Megan Carpentier has more on Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf palling around with the Bush administration:
If one were to hearken back to the halcyon days of the Bush Administration, one would remember that, when Bush adviser Karen Hughes was appointed Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, the Bush Administration saw improving America's standing among Muslims abroad as a part of its national security strategy. And, as such, Hughes set up listening tours, attended meetings and worked with interfaith groups that -- shocking, by today's Republican standards -- included actual Muslims.
One of those people was Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.
Contemporary press accounts indicate that Rauf and Hughes were part of the February 2006 U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar. He was part of a delegation that met with her in March 2006 and held a joint press conference. A letter to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in November 2007 indicates that contacts with Hughes and Under Secretary for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns had continued apace.
The intrepid right-wing "investigations" that went to extraordinary lengths to tie Rauf to terrorism somehow never uncovered his extensive ties to ... the Bush administration.
So in case it isn't clear yet, Rauf, his family, and his colleagues are the victims of a deliberate political smear campaign. He didn't become a "radical" to the conservative right until he became someone politically useful to demonize. The fact that all these people who used to work for the Bush administration stood by and watched as the conservative media smeared this man as sympathetic to terrorism makes them only slightly less culpable as the people who deliberately lied about his background and the project itself.
