Emerson was a freelance writer for
The New Republic, for whom he wrote a series of articles in 1982 on the influence of Saudi Arabia on U.S. corporations, law firms, public-relations outfits, and educational institutions. In their pursuit of large contracts with Saudi Arabia, he argued, U.S. businesses became unofficial, unregistered lobbyists for Saudi interests.
He expanded this material in 1985 in his first book,
The American House of Saud: The Secret Petrodollar Connection.
U.S. News and World Report and CNN
From 1986 to 1989 he worked for
U.S. News and World Report as a senior editor specializing in national security issues. In 1988, he published
Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era, a strongly critical review of Ronald Reagan-era efforts to strengthen U.S. covert capabilities. Reviewing the book,
The New York Times wrote: "Among the grace notes of Mr. Emerson's fine book are many small, well-told stories".In 1990, he co-authored
The Fall of Pan Am 103: Inside the Lockerbie Investigation, which argued for the alternate theory that Iran was behind the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. Reviewing the book,
The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Emerson and Mr. Duffy have put together a surpassing account of the investigation to date, rich with drama and studded with the sort of anecdotal details that give the story the appearance of depth and weight." The newspaper listed it as an "editors' choice" on their Best Sellers List, and cited it as a "notable book of the year".
In 1990, he joined CNN as an investigative correspondent and continued to write about terrorism. In 1991, he published
Terrorist: The Inside Story of the Highest-Ranking Iraqi Terrorist Ever to Defect to the West, detailing how Iraq spread and increased its terror network in the 1980s with U.S. support.
Jihad in America
Emerson left CNN in 1993 to work on a documentary,
Jihad in America, for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The documentary, filmed between 1988 and 1993 at rallies in half a dozen U.S. cities as he posed as an inquisitive journalist exploring the tenets of Islam, exposed clandestine operations of Islamist groups in the U.S. It aired as a
Frontline TV broadcast in November 1994.
In the documentary, he stood in front of the Twin Towers and warned:
"The survivors of the explosion at the World Trade Center in 1993 are still suffering from the trauma, but as far as everyone else is concerned, all this was a spectacular news event that is over. Is it indeed over? The answer is: apparently not. A network of Muslim extremists is committed to a jihad against America. Their ultimate aim is to establish a Muslim empire."
Emerson noted at the outset that "the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not members of militant groups." But the message of the documentary was that seemingly respectable Muslim organizations have ties with militants who preach violence against moderate Muslims, as well as against Christians and Jews, and that charitable contributions to those organizations make their way to extremists. He documented meetings in American hotels at which Muslims called for a holy war, raised funds for terror organizations, and predicted that terror would ultimately come to the U.S. He also filmed Muslim-American youth training with weapons in summer camps, and interviewed supporters of terror who operated under the cover of charitable organizations.
He showed videos of Muslim fundamentalist speakers such as Abdullah Azzam in Brooklyn urging his audience to wage
jihad in America (which Azzam explains "means fighting only, fighting with the sword"), Fayiz Azzam (a cousin of Abdullah) telling an Atlanta audience:
"Blood must flow. There must be widows; there must be orphans, hands and limbs must be severed, and limbs and blood must be spread everywhere in order that Allah's religion can stand on its feet",
and Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman in Detroit (later convicted of conspiring to blow up several New York City landmarks, and sentenced to life in prison) calling for
jihad against the infidel. Sheik Mohammed Al-Asi of Chicago said: "If the Americans are placing their forces in the Persian Gulf, we should be creating another war front for the Americans in the Muslim world," and at a November 1993 Hamas rally in New Jersey hundreds chanted: "We buy paradise with the blood of the Jews."
Near the program's end, Emerson prophetically said: "As the activities of Muslim radicals expand in the United States, future attacks seem inevitable. Combating these groups within the boundaries of the Constitution will be the greatest challenge to law enforcement since the war on organized crime."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim organization in Washington complained that PBS denied requests by Arab and Muslim journalists to screen the program before its showing, and that Emerson was promoting "a wild theory about an Islamic terrorist network in America."
The New York Times opined that CAIR's concerns "prove understandable (which is not to say the pressure to change or cancel the documentary was justified), since 'Jihad in America' is likely to awaken viewers' unease over what Muslim groups here may be up to".
After the film aired in South Africa, Emerson said that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informed him that a South African Muslim group had dispatched a team to the U.S. to assassinate him. According to
Slate, people who visit his Washington, D.C., office are blindfolded
en route, and employees call it "the bat cave."
He received the 1994 George Polk Award for best Television Documentary. He also received the top prize for best investigative report from the Investigative Reporters and Editors Organization (IRE).
Emerson elaborated on this subject in his 2006 book,
Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the U.S.
Voiced concerns
It was Emerson's 1994 documentary
Jihad in America that first linked Sami Al-Arian to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). When in February 2003 the U.S. indicted Al-Arian, accusing him of being the North American leader of PIJ and financing and helping support suicide bombings,
The New York Times noted that Emerson "has complained about Mr. Al-Arian's activities in the United States for nearly a decade." In 2006, Al-Arian pleaded guilty to conspiracy to help a "specially designated terrorist" organization, PIJ, and was sentenced to 57 months in prison, after a jury deadlocked on 9 charges (8 of which the government agreed to drop as part of the plea bargain) and acquitted him on another 8. Al-Arian said that he knew of the terrorist group's violent acts, though no evidence was admitted at trial showing that he was involved with violent acts.
In testimony on March 19, 1996, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Emerson described the Holy Land Foundation as "the main fund-raising arm for Hamas in the United States." In 2007, federal prosecutors brought charges against Holy Land for funding Hamas and other Islamic terrorist organizations. In 2009, the founders of Holy Land were given life sentences for "funneling $12 million to Hamas."
In early 1997, Emerson told the
Middle East Quarterly that the threat of terrorism "is greater now than before the World Trade Center bombing [in 1993] as the numbers of these groups and their members expands. In fact, I would say that the infrastructure now exists to carry off twenty simultaneous World Trade Center-type bombings across the United States."
On February 24, 1998, Emerson testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee: "The foreign terrorist threat in the United States is one of the most important issues we face.... We now face distinct possibilities of mass civilian murder the likes of which have not been seen since World War II." And just a few months before 9/11, he wrote on May 31, 2001: "Al-Qaeda is ... planning new attacks on the US.... [It has] learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings.... Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups ... have silently declared war on the US; in turn, we must fight them as we would in a war."
In January 2001 it was reported that Emerson pointed out that the U.S. had missed clues that would have allowed it to focus on al-Qaeda early on. One of the men convicted in the World Trade Center bombing, Ahmad Ajaj, returned to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1992 with a bomb manual later seized by the U.S. An English translation of the document, entered into evidence in the World Trade Center trial, said that the manual was dated 1982, that it had been published in Amman, Jordan, and that it carried a heading on the front and succeeding pages: "The Basic Rule". But those were all errors, as Emerson pointed out. The heading said "al-Qaeda"...which translates as "The Base". In addition, the document was published in 1989, a year after al-Qaeda was founded, and the place of publication was Afghanistan, not Jordan.
In 2010,
The New York Times quoted Emerson criticizing the Obama administration’s solicitation of Muslim and Arab-American organizations such as the Islamic Society of North America, which was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a 2008 case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, whose leaders were convicted of funneling money to Hamas, saying: "I think dialogue is good, but it has to be with genuine moderates. These are the wrong groups to legitimize." ISNA denies any links to terrorism.
