Thirteen Ways Government Tracks Us | Common Dreams

Published on Monday, April 9, 2012 by Common Dreams

Thirteen Ways Government Tracks Us

by Bill Quigley

Thirteen Ways Government Tracks Us | Common Dreams

The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart

Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau's more ethically murky practices Paul Harris in Irvine, California 

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 March 2012


Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.

"They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did," Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.

It is an astonishing admission that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious...

Read Full Article

FBI Infiltrator Who Spied on Muslims Reveals Techniques

RT, 4/6/2012 -- While the FBI insists they are acting to defend the US from potential terrorist attacks, a former informant says it treats an entire religious group as suspicious. He told RT about some of the bureau's ethically murky practices.

New Evidence of Anti-Islam Bias Underscores Deep Challenges for FBI’s Reform Pledge

Danger Room
By Spencer Ackerman
September 23, 2011

Following months of denials, the FBI is now promising a “comprehensive review of all training and reference materials” after Danger Room revealed a series of Bureau presentations that tarred average Muslims as “radical” and “violent.”

But untangling the Islamophobic thread woven into the FBI’s counterterrorism training culture won’t be easy. In addition to inflammatory seminars which likened Islam to the Death Star and Mohammed to a “cult leader,” Danger Room has obtained more material showing just how wide the anti-Islam meme has spread throughout the Bureau.

The FBI library at Quantico currently stacks books from authors who claim that “Islam and democracy are totally incompatible.” The Bureau’s private intranet recently featured presentations that claimed to demonstrate the “inherently violent nature of Islam,” according to multiple sources. Earlier this year, the Bureau’s Washington Field Office welcomed a speaker who claimed Islamic law prevents Muslims from being truly loyal Americans. And as recently as last week, the online orientation material for the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces included claims that Sunni Islam seeks “domination of the world,” according to a law enforcement source...

some voiced worries that the presentation sent an implicit message to agents that they should be targeting Muslims in the name of stopping terrorism. And in the past few years, the FBI has accelerated its monitoring of mosques, community centers, businesses and other organizations run by Muslims. Several observers suspect that the persistence of training materials that casts Islam in a threatening light helps explain the increased surveillance. Others — including many counterterrorism professionals within the FBI who say they are disgusted by the bigoted material they’ve received — fear that the presentations will drive a wedge between the Bureau and the U.S. Muslim communities whose assistance it needs to prevent terrorism...

Khutbah: "The Best Jihad: Challenging Injustice"

My Khutba/sermon commenting on the Irvine11 verdict, recent FBI abuses, Palestinian state bid at the UN, execution of Troy Davis, Islamophobic comments by OC councilmembers, and our need to respond to injustice.

Khutba was delivered on September 23, 2011 at the Islamic Institute of Orange County in Anaheim.


Khutbah: "The Best Jihad: Challenging Injustice" by Br. Hussam Ayloush. from Islamic Institute of Orange Cty on Vimeo.

Dangerous Lessons in Islamophobia at the FBI (MUST READ)

Posted by Julian Sanchez on Cato at Liberty
Sep. 16, 2011
...


One presentation makes it quite explicit that, in the analyst’s view, the problem is not Islamic “extremism,” but the inherent propensity for violence of Muslims as such:

• There may not be a “radical” threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology.
• The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are mainstream.
• The individual applying these values and practices may likely be simply a pious and devout adherent: i.e., a true believer as opposed to a “radical.”

In other words, FBI agents are effectively told that Osama bin Laden was correct, and that a sincere Muslim who understands and practices his faith correctly will naturally be a terrorist. It would be offensive in any context for the government to sponsor this kind of smear session against the enormous peaceful majority of its Muslim citizens, but it’s downright dangerous in light of the vast expansion of FBI surveillance authorities over the past decade...

Read Full Article

FBI Trainer Says Forget ‘Irrelevant’ al-Qaida, Target Islam (video)

Published on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 by Wired.com / Danger Room

by Spencer Ackerman and Noah Shachtman 

 

The FBI has publicly declared that its counterterrorism training seminars linking “mainstream” Muslims to terrorists was a “one time only” affair that began and ended in April 2011. But two months later, the Bureau employee who delivered those controversial briefings gave a similar lecture to a gathering of dozens of law enforcement officials at an FBI-sponsored public-private partnership in New York City.
And during that June presentation, the FBI’s William Gawthrop told his audience that the fight against al-Qaida is a “waste,” compared to the threat presented by the ideology of Islam itself.

Since Danger Room published the contents of Gawthrop’s April lecture, top Senators and representatives from Arab- and Muslim-American groups have blasted the FBI for the training documents, which compare Mohammed to a “cult leader.”...

The best strategy for undermining militants, Gawthrop suggested, is to go after Islam itself. To undermine the validity of key Islamic scriptures and key Muslim leaders.

Watch video

New Documents Reveal FBI’s Islamophobic Counterterrorism Training

By Eli Clifton on Sep 15, 2011

Counterterrorism agents at the FBI’s training center in Quantico, Virginia are being taught that “devout” Muslims are more likely to be “violent” and that American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers, according to training materials acquired by Wired’s Spencer Ackerman. (In fact, mosques have been found to be a deterrent to the spread of terrorism.)

An FBI spokesperson told Ackerman that the slides were no longer in use but dates on the slides would suggest that they were used at least until March 21.

The documents offer a violent interpretation of Islam in which “Any war against non-believers is justified” and a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.” A particularly blunt slide shows a comparison of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, depicting how they have moderated their “militancy considerations” over time:


The information in the slides is clearly Islamophobic and completely ignores the fact that Islamic extremism, while a national security concern worthy of sober discussion, is a limited problem within the United States and hardly a frequent phenomenon in Muslim communities. A recent Duke terrorism study showed that since 9/11, the U.S. has experienced only 33 deaths from Muslim terrorism while 150,000 murders have occurred during the same time.

Several of the slide presentations are the work of an FBI intelligence analyst named William Gawthrop who, in 2006, before he joined the Bureau, gave an interview to WorldNetDaily, in which he said “Muhammad’s mindset is a source for terrorism.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that the FBI has given a stage to noted Islamophobes. In July, Ackerman identified that an FBI terrorism presentation recommended anti-Muslim blogger Robert Spencer’s book, “The Truth About Mohammed: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion.”

READ FULL STORY

Sikh man claims to be FBI informant, deported over cough medicine

Desi claims to be FBI informant, deported over cough medicine

Bernice Yeung Aug 19, 2011
First Post

In a saga that sounds straight out of a TV crime show, an alleged FBI informant and convenience store clerk named Arvinder Singh sits in an Iowa jail awaiting imminent deportation to India over the sale of cold medicine.

Singh had originally immigrated to the US on a business visa, but he is now being sent back to India because he pled guilty in 2002 to selling a large quantity of cough medicine containing ephedrine, which can be used to manufacture methamphetamine.

In the years since he immigrated, Singh got married, obtained a green card, and ran a convenience store until he triggered an investigation by immigration authorities that led to deportation proceedings that began in December 2010. Singh has been detained in an Iowa jail for more than six months...

What makes Singh’s deportation case stand out is his claim that he served as a confidential informant to the US government and aided in stateside counterterrorism efforts.

Singh is sikh, and after he was arrested, he was allegedly approached by federal agents. “It was right after 9/11 and he was approached and they said, ‘We are looking for people who look like you in the War against Terror,’” according to attorney Said. “They created this persona for him, gave him checkbooks and checking accounts and they said, ‘Go to these mosques and claim to be Muslim, and pray, and give them money so we can trace the money.”

READ FULL STORY
http://www.firstpost.com/world/desi-claims-to-be-fbi-informant-deported-over-cough-medicine-64098.html

Locked Up Abroad—for the FBI

MotherJones
—By Nick Baumann
September/October 2011 Issue

Inside the feds' secret program to have American citizens detained and interrogated by foreign governments.

Learn more about the FBI's version of the rendition program.

A MUST READ
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/proxy-detention-gulet-mohamed
---

The Informants

Mother Jones
September/October Issue
—By Trevor Aaronson

The FBI has built a massive network of spies to prevent another domestic attack. But are they busting terrorist plots—or leading them?

The bureau now maintains a roster of 15,000 spies, some paid as much as $100,000 per case, many of them tasked with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States.

A MUST READ
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants

Terror Probes Have FBI's Informant Numbers Soaring (NPR)

August 21, 2011

In today's post 9/11 America, there are 15,000 informants working with the FBI. That's nearly three times as many as there were 25 years ago.

Over the years, when there has been a surge in the number of informants the FBI recruits and uses, there's a specific target in the FBI's sights — first organized crime, then drug smuggling, and now counterterrorism.
James Cromitie, center, is led by police officers from a federal building in New York, Thursday, May 21, 2009, after being arrested on charges related to a bombing plot in the Bronx. The arrest of Cromitie and three other Muslim ex-convicts in the alleged homegrown terror plot is renewing fears about the spread of Islamic extremism in the nation's prisons. (AP Photo/Robert Mecea)
Enlarge Robert Mecea/ASSOCIATED PRESS

And while the FBI uses many informants the traditional way — pointing the finger at wrongdoers — a new review of post-9/11 prosecutions reveals the increasing presence of informants in terrorism investigations.

"The informants play larger roles where they acted almost as agent provocateurs, where they provided not only the opportunity for the person to commit this act of terror, but also the means," Mother Jones contributor Trevor Aaronson tells NPR's Laura Sullivan. "Providing them with the plan, with the so-called weapons that were needed to ultimately create the act of terror that these people are them prosecuted for," Aaronson says.

Mother Jones partnered with the University of California-Berkeley's Investigative Reporting Program where Trevor Aaronson is an investigative fellow. Aaronson writes about the FBI's informant boom in the current issue of the magazine.

And how are the FBI agents finding so many informants willing to infiltrate mosques and Muslim communities? Sometimes, the money is alluring Aaronson says. In other cases, the money has nothing to do with it at all.

"A big reason, especially within the Muslim community and in counterterrorism investigations is that the FBI is able to use immigration against people," Aaronson says. "If you are going to recruit an informant and you realize that he has an immigration violation, often times the FBI will be able to use that as a form of leverage to say 'well if you work with us, we'll work with the immigration authorities to make sure you're not deported'."

Prevention Or Entrapment

For some critics, this use of coercion by the FBI to recruit informants is questionable. According to Aaronson's article, the FBI denies it blackmails informants, but does acknowledge that the bureau has prevented helpful informants from being deported.

But the larger problem for those opposed the FBI using informants to plan terrorism stings is whether the informants play an overactive role in convincing people to commit acts of terrorism.

"That's exactly the question is whether any of these people would be able to commit this plot or construct this plot on their own," Aaronson tells Sullivan. "The truth is when we looked closely at a lot of these cases the people who are leading these so-called plots or so called terrorist cells are not exactly the smartest people." In addition, informants seek out subjects that tend to be very poor, economically desperate and in some cases have a very elementary understanding of Islam, Aaronson says. "The informant is able to take advantage of that."

And then comes the question of entrapment. "I think in many of these cases nothing would have happened were it not for the FBI going in and making a plot possible," Aaronson says. "But I think it's important to understand that the legal definition of entrapment and what you and I would see as entrapment are very different. There hasn't been a case yet that's met the legal definition of entrapment."

Meet the FBI's new arsenal in recruiting informants: Operation Flex for Sex

The recent embarrassing fiasco by the FBI in Irvine reveals more than just a violation of the sanctity of peaceful mosques or an attempt to entrap law-abiding young Muslims into extremist and violent acts.  The exposed "Operation Flex" indicates that the local FBI official overseeing the agent provocateur authorized the use of sexual encounters with Muslim women to shame them into becoming informants, as charged by the former agent provocateur Monteilh.

This is a serious charge by Monteilh and, sadly, the Obama administration decided to deny the American public access to the truth about what happened.

The real name for this operation should have been: "Operation Flex for Sex"

----
 

Want to Sue the FBI for Spying on Your Mosque? Sorry, That's Secret.

Obama, once a critic of the state secrets doctrine, has invoked it repeatedly. But critics say his latest use of Bush's favorite get-out-of-court-free card is different.

—By Hamed Aleaziz
Mon Aug. 8, 2011

The state secrets privilege—perhaps the most powerful weapon in the government's legal arsenal—has a complicated history. For years, Democrats, including then-Sen. Barack Obama, accused the Bush administration of overusing of the privilege, which allows the government to quash cases that involve national security before a court even hears evidence. Then, after Obama took office, his Justice Department used this get-out-of-court-free card repeatedly.

Last week, the DOJ invoked the state secrets privilege yet again. But this case, civil liberties groups say, is different.

Most of the post-9/11 cases that the government has killed with the state secrets privilege have either involved foreign-born terrorist suspects or the government's actions abroad. The case the Obama administration tried to quash last week doesn't explicitly involve either. The case in question, which was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), focuses squarely on domestic intelligence-gathering targeting Americans—namely the FBI's allegedly widespread use of informants and surveillance against Muslim Americans.

The FBI's involvement in the case—and the fact that it involves Americans—makes it stand out among the other state secrets cases, says Ameena Qazi, CAIR's deputy executive director. "We're surprised at the government's shocking move in invoking the state secrets doctrine in this case of all cases," Qazi says. Since this case "involves domestic intelligence-gathering on US soil against Americans," she explains, "it's an unprecedented move to our knowledge."

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The case, Fazaga v. FBI, stems from the purported actions of Craig Monteilh, a 49-year-old convicted criminal who claims that he spent 15 months in 2006 and 2007 infiltrating mosques in Orange County, California, as part of an undercover FBI investigation known as "Operation Flex." The Fazaga case, which the ACLU and CAIR filed in February 2011, claims that the FBI utilized Monteilh to "collect personal information on hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocent Muslim Americans in Southern California." The ACLU says that the FBI investigation "violated the Constitution's fundamental guarantee of government neutrality toward all religions." For evidence, the two groups point to a somewhat problematic source: Monteilh.

According to Monteilh, Operation Flex did indeed involve the indiscriminate monitoring of the Southern California Muslim community with the goal of apprehending terrorists. Monteilh claims to have gone by the name Farouq al-Aziz and posed as a French Syrian man pushing a radical Islamist view on mosque-goers in Irvine, California. And after months of Monteilh's spying, Southern California Muslims did in fact call the FBI to alert them of a possible terrorist: Monteilh. The whole episode was a bit of an embarrassment for the FBI, and received national press attention after 2007, when Monteilh was imprisoned for grand theft and started talking to the press.

To CAIR's Qazi, the fact that Operation Flex allegedly took place in the United States and targeted Americans makes Fazaga v. FBI different from previous state secrets cases. "If the government were to prevail on their invocation of the state secrets doctrine it would essentially make such FBI actions non-reviewable by the courts and render any redress by our clients or by any other Americans for such activities ineffective," she says. "That's really the concerning part of what their use of the state secrets doctrine implies."

Robert Chesney, a law professor and national security law expert at University of Texas-Austin, disagrees with Qazi's assessment. "At the end of the day, the FBI is part of the intelligence community as well—it's not necessarily thought of as any different than the NSA," Chesney said. "Is the effort to prevent a bombing only national-security-related if the perpetrators have an international connection? I wouldn't hold my breath on a court accepting that logic."

Just because an international connection hasn't emerged so far in this case doesn't mean one isn't there, Chesney explains. "It certainly could be the case that the very secret at issue here has to do with a possible foreign nexus," he says.

Monteilh, for his part, claims he knows what the government might be trying to hide. Monteilh—who, for what it's worth, is a convicted felon—now says that the FBI broached the subject of his traveling abroad to act on the intelligence he gathered during Operation Flex. In one instance, Monteilh says, the FBI asked him whether he'd be interested in traveling to Pakistan to assassinate a terrorist target. Monteilh also claims that a CIA representative reviewed his progress in Arabic and Islamic training every month.

Monteilh also claims that during his time as an informant, the FBI also involved him in an elaborate plan to present himself as a single, Muslim man seeking introductions to potential wives in Orange County and record his meetings with the women. Monteilh claims that before the relationships turned sexual, he approached the FBI agents on the case: "I said look guys, as you hear the recordings, if it goes to a level where there's a potential sexual encounter what do you want me to do?" According to Monteilh, the agents said to go ahead with the sexual interactions in cases where good information existed. After learning more about the women's potential "terrorist" connections abroad through Monteilh, the FBI would confront the women with recordings of their sexual encounters with Monteilh, intending to frighten them into giving the bureau actionable intelligence. "They told me that we're going to use the [Islamic] culture against the Muslim community," Monteilh says.

Monteilh's claims aren't the kind of thing that anyone would believe without further proof of the kind that could be obtained in a courtroom. But if the Justice Department gets its way, that kind of proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. "In asserting the state secrets privilege they have sealed the gaps of the entire Department of Justice on Operation Flex," Monteilh says. "There's one gap they can't touch—which is me."

For the alleged victims of Operation Flex, that probably seems like cold comfort.

Hamed Aleaziz is an editorial intern at Mother Jones.

Rep. King asked to hold hearings on FBI’s illegal surveillance of Muslims

Hussam Ayloush & Ameena Qazi
Jewish Journal
3/8/2011

As Representative Peter King (R-NY) launches congressional hearings on Muslims and radicalization this week, we wonder at the expenditure of time to examine an issue whose conclusion has long been self-evident: that American Muslims have worked tirelessly alongside fellow Americans to uphold and strengthen the time-honored values of religious freedom and equality and to protect our nation against all threats.

To that end, we have joined the U.S. Armed Forces, became police officers, and served as first responders. Muslims also forged stronger ties with law enforcement agencies and the FBI – partnerships rooted in trust and cooperation. For example, Southern California Muslims formed a joint partnership with the FBI called the Multi-Cultural Advisory Committee, and similarly partnered with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and Orange County Sheriff’s departments, and other local law enforcement agencies.

For us, the reasons for improving relations with law enforcement, particularly the FBI, were clear – to reduce mistrust and suspicion of Muslims, and help Muslims understand how law enforcement works. This in turn led to increased cooperation and helped thwart terror plots, and fewer hate crimes and less religious discrimination of Muslims, all of which stem from unfamiliarity with the Muslim faith.

Despite this history, little congressional attention is given to the fact that the Muslim community’s good faith gestures toward cooperation and trust-building have been met with sweeping FBI fishing expeditions and covert surveillance of Muslim communities.

Relations between Muslims and the FBI grew shaky as more and more Muslim Americans reported being interrogated, and news stories simultaneously highlighted the FBI’s surveillance of Muslims’ lawful First Amendment activities. Even so, the then-FBI Assistant Director in Charge of the Los Angeles field office, Steve Tidwell, assured Irvine mosque-goers in 2006 that the FBI was not monitoring the community.

Then in 2007, a self-proclaimed Muslim convert started making rounds at Southland mosques, advocating terrorist sympathies. Muslim congregants immediately reported the man, Craig Monteilh, to law enforcement when his rhetoric turned violent. One mosque even filed for and received a restraining order against Monteilh. In 2009, an FBI agent’s court testimony confirmed that the FBI had indeed recruited Monteilh as a confidential informant.

Monteilh is but a small piece of a frightening trend of broad FBI surveillance of American Muslims that is unconstitutional, illegal, and counterproductive.

A confidential informant was sent to spy on law-abiding Muslim worshipers, without any suspicion of criminal activity. The only basis for the FBI’s suspicion was the congregants’ religion: Islam. At the behest of the FBI, Monteilh made friends with Muslims, particularly those more observant in their religious practices as well as young Muslim men. Electronic surveillance equipment was installed at several mosques to complement the informant’s surveillance efforts.

The informant, who recorded hundreds of hours of audio and video of individuals for the FBI, says his FBI handlers told him Islam itself was a threat to America.

Monteilh was further instructed to look for vulnerabilities that could be used against Muslims to blackmail them into becoming informants.

The illegal surveillance of Muslims and their houses of worship by a confidential informant, combined with national news reports of surveillance of Muslims and FBI guidelines that allow religion to be considered as a factor in investigations, all indicate some FBI agents’ apparent fixation on criminalizing Islam and its followers. If so, such practice flies in the face of the U. S. Constitution.

Sadly, some of our members have reported shying away from congregational worship, attending mosque programs or engaging in normal recreational activities like camping and hiking, out of fear that such activities may attract unnecessary law enforcement scrutiny. The community fabric is threatened as members have become suspicious of new congregants and converts, thinking they might be the next FBI informant.

Left with no other recourse to rectify the FBI’s wrongful monitoring of a besieged American community, CAIR has partnered with the ACLU of Southern California and the law firm of Hadsell Stormer Keeny Richardson & Renick, LLP, to knock on the doors of the highest authority in justice. We filed a class-action lawsuit two weeks ago, hoping the courts will help put an end to the FBI’s unconstitutional and discriminatory tactics against American Muslims.

As the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee did away with the FBI’s COINTELPRO program from the 1960s and 1970s, we hope that the courts will put a stop to the FBI’s unlawful surveillance of the American Muslim communities. Profiling undermines the Constitutional values meant to guard against religious discrimination, impedes legitimate intelligence-gathering, and wastes our precious tax-payer dollars our government should use to ensure our families’ safety from any foreign or domestic threats.

Perhaps Congressman King’s efforts will be better served by examining how the FBI’s unlawful tactics undermine our nation’s security and our Constitutional freedoms.

Hussam Ayloush is the executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Area office of CAIR, the Council on America-Islamic Relations. Ameena Mirza Qazi is the deputy executive director and staff attorney for CAIR-LA.

Muslims suing FBI for spying on worshipers (Russian TV)

                           

US citizen recalls 'humiliating' post-9/11 arrest by the FBI (AP)

2/27/2011
Associated Press

In this photo taken Feb. 14, 2011, plaintiff Abdullah al-Kidd, right, and his attorney, American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Director of the Immigrants' Rights Project Lee Gelernt., (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Handcuffed and marched through Washington's Dulles International Airport in his Muslim clothing, the man with the long, dark beard could only imagine what people were thinking.

That scene unfolded in March 2003, a year and a half after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. One of the four planes hijacked in 2001 took off from Dulles. "I could only assume that they thought I was a terrorist," Abdullah al-Kidd recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.

Al-Kidd called his airport arrest "one of the most, if not the most, humiliating experiences of my life."

The humiliation had only just begun.

Over the next 16 days he would be strip-searched repeatedly, left naked in a jail cell and shower for more than 90 minutes in view of other men and women, routinely transported in handcuffs and leg irons, and kept with people who had been convicted of violent crimes. On a long trip between jails, a federal marshal refused to unlock al-Kidd's chains so he could use the bathroom.

In the midst of al-Kidd's detention, FBI Director Robert Mueller testified to Congress about recent major successes against terrorism. No. 1 on Mueller's list was the capture of professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

No. 2 was the arrest of al-Kidd, a Kansas-born convert to Islam who was not charged with a crime — either then or later...

READ FULL ARTICLE

CAIR-LA, ACLU/SC Sue FBI for Illegal Surveillance of Southern Calif. Muslims

Suit filed over broad surveillance of Muslims based solely on religion

(LOS ANGELES, CA, 2/23/11) -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations of the Greater Los Angeles Area (CAIR-LA), the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU/SC), and the law firm Hadsell Stormer Keeny Richardson & Renick LLP today announced that they have filed a federal class action lawsuit against the FBI for infiltrating mainstream mosques in Southern California and targeting Muslim Americans for surveillance solely because of their religion.

For over 14 months between 2006 and 2007, FBI agents planted an informant in Orange County mosques who posed as a convert to Islam and through whom the FBI collected names, telephone numbers, e-mails, and other information on hundreds of California Muslims. Sheikh Yassir Fazaga, Ali Malik, and Yassir AbdelRahim - plaintiffs in the case-are three of the many individuals who came in contact with the bureau's informant.

SEE: Lawsuit Alleges FBI Violated Muslims' Freedom of Religion (Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/22/AR2011022206975.html

SEE: Local Muslims Outraged by alleged FBI Surveillance, Lawyers claim (LA Times)
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/02/local-muslims-outrage-by-alleged-fbi-surveillance-lawyers-claim.html

According to the lawsuit, the FBI directed the informant, a convicted felon named Craig Monteilh, to gather as much information as possible on members of the Muslim community, and to focus on people who were more devout in their religious practice, irrespective of whether any particular individual was believed to be involved in criminal activity.

"The FBI gathered information on hundreds of innocent Americans simply because they worship at a mosque. It's hard to imagine a more blatant violation of the First Amendment's guarantees against religious discrimination," said Peter Bibring, Staff Attorney for the ACLU of Southern California (ACLU/SC).

The First Amendment guarantees that no person should be singled out for different treatment by the government because of his or her religion, which is exactly what the FBI did to the Muslim community, according to the suit.

Ameena Mirza Qazi, Deputy Executive Director and Staff Attorney for CAIR-LA, said:  "Targeting American Muslims for surveillance not only destroys community cohesion, it erodes the trust between law enforcement and Muslim communities, which, in turn, undermines our national security interests. This broad investigation by the FBI that failed to produce even a single terrorism-related conviction was not based on suspicion of criminal activity, but rather on the targets being Muslim."

Montheilh's role as an FBI informant was not revealed until February 2009, first in court documents, in which the FBI and local law enforcement revealed his role, and then through his own statements which have been reported widely in the press.

Josh Piovia-Scott, an attorney with the law firm Hadsell Stormer Keeny Richardson & Renick LLP said, "This practice is an abuse of the Constitution, and this case will force the FBI to destroy its illegally obtained information."  
 The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief on behalf of all people targeted by the FBI agents and their informant, requiring the FBI to turn over or destroy all information collected through the discriminatory investigation, as well as damages for emotional distress for the three named plaintiffs.  

There are approximately 120,000 Muslims in Orange County, a dynamic part of the Southern California Muslim community, which is home to the second largest population of Muslims in the United States.

- END -

Muslims sue FBI for alleged First Amendment violation (KPCC)

Feb. 23, 2011 | Frank Stoltze | KPCC

Click to listen to radio/audio report


Civil rights groups on Wednesday said they’ve sued the FBI for allegedly violating the First Amendment by spying on Orange County Muslims inside mosques. KPCC’s Frank Stoltze says the case focuses on the activities of a paid informant for the federal law enforcement agency.

One plaintiff in the lawsuit is 26-year-old Ali Malek. He recalled his initial encounter with Craig Monteilh.

“I first met Monteilh when he testified to his faith in front of roughly 1,000 people at the mosque in Irvine,” said Malek. “It was a ceremony in which you become a Muslim.”

Malek said his imam asked him to teach the convert about his new religion. He said Monteilh had other interests.

“Constantly he would ask me about jihad and what I thought about it,” said Malek. “My reaction initially was, he is a new Muslim, he just became Muslim, perhaps has some misconstrued ideas and perceptions of the religion and I was more than happy to clarify those misconceptions.”

When Monteilh continued his questions about jihad and began showing up at the gym where he worked out, Malek became suspicious.

“I thought he was weird and so I just wanted to keep my distance,” Malek said. “And I wanted to give it some time to see how the situation developed. And then when the case came out, all the pieces of the puzzle came together.”

Monteilh, it turned out, was working for the FBI. The Associated Press reports that the former fitness instructor with a criminal past spied on Orange County mosques for the FBI for more than a year from 2006 to 2007, recording conversations and meetings with a device concealed on his key ring and a camera hidden in a shirt button.

“I can not conceive of any, any legitimate purpose the government would have to send an informant into our mosques, to gather indiscriminately information, destroying the sanctity of our sacred space,” said Ameena Mirza Qazi with the Council on American Islamic Relations.

In their class action lawsuit, the council and the American Civil Liberties Union accuse the FBI of targeting Muslims based on their religion.

In a statement, the FBI refused to comment on its investigation, and said the agency investigates individuals based on whether they may threaten national security – not based on their religion.

Monteilh faces fraud charges in a separate case, and he apparently no longer works for the agency.

The ACLU’s Peter Bibring said the FBI is slowly moving away from restrictions Congress placed on it following revelations in the 1970s that it had indiscriminately spied on innocent American citizens.

“Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen the FBI steadily rolling back those protections, increasing their ability to initiate investigations without any indication of criminal activity,” said Bibring.

He says Muslims are a favorite post-Sept. 11, 2001 target. Imam Yassir Fazaga is with a therapist who works with the Orange County Islamic Foundation. He said he’s seen his clients become more paranoid about having personal conversations with him at a mosque.

“I can no longer discuss this with them at the mosque,” said Fazaga. “From now on I have to meet my clients in the park. I have to meet with them somewhere else where they would feel more comfortable than at the mosque.”

Malik, now an administrator for a San Francisco non-profit, said he too has become more suspicious.

“I feel that at times I am being followed,” he said. “I definitely feel that all my phone calls are tapped. I feel that my emails are filtered and tapped. I feel like I can’t have a loving conversation with my wife.

“My wife and I both feel that way. We feel like we can’t even keep the phone in the room on and have a loving conversation without assuming the FBI is monitoring that conversation. I feel like there’s probably FBI in this room right now.”

The class-action lawsuit seeks to stop the FBI from indiscriminately targeting Muslims and to force the agency to destroy any information collected that way. The three named plaintiffs also seek damages for emotional duress.

Muslims Say FBI Informant Dealt Drugs While Snooping on Sex

Courthouse News
2/24/2011

LOS ANGELES (CN) - In a federal class action, Muslims claim the FBI hired an "agent provocateur" to infiltrate mosques and "indiscriminately collect personal information on hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocent Muslim Americans in Southern California."

The class claims the agents had their snitch provide illegal drugs to Muslims and snoop on their sex lives, and that the fruitless "dragnet investigation" did not end until "members of the Muslim communities of Southern California reported the informant to the police because of his violent rhetoric, and ultimately obtained a restraining order against him."

Represented by the ACLU and Council on American-Islam Relations, the three named plaintiffs say the FBI's agent provocateur's "violent rhetoric" about "jihad and armed conflict" disrupted their religious practice.

The class claims the FBI has been profiling Muslim communities since Sept. 11, 2001, and requested interviews with hundreds of Muslims, "often by sending FBI agents to appear unannounced" to their homes or workplaces, to question them about religious practices.

This despite the fact that in 2006, the FBI's Assistant Director for the Los Angeles area, Stephen Tidwell, assured a Muslim group that the FBI would never send an undercover informant to spy on believers.

But in July 2006, FBI agents Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen directed undercover informant Craig Monteilh to infiltrate the mosques in Southern California and paid him $6,000 to $11,000 per month create video and audio recordings of Muslim activities, the plaintiffs claim. They add that Monteilh was provided with "sophisticated audio and video recording devices."

Monteilh then publicly declared his Muslim faith during a prayer in front of hundreds of members of the Islamic Center of Irvine (ICOI), and immersed himself in the religion, the class says.

Monteilh went to 10 mosques in the area to interact with followers, and attended up to four mosques in one day. Armstrong and Allen ordered him to "gather as much information on as many people in the Muslim community as possible," the class claims...

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Muslim group sues FBI over surveillance at California mosques (Christian Science Monitor)

By Patrik Jonsson, Staff writer / February 23, 2011
Christian Science Monitor

In a case that could test law enforcement's ability to identify and monitor potential terrorists inside the United States, an Islamic organization has sued the FBI for the actions of a paid spy who infiltrated several Orange County mosques in California in the mid-2000s.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations allege in the lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles, that a paid informant named Keith Monteilh violated the First Amendment rights of hundreds of Muslim worshipers when he performed "indiscriminate surveillance" on "people who were more devout in their religious practice, irrespective of whether any particular individual was believed to be involved in criminal activity."

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The FBI responded that it doesn't ask its informants or agents to target people for their religious affiliations, and maintains it has done a good job of balancing civil liberties with its ongoing antiterrorism work.

Nevertheless, the case threatens to erode already-tenuous relationships between law enforcement and the broader American Muslim community, which has the best potential to spot suspicious behavior in its midst. That ability – and willingness – was illustrated in this case.

Mr. Monteilh "became an agent provocateur," says Ibrahim Hooper, national CAIR spokesman. "He was the one suggesting all these kinds of bizarre activities to the extent that community itself turned him in."

The Monteilh affair was particularly galling to Los Angeles-area Muslims, since he was working in a mosque where an FBI official had promised no such surveillance would take place under his watch.

More broadly, targeting mosques and even fervent believers is a sure way for the FBI to alienate moderate, law-abiding Muslims, says Ameena Mirza Qazi, staff attorney of CAIR-Los Angeles.

"When Muslims perceive that they are viewed as a suspect community by law enforcement or the FBI, it really has a devastating effect on relations between law enforcement authorities and American Muslims," says CAIR's Mr. Hooper.

But the FBI can't ignore the role of mosques as potential hubs of terror activity, says Gabriel Schoenfeld, a national security expert at the Hudson Institute. Some of the organizers of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, for example, met at a mosque in New Jersey.

"Mosques can't be sanctuaries for criminals," says Dr. Schoenfeld, author of "Necessary Secrets: National Security, Media, and the Rule of Law."

"Even if the FBI did something wrong in this case, that would not eliminate the need for the agency to investigate places like mosques, where terror activities have been cooked up in the past. Does that cut against the First Amendment? Undoubtedly. But the First Amendment isn't a suicide pact. It has to be balanced against other provisions of the Constitution, like providing for the common defense," argues Schoenfeld.

The lawsuit contends that Monteilh's FBI handlers told him to collect e-mail address, phone numbers, and other pertinent information about Muslims, and "explicitly told Monteilh that Islam was a threat to America's national security."

Legal experts say the lawsuit could succeed if the ACLU proves that the FBI targeted Muslims for their religious beliefs. But resting an entire case on a paid informant – with a criminal record, in Monteilh's case – can be tricky. "Using informants is an unsavory business, and informants often lie,'' John Baker, a Louisiana State University law professor, tells the Washington Post. "How trustworthy is his information? No one knows.''

Schoenfeld adds that lawyers could also parse the allegation that the FBI asked Monteilh to look for worshippers who were particularly devout. "What does that mean?" he says. "Are they devout in trying to memorize the Koran, or are they devout in preaching a political brand of Islam? That could be legitimate for the the FBI to investigate."

"Nobody objects" to the FBI investigating "when there's actual probable cause," says Hooper, "but to just say, 'go into these various mosques and see what you can dig up' – and even suggest to people that they should engage in criminal activity – that is something that is way beyond the pale."