[News] FBI's Creepy Intiative to Turn Imams Into Informants

[Anti-Imperialist News]

*http://reason.com/archives/2016/04/25/fbis-creepy-intiative-to-turn-imams-into* 



  FBI's Creepy Intiative to Turn Imams Into Informants

Shikha Dalmia | April 25, 2016

Protecting civil liberties has never been the FBI's strong suit. But its 
new Shared Responsibility Committees program, which it is quietly beta 
testing now, is downright Orwellian.

The FBI bills this program as a collaborative effort with Muslim 
communities to rescue individuals on the road to radicalization. In 
reality, it is just another questionable informant program that will 
further alienate Muslim communities and hurt counter-terrorism efforts.

America's Muslim communities are already under massive surveillance. 
There is, for example, the FBI's informant program 
<http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants>, 
which has grown 10-fold, from 1,500 before the 9/11 attacks to 15,000 
informants now. And that's only its official, listed informants. The 
feds also have a network of unofficial and largely unaccountable spies 
that is three times bigger.

Many of these informants are desperate people in legal or financial 
trouble whom the FBI has blackmailed or coerced into enlisting. They spy 
on mosques and identify vulnerable and often mentally disturbed 
individuals who might be enticed into committing acts of terrorism. 
Indeed, a 2014 Human Rights Watch report 
<https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/07/21/illusion-justice/human-rights-abuses-us-terrorism-prosecutions> 
found that many of the sexy terrorist plots that the FBI claims to have 
uncovered since 9/11 would never have materialized without the active 
material support and inducement of the agency itself.

And then there's the program of "voluntary interviews" that CUNY School 
of Law's CLEAR 
<http://www.law.cuny.edu/academics/clinics/immigration/clear.html> 
project (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility) has 
been documenting. It works like this 
<http://www.thenation.com/article/wheres-outrage-when-fbi-targets-muslims/>: 
FBI agents, without a warrant or court order, accost ordinary Muslims in 
their homes, colleges, neighborhoods or near their workplace—settings 
calculated to cause maximum embarrassment—and demand that these Muslims 
accompany the feds to headquarters for a "chat." Once at headquarters, 
agents pepper their frightened and confused subjects with questions such 
as "Do you hate Israel?" and "How often do you call your mother in 
Yemen?" Sometimes the FBI asks these Muslims to become informants. More 
often, agents are simply fishing for signs of radicalization.

Such traumatizing encounters, which CLEAR maintains are rampant, have a 
hugely chilling effect on Muslim-American communities, prompting Muslims 
who have endured them (and even those who haven't) to delete their 
social media accounts, withdraw from active participation in their 
mosques, and otherwise disengage to avoid raising any red flags. Indeed, 
the NYPD's discontinued Muslim surveillance program that generated 
outrage because of its aggressive tactics is nothing compared 
<http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/08/fbi-terrorist-informants> 
to what the FBI still does on a daily basis.

Given this backdrop, it's hard not to laugh at the FBI's claims that its 
new Shared Responsibility Committees program is just a friendly effort 
to "empower" Muslim communities.

The program, which the FBI claims to be piloting in unnamed communities, 
would sign up community leaders, imams, mental health professionals, and 
teachers into committees, notes 
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/muslim-american-surveillance-fbi-spying-213773> 
Georgetown University Law School's Arjun Sethi, whom the FBI asked for 
input. It would refer individuals it has flagged by unspecified means as 
"at risk" of going jihadi to the relevant committee, who would contact 
them and conduct a series of meetings. The committee would offer the FBI 
its recommendations—whether to drop or continue the investigation or 
arrange therapy—which the FBI would be free to reject. The whole time 
that the committee is doing its work, the FBI could simultaneously be 
conducting its own criminal investigation. Worse, although the FBI 
doesn't have to disclose its findings to the committee, it would be free 
to seize the committee's notes and proceedings and also subpoena its 
members to testify against the suspect.

The FBI claims that this program will help channel social services early 
toward individuals showing signs of radicalization and keep them out of 
jail. That might be a more credible claim if the program was 
administered by health or other civilian agencies. Instead, given the 
FBI's involvement, it seems like a naked attempt to erode protections 
for privileged communication. It'll expand and entrench—even 
institutionalize—the FBI's network of confidential informants in the 
Muslim-American community, Sethi worries. Or, to put it more bluntly, 
it'll turn civilian professionals into Stasi-like snitches.

Indeed, the upshot of SRC won't be early help for "at risk" young 
Muslims at all. It'll be to inflame them against all authority figures, 
breeding suspicion and alienation in Muslim communities. This is exactly 
what is happening 
<http://www.wbur.org/npr/457599126/is-a-british-program-spotting-radicals-or-alienating-muslims> 
with a similar British program called Channel that actually inspired 
SRC, although Britain, chillingly, is going one step further and legally 
requiring 
<http://www.wsj.com/articles/u-k-law-targeting-extremism-in-schools-draws-criticism-from-muslim-groups-1435755146> 
all public sector workers, including preschool teachers, to report 
anyone showing signs of radicalization or even just alienation (which 
would pretty much cover all teenagers).

This isn't the FBI's first attempt to flag prospective "terrorists." 
Last year, it unveiled an even more ham-handed effort called "Don't be a 
Puppet"—kind of like a DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Effort) for 
terrorism. The program's purpose was to help school kids resist 
terrorist inclinations and help identify peers showing signs of them. It 
consisted of an interactive video game 
<https://cve.fbi.gov/whatis/?state=blameSection1> meant to alert kids to 
the twisted logic of terrorists. Among the telltale signs of incipient 
jihadism, according to the game, are beliefs such as "an enemy is 
responsible for this injustice" and "we must defend our 
traditions"—never mind that both those statements describe the victims 
of terrorism just as well as the perpetrators. An outcry by Muslim civil 
rights groups forced the FBI to can its plans to introduce this game 
into public school classrooms, but the new SRC initiative shows that it 
clearly hasn't given up on preemption efforts based on some rather 
dubious notions about how early jihadis behave.

One reason why America has avoided the fate of Molenbeek, the lawless 
Brussels neighborhood that has become a hotbed of jihadist activity, is 
that far from being radicalized, American Muslims are actually very 
assimilated and remarkably cooperative with law enforcement. For 
example, in Muslim-dominated Dearborn, Michigan, near where I live, 
twice 
<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/fbi-muslim-outreach-terrorism-213765> 
in the last few years fathers have turned in their own sons who seemed 
to be falling prey to radical propaganda.

Squandering the goodwill of Muslim Americans through ill-advised 
programs that make them feel even more targeted than they already are 
won't make America more safe—just less free and fair.

/This column originally appearead 
<http://theweek.com/articles/617941/how-fbis-orwellian-antiterror-programs-are-making-less-safe> 
in The Week./

-- 
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