(Image: JR / t r u t h o u
t)
In August 2002, police were called to a home in
Seminole, Florida, by a woman who said her husband had threatened to kill her.
She invited them to conduct a search. They found a cache of weapons, including
20 live bombs, mines and more than 30 guns, among them semi-automatic weapons,
50-caliber machine guns and sniper rifles. There was also a list of targets -
50 worship centers across the state.
Little attention outside of Florida was paid to the
elaborate plan to bomb the Islamic Center of Pinellas County, target mosques
and “kill all rags” drawn up by Robert Jay Goldstein, a Tampa podiatrist.
Goldstein was not referred to as a “terrorist” in the limited national coverage and neither was there a mention
of his religious background. Goldstein, who was not a Muslim, did not fit the
frame.
Muslim communities have borne the brunt of the nation’s
single-minded focus on terrorism since 9/11. Rather than building up relations
of trust, the FBI, through its Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) has,
beginning with its “special interest arrests” and mass interviews, adopted the
counterproductive strategy of treating Arabs, South Asians and Muslims from
other regions as an actual or potential “enemy within.” Their raids have
received sensational media coverage, leading the public to assume that Muslims
are a unique terrorist threat.
But FBI reports show that Muslims are not, in fact,
chiefly responsible for terrorist incidents and plots within the United States.
The 2002 - 2005 FBI terrorism report reveals that 23 of 24 recorded
terrorist “incidents” were perpetrated by non-Muslims, while 10 of 14 terrorist
“preventions” had nothing to do with Muslims. It details terrorist plots that
would have dominated the news if Muslims had been involved. As University of
North Carolina Professor Charles Kurzman stated in his report, “Muslim-American Terrorism Since
9/11: An Accounting”: “Muslim-American terrorism makes news. Out of the
thousands of acts of violence that occur in the United States each year, an
efficient system of government prosecution and media coverage brings
Muslim-American terrorism suspects to national attention, creating the
impression ... that Muslim-American terrorism is more prevalent than it really
is.”
Although government agencies claim they do not resort
to the kind of racial and ethnic profiling that had been widely discredited by
the end of the 20th century because of its association with the “war on drugs”
traffic stops, the facts suggest otherwise. From the compiling of terrorist
watch lists to programs like the “Special Registration” National Security
Entry-Exit Registration System - where people were asked which mosques they
attended and sometimes made to hand over their address books - and Operation
Green Quest targeting Muslim charities and businesses believed to be
part of a terrorism “money trail,” religious profiling and profiling on the
basis of national origin have been central to post-9/11 government policies.
The 2002 revisions to FBI guidelines allowed the
Bureau to monitor lawful religious as well as civic and political activity
without suspicion of wrongdoing. Before long, FBI supervisors were being ordered to count the number of
mosques and Muslims in their areas and use this information to establish a
yardstick for the number of terrorism investigations they would carry out. In
2005, it was
reported that the FBI - without obtaining warrants - was monitoring
for radiation 100 Muslim mosques, homes and businesses in Washington, DC and at
least five other cities. After the FBI’s guidelines again were revised in 2008
to further ease restrictions on using race and ethnicity as factors in opening
investigations, it was revealed through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
litigation that the Bureau’s internal Domestic Intelligence and Operations
Guide gave agents the authority to collect information about “behaviors” and “life
style characteristics” and “map” racial and ethnic demographics. FOIA efforts to discover the substance of the FBI’s mapping
project have produced hundreds of entirely redacted pages.
At least two police forces had their own mapping
projects. An outcry by
community and civil rights groups forced the Los Angeles Police Department to
drop its plan to map the geographic distribution of Muslims in Los Angeles and “look
at their history, demographics, language, culture, ethnic breakdown,
socioeconomic status and social interactions.” The intelligence unit of the New
York Police Department (NYPD), which works closely with the CIA, learned from
the Los Angeles outcry that its own mapping of the city’s Muslim neighborhoods “should
be kept secret.” According to an Associated Press investigation, the NYPD program “was modeled in part on how
Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank” and goes well beyond what is permissible under FBI guidelines.[1]
With this kind of scrutiny, it is not difficult to
see why many Muslims feel under siege. FBI and JTTF agents repeatedly show up at
their homes and places of work to ask them about personal aspects of their
lives and other community members. Any
discrepancy in their statements can be used to induce them to become an
informant: cooperate with us, or we will charge you with a felony for lying to
a federal official.
First-generation Muslims who came to the United
States from police states feel especially vulnerable, as they see once vibrant
neighborhoods decimated by JTTF raids and arrests - often as a result of
information given by informers and agents provocateur who have their own
problems with the law.
“Inform or be deported” - this is what the FBI has
been telling many Muslims who are not citizens, according to The Wall Street Journal. There have been instances of
people having their green cards taken by the FBI and then told they would only
get them back if they agreed to inform on fellow Muslims. If they refuse, they
would be sent back to their countries of origin. Imams have been threatened
with deportation for refusing to work for the FBI, and over 1,000 have been
deported on a variety of pretexts. Among those asked to be an informant was Imam Foad Farahi, an asylum seeker, who was offered
residency and money to report on specific people in the Miami area. When he
refused, he was given the choice of leaving the country voluntarily or facing
terrorism charges.
Informants and undercover operatives have played a
central role in a striking number of “terrorist plots.”[2] In
cases from New Jersey, Albany, Miami, in Lodi, California, and elsewhere, paid
FBI informants have infiltrated groups, egged them on and often supplied them
with plots and weapons. Informers have provided sometimes reluctant
conspirators with the know-how and (fake) bombs in tightly stage-managed “plots”
that capture the headlines and demonstrate the FBI is doing its job. Often,
clueless participants have been lured with promises of wealth, with informers
keeping them on the “jihadist” path when their interest in the mission
threatened to peter out.[3]
Examples include the “homegrown terrorists” known as
the Liberty City 7, who were not Muslim, although they were initially presented
as such. Living in an impoverished Miami neighborhood, this group of poor
Haitian immigrants belonged to the Moorish Science Temple, which was
infiltrated by a JTTF operative known as “Brother Mohammed” who posed as a member of al-Qaeda. He
promised their leader $50,000 in cash, firearms and other equipment if the
group would agree to blow up federal buildings and the Sears Tower in Chicago.
Even though the FBI itself dubbed the plot “aspirational
rather than operational,” federal prosecutors pursued the men relentlessly.
In 2009, four years after they were arrested and after two trials ended in hung
juries, the federal government convened a third trial and finally got a jury to
agree to convict five of the seven men.
A New York synagogue and Jewish center were the
targets of a May 2009 “homegrown terrorist” plot. It involved four destitute
African-American ex-cons in impoverished Newburgh, New York, one of whom
suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and none of whom were regularly practicing
Muslims, although the extensive news coverage suggested otherwise. They were
given cash, food, rent money, drugs, cell phones, a camera and disabled
explosive devices - including a Stinger missile - by an FBI informant who had
been convicted of identity fraud and was hoping for a reduced sentence - and
was paid $100,000 for his efforts. The plot commanded huge media and political
attention when it was “disrupted.” On June 29, 2011, Manhattan US District
Court Judge Colleen McMahon, who had called the FBI informant a “serial liar”
who perjured himself at trial and stated that the FBI had “created the crime
here,” handed down mandatory minimum 25-year sentences to three of the men. “The
government did not have to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot - there was no nefarious plot to foil,” she declared.
Just prior to the sentencing of her nephew, who was
one of the men convicted following the orchestrated plot, Alicia McWilliams wrote:
The government spent millions of taxpayers dollars on
the informant’s salary, perks, luxury cars, surveillance equipment, fake
weaponry, helicopters, and the dramatic trial.... And the benefits? I may be
biased, but I haven’t met many people who can say with a straight face that our
nation is safer from terrorism as a result of all of this. I also sometimes
wonder, what good might those resources have done if they’d been invested in
our communities instead?...What I can’t understand is spending millions of
dollars to set David and the others up, and then to put them in prison for
life, which will also cost millions of dollars. Just so the government can have
another notch on its belt in the “war on terror?”
In perhaps the most bizarre case involving a
government informant, Ahmad Niazi, a worshipper at a mosque in Irvine,
California, reported to the FBI that someone at the mosque was making overtly
jihadist statements. That someone turned out to be a paid FBI informant and
convicted forger, Craig Monteilh, a k a Farouk al-Aziz, who later claimed to
have spied for the FBI at several mosques around Southern California and been
paid $177,000, tax-free, over a 15-month period. The mosque got a restraining
order against him.
The matter did not end there. The FBI then asked
Niazi to become an informant, and he refused - whereupon an FBI agent allegedly
said he would make his life a “living hell.” Niazi was subsequently charged
with perjury, fraud and making false statements. Monteilh, meanwhile, sued his
former bosses, alleging his work with the Bureau had put his life in danger.
In February 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) brought a lawsuit against the FBI on behalf of Muslim
plaintiffs, alleging that Monteilh was ordered by the FBI to carry out “indiscriminate
surveillance” of Muslims, in violation of their right to freedom of religion.
The lawsuit claims that the FBI told Monteilh that, “Islam was a threat to
America’s national security.” On August 1, Attorney General Eric Holder invoked
the state secrets privilege and told the court that forcing the government to
reveal information about mosque surveillance could harm national security.
“The FBI is not earnestly looking for Muslims to be
their partners,” a Boston community organizer stated. “They are looking for
criminals. They assume we are a criminal community, and we are forever burdened
with proving that we are not. As long as you think Muslims are the problem,
this would be some lousy partnership. Muslims have to be considered part of the
solution.”
But it is not always the FBI that is carrying out
sting operations. In mid-May, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New
York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly held a high-profile news conference at
City Hall featuring live-action arrest photos. At the conference,they announced
the arrest of two Muslims who “wanted to kill Jews.” One of the men had reportedly been in a psychiatric hospital on more than 20
occasions. This time, it was undercover NYPD agents who befriended the men and
provided them with handguns, ammunition and a dud hand grenade a few minutes
before the sting was consummated. Interestingly, the FBI declined to get
involved, federal prosecutors were apparently never consulted and a state grand
jury later threw out the most serious charges against them.
Aware that their places of worship are being
monitored and potential informants are being recruited, it is not surprising
that many Muslims no longer feel comfortable in mosques. They don’t know who
can be trusted. They find it difficult to fulfill their religious obligation of
charitable giving because the government has used secret evidence to shut down
the main Muslim charities.
Muslims’ experience of being targeted does not stop
there. Against
a backdrop of rising Islamophobia stoked by the media, certain advocacy
groups, and politicians, Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim
frequently encounter harassment on the streets, discrimination at work, and
frozen bank accounts. They are targeted for intrusive questions, humiliating
searches and long delays at borders and airports. They may be bumped off
planes, as were two imams who, in May 2011, were flying to a conference on
Islamophobia. Pomona College student Nicholas George never made it onto his
plane. In August 2009, having a set of English-Arabic language flash cards in his
pocket was enough to get him handcuffed by Transportation Security
Administration (TSA) agents, locked up for four hours, and questioned about
9/11 and the language spoken by Osama bin Laden.
If “guilt by association” a half-century ago got
people who thought a certain way put on blacklists, today it can get people who
worship a certain way, or have an interest in learning Arabic, regarded as “suspicious”
and put into surveillance system watch lists. And because databases can be fed
information from multiple entry points, there appears to be no straightforward
way to clear names, as those who have complained to the Department of Homeland
Security (DHS) about their treatment at airports will attest. People who are
innocent of any wrongdoing may well spend their lives as “suspects.”
1.
Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, the authors of the
AP expose, “With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas,” state that,
unlike the NYPD program, “the FBI requires evidence of a crime before an informant
can be used inside a mosque” and quotes the FBI’s general counsel saying the
same thing. But under its 2008 guidelines, the FBI can undertake “proactive”
assessments, which include the use of surveillance and sending an informant to
meetings (and mosques), without a factual basis for suspecting the target of
wrongdoing. During the period between March 2009 and March 2011, the FBI
opened 82,325 assessments of individuals and groups. It needs some kind of “factual
predicate” to open a preliminary or full investigation, and these cannot be
based solely on First Amendment activity.
2.
A report by New York University’s Center on Law and Security
has found that undercover agents or informants were relied on in 62 percent of
the 156 most significant anti-terrorism prosecutions since 9/11.
3.
Among recent high-profile cases involving
informers and claims of entrapment was the November 2010 plot to bomb a crowded
Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon. The alleged perpetrator,
Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a Somali teenager who had been under federal
surveillance for six months, was given a dud bomb by an undercover FBI agent.
Two days after his arrest, there was an arson attack on a nearby Islamic
center. In another case, the lawyer for 23-year-old Antonio Martinez claims his
client would not “have had any ability whatsoever to carry out any kind of plan”
without the assistance of an FBI informant. Martinez, a recent convert to
Islam, was arrested in a sting operation in early December 2010 as he was
trying to detonate a fake bomb outside a Baltimore military recruitment center.
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