I wrote about Hassan here when news broke that he had traveled to Iraq alone and without his parent’s knowledge to gain insight for his journalism class. Well, that story is unraveling, from the Broward-Palm Beach New Times:
One said she'd heard from a friend of a friend of a friend that big news was soon going to break about Farris.
"This story doesn't make sense," she said. "Someone very close to the family said his father had gotten into all kinds of trouble over terrorism in New Orleans and the kid was really going over there to join al Qaeda."
Al Qaeda? Terrorism? It couldn't be true. After all, the headlines across the globe showed that Farris' hazardous trip was a "quest for knowledge" and that he went to Iraq to "promote democracy."
He was just a boy with a dream.
Unfortunately, nothing is ever that simple when it comes to the Iraq War and the Middle East. Although an al Qaeda mission doesn't seem realistic, there are some disturbing questions about Farris Hassan's journey that have been left happily unanswered by the swarming, yelping media seals. And most of them center on his father, Dr. Redha Hassan, a 57-year-old anesthesiologist who does indeed have a rather shady past that we'll explore a bit later.
Yes it does appear that his father does have a shady past, infact it now appears that his father was investigated on terrorism charges and the FBI arrested Dr. Hassan back in 1985 after he tried to manufacture thousands of false Iraqi passports and military identification cards. The doctor's capture happened in Fort Lauderdale, but the covert web of Hassan's cohorts stretched across the world. Also arrested were two of Hassan's brothers, Nouri and Ali, and a "pro-Khomeini" activist named Salah Jawad Schubber.
What also isn’t widely reported is that Hassan, the son, was assisted in his travels by his father who used his “contacts” to secure his son’s travel visa’s and that while Farris was traveling in the area he met with a media relations officer of the terrorist group Hezbollah at their Central Press Office, in Beirut. This meeting was arranged through the assistance of his hosts – the family’s friends.
So was Farris just a wildly adventurous boy with a desire to learn more about what was going on in the area, or was he on the path of taking up his father’s radical belief’s and looking for a way to become the next foreign fighter to take up arms against the country of his citizenship? This is definitely a story that needs to be tracked and investigated, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the dark colored Crown Vic’s show up in the Hassan’s driveway to do some talking again real soon.
H/T Michelle Malkin, BizzyBlog
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