Siljander was born in Chicago, Illinois, where he attended the public schools, having graduated in 1969 from Oak Park and River Forest High School. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1972 and a Master of Arts from Western Michigan in 1973. Siljander was awarded an honorary doctorate in humanities from Coral Ridge Baptist University, Jacksonville, Florida, and a Ph.D. in international business from George Wythe College, Cedar City, Utah (accreditation pending), where he was listed as a faculty member.[2] He served as a trustee on Fabius Township Board in St. Joseph County, Michigan, from 1972–1976 and also worked as a real estate broker.
Charges of money laundering are at the root of the Siljander indictment, with "conspiracy and obstruction" built around those accusations. However, the basis of the Bush Department of Justice "money laundering" charges theoretically make any funds received from a blacklisted charity, a list devoid of "due process", whether banning is public or secret, whether funds are distributed before or after "blacklisting," guilty of a criminal act in support of "terrorism."
With such overbroad application of enforcement, according to OMBWatch, any vendor or supplier could face prosecution. Equally, no person could donate funds to any charity organization where the remote chance that any relationship, no matter how tenuous or obscure, may exist or have existed with any organization or individual tied to a "blacklist."
An argument would thus follow that the issue of prosecutorial targeting tied to political concerns, rather than security issues would provide a basis for an affirmative defense, supported by the wide number of controversies tied to Gonzales appointees and the litany of accusations they face as outlined here.
The Afghan warlord tied by this indictment to the IARA, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, is reported to have had a long relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency and to have been the recipient of millions in US funding:
"As the US mobilizes for covert war in Afghanistan (see 1978 and July 3, 1979), a CIA special envoy meets Afghan mujaheddin leaders at Peshawar, Pakistan, near the border to Afghanistan. All of them have been carefully selected by the Pakistani ISI and do not represent a broad spectrum of the resistance movement. One of them is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a drug dealer with little support in Afghanistan, but who is loyal to the ISI. The US will begin working with Hekmatyar and over the next 10 years over half of all US aid to the mujaheddin will go to his faction (see 1983).
Few articles in the mainstream press mention the far more substantial historical association: that between Hekmatyar and the CIA. During the 1980s he received fully 90% the CIA-supplied funds doled out via Pakistan's Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) to the Mujahadeen Islamic warriors (see Ahmed Rashid, Taliban [Yale University Press, 2000], p. 91). These funds amounted to some half-billion dollars per year throughout the 1980s, matched by equal sums from that other enthusiastic Mujahadeen patron, acting in close cooperation with the US: Saudi Arabia. Hekmatyar is Mr. Blowback, among the most vicious of former US clients now at odds with their one-time paymasters. So his career deserves some study. Born in Baghlan around 1950, Hekmatyar attended a military academy, then Kabul University where by some accounts he was for several years a member of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), a party aligned with the Soviet Union.
The possibility that the IARA or elements of that organization may have been working in close association with US intelligence agencies throughout this period without the knowledge of Missouri based Justice Department officials or local FBI agents there and that key intelligence capabilities may have been cripled through the lack of interagency cooperation is suggested but essential facts supporting this hypothesis remain classified.
"Commingling" of USAID funds in IARA accounts is a critical issue in the series of indictments. Though the USAID claims none of its funds were used to support terrorism, a statement that would render all claims in any of the indictments as void, the timeline of FBI contacts with Khaleel and "revelations" of his terrorist involvement, when superimposed on records of continued funding by the US of his activities shows an unavoidable set of conflicting facts either demonstrating ineptitude by US government agencies or inadvertent exposure of a covert intelligence gathering program. As US funding ended in 1999, it wasn't until 2004 that the US shut down operations yet several indictments are based on dispersal of funds of only USAID origin while funds from other sources may have been resident in the IARA accounts.
Further supporting this line of inquiry is the 1996 release by the CIA of a classified report stating that the IARA supplied weapons to Bosnian fighters and was affiliated with Sudan's government and elements in Saudi Arabia. Evidence that the U.S. government continued to fund this group despite this additional set of revelations could be seen as additional support to the hypothesis that the Siljander/IARA indictments exposed a covert intelligence operation of the United States. Siljander is said to have had ties to the CIA and was once targeted for assassination by the PLO.
On July 7, 2010, Siljander pled guilty to obstruction of justice and acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
Siljander, Mark D. (October 2008). A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman's Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide. New York: HarperOne. ISBN 9780061438288.
Belz, Emily. "Bad Connections". WORLD magazine. 14 August 2010. pp. 44–6.
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