A new report from National Review reveals the Obama White House intentionally provided an Islamic terrorist-financing organization with hundreds of thousands of dollars despite being designated as a terrorist-affiliated organization for ten years (at that point) by the Treasury Department.
The Sudanese-based Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA) received well over $100,000 from the Obama administration after analysts warned them that ISRA was a designated terror-financing organization with ties to Osama bin Laden and Maktab al-Khidamat (MK), the precursor of al-Qaeda.
After 9/11, ISRA raised funds allocated explicitly for Hamas suicide bombing and well over $1 million to Iraqi insurgents and other terror groups, including Afghan warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Per National Review:
Obama-administration officials knowingly approved the transfer of taxpayer dollars to an al-Qaeda affiliate, and not an obscure one but an enormous international network that was often in the headlines.
How was this prominent terror funder initially approved to receive American taxpayer funds ten years after it had been placed on the “Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons” terror list?
Existing measures to prevent the payment of government monies to designated terrorist organizations include: first, a requirement that all grantees and sub-grantees of U.S.-government grants register for a Data Universal Numbering System (DUNS) number; and second, a requirement that all government vendors register with the government’s System for Award Management (SAM) database. A designated organization should not be able to acquire a DUNS number, and any designation is explicitly recorded in the SAM database with a note that the designated organization is excluded from government grants.
However, ISRA was in fact assigned a DUNS number — as recorded at the government’s USAspending.gov website — which matched no organization in the government’s SAM database. The only listings for “Islamic Relief Agency” or “ISRA” in the SAM database are the designated Sudanese al-Qaeda affiliate and its branches.
It’s no secret that the Obama administration sought to minimize the threat of Islamism and even attempted to co-opt Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, to achieve its foreign policy objectives.
It is nonetheless mentally exhausting to attempt to attribute this behavior to anything other than dangerous naïveté and liberal dogma. While we already knew that – the fact that the previous administration funded an al-Qaeda affiliate with taxpayer dollars is another, far more troubling, issue.
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AAN Staff
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