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MI5 ’still using threats to recruit Muslim spies.’
MI5 faces accusations that its officers have blackmailed and harassed vulnerable immigrants living in Britain as part of a campaign to recruit spies to report on Muslim communities.
In one case, a man who escaped persecution in Africa where members of his family were murdered claims that for the past nine months he has been harassed by MI5 agents who have tried to force him to work for the Security Service.
…those relations have reached a low point in recent months, many Muslim leaders say. Several high-profile cases in which informers have infiltrated mosques and helped promote plots, they say, have sown a corrosive fear among their people that F.B.I. informers are everywhere, listening.
“There is a sense that law enforcement is viewing our communities not as partners but as objects of suspicion,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who represented Muslims at the national prayer service a day after President Obama’s inauguration. “A lot of people are really, really alarmed about this.”
FBI tries to deport imam for refusing to be an informant.
“We want you to work with us,” Farahi remembers the FBI agents telling him.
And this is when the imam’s five-year battle with the federal government began.
“I have no problem working with you guys or helping you out,” Farahi said. He could keep them informed about the local Muslim community or translate Arabic. But the relationship, he insisted, would need to be public; others would have to know he was helping the government.
But that wasn’t what the FBI had in mind, Farahi says. The agents wanted him to become a secret informant who would investigate specific people. And they knew Farahi was in a vulnerable position. His student visa had expired, and he had asked the government for a renewal. He had also applied for political asylum, hoping one of those legal tracks would offer a way for him to stay in the United States indefinitely.
….The slender, bearded 34-year-old Farahi frowns as he recalls all of this while sitting on a white folding chair in the Shamsuddin Islamic Center on a recent afternoon. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” he says, remembering the choice he faced. “That’s where the problem is.”
Farahi soon discovered the FBI’s offer wasn’t optional. The federal government used strong-arm tactics — including trying to have him deported and falsely claiming it had information linking him to terrorism — in an effort to force him to become an informant, he says.
CAIR has asked attorney general Eric Holder to review FBI investigation guidelines for possibly violating Muslim’s civil rights, especially in regards to the use of informants in mosques.
The group’s national legal counsel said, “The Obama administration should review these guidelines and bring them into conformity with the Constitution and with the cherished American values of religious freedom and respect for civil liberties.”
Other civil liberties organizations have expressed concerns about the FBI’s vague rules for initiating an initial investigation that does not require “any particular factual predication” and the possible use of race and ethnicity as factors when opening an investigation, al-Khalili said.
Farahi claims that at his asylum hearing in November of 2007, he was blindsided when a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor offered him a deal to leave the country within 30 days, or face arrest for ‘’support of terrorist groups.” Fahari said he was intimidated into withdrawing his asylum petition, and that he may have been targeted because he had refused to serve as an informant for the FBI. ICE officials have denied his accusations.
AltMuslim article puts the focus right on the center of the problem of cooperation between American law enforcement and US Muslim communities:
The position of American Muslim communities is complicated exponentially by two policing tactics more familiar from totalitarian states—the forced recruitment of informants to spy on Muslim communities and the deployment of paid agents provocateurs to encourage and incite crimes. However one comes down on the larger relationship between American Muslims and law enforcement, the corrosive fear and distrust seeded by these tactics impedes useful political conversation. It unfairly handicaps community efforts to mobilize in local and national political voice. And it does not make anyone safer.
And a pattern:
In many earlier criminal prosecutors, trials have revealed that informants play a catalytic role of instigation. This pattern emerges: State agents trawling Muslim communities for psychologically vulnerable young men who can be tempted into violence. The state is persistently cooking up conspiracies for which it then seeks our applause.
NPR weekend edition reports on the riff between the FBI and CAIR. Two issues: Holy Land Foundation trial and informants in mosques. It’s nothing new to regular readers here, but you do get to hear from principles at CAIR, MPAC and the FBI talking about their positions themselves, rather than summarized by reporters and bloggers.
Personally, I don’t have a problem with law enforcement infiltrating groups working to commit violence, but these informants are targeting the whole community when they wander into mosques. We also know from recent cases that the informants go in with a mandate to entrap otherwise harmless people described as “aspirational terrorists,” thereby creating ’show trials’ and opportunities for career advancement on the part of FBI G-men for ‘breaking up terrorist cells.’ That’s why they hire professional liars as informants. We also know that US Muslims who have otherwise tried to be dutiful good citizens and report violence-espousing people have become the object of FBI strong-arm tactics to coerce them into becoming informants against their will.
More on that crack team of ultra deadly killer jihadis in NY:
Relatives said the defendants were down-on-their-luck men who worked at places like Wal-Mart, a landscaping company and a warehouse when they weren’t behind bars. Payen’s lawyer said he was “intellectually challenged” and on medication for schizophrenia. Marilyn Reader said he has “a very low borderline” IQ.
The picture that is emerging is that yet another agent provacateur informant badgered the most vulnerable village idiots into a frenzy and then handed them [replica] weaponry it would have been impossible for them to obtain if the government wasn’t providing it.
The upshot is someone will get a promotion out of this! (snark)
Madhi Hashi, a 19-year-old care worker from Camden, claims he was held for 16 hours in a cell in Djibouti airport on the orders of MI5. He alleges that when he was returned to the UK on 9 April this year he was met by an MI5 agent who told him his terror suspect status would remain until he agreed to work for the Security Service. He alleges that he was to be given the job of informing on his friends by encouraging them to talk about jihad.
Mohamed Nur, 25, a community youth worker from north London, claims he was threatened by the Security Service after an agent gained access to his home accompanied by a police officer posing as a postman.
“The MI5 agent said, ‘Mohamed if you do not work for us we will tell any foreign country you try to travel to that you are a suspected terrorist.’”
Is there a Muslim civil rights organization in the UK similar to CAIR that could step up on this, provide legal counseling, political lobbying, etc?
Yet another Muslim in the US has been brought up on unrelated charges after having refused to become an FBI informant – this time in Boston (Here’s another instance I blogged about recently from the LA area). The accused’s name is Tariq Mehanna, who was an active community member in the Boston area and points immediately west (Worcester, Lowell, etc). From the Boston Globe: “He created a blog called Iskandrani, a name tied to his Egyptian ancestry, and was considered a leader to teenagers at the Worcester Islamic Center. He went under the name Abu Sabaya, which he translated as “Father of Children.”"
Also, his blog postings have been cited in the media as damning. Here’s a link to his blog, and a post about Aafia Siddiqui, his writings about which were cited in the Globe article. He has also claimed Abdullah Azzam and Sayyid Qutb are inspirational figures to him, according to the Globe. I’m disgusted with the Globe for referring to the Siddiqui case, since you can find US Muslims all over the web from across the political spectrum who are troubled by what happened to her (Muslim Matters, Muslimah Media Watch, my blog, Umar, etc, etc.) I admit I have not read his post about Sr. Aafia, so I dont know if there is anything there that is substantially unusual relative to what anybody else is saying.
The Globe reporter buried the key information about the informant offer deep in the story: