OMNI FBI
NEWSLETTER #2, August 17, 2013. Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace
and Justice. (#1 Feb. 1, 2011).
My blog:
War Department/Peace Department
War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
See: CIA/FBI Newsletter
Index:
See: ACLU, CIA, COINTELPRO, Empire, Homeland
Security Agency, Intelligence Agencies, Militarism, National Security
State
Contents of #1
President Obama Seeks Greater Wiretap Power
FBI Database
Raids in September
Minneapolis and Chicago
Memphis
Resistance
Related Information: Film on FBI Sting
Contents of #2
Susan Herman (former ACLU President), "Taking Liberties” (essay): Unprecedented, Unchecked
Spying and Erosion of Privacy
Susan Herman, Taking Liberties (book), What We Lost After 9/11
Catholic Workers Terrorists? FBI Investigates Casa Maria
FBI (the Unamericans) Investigates William T.
Vollmann
Robinson, FBI Stings Muslims
Seth Rosenfeld, Subversives, the FBI’s War on Student Radicals and Reagan’s Rise to
Power
Aaronson,
FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism Against Muslims
Spannaus,
Chronology, How Obama Expanded
Bush-Cheney Domestic Spy Dragnet
FBI, George W. Bush, Spying Google Search
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now: From Martin
Luther King, Jr., to Edward Snowden
FBI, Obama, Spying Google Search
SUSAN HERMAN, TAKING LIBERTIES
SUSAN HERMAN, “Who’s Watching the
Watchers?” Civil Liberties (ACLU Newsletter, Winter 2012). “The ACLU
has seen plenty of government overreach in its time, but nothing like the
unchecked spying and erosion of privacy of recent years.” –Dick
‘Taking Liberties’ — New Book on What We All Lost After 9/11
Published: Tuesday, 6
Sep 2011 | 10:38 AM ET
By: Susan Herman|ACLU
President and author of, "Taking Liberties"
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GUEST AUTHOR BLOG: The Fourth Amendment is good for
business and essential for democracy by Susan Herman, ACLU President and author
of, "Taking Liberties: The War on
Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy."
Post-9/11 surveillance measures have made it far too easy for
the government to review our personal and business records, telephone and
e-mail conversations, and virtually all aspects of our lives.
For example,
·
Under the so-called “library provision” of the USA PATRIOT Act, the
government can demand that custodians of records – including librarians,
schools, social work institutions, and internet service providers (who, in
these days of cloud computing, have access to a mind-boggling array of
information about us) – turn over those records without having to explain to a
court why they want those records, or whether the person who is the subject of
the records has done anything suspicious.
·
Under the expanded “National Security Letter,”the
FBI and other agencies can demand some records from telecommunications and
financial services providers without any court order at all and then gag the
recipients.
·
Patriot Act amendments let the government spy on Americans using
a Cold War era statute designed for tracking the covert activities of Soviet
agents.
Taking Liberties: The
War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy
The Constitution’s Fourth Amendment,
our principal protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, generally
requires government agents to convince a neutral and detached magistrate that
they have “probable cause” before conducting an arrest, or searching or seizing
property.
But the very goal of these provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act and
other post-9/11 surveillance measures is to let the government avoid this
protective protocol.
The role of the courts in reviewing applications for
eavesdropping or other types of searches and seizures is reduced; the power to
spy on innocent Americans expanded.
What’s wrong with giving the government this broad power
just in case, some people ask?
Why should I care whether the government knows what I am doing
if I am not doing anything wrong?
But diluting Fourth Amendment protection is dangerous.
"Our ancestors who
wrote the Fourth Amendment feared the potential for political repression,
selective use of power, and, ultimately, a police state."
President,
ACLU & Author, "Taking Liberties"
Susan Herman
As Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg
Our ancestors who wrote the Fourth Amendment feared the
potential for political repression, selective use of power, and, ultimately, a
police state. In fact, their insistence on having their “persons, houses,
papers, and effects” (in the words of the Fourth Amendment) protected against
government agents searching for seditious literature or for untaxed tea or rum
was one of the principal causes of the American Revolution.
Uncontrolled search and seizure is also bad for business.
When customers/clients/patrons know that any information they
share with their bank, school, or social work agency is only one easy step away
from government eyes, they may be reluctant to create those records by sharing
information in the first place.
And it is not only surveillance authority that has been
expanded post-9/11.One
Patriot Act provision allowed seizure of the assets of an American charity,
KindHearts for Charitable Humanitarian Development, with no warning and no
hearing, even though the charity was not on any blacklist. And the government
opportunistically employed a statute designed for detention of material
witnesses to arrest an American citizen, Abdullah al-Kidd, despite the fact
that they lacked probable cause to believe he had done anything wrong. He was
never called to testify at any proceeding.
September 11: Ten Years
Later - A CNBC Special Report
Some belittle Fourth Amendment principles as “technicalities.”
But as scholar Elaine Scarry noted, the post-9/11 powers distort
the Constitution’s vision of the relationship between the individual and the
state. “The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people’s
lives be private and the work of government officials be public.”
The Fourth Amendment protects more than just our “persons,
houses, papers, and effects.”
It protects our democracy.
TERRORIST CATHOLIC WORKERS OR TERRORIZED?
“The FBI’s Terrorist Investigation of Casa Maria” by Michael Komba. Casa
Maria Catholic Worker Newsletter (July 2011). The FBI in 2003 accused Mr. Komba of breaking
a window at an army recruiting center, ordinarily a vandalism charge, but
upgraded to terrorism because a recruiting center. Years later he acquired his file that
disclosed he was investigated along with many other opponents of the wars. Let’s all recognize how grossly distorting
is the so-called War on Terror, which quickly became both foreign and domestic
McCarthyism. So let us all prepare not
to be intimidated by our police bullies.
A big help: Howard Zinn, who had
a 423 page FBI file, wrote an essay entitled “Federal Bureau of Intimidation,”
in which he urged us all to expose bully agents (not all). --Dick
REPORT — From the September 2013 issue
Life as a Terrorist: Uncovering my FBI file By William T. Vollmann
Download Pdf
MicroFiche
William T.
Vollmann’s “Life as a Terrorist” will be posted to the website on Thursday,
August 22. Our apologies for the delay.
[A
devastating expose of FBI behavior: “secret, exclusive, mysterious, cruel,
afraid, dangerous, and monstrously ignorant” (to quote John Steinbeck on the
KKK, p. 45 in the article. –Dick]
“Deploying Informants, the FBI
Stings Muslims”
June 13, 2012 | This article
appeared in the July 2-9, 2012 edition of The Nation. Behind nearly every
"foiled terror plot" lurks a government informant sent to entrap
hapless young Muslim men. --Dick
TIM ROBINSON
It wasn’t long after he met the man called Shareef that Khalifa Al-Akili began to sense he was being set up. Within days of their seemingly chance meeting, Shareef was offering to drive Akili, a 34-year-old Muslim living in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, to the local mosque for prayers. Shareef told Akili he was “all about fighting” and “had a lot of resources at his disposal.” But when Shareef began to probe Akili about his views on jihad and asked him if he could obtain a gun, Akili grew nervous. “I begin to try to avoid him, but would still see him due to the fact that he lived two minutes’ walking distance from my apartment,” Akili said later. In January of this year, Shareef showed up with a “brother” who called himself Mohammed and was keen to meet Akili. Mohammed told Akili that he was a businessman from
The US
Related Topics
Out of curiosity, Akili did an Internet search on the cellphone number he’d
received from Mohammed. Much to his surprise, he discovered that the man was,
in fact, an FBI informant named Shahed Hussain, who had played a pivotal role
in at least two major terrorism-related sting operations in recent years. In a
lengthy posting on his Facebook page recounting these events, Akili wrote, “I
would like to pursue a legal action against the FBI due to their continuous
harassment.” He also set up a press conference in Washington
“The government is basically saying [the charges have] nothing to do with
the informant,” Akili’s attorney, Markéta Sims, told me. “But I’ve been doing
this a long time, and I’ve never heard of someone being charged with felony
possession for handling a gun at a shooting range.”
The FBI has employed informants ever since its inception as the Bureau of
Investigation in 1908. In 1961 director J. Edgar Hoover established the Top
Echelon Criminal Informant Program, in which FBI field offices were instructed
to develop live sources in the “organized hoodlum element.” By 1975 the Church
Committee found that the bureau was employing more than 1,500 domestic
informants. But while the FBI has long used undercover informants to infiltrate
criminal networks and build cases against potential suspects, in the domestic
front of the “war on terror,” informants have come to play a far more proactive
role in surveilling communities deemed suspect by the bureau.
According to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law
School
Before he approached Akili, Hussain was pivotal in securing convictions in
2006 against two Muslim men in Albany ,
New York Newburgh ,
New York , where he spent nearly a year
enticing a group of indigent African-American and Haitian men, some of whom
converted to Islam in prison, with offers of as much as $250,000 to participate
in a plot to bomb a Bronx synagogue and Jewish
community center. After the men were convicted at trial, the judge in the case,
Colleen McMahon, said it was “beyond question that the government created the
crime here” and criticized the FBI for sending informants “trolling among the
citizens of a troubled community, offering very poor people money if they will
play some role—any role—in criminal activity.” The men were sentenced to
twenty-five years in prison.
The FBI’s expanded deployment of informants over the past decade is the
result of a mandate to catch terrorists before they can strike next, an effort
that has fundamentally refocused the bureau from its traditional law
enforcement mission to gathering intelligence on potential threats. Within a
year of the 9/11 attacks, the FBI had reassigned nearly half its field office
positions formerly devoted to the “war on drugs” to the new “war on terror” and
launched nearly 3,000 new counterterrorism investigations. Since then, the
bureau has been increasingly devoted to counterterrorism efforts: its current
$8.1 billion budget allocates $4.9 billion to intelligence and
counterterrorism, approximately $1.7 billion more than all other federal crimes
combined.
Informants are crucial to producing the raw field intelligence that the
bureau uses to justify these vast new expenditures. Under the FBI’s Domain
Management program, modeled after the NYPD’s CompStat initiative, FBI Director
Robert Mueller holds periodic “accountability” meetings with field offices, in
which his agents report on a series of intelligence-gathering metrics in the
geographic areas they oversee—among them the production of raw intelligence
gathered by informants or electronic surveillance compiled in “information
reports” and disseminated to law enforcement agencies. These informants operate
in a post-9/11 environment of relaxed guidelines that allow the FBI to engage
in lengthy and extensive surveillance of individuals and communities with
little or no evidence of any wrongdoing afoot. Where once agents needed to have
a “predicate” to launch such an investigation, these days none are required.
The FBI has kept the details of the full scope of its informant network a
closely guarded secret. It has not revealed the number of official and
unofficial informants (the latter known as “hip pockets” in bureau parlance) on
its payroll; or how much it budgets for these informants; or what kinds of
targets they track, particularly in Muslim communities. In its 2008 budget
request the FBI disclosed that it had been working since November 2004 under a
classified presidential directive that mandated an unspecified increase in
“human source development and management.” In 2009, after civil liberties
groups sued for some of these details under the Freedom of Information Act, the
bureau made public its internal investigative guidelines but redacted nearly
the entire section on “undisclosed participation” of confidential informants.
* * *
Though relatively few informant-driven investigations have led to the
discovery of actual “homegrown” plots, the Muslim community for years has
reported instances of people being approached by informants trying to enlist
them in violent jihad. At times the informants have been so aggressive they
have quickly raised suspicions. At a California Orange County , California
Once the restraining order was issued, Monteilh was effectively done as an
informant. His work became public a few months later when he was convicted on
grand larceny charges in an unrelated incident. He subsequently sued the FBI,
alleging the agency had revealed his informant status, leading to an attack by
a fellow prisoner during his incarceration. He also gave a statement in support
of a suit filed against the bureau by the ACLU that named the then head of the Los Angeles office, J. Stephen Tidwell, who had made a
point of visiting a mosque in Irvine
According to Monteilh, his handlers in Operation Flex instructed him to
identify potential militants or, failing that, to “pay attention to people’s
problems”—such as marital or business difficulties—and assess whether
individuals might be susceptible to rumors about their sexual orientation “so
that they could be persuaded to become informants.” His handlers also told him
that “everybody knows somebody,” meaning that people from Afghanistan
In 2005 the FBI’s Office of the Inspector General found “serious
shortcomings” in the bureau’s Criminal Informant Program. The report, which
examined some 120 cases, including those related to terrorism, found that 87
percent of the investigations involving informants contained violations of the
FBI’s own guidelines. Among the chief violations were the failure of agents to
caution informants about the “limits of their activities,” the “failure to
report unauthorized illegal activity” by their informants, and the issuance of
“retroactive approvals” for illegal acts the informants had already committed.
The report noted that since 2001 the rules had been loosened at the FBI’s
request to reflect the new emphasis on intelligence gathering, and by extension
the bureau’s dire need for informants. In testimony before Congress in May
2002, FBI Director Mueller argued that requiring agents to read “verbatim
instructions” to their informants, “written in often intimidating legalese,
[was] proving to have a chilling effect, causing confidential informants to
leave the program.”
When inspectors asked the FBI to identify a terrorism investigation in
which an informant had played a “pivotal role,” the bureau cited the work of
Mohamed Alanssi, who in 2005 had secured the conviction of a well-known Yemeni
cleric and his assistant. The two men were charged with funding Al Qaeda and
Hamas. What the report didn’t mention was that Alanssi, in a fit of pique at his
handlers (who he claimed owed him money for his services as an informant in as
many as twenty terrorism prosecutions), had set himself on fire in front of the
White House and ended up being deemed so unstable that at the trial of the two
Yemenis, he was asked to testify for the defense.
* * *
For Muslims approached by the FBI to become informants, the consequences of
declining such requests can be dire. Ahmadullah Niazi, one of the mosque
members who reported the FBI’s own informant, Craig Monteilh, after hearing him
talk about planning a terrorist attack, was later contacted by agents and asked
to become an informant himself. When he refused, he found himself arrested on
charges of lying to immigration officials after he allegedly denied having
family ties to a member of Al Qaeda. Prosecutors ultimately withdrew the
charges, but Niazi said by the time the case was dismissed, both he and his
wife had lost their jobs.
In 2010 Tarek Saleh, a Brooklyn cleric, alleged that the FBI derailed his
green card application after he declined its request to travel to Afghanistan
and make contact with a relative who was allegedly part of Al Qaeda. “To use me
as a bait to trap people, I cannot do this job,” Saleh said.
Tarek Mehanna, a 29-year-old US citizen convicted this year of advocating
violent jihad through his writings and translations of various texts, claims
that the criminal case against him was initiated after he rebuffed the
overtures of FBI agents to become an informant. “They said that I had a choice
to make: I could do things the easy way or I could do them the hard way,”
Mehanna said at his sentencing. “The ‘easy’ way, as they explained, was that I
would become an informant for the government, and if I did so I would never see
the inside of a courtroom or a prison cell. As for the hard way, this is it.”
With the FBI’s expanding operations overseas, such cases are not limited to
the United States Portland , Oregon , while he was visiting family in Sudan Sudan United Arab Emirates United States
Attorneys at the CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability &
Responsibility) project, based out of the City University of New York School of
Law, have represented dozens of people since 2009 who have been approached by
the FBI for voluntary interviews; they say the threat of retribution for those who
refuse to become informants is real. “The FBI approaches the vast majority of
our clients as potential informants to partake in mass surveillance of Muslim
communities, unconnected to any real criminal investigation,” said Amna Akbar,
a supervising attorney at CLEAR. “The bureau is aggressively attempting to
cultivate informants in Muslim communities by using coercion, pressure tactics
and intimidation.”
As an example, Akbar cites the case of Mohammed Tanvir, a 28-year-old from
Pakistan who in October 2010 found himself on the Department of Homeland
Security’s “no fly” list following more than a year of fending off requests
from FBI agents to become an informant. In 2009, after returning from a visit
to his wife in Pakistan ,
Tanvir says agents appeared at a 99 Cent Store in the Bronx
where he worked to question him. “They said they had been following me,” Tanvir
recalled. “They had photos of me riding the train to work.” The agents told
Tanvir they’d heard from his co-workers at a previous construction job that he
had been to Taliban training camps in Afghanistan New York City , and offered him money and other
enticements, such as bringing his wife to the United
States and paying for his parents to make religious
pilgrimages from Pakistan to
Saudi Arabia Afghanistan
Tanvir says the FBI first approached him in 2007, after he wired money to
help a childhood friend from Pakistan
who had been detained in Mexico
Akbar says the FBI placed Tanvir on the “no fly” list as retaliation for
his refusal to work as a paid informant. In May CLEAR sent a letter to the FBI
threatening to sue if Tanvir isn’t removed from the list. Regardless of the
outcome, Tanvir—a green card holder who once hoped to settle in the United States —says that as a result of his
ordeal, he is now seeking to return to Pakistan
Also in This Forum
Moustafa Bayoumi, “Fear and Loathing of Islam”
Jack Shaheen, “How the Media Created the Muslim Monster Myth”
Laila Lalami, “Islamophobia and Its Discontents”
Abed Awad, “The True Story of Sharia in American Courts”
Ramzi Kassem, “The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying Program”
Max Blumenthal, “The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate”
Laila Al-Arian, “When Your Father
Jack Shaheen, “How the Media Created the Muslim Monster Myth”
Laila Lalami, “Islamophobia and Its Discontents”
Abed Awad, “The True Story of Sharia in American Courts”
Ramzi Kassem, “The Long Roots of the NYPD Spying Program”
Max Blumenthal, “The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate”
Laila Al-Arian, “When Your Father
We Recommend
Islamophobia
and Its Discontents (Racism and
Discrimination, Conservatives
and the American Right, Race and
Religion)
Assailed by the right as a fiction, anti-Muslim bias is all too real for
those who live with it.
The
True Story of Sharia in American Courts (Racism and
Discrimination, Law, States, Conservatives
and the American Right)
Sharia is as unthreatening to the US
About the Author
Petra
Bartosiewicz
Petra Bartosiewicz,
a freelance writer living in Brooklyn ,
New York
Also by the Author
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