Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi

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Abdul Rahman Al-Amoudi, picture taken 1995-12-08

Abdul Rahman Al-Amoudi also Abdurahman Alamoudi, is the founder of the American Muslim Council in the United States. He was born in Eritrea, but was raised in Yemen, and later immigrated to the USA.

He founded the American Muslim Council in 1990, a group dedicated to lobbying American politicians (both Republican and Democratic) on behalf of Muslims in the US. Until 1998, he was involved with the selection of Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military (through the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, which he co-founded in 1991), and acted as a consultant to The Pentagon for over a decade.

During this time Al-Amoudi served as an Islamic adviser to President Bill Clinton and a fund raiser for both the Republican and Democratic parties. More recently, Al-Amoudi had worked with leading conservatives such as Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform. He became a US citizen in 1996.

Al-Amoudi and other Muslim leaders met with then-presidential candidate George W. Bush in Austin in July 2000, offering to support his bid for the White House in exchange for Bush's commitment to repeal certain anti-terrorist laws.

After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Al-Amoudi spoke at the Washington National Cathedral prayer service for the victims of the attack.

[edit] Controversy

Al-Amoudi has been described an "expert in the art of deception" in a report by Newsweek journalists Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, for expressing moderate, pro-American sympathies in his lobbying and public relations work with Americans, but then being caught on camera expressing support for Hamas and Hezbollah at an Islamist rally.^[1]

On July 30, 2004 he pled guilty to three charges of illegal dealings with Libya, after admitting that he participated in a plot to murder Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for Muammar al-Gaddafi and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars from top Libyan officials, in addition to tax and immigration violations. He was sentenced to 23 years in jail.

David Safavian, the White House Chief Procurement officer, indicted in 2005 and charged with obstructing a criminal probe, has also been linked to Al-Amoudi by federal prosecutors.

Al-Amoudi is a co-founder of Ptech, Inc., an enterprise software company charged with ties to terrorists (though to date, no evidence has been found), which had a client roster on September 11, 2001 that included several US Government agencies involved in failures to prevent the September 11, 2001 attacks. As of May, 2004, Ptech still had contracts with federal agencies including the White House.