An Indian-American Muslim raised in Texas, Hussain is a deputy associate White House counsel who was also closely involved in shaping the major address the president delivered in Cairo last June, explaining Obama’s views to the Muslim world. In announcing Hussain’s appointment last week as the U.S. envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the president called Hussain “an accomplished lawyer and a close and trusted member of my White House staff.” Hussain traveled to Saudi Arabia and Qatar earlier this week with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Hussain’s allies have defended him against claims that he is soft on terror by pointing to a think tank study he co-wrote arguing that U.S. policy should emphasize that terrorism is antithetical to the teachings of Islam.
At the time Hussain spoke in 2004, the government's treatment of Sami Al-Arian was a cause celebre among Arab-American and Muslim activists, as well as many civil libertarians generally. Al-Arian was accused of raising funds for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but his trial in 2005 ended with some acquittals and a hung jury on other counts. The former University of South Florida computer science professor later pleaded guilty to one count of aiding a terrorist group and was sentenced to 57 months in prison.
Adding to the controversy about Hussain’s comments on “political motivated persecutions” is that they were deleted from a report on the conference that first appeared in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, a magazine on the region with articles from the Arab and Muslim perspectives.
In the current version of the story on the Washington Report’s website, there is no reference to Hussain’s comments, or even that he appeared at the 2004 conference. But earlier, cached versions of the same story do include the comments — initially adding to the mystery of why they were taken out and at whose request. The discrepancy was first noted in a story last Sunday in the Web-based Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report.
A Washington Report editor initially said the author of its article requested the change because Laila Al-Arian’s comments had been misattributed to Hussain. However, in an e-mail to POLITICO, the author, Shereen Kandil, stood by her reporting and denied she ever made such a request.
In addition, both Laila Al-Arian and Kandil, who now works in the Obama administration at the Environmental Protection Agency, said they were never consulted before the passages referring to Hussain were deleted. The deletion took place sometime between October 2007 and this year, according to the Internet Archive, though the version available in Nexis was never modified.
The changes made some three years or more after his speech have led to speculation that Hussain was sanitizing his record to smooth his path to a White House legal post. However, the strident criticism he offered of the Justice Department’s handling of various alleged terrorism cases raises the possibility that his remarks could have posed a problem when he was applying for work at Justice in 2008. He joined the agency in the last year of the Bush administration as a trial attorney handling civil cases against the government, a Justice spokeswoman said.
While the audio shows that Hussain did utter the phrase “politically motivated persecutions” in the midst of his discussion about Sami Al-Arian, another comment Kandil attributed to Hussain, describing Al-Arian as being “used politically to squash dissent,” is not audible in the recording POLITICO obtained, which cuts off before any question-and-answer period.
Hussain’s remarks about Al-Arian appear to have been extemporaneous, but he seemed to have prepared in advance his denunciation of the Bush administration’s handling of other terrorism-related detentions and prosecutions.