Hamas-Linked CAIR Seeks To Stymie FBI Sharing Of Terror Watchlist
PAMELA GELLER
FREEDOMOUTPOST.COM
2/26/2019
Although it poses as a “moderate,” “civil rights” organization, Hamas, aka CAIR, is anything but. Despite being named as unindicted co-conspirators in the largest terror funding trial in our nation’s history, they remain the number one go-to Islamic group for the leftist-elite media, and clearly for the social media monopolies as well.
Several CAIR officials have been convicted of participating in violent jihad activities.
So, it’s no surprise that terror-tied CAIR would seek to stymie FBI sharing of the terror watchlist.
“Hamas-linked CAIR seeks to stymie FBI sharing of terror watchlist,” World Israel News, February 21, 2019 (thanks to Mark):
A U.S.-based Muslim group called for a congressional investigation Wednesday after its lawsuit revealed that the U.S. government has shared access to parts of its terrorist watchlist with more than 1,400 private entities, including hospitals and universities.
The group, called Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), has been accused of links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and its director, Hussam Ayloush, in November tweeted that the Middle East would be better off if Israel were “terminated.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations said Congress should look into why the FBI has given such wide access to the list. CAIR claims that dissemination of the names makes life more difficult for those who are wrongly included.
“To share private information of citizens and non-citizens with corporations is illegal and outrageous,” said CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad.
The FBI said in a statement Wednesday night that private groups only receive a subset of the terrorist watchlist called the Known or Suspected Terrorist List. It is unclear how significantly that narrows the list from the watchlist, which is formally known as the Terrorist Screening Center Database and includes hundreds of thousands of names.
Gadeir Abbas, lawyer for CAIR, said there is no evidence that the list of Known or Suspected Terrorists, or KST, is in any meaningful way less broad than the overall watchlist. Indeed, the articulated standard for inclusion on the watchlist is a reasonable suspicion of being a known or suspected terrorist.
The FBI statement says that any private agency accessing the list “must comply with agreements to ensure the security and confidentiality of the information. A requestor can only ask for information about a specific individual and cannot access all the data available in the KST File.”
Any private entity that comes in contact with a match from the list is instructed to contact the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center for further instructions, the FBI said.
The council filed a lawsuit in 2016 challenging the list’s constitutionality and saying those wrongly placed on it routinely face difficulties in travel, financial transactions and their dealings with law enforcement.
In response to the lawsuit, a federal official recently acknowledged in a court filing that more than 1,400 private entities received access to the list.
For years, the government had insisted that it did not generally share the list with private organizations.
A hearing is scheduled in federal court for Friday on CAIR’s request that the government now detail exactly which entities have received access to the names. CAIR also wants to know what private organizations are doing with the watchlist information — whether, for example, it is influencing universities’ admissions decisions or is being used by hospitals to screen would-be visitors.
In depositions and in court hearings, government officials had denied until very recently that the watchlist compiled by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center is shared with private entities. At a hearing in September, government lawyer Dena Roth told U.S. District Judge Anthony Trenga that the Terrorist Screening Center “does not work with private partners, and that watchlist status itself … is considered law enforcement sensitive information and is not shared with the public.”
Despite that assurance, the judge ordered the government to be more specific about how it disseminates the watchlist. Trenga said the plaintiffs are entitled to the information to try to prove their case that inclusion on the list causes them to suffer “real world consequences.”…
