Fund-raisers, surveillants, recruiters, logistics-cells.all are as much
terrorists as bomb throwers and assassins.
 
Bruce
 
 
Nasrallah's Men Inside America 
 
Prosecutors suspect Hizbullah has fund-raising cells in the United States,
but not terrorists-so far, that is.
By Dan Ephron and Michael Isikoff
Newsweek
Aug. 14, 2006 issue - It began, as the Feds tell the tale, with a
run-of-the-mill tax-fraud scheme. Imad Hammoud and his ring of Lebanese
Americans from the Detroit area would buy boxes of cigarettes in North
Carolina, where the state tax on smokes is among the lowest in the country,
allegedly truck the goods back to Michigan and sell them at a profit of more
than $10 a carton. Hammoud, an immigrant with ties to Hizbullah, according
to an indictment filed with a U.S. district court in Michigan earlier this
year, would then wire a portion of the earnings to a member of the group in
Lebanon. By 2002, Hammoud and some of his colleagues were believed to be
running $500,000 worth of cigarettes a week across state lines and expanding
into stolen contraband and counterfeit goods, including Viagra tablets.
During a three-month period that year, authorities allege, more than 90,000
Viagra knockoffs were purchased, with a plan to sell them as the real thing.
"They're small, they're high in demand and they're easily transportable,"
says Bob Clifford, a senior FBI agent. "They're the perfect medium."
The Hammoud case is among a handful of money scams uncovered across the
country in recent years bearing Hizbullah's fingerprints. Though the
revenues are not huge, the cases together underscore a daunting reality: one
of the most proficient terrorist groups in the world has at least a small
web of operatives in America who, prosecutors believe, are loyal to Hassan
Nasrallah. Hizbullah has not targeted Americans since the 1980s, when
attacks on a Marine barracks in Lebanon and on the U.S. Embassy there killed
more than 300 people. Sometime later, the group apparently made a strategic
decision not to tweak the world's only superpower. Law enforcers say there's
been no sign the fighting between Israel and Hizbullah, with all the Arab
anger it stirs against America, will goad the group into action against the
United States. Still, security officials worry that if Hizbullah does one
day decide to strike, it can exploit an already-existing network in this
country. "You often see in these groups that people who deal in finances
also have military backgrounds," says Chris Hamilton, who was the FBI's unit
chief for Palestinian investigations until last year. "The fact is, they
have the ability [to attack] in the United States."
The FBI has made Hizbullah a central target of its counterterrorism efforts,
setting up a unit dedicated to tracking the group and assigning agents to
develop sources in Lebanese and other Middle Eastern communities across the
country. Clifford, who once headed the unit on Hizbullah and Iran, made his
biggest Hizbullah bust six years ago, cracking a North Carolina ring that
forged credit cards and laundered money, using some of the profits to buy
gear for Hizbullah. The ringleader, Mohammed Hammoud (no relation to Imad),
was convicted of providing "material support" for terrorism and sentenced to
155 years in prison. Although he and his followers were not linked to actual
terror attacks, the FBI found evidence they did engage in "tactical" arms
training and would have been ready to strike if told to do so. "If they were
given an order to conduct an operation in the United States, they would have
found a way to do it," Clifford says.
What might prompt Hizbullah to issue such an order? American
screw-tightening on Iran over its nuclear program, for one. Iran is
Hizbullah's main political and financial backer. Some analysts believe the
group's deadliest terrorist attacks, including bombings at Israel's
Argentine Embassy in 1992 and at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires
in 1994, were ordered up by Iranian handlers. "It would be enough for the
Iranian leadership to say the word for Hizbullah to launch an attack," says
Congressman Ed Royce, a Republican from California who chairs the House
subcommittee on international terrorism and nonproliferation.
But Hamilton, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for
Near East Studies, says Hizbullah would be more likely to attack Americans
abroad. "They would go for soft targets in places where they have lots of
resources," such as South America or Turkey. Other experts believe Hizbullah
would have too much to lose from an attack on American soil. "Their
fund-raising activities have been very fruitful in the United States," says
Dennis Lormel, who was the FBI's section chief for terrorist financing until
2003. "With Israel clamping down on their other sources of revenue, it
wouldn't make sense for them to wreck their own ability to continue making
money here."
Support for Nasrallah runs high in Lebanese communities across the country,
and it spikes when Israel's war with Hizbullah or with Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza heats up. When Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy Lt.
John Stedman searched the home of a Lebanese immigrant in Los Angeles two
years ago, he found Hizbullah flags decorating the walls, along with
pictures of Nasrallah and audiotapes of his speeches. "We love him," Stedman
quotes a resident of the home as saying, "because he protects us from the
Jews." In a case against a Lebanese immigrant in Dearborn, Mich., who is
suspected of tax fraud, prosecutors have showcased pictures of the suspect
seated alongside Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Hizbullah's spiritual leader,
at a 2002 fund-raiser in Lebanon.
But Arab-American leaders complain law enforcers are too quick to equate the
pride some ex-patriates take in Hizbullah's stand against Israel-or even
just the sympathy they feel for the Lebanese people-with support for
terrorism. "Any time somebody sends money to somebody in Lebanon, they
[prosecutors] say it's for Hizbullah," says Maurice Herskovic, who initially
represented one of the defendants in the Detroit case. Last month two of the
defendants reached a plea bargain with prosecutors, admitting to several
fraud charges that carry a penalty of up to 30 months in prison, but they
were not charged with terrorism. Hammoud was not among them. Though three of
his brothers entered not-guilty pleas in the case, prosecutors say Hammoud
slipped out of the United States and is probably back in Lebanon, where
Hizbullah gunmen are waging bloody street battles with Israeli troops. "This
is a new organization [compared with what it was years ago]," says Bob Baer,
a retired CIA agent who spent years in the Middle East. "It's fighting a
conventional war." Yet it also has the capacity to carry out devastating
terrorist attacks. In Europe and South America, and possibly in the United
States as well, that's a threat law enforcers must take seriously.
With Jamie Reno in San Diego, John Sparks in New York and Mark Hosenball in
Paris
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14208386/
 


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