Former 3 term GOP congressman and UN ambassador guilty of aiding Islamic terror supporter and obstruction gets only 1 year in jail-Reuters

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Siljander was in congress from 1981-1987.

1/11/12, "Ex-congressman gets year over links to defunct Islamic charity," Reuters, Kevin Murphy

"A former U.S. congressman from Michigan was sentenced to a year in prison on Wednesday for accepting secret payments to try to help an Islamic charity get removed from a congressional watch list of relief agencies suspected of supporting terrorism.

Mark Deli Siljander, 60, a former three-term Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives, pleaded guilty in 2010 to obstruction of justice and acting as an unregistered foreign agent on behalf of the now-defunct Islamic American Relief Agency.

As part of his plea deal, Siljander admitted he had lied to the FBI and prosecutors in denying he was hired by the Missouri-based charity, U.S. Attorney Beth Phillips of Kansas City said in a statement.

The agency, which Phillips said "secretly funneled more than a million dollars to Iraq" in violation of U.S. economic sanctions, was closed in 2004 after the U.S. Treasury Department

• designated it as a global terrorist organization.

That same year, it hired Siljander, who had served in Congress in the 1980s, to lobby for the agency's removal from a Senate Finance Committee list of charities suspected of funding terrorism, Phillips said. He also sought to get the agency reinstated as an approved government contractor, a status it lost in 1999, she said.

Phillips said Siljander received $75,000 in payments from the charity that the agency concealed by routing them through non-profit entities.

A 42-count federal indictment returned in 2008 had also accused the agency and its former executive director, Mubarak Hamed, of engaging in prohibited financial transactions for the benefit of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan mujahideen leader designated by the U.S. government in 2002 as a terrorist.

The government said that Hekmatyar, a former warlord who fought against the Soviet Union and later served as Afghanistan's prime minister in the 1990s, supported al Qaeda and the Taliban and had "vowed to engage in holy war against the United States and international troops in Afghanistan."

Siljander served in the U.S. House of Representatives for nearly six years, from April 1981 to January 1987. He later ran a Washington-based business called Global Strategies, a marketing and public relations company. He also was an ambassador to the United Nations.

A federal judge in Kansas City sentenced Siljander to a year and a day in prison without parole. Four co-defendants affiliated with the Islamic charity also were sentenced on Wednesday."...

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8/30/07, "Plan for Terror Screening of Aid Groups Cut Drastically," Washington Post, Pincus

"The Bush administration has decided to sharply scale back its plan to screen U.S. foreign aid contractors around the globe for potential terrorism connections..."...

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Appointed by Ronald Reagan to be UN delegate in 1987:

"SILJANDER, Mark Deli, (1951 - )

"Delegate to the United Nations General Assembly, September 1987-September 1988; "



via Atlas Shrugs