Rita Katz - Career

Career

Katz believes that most Muslims living in America are moderate, but that a small group of people, funded by some Saudi Arabians and others, are trying to radicalize them.

In approximately 1997 she began working for a Middle Eastern research institute. As a result of her research, she realized that the Holy Land Foundation was a front group for Hamas. Wanting to examine it more closely, she attended a fundraiser of theirs dressed as a Muslim woman. Soon thereafter, again disguised as a Muslim woman, wearing a burqa and wearing recording equipment, she began attending Islamic conferences and fundraisers, visiting mosques, and participating in pro-Palestinian rallies in the U.S. as an undercover investigator in order to expose links of American Islamic groups to foreign terrorist groups.

Katz's SITE Institute, co-founded with Josh Devon in July 2002, was funded by various federal agencies and private groups. It analyzes "corporate records, tax forms, credit reports, video tapes, internet news group postings and owned websites, among other resources, for indicators of illicit activity". It provided information on radical Muslim groups operating in the United States, and led to closures of organizations, deportations, and ongoing investigations. She spends hours every day monitoring password-protected online chat rooms in which Islamic terrorists discuss politics, exchange tips, and announce their plans and accomplishments. She and her researchers research online sources for intelligence, which her staff translates and sends out by e-mail to about 100 subscribers. Among her subscribers are people in government, in corporate security, and in the media. She has worked with prosecutors on more than a dozen terrorism investigations, and many American officers in Iraq rely on her e-mails to, for example, brief troops on the designs for explosives that are passed around terrorist Web sites.

With the SITE Institute, which she co-founded to monitor Islamic extremist websites and to expose terrorist front groups, she worked with federal investigators in terrorism cases. She was cited in Richard Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies", as having helped to provide information to the government on the Al Qaeda network. Clarke wrote that she and Steven Emerson, for whom she formerly worked, regularly provided the White House with a stream of information about possible Al Qaeda activity inside the U.S. that was apparently largely unknown to the FBI before the 9/11 attacks. They gave Clarke and his staff the names of Islamic radical Web sites, the identities of possible terrorist front groups, and the phone numbers and addresses of possible terror suspects—data Clarke was unable to get from elsewhere in the government. She also served as a consultant in a $1 trillion wrongful-death suit seeking to hold Saudi government and business interests accountable for the 9/11 attacks.

In May 2003, Katz related her story on the CBS newsmagazine, "60 Minutes," but in disguise, discussing her work helping the U.S. in a number of terrorism-related investigations by sneaking undercover into mosques linked to radicals. She also wrote a book entitled Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America under the name Anonymous, to protect herself and her family from retaliation from groups that she said were linked to al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. In the book she tries to reveal what she sees as the gravity and extent of the presence of Islamic fundamentalism in America, and that government agencies still do not all work together as one to fight terrorism, but instead hide information from each other, try to take over investigations, and even deliberately slow down terrorism investigations.

SITE's work was cited in The New York Times and the Washington Post about twice a month as of 2006. In January 2007, Al-Jazeerah reported that the National Association of Muslim American Women filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Criminal Section, and also with the Executive Office for the United States Attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging that as a result of misleading and false information provided to U.S. law enforcement agencies, the media, and various governmental bodies, various Jewish organizations and individuals including Katz had sought to create an environment in the U.S. that is hostile towards U.S. Muslims, resulting in the deprivation and violation of Muslim civil liberties and civil rights.

In October 2007, it was revealed that Katz had discovered and issued to the Bush administration a copy of an Osama bin Laden video which had yet to be released by al-Qaeda. Katz issued the video via a private link to a SITE web page to White House counsel Fred F. Fielding and Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the President for Homeland Security. Within 20 minutes, computers registered to various parts of the Executive Branch began downloading the video, and within hours a transcript referencing SITE had appeared on Fox News. Katz had requested that the web page remain confidential, and has reported that dissemination of this information tipped off her Al-Qaeda supporters who had since eliminated the ability of SITE to gather such information.

"Rita really knows what she's talking about—who's responsible for attacks, what's a legitimate terrorist organization, and what's not", said Robert Worth, a New York Times reporter.