He is a lifelong Texan, registered Republican, die-hard Dallas Cowboys fan and professional Muslim ‘de-radicalizer’ all-in-one. Especially in light of both the recently-foiled Christmas day airline bombing plot in Detroit and earlier high-profile arrests of 5 young American Muslim men in Sargodha, Pakistan; the current debate within the chattering class of our political zeitgeist is revolving around ensuring that young impressionable Western Muslims are not radicalized within the dark recesses of cyberspace and the Internet.

This is where professional de-radicalizers like Mohamed Elibiary come into play.

As founder and president of The Freedom and Justice Foundation in Dallas, Mr. Elibiary has recently found himself serving the American Muslim community by helping to serve families and communities who are concerned about some of their youngsters naively falling prey to the lure of a ‘new jihadi cool’; a sociopolitical term coined by former CIA forensic psychiatrist Dr. Marc Sageman to categorize some of these young impressionable men who seek to perform acts of criminal vigilante terrorism contrary to every normative mainstream teaching of Islam.

“There are two major approaches to de-radicalization,” Mr. Elibiary recently told me during an exclusive interview. “We have to present our youth with better conduits to voice their dissent more effectively in order to fix geopolitical challenges facing the Muslim world” and thus reduce the feelings of disenfranchisement which could possibly lead to potential radicalization.

“All this [professional de-radicalization] stuff started about five years ago,” he further told me as he recalled a 2008 story when he was called by a Texas imam about an Egyptian-American young man who was en route to Pakistan after the traumatizing death of his father. Immediately, Mr. Elibiary was quickly connected to the sister of this young man by the imam and he found out that the young man was flying “over the Atlantic” on an airplane at the moment he received this frantic phone call.

“I was literally on K Street [in Washington DC] when I received the phone call,” recalled Elibiary about the 2008 incident. Immediately, he learned from the sister in Texas that the young man’s mother and another sister were living in Cairo, Egypt at the time.

Mohamed Elibiary immediately thought of a plan.

He told the sister in Cairo to immediately fly to Dubai and meet the brother during his layover for the next segment of his flight to Pakistan. At the airport in Dubai, she met her brother and immediately told him that his mother in Cairo was “completely distraught” and that if he did not accompany her back to Cairo that their “mother would probably die” very soon. With familial obligations now trumping any idiotic extremist tendencies, the young man immediately abandoned his plans for Pakistan and flew back home with his sister to their mother’s home in Egypt.

During this whole concocted ordeal, Mr. Elibiary was here stateside and immediately reached out to his contacts in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and said that “the Bureau was fully cooperative” during the whole plan to intercept the young woman’s brother at Dubai International Airport.

When speaking further about the professional de-radicalization process, Mr. Elibiary also highlighted that the concept of a ‘cognitive opening’ lies at the psychological heart of the de-radicalization process in many cases.

Professor Quintan Wiktorowicz of Rhodes College has written extensively on this subject and says that “the first step to radicalization is a ‘cognitive opening’, which is the first crack opening a person has to extremist ideas.”

According to Professor Wiktorowicz, the phenomenon of a ‘cognitive opening’ can be the “result of social, economic, and/or political discontent from various kinds of alienation, discrimination, and/or victimization.” Furthermore, he goes so far as to include personal issues (such as a death in the family) to being a potential ‘cognitive opening’ for potential radicalization as well.

The common thread of these radicalization experiences is that they precipitate an internal personal crisis that “shakes certainty in previously-accepted beliefs and renders an individual more receptive to the possibility of alternative views and perspectives,” according to Professor Wiktorowicz.

Most recently, Mohamed Elibiary was also at the forefront of the recent case of 5 young American Muslim men who were arrested by law enforcement authorities in Sargodha, Pakistan. At the very beginning of this case, he was quickly contacted by their families and representatives when they realized something was afoul when their sons did not return to their homes in Northern Virginia.

Mr. Elibiary was immediately called by the families’ representatives who had stated that the family representatives had just stepped out of a conference room and that “we got a [farewell] video” from one of the five men arrested in Pakistan.

“I’ll call the Bureau,” Mr. Elibiary responded and immediately was in touch with the Washington Field Office of the FBI to let them know that the American Muslim families of the 5 men wanted our law enforcement agencies to know about their sons’ disappearance.

The one major silver lining for this case in Sargodha, Pakistan was that the concept of ‘community policing’ worked very well. More than a “week and a half” after Mr. Elibiary first received the families’ phone call, CNN reported the fact that the young men’s families went directly to their mosques and Muslim civil rights organizations on the morning of December 1, 2009, shortly after discovering their sons were missing almost two weeks earlier.

“The path for a lot of these kids is essentially like at-risk gangbangers, who want to stand up for their community, to address grievances of the global Muslim community more effectively than they’ve seen the elder generation address them since 9/11,” Mr. Elibiary told CNN’s Anderson Cooper shortly after the arrest of the five young men in Pakistan.

“For over three years, there was been a ‘virtual war’ going on between mainstream Muslim scholars who are trying to block the extremist message in Western countries, which has not been reported in the West,” Mr. Elibiary continued to tell me during our exclusive interview on his work as a professional de-radicalizer.

When asked further what the American Muslim community can do to ensure that our children are not future potential pawns for extremist propaganda; he highlighted obvious and everyday civic duties that we do in our lives like, “Taking your kids with you when you go to vote, while you go sight-seeing at the state capital or visiting your congressperson.”

“That is the best way that we can help bring about positive change in America; not 5 random guys aimlessly going into a war zone somewhere” in the forgotten hinterlands of Pakistan.

According to an advance exclusive feature-length article by journlist Scott Horton that will appear in the March 2010 issue Harper’s Magazine (available on newsstands the week of February 15), several U.S. Army whistle-blowers have bravely come forward to set forth newly unpublished facts regarding the June 2006 reported ’suicides’ of 3 Guantanamo Bay inmates which may shed more light on these incidents.

A few days after his inauguration, on January 22, 2009, President Barack Obama issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo Bay “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.”

With only a few days left until that self-imposed deadline, the Obama administration has failed to fulfill this promise thus far.

According to the upcoming Harper’s exclusive article, journalist Scott Horton outlines a compelling whistle-blower narrative of “crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.”

Late in the evening on June 9, 2006, three different prisoners at Guantánamo Bay died suddenly and violently at virtually the same time.

None of the three inmates- 37-year-old Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, 30-year-old Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi and 22-year-old Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani- had ever been charged with a crime; although all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block- known as Alpha Block- reserved for particularly “troublesome or high-value prisoners”.

According to journalist Scott Horton, the commander at Guantánamo at the time- Rear Admiral Harry Harris- then declared the deaths “suicides” at the time of their near-simultaneous deaths in June 2009.

Over two years later, the U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS)- which has primary investigative jurisdiction within the naval base- issued a report supporting the “suicide account originally advanced by Admiral Harris, now a vice-admiral in command of the Sixth Fleet”, according to the Harper’s magazine article.

Recently though- after several Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests- the official NCIS report was carefully cross-referenced and deciphered by professors, students and faculty at the law school of Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and their findings, released in November 2009, shed new light on these June 2006 ’suicides’ at Guantanamo Bay.

According to the NCIS report, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall.

The NCIS report further stated that “each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat”.

Most astonishingly, according to the Harper’s article, “we are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated“.

The NCIS report further proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously that same June evening in 2006.

The Army whistle-blowers in the Harper’s article- Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman and men under his supervision at Guantanamo Bay- have disclosed evidence in exclusive interviews with Harper’s Magazine that “strongly suggests that the three prisoners who died on June 9 had been transported to another location prior to their deaths.”

Furthermore, the whistle-blowers’ accounts also “reveal the existence of a previously unreported ‘black site’ at Guantánamo where the deaths, or at least the events that led directly to the deaths, most likely occurred” that June night over three years ago.

According to the Harper’s article, Army Staff Sergeant Joseph Hickman deployed to Guantánamo with his friend Specialist Tony Davila, who grew up outside Washington, D.C., and who had himself been a private investigator. When they first arrived at Camp Delta, Mr. Davila told journalist Scott Horton that soldiers from the California National Guard unit they were relieving introduced him to some of the curiosities of the base.

The most noteworthy of these curiosities “was an unnamed and officially unacknowledged compound nestled out of sight between two plateaus about a mile north of Camp Delta, just outside Camp America’s perimeter.”

This unnamed compound was not visible from the main road, and the access road was chained off.

The Guardsman who told Mr. Davila about the compound had said, “This place does not exist,” and Army Sergeant Hickman, who was frequently put in charge of security for all of Camp America, was not briefed about the site.

A friend of Sergeant Hickman’s had nicknamed the compound ‘Camp No’ with the idea being “that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, ‘No, it doesn’t’…”

Both Sergeant Hickman and Specialist Davila further told Harper’s that they had concertedly “made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once, Hickman said, he heard a ’series of screams’ from within the compound [named 'Camp No']…”

(Courtesy of Harper's Magazine)

Immediately after the June 2009 deaths of the 3 Gitmo inmates- according to independent interviews by Harper’s journalist Scott Horton with soldiers who witnessed the speech- Army Colonel Michael Bumgarner (head of Camp America at the time) told his soldiers that “you all know” three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during that night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death.

But then Bumgarner told those soldiers assembled “that the media would report something different” regarding the deaths of the 3 Guantanamo Bay inmates.

According to the whistleblowers’ accounts, Colonel Bumgarner told his soldiers that the media “would report that the three prisoners had committed ’suicide’ by hanging themselves in their cells”.  Furthermore, it was reported by Harper’s that the servicemen were reminded during this speech to “make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report”.

Finally, the soldiers and sailors were ominously reminded during that speech that “their phone and email communications were being monitored” to ensure that nothing except the ‘official’ cause of deaths were being relayed to the American media from Guantanamo Bay.

Additionally, when later presented by journalist Scott Horton with the ’suicide’ letter supposedly left by one of the three Guantanamo inmates, the father of one of the dead inmates carefully studied the suicide note from his son and replied: “This is a forgery.”

Outside autopsies were then commissioned by the families and Swiss pathologist Dr. Patrice Mangin, for his part, expressed particular concern about one of the victim’s mouth and throat, where he saw “a blunt trauma carried out against the oral region.”

The official U.S. autopsy report mentions an effort at resuscitation, but this, in Dr. Mangin’s view, did “not explain the severity of the injuries…He also noted that some of the marks on the neck were not those he would normally associate with hanging.”

One of the Army whistle-blowers in the Harper’s Magazine article -U.S. Sergeant Joe Hickman- ended his tour of duty in March 2007 and ended his distinguished Army career. During his time there, Mr. Hickman was selected as Guantánamo’s “NCO of the Quarter” and was even awarded a commendation medal. When he returned to the United States, he was promoted to staff sergeant and worked in Maryland as an Army recruiter before eventually settling in the Midwest.

But he could not forget what he had seen at Guantánamo Bay. When Barack Obama became president, Mr. Hickman now decided to act.

“I thought that with a new administration and new ideas I could actually come forward, ” he told journalist Scott Horton.

“It was haunting me…”

Mr. Hickman had seen a 2006 report from Seton Hall University Law School dealing with the deaths of the three prisoners, and he followed their subsequent work. After President Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, he called Mark Denbeaux, the professor who had led the Seton Hall team.

“I learned something from your report,” he told Professor Denbeaux, “but I know some things you don’t.”

According to media reports throughout the years, the “presence of a black site at Guantánamo has long been a subject of speculation among lawyers and human-rights activists” and the experience of Sergeant Hickman and other Guantánamo guards compels us to “ask whether the three prisoners who died on June 9 were being interrogated by the CIA, and whether their deaths resulted from the grueling techniques the Justice Department had approved for the agency’s use—or from other tortures lacking that sanction,” according to journalist Scott Horton.

Mr. Horton further highlighted a subsequent legal ruling of U.S. District Court Judge James Robertson who noted a curious aspect of the government’s presentation in a court hearing: The government’s “citations supporting the fact of the suicides” were all drawn from outside media accounts.

According to Harper’s: “Why had the Justice Department lawyers who argued the case gone to such lengths to avoid making any statement under oath about the suicides? Did they do so in order to deceive the court? If so, they could face disciplinary proceedings or disbarment.”

As retired Rear Admiral John Hutson, the former judge advocate general of the Navy, told Harper’s in their extensive article:

“Filing false reports and making false statements is bad enough, but if a homicide occurs and officials up the chain of command attempt to cover it up, they face serious criminal liability. They may even be viewed as accessories after-the-fact in the original crime.”

Furthermore, with command authority comes command responsibility, further stated former Admiral John Huston.

“If the heart of the military is obeying orders down the chain of command, then its soul is accountability up the chain. You can’t demand the former without the latter.”

In light of the Obama Administration’s dictum to “look forward, not backward” when analyzing Guantanamo Bay and other Bush administration legal follies; are we as a nation going to continue to view these 3 Guantanamo Bay deaths in June 2009 as mere ’suicides’ or actually “pursue a course of action that would implicate the Bush Justice Department in a cover-up of possible homicides”?

Holy underwear, Batman!

Looks like the ‘Butt Bombers’ are at it again…

From the most-recent thwarted attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport to Detroit Metro Airport in Michigan, it seems that Al-Qaeda is again resorting to the ‘butt bomber’ modus operadi in trying to carry out alleged acts of terrorism.

According to ABC News, one “singed pair of underwear with a packet of powder sewn into the crotch, seen in government photos obtained exclusively by ABC News, is all that remains of al Qaeda’s attempt to down an American passenger plane over Detroit.”

The underwear with the explosive worn by alleged Northwest 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is shown in this undated photo. (Courtesy of ABC News)

As seen in these photos, the alleged bomb consisted of a packet of powder sewn into the briefs of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a 23-year-old Nigerian. Al Qaeda took credit Monday for the attempted bombing, boasted of its ability to overcome U.S. intelligence and airport security, and promised new attacks.

But this is not the first time a ‘butt bomber’ has used the nether regions of their body to try and explode a suicide bomb.

In a previous column of mine, I wrote about the would-be assassin of Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Nayef (head of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts) who apparently decided in October 2009 to hide his bomb in his underwear, apparently believing that cultural taboos would prevent a search in that part of his body, according to a Saudi government official close to the investigation.

In the October 2009 Saudi assassination attempt, the terrorist concealed the bomb, made of [the explosive] PETN, in his underwear, according to the official Saudi investigation.

According to CNN, “PETN is a plastic explosive that is not picked up by metal detectors — through which the would-be assassin had to pass before he was allowed to meet with the Saudi prince.”

Like the October 2009 Saudi assassination attempt, similarly, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to bring down Northwest Airlines flight 253 using the same kind of ‘PETN underwear bomb’ that was not discovered by metal detectors.

Sadly, as I had written before, after this most recent Christmas Day incident with Northwest Airlines Flight 253, there are only two things that are going come out of yet another silly and tragic episode of ‘toilet terrorism’:

1) Airport screeners will probably now invest even more money to buy latex gloves and;

2) In addition to already removing half of our clothing at the airport, young brown six-foot-four Muslim males (like myself) who fit the ‘racial profile’ will probably have to spend a little more time at the airports ‘assuming the position’ and ’spreading our cheeks’ the next time that we want to board an airplane.

Thanks a alot, Butt Bombers…

Holy jihad, Batman!

Did Al-Qaeda just officially offer condolences to innocent civilians murdered by their stupid acts of terrorism?

Well, sort of…

According to CNN, Adam Gadahn- also known as ‘Azzam the American’- appeared in a 17-minute video released on Islamist online forums late Friday, offering condolences to the families of innocent people killed in Al-Qaeda attacks.

“We express our condolences to the families of the Muslim men, women and children killed in these criminal acts…” he says in the video.

Wait a minute. Did a member of Al-Qaeda just admit that their acts of terrorism are ‘criminal acts’?

Well, that’s a first, indeed.

Image released by Al-Qaeda-linked group on January 6, 2008 purportedly shows Adam Gadahn. (Courtesy of CNN)

Furthermore, he stated that Al-Qaeda “also expresses the same in regard to the unintended Muslim victims of the mujahedeen’s operations against the crusaders and their allies and puppets, and to the countless faceless and nameless Muslim victims of the murderous crusades” in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s Waziristan regions and Swat Valley, he continued.

CNN rightfully noted that, “It is a rare example of Al-Qaeda offering condolences to the families of those killed in the group’s own attacks.”

Well, sort of…

The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point recently released a stunning report which found that Muslims have accounted for 85 percent of total casualties from Al-Qaeda attacks between 2004-2008. Even more astounding, during the last two years of the study (2006-2008), the percentage of Al-Qaeda’s murdered victims who were Muslim skyrocketed to an almost-unbelievable 98 percent.

Using that math, this means that Al-Qaeda is apologizing to 85-98% of total innocent civilians murdered by their ‘criminal’ and ungodly acts of terrorism.

Even so, this is still not good enough.

They still need to apologize to the remaining 2-15% of non-Muslim innocent men, women and children murdered by Al-Qaeda (and their franchisees) in places like Bali, Madrid and London throughout the years.

This is because Islam forbids the wanton murder of ANY innocent human being, regardless of whether they are Muslim or not.

So although it is a significant gesture that Al-Qaeda has now officially ‘apologized’ to 85-98% of their innocent civilian victims, they still need to completely disavow the murderous violence of their terrorist criminal enterprise and apologize to the remaining 2-15% of the non-Muslim civilian victims who have been brutally murdered by their terrorist cohorts in places like Bali, Madrid and London.

Until that beautiful (and unlikely) day, Al-Qaeda and their brainless zombie pawns will continue to be an enemy to all of mankind.

Dude…You have got to be kidding me…

With the recent arrest of five young American Muslims in Sargodha, Pakistan on alleged charges of terrorism by Pakistani authorities, many of the over 7 million American Muslims were collectively groaning and rolling our eyes whilst saying:

“Are you kidding me? Thanks a lot, you idiots…”

A recent CNN article noted that the potential radicalization of American Muslim teenagers has now become known as “jihadi cool,” a term coined by author/psychiatrist (and former CIA official) Dr. Marc Sageman.

“The path for a lot of these kids is essentially like at-risk gangbangers, who want to ’stand up’ for their community, to address grievances of the global Muslim community more effectively than they’ve seen the elder generation address them since 9/11.”

Many professional ‘de-radicalizers’ have said that the great majority of these young men have little sense of what they are doing. They are “extremely shallow theologically and even ideologically.”

Furthermore, the absurdity of this most-recent story came from the fact that they tried to ‘hook up’ with two Pakistani militant groups — Jaish-e-Mohammed and the Jamaat ud Dawa — but neither group showed any interest in these wanna-be ‘jang-bangers’ (my newly-coined amalgamated term for ‘jihadi’ and ‘gang-banger’) .

I guess these wanna-be ‘jang-bangers’ should have taken off their NBA jerseys and/or New York Yankees hats…Good grief…

First of all, as someone who has actually driven through Sargodha, Pakistan, I can assure you that these dumb-asses were probably not there for any leisurely sight-seeing or to ‘chill’ during a vacation.

That would be like going to Compton for Spring Break.

Forget Sargodha, Pakistan…You knuckleheads should go to Compton first and see how long you wanna-be ‘jang bangers’ would last there.

Not very long, I promise you.

To any ‘wanna-be’ jang bangers out there; you want to help your community?

Put down your XBOX 360, turn off the over-militaristic ‘Halo 3′ video game and go feed the homeless in a soup kitchen.

That is Islam, my friends.

Not 5 young idiotic hot-heads seduced by Internet extremist propaganda to become brainless zombie pawns on Osama’s sinister death-laden chessboard.

The one major silver lining for this case was that the concept of ‘community policing’ works very well in America today.

CNN highlighted the fact that the young men’s families went directly to their mosques and Muslim civil rights organizations on the morning of December 1st, shortly after discovering their sons were missing.

Furthermore, the families and organizations became more disturbed when they had also discovered a disturbing video posted by one of them.

The groups then “contacted a Muslim community organization involved in de-radicalization efforts”, the director of that organization said to CNN.

The de-radicalizer and Muslim organizations then contacted the FBI and worked closely with U.S. authorities to locate the men. FBI agents then interviewed family members of the missing men in northern Virginia and young Muslims living in the area.

CNN further noted that “the Muslim community in northern Virginia was very cooperative” in immediately reporting this suspicious activity to the FBI.

This sad case study should give all wanna-be terrorists severe pause and they should remember this promise from the American Muslim community:

You will NOT be given any sanctuary within our mosques, community centers and Islamic schools…

For anyone plotting to do any stupid criminal act which would result in the death of even ONE human life, the American Muslim community will pick up our phones so fast and call the FBI that you will not even be able to utter the words ‘Osama bin Laden’ three times in a row before the handcuffs are slapped on your limp wrists.

Because that is our civic duty as proud patriotic Americans and also our religious obligations as loving, practicing and peaceful Muslims.