for the nation and suicidal politically. The second option would look terrible in light of an acquittal and would harm the legitimacy of every subsequent terrorist trial.

This terrible choice — which came close to becoming a reality — reveals why military detention is fundamental and appropriate here. The reason the first option is unsafe and the second option is available is that Ghailani helped conduct a major terrorist operation on behalf of a group with which the country is at war. Military detention was designed precisely to prevent such fighters from returning to the battlefield. It is a tradition-sanctioned, congressionally authorized, court-blessed, resource-saving, security-preserving, easier-than-trial option for long-term terrorist incapacitation.

As civilians, Ghailani, al Nashiri, and KSM all waged illegal war against the United States by attacking our embassies, the USS Cole, and both civilians and military personnel on 9/11. If no evidence exists to support those assertions, then both President Bush and President Obama had no inherent or Congressional authority to continue to hold them as detainees. Yet abundant evidence exists that all three committed war crimes resulting in the deaths of U.S. persons.

The Supreme Court reaffirmed the President’s authority to indefinitely detain the enemy back in 2004 so their detention is not at issue. That war crimes were committed, they require an accounting, and America’s enemies should not be afforded Constitutional rights are the issues.

Attorney General Holder declined to prosecute Ahmed Ghailani for his post-9/11 activities as a member of al Qaeda. It is telling that Holder announced last year that U.S.S. Cole bomber al Nashiri would be brought to a military commission in the United States only to let the DOJ withdraw those charges in August 2010, as the Washington Post reported:

[C]ritics of military commissions say the Nashiri case exemplifies the system’s flaws, particularly the ability to introduce certain evidence such as hearsay statements that probably would not be admitted in federal court. The prosecution is expected to rely heavily on statements made to the FBI by two Yemenis who allegedly implicated Nashiri. Neither witness is expected at trial, but the FBI agents who interviewed them will testify, said Nashiri’s military attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Stephen C. Reyes. “Unlike in federal court, you don’t have the right to confront the witnesses against you,” he said.

Three of the prosecution’s witnesses against Ahmed Ghailani were not available because they died since testifying in the 2001 trial against the four previously arrested for the 1998 attacks upon our embassies. If our national policy becomes delaying war crime prosecutions until the end of hostilities, it imbues war criminals with a temporary immunity and risks their outliving the means to bring them to justice.

Judge Kaplan’s ruling that the testimony by the seller of the TNT to Ghailani was “fruit of a poisoned tree” is exactly why President Obama and Attorney General Holder hold out hope to someday bring more Gitmo detainees onto U.S. soil and to trial, regardless of the venue. Yet after the Ghailani verdicts, this and future Congresses are unlikely to ever fund bringing them here for that purpose.

This war will not end in our lifetimes or theirs and no President will release al Nashiri and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed alive to again wage illegal war upon the United States. Should they be acquitted due to Constitutional protections, America will finally see the wisdom of our Founding Fathers who gave no authority to the Judiciary branch in war. If they are convicted and pay the full measure for their war crimes, justice will at last be served.