An Unwelcome Guest

The Justice Department this summer abruptly cancelled a high-profile "Muslim outreach" event featuring Attorney General Alberto Gonzales after discovering that one of the invited guests was an officer of an organization just named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in a major terrorism case.

The scheduled event was slated to take place in the main department auditorium known as the Great Hall of Justice on June 27--with Gonzales billed as the keynote speaker. The program was titled "Securing America: Law Enforcement Partnerships with American Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern and South Asian Communities," according to the official invitation, which went out to scores of groups and individuals last spring.

But after the invites went out, aides to Gonzales suddenly became alarmed that it could create a new embarrassment for the embattled attorney general. The reason: one of the featured speakers was a prominent Northern Virginia imam who serves as vice president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which had just been branded by federal prosecutors in court papers as a U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood--the international movement, based in Egypt, dedicated to the creation of a worldwide Islamic caliphate. ISNA, which has not been charged with any crime, was among more than a hundred organizations and individuals who were listed in late May as "unindicted co-conspirators" in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation--the Texas-based group now on trial in Dallas for allegedly conspiring to funnel funds to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.

The discovery created tensions among officials of the department's civil-rights division (which organized the event) and the criminal division's counterterrorism section (which is overseeing the prosecution). It prompted Justice officials to hastily "postpone" the event, calling up and e-mailing the invited guests in early June and informing them that the attorney general had a "scheduling conflict."

"There was some concern in DOJ over this," said one of the senior officials. "The political math was that this could lead to stories about the attorney general sitting down with bad guys and that was going to become an embarrassment."

"It is not unusual for tentatively scheduled DOJ events to be postponed due to any number of reasons," said Brian Roehrkasse, the Justice Department's chief of public affairs, when asked about the cancellation. He pointed out that Gonzales was on a nationwide speaking tour that week and did not return until the evening of the day the event was scheduled. A Justice official (who asked not to be identified talking about upcoming scheduling issues) said the department was planning "a couple of similar events" for later in the year, but declined to say "who will or won't be invited."