Muslims Say F.B.I. Tactics Sow Anger and Fear

US | December 18, 2009
Muslims Say F.B.I. Tactics Sow Anger and Fear
By PAUL VITELLO and KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
Since 2001, the F.B.I. and Muslim leaders have tried to build a relationship of trust, but those relations have reached a new low point, Muslim leaders say.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/18/us/18muslims.html

December 18, 2009
Muslims Say F.B.I. Tactics Sow Anger and Fear
By PAUL VITELLO and KIRK SEMPLE

The anxiety and anger have been building all year. In March, a national coalition of Islamic organizations warned that it would cease cooperating with the F.B.I. unless the agency stopped infiltrating mosques and using “agents provocateurs to trap unsuspecting Muslim youth.”

In September, a cleric in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, sued the government, claiming that the F.B.I. had threatened to scuttle his application for a green card unless he agreed to spy on relatives overseas — echoing similar claims made in recent court cases in California, Florida and Massachusetts.

And last month, after an imam in Queens was charged with aiding what the authorities called a bomb-making plot, a group of South Asian Muslims there began compiling a database of complaints about their brushes with counterterrorism investigators.

Since the terror attacks of 2001, the F.B.I. and Muslim and Arab-American leaders across the country have worked to build a relationship of trust, sharing information both to fight terrorism and to protect the interests of mosques and communities.

But 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.”

There is little doubt that a spate of recent cases — from the alleged bomb plot by a former Manhattan coffee vendor, Najibullah Zazi, to the shootings at Fort Hood, in Texas — has heightened Americans’ concerns about homegrown terrorism. Muslim leaders have promised to redouble efforts to combat extremism in their ranks.

Yet they also worry about the fallout for the vast numbers of the innocent. Some Muslims, Ms. Mattson said, have canceled trips abroad to avoid arousing suspicion. People are wary of whom they speak to. Community groups say it is harder to find volunteers. Many Muslim charities are hobbled.

And some law enforcement experts warn of a farther-reaching consequence: the loss of a critical early-warning system against domestic terrorism.

“This is a national security issue,” said David Schanzer, who heads the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University. “It’s absolutely vital that the F.B.I. and the Muslim-American community clear the air and figure out how to work together.”

Even in better times, the relationship has been a challenge to maintain, given that counterterrorism agents operate on multiple levels — holding open meetings at a mosque, say, and seeding it with informers.

The F.B.I. has defended its practices, saying it must pursue suspects wherever they go. Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, said in an interview that it tries to resolve anxieties by giving community leaders “explanations, where the circumstances permit, and resolving concerns where possible.”

In October, agents met privately in Queens with more than 40 Muslim and Arab-American leaders to hear their grievances, and agency officials said they anticipated more sessions in New York and other cities. In July, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. took questions about counterterrorism tactics from 200 young Muslims at a Los Angeles mosque.

Mr. Bresson said that no group is spotlighted because of its members’ religion or ethnicity. “The F.B.I. investigates people, not places, and only when we have information or allegations that persons are or may be committing crimes or posing a risk to national security,” he said.

Yet the Justice Department has in the last two years loosened some restrictions on agents’ ability to start and conduct terrorism investigations. The new guidelines, which the F.B.I. confirmed in October in response to a suit filed by the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, make it easier to plant informers and allow agents to include ethnicity and religion in the assessment of targets, as long as those are not the only factors considered.

After four members of a mosque in Newburgh, N.Y., were charged in May with plotting to bomb two Bronx synagogues, the authorities acknowledged that the investigation had begun with an informer who became a linchpin in the scheme. Congregation members said he had frequented the mosque, offering young men money and gifts.

The Queens imam arrested in September as investigators pursued the coffee vendor was an informer who had helped authorities. Last month, federal prosecutors moved to seize several buildings across the country that house mosques, saying they were owned by a nonprofit group with links to Iran. As a rare federal investigation that has ensnared houses of worship, the case stoked apprehensions that the government sees Arab-Americans and Muslims as a people apart.

“We are citizens who care about our country as much as everyone,” said Wael Mousfar, president of the Arab Muslim American Federation, a New York umbrella group. “But people don’t know what to expect — who might report them for speaking about Middle East politics, what someone might get your teenage son to do.”

His community’s relations with law enforcement were rocky in the weeks after 9/11, when the authorities began detaining hundreds of Muslim and Arab noncitizens, most of whom were cleared of links to terrorism and deported. But F.B.I. officials and leaders of Muslim, South Asian and Arab-American groups eventually forged an understanding, maintaining communication channels.

Linda Sarsour, director of the Arab-American Association of New York, a social-services agency, said that even then, the connection felt tentative. She was baffled when bonds that she and other leaders established with a New York F.B.I. chief evaporated upon the arrival of his successor.

Experts say that complaint partly reflects high turnover.

It also attests to differing views within the bureau about the effectiveness of community outreach, said Michael Rolince, a former director of counterterrorism in the F.B.I.’s Washington field office. Some factions within the agency, he said, have always been leery of Islamic and Arab-American organizations, considering their loyalties to be divided.

“There are some people in the bureau who believe, as I do, that the relationship with the Muslim community is crucial and must be developed with consistency,” Mr. Rolince said. “And there are those who don’t.”

The American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections, which threatened to cease cooperating with the F.B.I., has not yet done so.

But by most accounts, the unraveling of ties between the F.B.I. and Muslim-Americans began two years ago, with the F.B.I.’s decision to stop sharing information with the nation’s most prominent Muslim civil rights organization, the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The F.B.I. said it was motivated by council executives’ failure to answer questions about links with the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The executives denied any such connection, and accused the F.B.I. of staining the council’s reputation without due process.

In June, the American Civil Liberties Union made a similar complaint about Justice Department decisions to shut down six Muslim charities without filing charges. The moves, which froze billions of dollars in assets, have instilled among Muslims “a pervasive fear that they may be arrested, prosecuted, targeted for law enforcement interviews” if they give to any Islamic charity, the A.C.L.U. said.

Imam Mohammad Shamsi Ali, chief cleric at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, in Manhattan, said that his organization had suffered a 30 to 40 percent decline in contributions since 2001, in part because of that fear. He said the center no longer solicits donations from individuals living abroad ”because of the possibility that we could be misunderstood.”

Still, the specter looming largest among immigrant Arabs and Muslims is fear of deportation. And some say the F.B.I. has used that threat forcefully.

Sheik Tarek Saleh, the Bay Ridge cleric who is suing the government, said he welcomed F.B.I. agents at his storefront mosque after 9/11 when they asked about his kinship with Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a high-ranking Al Qaeda militant and his cousin’s husband.

Sheik Saleh, 46, said he repeatedly discussed Mr. Yazid as well as his own former membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, a sometimes-violent political movement he joined as a teenager in Egypt and disavowed years later. But when he refused to travel overseas to spy on Mr. Yazid, he said, agents told him to forget his pending application for permanent residence.

In February, immigration officials told Sheik Saleh that the application had been rejected because he failed to fill in a section about ties to political groups. He contends that was a minor oversight. F.B.I. and immigration officials would not discuss his case.

Sheik Saleh said that he faced deportation because he resisted F.B.I. pressure. “Your dignity is bigger than the green card,” he said.

Zein Rimawi, a pet store owner and a founder of the Al-Noor School, a private school in Bay Ridge, said anxiety made people cautious about transactions with individuals and institutions — even his school, which he said was $700,000 in debt as a result.

Mr. Rolince, the former F.B.I. agent, said he understood the worries, but felt they were overblown. “The F.B.I. has 12,500 agents,” he said. “Believe me, there’s not enough of them to waste time looking at you unless they have a good reason.”

Ali Adeeb and Majeed Babar contributed reporting.

FBI walks tightrope in outreach to Muslims, fighting terrorism

FBI walks tightrope in outreach to Muslims, fighting terrorism

By Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 20, 2009; A05

At a retirement party last week for the head of the FBI's Washington field office, Muslim and Arab leaders presented the guest of honor with a crystal plaque.

It thanked Joseph Persichini Jr. for reaching out to the local Muslim and Arab communities. Yet even as the tribute on Capitol Hill went on, his agents had a different mission. They were flying to Pakistan to interrogate five Washington area Muslim men arrested in a terrorism probe. The outcome of that investigation threatens to undermine the very relationships their boss tried to foster.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, FBI agents from the same office have met with Muslim leaders, fielded questions at mosques and participated in Ramadan feasts. The outreach might well have resulted in the families of the five men coming forward to the FBI to report them missing.

But that action now has agents and prosecutors facing a dilemma as the case has morphed from a missing persons investigation into a counter-terrorism probe. As U.S. officials consider whether to file criminal charges against the men and how aggressively to prosecute any potential case, some Muslim leaders are calling for leniency, saying the tough approach often used by the Bush administration would alienate a community whose relationship with law enforcement is uneasy.

"Charging them and throwing them in jail is not the solution," said Nihad Awad, national head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which approached the FBI on behalf of the families. "The government has to show some appreciation for the actions of the parents and the community. That will encourage other families to come forward."
Return could take months

The men, ages 18 to 24, traveled overseas just after Thanksgiving without telling their families and were arrested near Lahore on Dec. 8. A Pakistani court this week ordered them held for up to 10 more days of interrogation, but officials say their likely return to the United States could take months. Pakistani officials say the men were in touch with a Taliban recruiter and were aiming to join up with al-Qaeda and battle U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

No one has been charged, and the men's friends and spiritual advisers say they never saw any sign of radical beliefs or activities.

Federal prosecutors in Alexandria, where any criminal case would probably be brought, declined to comment. But law enforcement sources say prosecutors are likely to consider charges that include providing material support to terrorist organizations. Prosecutors face complexities that include whether the men's reported admissions to Pakistani authorities are admissible in a U.S. court and whether any statements were coerced.

Senior Justice Department officials are expected to balance broader issues in any charging decisions, such as concern over a growing threat from domestic extremism.

"Home-based terrorism is here," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a recent speech in which she cited the arrests of U.S. citizens suspected of plotting attacks with al-Qaeda and other Muslim groups. The five Virginia men are U.S. citizens.
Possible clash in goals

But the law enforcement imperative could clash with President Obama's desire to improve relations with Muslims abroad and in the United States. When asked about the arrests in Pakistan, Obama praised "the extraordinary contributions of the Muslim-American community."

U.S. law enforcement also views relations with Muslims as critical for its mandate to prevent terror attacks. The Northern Virginia families "alerted their community and the authorities immediately when they knew there was something wrong with their sons," said one federal official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the case is unfolding. "That's a very positive step."

Current and former law enforcement officials said the families' actions will not affect the FBI's intensifying investigation. "When you come upon information that the law may have been violated, the way you receive that information does not change your obligation to respond to it accordingly," said Michael A. Mason, who preceded Persichini as head of the FBI's D.C. field office.

Other officials said cooperation could affect any decision on whether to file charges and what penalties to seek, although that might depend on whether the five men cooperate. The key factor, officials said, is always the evidence.

"Cooperation typically does not override public safety," said Paul J. McNulty, who as U.S. attorney in Alexandria oversaw many terrorism cases, "but it does play a role."

The case is unfolding against a backdrop of increased tension nationally between the FBI and the Muslim community. A coalition of two dozen Muslim groups in March suspended most contacts with the FBI over what it called inappropriate infiltration of mosques.

Relations between the FBI and Muslim groups are generally less strained in the Washington area, where the field office -- the bureau's second largest, with about 800 agents -- is continuing its intensive outreach to the region's estimated 250,000 Muslims.

"They've made a very sincere effort," said Rizwan Jaka, a board member at the Sterling-based ADAMS Center, the area's largest mosque. The center has held FBI town hall meetings and hosted agents during the breaking of the daily Ramadan fast.

Supervisory Special Agent Katherine Schweit, spokeswoman for the field office, said the FBI "recognizes there are issues and concerns that have been raised from the Muslim community and will continue to be raised. We always try to address them by maintaining a regular dialogue.

"We have to have the trust and understanding of the public to do our job," she added.

Yet tensions remain, and local Muslims still decry the prosecution of terrorism cases in Northern Virginia after Sept. 11, especially the conviction of 11 men in what prosecutors called a "Virginia jihad network."

Nawar Shora, legal director for the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee -- who, with a representative from a Muslim group presented the award to Persichini -- said the Arab and Muslim communities will accept any charges against the men arrested in Pakistan as long as they are treated fairly.

Yet he indicated that tensions could flare, depending how the government approaches a case. "If the FBI and the prosecutors say these were five Muslims and they were trying to commit jihad, and they throw out all of these incendiary religious terms, that's different," Shora said.