More on the Gitmo lawyers' shady Wahhabist backers

Let's take a break from election stuff for a moment and get back to one of my favorite topics: the Gitmo Lawyers and who's paying for them. Back here I wrote about a liberal advocacy outfit called the Center for Constitutional Rights, which was representing several of the Gitmo detainees (such as Majid Khan) in court. Not only are they representing lawyers, but they are also coordinating all the legal representation for most of the detainees--more than 500 pro-bono lawyers.

The CCR's funding statement revealed an interesting detail, as you'll see at that link. The International Institute for Islamic Thought, the IIIT, was a major donor to the CCR's work. The IIIT was raided in 2002 by Federal agents as part of a terror-funding investigation.

I had cause to revisit that post recently and looked at their donor list again. There are a couple of names on there I missed the first time whose participation bears note, both of them (like the IIIT) giving in the $25000-$49,999 range:

Hisham Altalib: Director of Finance for the IIIT. In the affidavit* for the search of IIIT's premises, Altalib (or Al-Talib) is mentioned by name:

70. Hisham Al-Talib is a director or officer of several Safa Group organizations, including Safa Trust, Inc. and IIIT. Al-Talib was referenced in Al-Alwani’s 1991 letter expressing solidarity with [Sami] Al-Arian.

Jamal Barzinji: Also a VP of the IIIT.

Barzinji is also named in the affidavit:

73. Jamal Barzinji has been the officer or director of numerous Safa Group organizations, including Mar-Jac Poultry, Reston Investments, and Safa Trust. Barzinji was referenced in Al-Alwani’s 1991 letter expressing solidarity with Al-Arian. I believe that Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ (as evidenced by ties to Al-Arian, including documents seized in Tampa in 1995 reflecting direct correspondence between Barzinji and Al-Arian), but also with HAMAS. REDACTED xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.

Barzinji is quite active in politics, having (apparently) hired disgraced Bush administration official (and Grover Norquist/ Jack Abramoff-linked lobbyist) David H. Safavian to lobby on behalf of the imprisoned Malaysian deputy Prime Minister. Originally Safavian's firm had declared they were lobbying for a fellow named Abdurahman Alamoudi. When Alamoudi was convicted of taking money from Libya to attempt an assassination of the Crown prince of Saudi Arabia, the lobbyists said they weren't working for Alamoudi after all and had in fact been hired by Barzinji. (Cue Marlon Brando voice: Now I see it was Barzinji all along...) Barzinji's background was considered sketchy enough for the Washington Post to break out the T-word:

The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee held up Safavian's nomination for more than a year, in part because of lawmakers' concerns about lobbying work for two men later accused of links to suspected terrorist organizations, according to committee documents.

Anyway, there's a lot more out there about Barzinji that I'll let you google if you like. (Neither Barzinji nor Altalib have been charged with any crime as a result of these investigations.)

It's interesting to me that these guys took this step and put their names and the IIIT on the line. At least two of the major donors, the Tides Foundation and the JEHT Foundation, are described by Discover the Networks as capable of effectively anonymizing contributions to non-profits. Anyone can donate money to one of those groups anonymously and earmark it toward a particular project, like the CCR.

Ah, yes, the point: Up at that first link I quoted a DoD official spoke out on the lawyers representing the Gitmo detainees:

When asked in the radio interview who was paying for the legal representation, Mr. Stimson replied: “It’s not clear, is it? Some will maintain that they are doing it out of the goodness of their heart, that they’re doing it pro bono, and I suspect they are; others are receiving moneys from who knows where, and I’d be curious to have them explain that.”

The legal community closed ranks against him, and he lost his job for saying that. They even tried to have him disbarred.

And yet, as I've been pointing out again and again for over a year now, that man was on to something.

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*Affidavit available here, in a long .pdf file. Fascinating stuff, and also relevant to the recent Holy Land Foundation trials. Great table of who's who in the "Safa Group" on page 42-3, which shows how many of those pies Jamal Barzinji and Hisham Al-Talib had their fingers in. (And you know, contributions in the $25-50K range aren't chicken change. Are they that well compensated? I'm in the wrong line of work!) And then there's this tidbit, which may well be innocent, but in the totality of circumstances certainly raises an eyebrow:

24. In June 1998, redacted xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx at IIIT's physical address and its post office box in Herndon revealed the receipt of mail from the El-Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Company, in Khartoum, Sudan. That company’s facility, believed to be producing ingredients used in chemical weapons, was the target of an August 20, 1998 American cruise missile attack that retaliated for the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Tantalizing redaction in original. One more excerpt from that affidavit? Oh, twist my arm:

A Fairfax County Police Department criminal history check revealed that in November 2000, Jamal Barzinji was arrested at [Address redacted by See-Dubya], Herndon, Virginia, and charged with Domestic Abuse and Resisting Arrest.

ADDENDUM: Welcome LGF'ers! Some discussion of this post in the LGF comments suggests that people are reading this and thinking "The Gitmo Lawyers" are being paid by the IIIT. In reality it's much more complicated than that--but let me be clear: all of the 500 lawyers who are coordinated by the Center for Constitutional Rights are themselves legitimately pro-bono and do not get paid for this work. Not that that means they're angels or anything. (The CCR's own staff attorneys, such as Gitanjali Gutierrez, are full-time public interest attorneys, and are therefore their work is subsidized by these contributions.) This post and the post at the first link merely detail how the CCR itself has received somewhere between $75,000 and $149,998 from the (decidedly shady) IIIT and two of its vice presidents.

AS for the pro bono lawyers, there are still interesting aspects to that. The first of which is that in many cases, they come from law firms who have a Middle Eastern state or prince as a major client--in one case, in the trillion dollar 9/11 suit. The second is that the impetus to get the legal industry to join forces behind the Gitmo detainees was itself a Kuwaiti-funded PR campaign.

IF you are interested in this subject, I've posted on it a lot. Put "Gitmo lawyers" in the search bar on the left and you'll get an eyeful.

One more thing: If you're new to the JYB, here's one more cool story I dug up that hasn't made the MSM yet, but should.

UPDATE: Many of the Gitmo lawyers have signed a petition endorsing Barack Obama.