Drop Site says an Emirati-paid Swiss firm commissioned the blacklist of American Muslim groups

Drop Site News reported this week, citing an archive of leaked documents it obtained, that Alp Services — a Geneva-based private intelligence firm working for the United Arab Emirates — commissioned a report on American Muslim organizations from a US researcher as part of a campaign to damage their reputations through allegations of Muslim Brotherhood links. The commission produced a 2018 report; the resulting blacklist, per Drop Site, names mainstream American Muslim groups and dozens of American citizens. The same piece notes two bills now pending in Congress: the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act, from Representative Mario Diaz-Balart and Senator Ted Cruz, requiring annual government reports identifying Brotherhood branches and evaluating them for designation and sanctions; and a bill from Representative Chip Roy to designate CAIR a Specially Designated Global Terrorist, freeze its assets, revoke its tax exemption and bar Americans from dealing with it.

The European record behind the claim is older and better corroborated. European Investigative Collaborations, working from 78,000 confidential documents obtained by Mediapart, reported that between 2017 and 2020 Alp Services compiled files on individuals from 18 European countries and 400 organisations for Emirati intelligence, for a reported €5.7 million, with orders placed at €20,000 to €50,000 per individual. Belgium summoned the UAE ambassador over the campaign. The New Yorker reported the financing in March 2023; pitch documents recovered by Hazim Nada after the 2019 bankruptcy of his firm Lord Energy state that Alp offered “tested advanced confidential techniques in ‘dark PR'” to “discredit and embarrass key targets.” Alp has told reporters the circulating material was based on “stolen data” and was “partly falsified.”

Assessment: Hold the two halves apart. The European file is multi-source and documented; the American commission rests on a single outlet holding a single archive, and no one has yet matched it. That is plausibility, not corroboration. The temptation this week is to draw a line from a 2018 Geneva commission to a Tallahassee cabinet vote eleven days ago. Nothing in the record does that, and the Florida document is 427 pages of its own making. What the two stories share is a structural fact worth more than any causal claim: designation campaigns run on dossiers, and dossiers have authors and invoices. Ask who paid for the paper before arguing about what is in it.