A Troubling Money Trail

The Bush administration’s latest crackdown on terrorist finances could touch some raw political nerves. Last week federal agents raided more than a dozen U.S.-based Islamic businesses and charities looking for ties to Al Qaeda and other terror groups. NEWSWEEK has learned that a main target of the raids, a Saudi-backed charity called the SAFA Trust, has provided funding for an influential Islamic political group with close ties to the GOP and the Bush White House. The group, the Islamic Institute, which operates out of the same D.C. office suite as GOP activist Grover Norquist, was set up in 1999 to mobilize American Muslim support for the Republican Party. Since then Norquist and the group’s chairman, Khaled Saffuri, have arranged meetings between Islamic leaders and top Bush officials.
Funding for the institute’s $170,000-a-year operation could prove problematic. Saffuri confirmed the authenticity of checks obtained by NEWSWEEK showing the institute received $20,000 from the SAFA Trust and another $20,000 from Abdurhanman Alamoudi, a board member of the Success Foundation, whose offices were also raided. (The institute has also received foreign funding, including $55,000 from Kuwait and more than $200,000 from Qatar.) Steve Emerson, who tracks U.S.-based terror groups, said the checks “raise questions as to whether militant Islamic groups were trying to acquire political influence” in the United States. But Saffuri denied the funds came with any strings. Norquist, an institute board member, said the group “promotes democracy and free markets. Any effort to imply guilt by association is incompetent McCarthyism.”
Sources close to the case told NEWSWEEK the raids were prompted by evidence showing the SAFA Trust and related groups transferred millions of dollars to obscure entities on the Isle of Man, a notorious money-laundering haven. Records also show that the president of SAFA Trust once served on the board of a firm associated with Al Taqwa, an international financial network whose assets were frozen by President Bush. So far no charges have been filed, and U.S. Islamic groups called the raids an “outrageous” violation of their civil liberties.

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