Red Tape Nearly Stops Testimony by Top Former Islamic Radical

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

By JEFF STEIN, Congressional Quarterly

It took last-minute arm-twisting by congressional offices and the Department of Homeland Security Wednesday to unravel State Department red tape that nearly prevented a top former Islamic radical from testifying to a Senate committee on the threat his former comrades present to the West.

Maajid Nawaz, 30, a former key member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a secretive Islamicist group that works to foment military coups d'etats in countries friendly to the West, is scheduled to testify on Islamicist terrorism Thursday at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

A British citizen of Pakistani heritage, Nawaz was finally granted a "significant benefit parole" into the U.S. by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The procedure is used to allow individuals with "significant criminal histories," such as mafia figures, into the U.S. to testify against their former organizations.

Nawaz, who gets "credible death threats from al-Qaeda types on a weekly basis," according to a person working on getting him into the U.S., was imprisoned and tortured for more than four years in Egypt because of his involvement with Hizb ut-Tahrir.

ICE deployed agents in three cars to escort him from Dulles Airport to his Washington hotel and an afternoon briefing at the Center for National Policy, a think tank headed by former Indiana congressman Tim Roemer, a member of the 9/11 Commission.

The security agents also took a room opposite his at the hotel.

ICE spokeswoman Kelly A. Nantel declined to comment, citing privacy issues.

But an official familiar with the events said Nawaz "has free movement but is monitored. The procedure is the same for anyone with a significant criminal history."

Nawaz, speaking by phone from his hotel room Wednesday afternoon, sounded amused by all the security. He described the ICE agents as "very polite, very civil."

His final clearance to enter the U.S. came in cloak-and-dagger fashion, he said.

He said he got a call Tuesday night from someone the American Embassy in London, telling him to be at Heathrow at 7 a.m. the next morning, where he would be met by "a man in a blue raincoat" and provided the necessary papers to enter the U.S.

"It was very Hollywood-like," he said. The man walked up and handed him three envelopes, one for himself, one for the airline, and one to present at Customs when he landed.

Nawaz, co-director of the U.K.-based Qulliiam Foundation, which describes itself as a "counter extremism think tank," is well known in Britain from interviews and television appearances featuring his attraction to, and disaffection with, radical Islam.

In a memoir published earlier this year, In and Out of Islam, Nawaz recounted how the racism he faced as a youth in Britain opened him to the siren song of radical Islam.

"Nawaz might be the most senior former leader of an Islamic extremist group to testify before the Congress since the 9-11 attacks," Andrew Cochran wrote Wednesday at The Counterterrorism Blog.

Nawaz says that Hizb ut-Tahrir agents have infiltrated the military services of Uzbekistan and other Central Asian states, as well as Indonesia.