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A Year In Prison For Former Congressman Who Helped Terrorist Organization

A former congressman from Michigan, Mark Siljander, has been sentenced in Kansas City for accepting stolen money to do work for a charity with alleged ties to terrorism.  

Siljander represented central Michigan in the mid 1980s, but had since become a lobbyist.    One of his clients was an organization based in the Sudan, with a branch in Missouri, called the Islamic American Relief Agency.    

The federal government had named the agency a global terrorist organization in 2004.  The agency apparently hired Siljander the same year, paying him 75-thousand dollars to get it off that list.  

As he lobbied the State Department and others, Siljander never disclosed that he was working for a foreign agency.  That’s illegal.   Siljander was indicted January of 2008.   US Attorney for Western Missouri Beth Phillips said came clean in 2010.

“ He admitted that he repeated lied to FBI agents and Prosecutors,   and that he falsely denied that he was hired to advocate for the charity”, said Phillips.   

Siljander’s been sentenced to a year and a day in federal prison.   Several employees and officers of the Islamic American Relief Agency were also sentenced Wednesday.   The Executive Director Mubarak Hamed, a naturalized US Citizen who was living in Columbia, got four years and ten months in prison without parole. 

I’ve been at KCUR almost 30 years, working partly for NPR and splitting my time between local and national reporting. I work to bring extra attention to people in the Midwest, my home state of Kansas and of course Kansas City. What I love about this job is having a license to talk to interesting people and then crafting radio stories around their voices. It’s a big responsibility to uphold the truth of those stories while condensing them for lots of other people listening to the radio, and I take it seriously. Email me at frank@kcur.org or find me on Twitter @FrankNewsman.
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