Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards campaign signs littered the lawns in his North Miami Beach neighborhood as Imam Foad Farahi walked from his mosque to his apartment a few blocks away. It was five o’clock in the afternoon on November 1, 2004, the day before George W. Bush would win a second term in office, but Farahi, an influential South Florida Islamic religious leader, had been too busy fasting and praying Ramadan to pay much attention to the presidential election.
As he neared his apartment, he saw two men standing outside. “We’re from the FBI,” one of the men said. They wanted to know about José Padilla and Adnan El Shukrijumah, two men linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Padilla, the so-called Dirty Bomber, had been arrested in May 2002 and given enemy combatant status. He stood trial in Miami and was convicted in 2008 on terrorism charges and sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Currently on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list, Shukrijumah is a senior Al Qaeda member who came to the Bureau’s attention in the Imran Mandhai case.
“I know José Padilla, but I don’t know Adnan,” Farahi told the agents.1 As imam of the Shamsuddin Islamic Center in North Miami Beach, Farahi was in a unique position to know about local Muslims. While he had met Shukrijumah, the son of a local Islamic religious leader, on one occasion in 2000, he had had no contact with him since then. “I don’t know anything about his activities,” Farahi said. Padilla had prayed at Farahi’s mosque and had once been among his Arabic students. However, Farahi told the agents that he had had “no contact with Padilla since 1998, when he left the country.”
“We want you to work with us,” one of the agents then said to Farahi.
“I have no problem working with you guys or helping you out,” Farahi told the agents. He could keep them informed about the local Muslim community, or translate Arabic. But the relationship, he insisted, would need to be made public; others would have to know he was working with the government. But that wasn’t what the FBI had in mind: the agents wanted him to become a secret informant. And they knew Farahi was in a vulnerable position as 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.
“We’ll give you residency,” the agents promised. “We’ll give you money to go to school.”
Farahi considered the offer for a moment, then shook his head. “I can’t,” he told them.
The slender, bearded Farahi frowned as he recounted this to me while sitting on a white folding chair in the Shamsuddin Islamic Center in May 2009. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” he said, remembering the choice he faced. “That’s where the problem is.”
Farahi soon discovered that the FBI’s offer wasn’t optional, as the federal government began using 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. The imam resisted the government at every step of the way and took his political asylum case to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta. “As long as you’re not a citizen, there are lots of things [the government] can do,” Ira Kurzban, Farahi’s lawyer, told me.2 “They can allege you’re a terrorist and try to bring terrorist charges against you, or they can get you deported.”
Farahi’s was among the first cases to become public of the FBI using leverage to recruit informants from within U.S. Muslim communities, an aggressive program that has netted thousands of informants since 9/11. And the only reason his case became public was because Farahi chose to fight, risking deportation. “People have two choices,” Farahi told me. “Either they end up working with the FBI or they leave the country on their own. It’s just sometimes when you’re in that situation, not many people are strong enough to stand up and resist and fight—to reject their offers.”
Two days after Farahi told the FBI he couldn’t spy on members of his mosque in good conscience, the two agents phoned him and requested he come to their office to take a polygraph. “I had nothing to hide,” Farahi said of the test. “They asked the same questions over and over, to see if my answer would change, and it didn’t.” The agents were focused primarily on Adnan El Shukrijumah, Farahi recalled. “What is your relationship with him?” they asked. “When was the last time you were in contact with him? Where is he now?”
Following the polygraph, Farahi didn’t hear from the FBI for two and a half years. Then, in the summer of 2007, he received a call from an agent who asked to meet with him. In Cooper City, a suburb northwest of Miami, two FBI agents—a man and a woman—again asked Farahi if he would work with the government. He again declined, and the meeting ended amicably.
Farahi didn’t know the push back would come later on.
Though he has never set foot in the country, Foad Farahi is technically an Iranian. He was born in Kuwait, but under Middle Eastern law, he is considered an Iranian citizen because his father was from there. Farahi grew up in Kuwait City, where his father operated a currency exchange business. His mother, a Syrian, raised him and his younger sister to speak Arabic and worship as Sunnis, an Islamic sect that is persecuted in Iran. But he knew his future would never be secure in Kuwait. “Even if I married a Kuwaiti woman, I wouldn’t become a citizen,” Farahi said. “Kuwait could deport me to Iran at any time for any reason.”
At the age of nineteen, Farahi applied for and received a student visa to study in the United States. He chose to go to South Florida, where his family had once vacationed when he was a teenager. He enrolled at Miami Dade College and received an associate’s degree before transferring to Barry University, a private Catholic school in Miami Shores, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. While at Barry, he served on the university’s interfaith committee as well as participating as a teacher in a university peace forum attended by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children. “He has had a positive influence at this university,” said Edward R. Sunshine, a theology professor at Barry.3 No one who knows Farahi, Sunshine told me, would suspect he is radical or militant.
Farahi went on to obtain a master’s degree in public health from Florida International University. At the same time, he began an intensive, three-year imam training course at a mosque in Miramar, Florida. In 2000, the Shamsuddin Islamic Center opened near his home in North Miami Beach. Six months later, its imam returned to Egypt, and Farahi became his successor. It was through this position that he came into contact with several South Floridians who have been linked to terrorism, including Padilla, Shukrijumah, and Imran Mandhai, the nineteen-year-old Pakistani American man who conspired with FBI informants Howard Gilbert and Elie Assaad. “Imran came here once years ago during Ramadan,” Farahi said. “It was a big event for him at the time. He memorized and recited the Koran.”
On a November day in 2007, Farahi arrived at Miami Immigration Court for what he thought was a routine hearing on his political asylum case. The imam had requested asylum because he is a Sunni, a persecuted religious minority in Iran. As Farahi entered the courthouse, he saw four men from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They were wearing body armor and had guns holstered at their sides. All four followed Farahi from the security checkpoint on the ground level to the third-floor courtroom of U.S. Immigration Judge Carey Holliday.
Farahi’s lawyer at the time, Mildred Morgado, spoke with the ICE agents, then asked to talk to her client in private. “They have a file with evidence that you’re supporting or are involved in terrorist groups,” Farahi recalled Morgado telling him. Farahi was then given an ultimatum: drop the asylum case and leave the United States voluntarily, or be charged as a terrorist.
Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on Farahi’s side when drawing a judge for his asylum claim. Appointed to the immigration court in October 2006, Carey Holliday was a Louisiana Republican who had quickly earned a reputation for being tough on immigrants. In one case, he declined to hear arguments from an Ecuadorian couple who alleged they were targeted for deportation because their daughter, Miami Dade College student Gabby Pacheco, was a well-known activist for immigration reform. “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones,” Holliday wrote in his ruling.4 (Holliday resigned in January 2009 after the Justice Department found that Bush administration officials had illegally selected immigration judges based on their political affiliation.)
After the ICE agents threatened Farahi with terrorism charges, he told Holliday he would voluntarily leave the country within thirty days. Although his Iranian passport was expired—a bureaucratic problem that should have given him more time to consider the government’s threat—Holliday granted the order of voluntary departure. The agents let Farahi go free after he promised to leave the country. However, Farahi later changed his mind and decided to appeal the government’s action, as he believed that the claim that Justice Department lawyers would prosecute him as a terrorist was a bluff—nothing more than leverage to coerce him into becoming an informant. To this day, the government has never shared with Farahi or his lawyer any information about the professed evidence that he is a terrorist, and he has never been charged with a crime. “If they have something on Foad, they should make it public. They haven’t done that,” said Sunshine, the Barry University theology professor. “They are intimidating and bullying, and I resent that type of behavior being paid for by my tax dollars.”
Farahi’s assertion that the government tried to coerce him to become an informant could not be verified independently because the FBI won’t comment on his case. “It is a matter of policy that we do not confirm or deny who we have asked to be a source,” Miami FBI Special Agent Judy Orihuela told me. However, other individuals whom the FBI wanted to use as informants have been targeted in a similar manner as Farahi. In November 2005, for example, immigration officials questioned Yassine Ouassif, a twenty-four-year-old Moroccan, as he crossed into New York State from Canada. The officials confiscated his green card and instructed him to meet an FBI agent in Oakland, California. The Bureau’s offer: become an informant or be deported. Ouassif refused to spy and won his deportation case with the help of the National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights on behalf of Muslims and immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia.
Another case involves Brooklyn religious leader Sheikh Tarek Saleh, who has been fighting deportation since refusing to become an informant against his estranged cousin, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the Egyptian-born man the 9/11 Commission identified as Al Qaeda’s “chief financial manager.” Even after al-Yazid was killed in a Predator drone strike in Pakistan in early 2010, the government continued to press for Saleh’s deportation, alleging that the religious leader had lied on his visa application about never having been part of a terrorist group.5 Saleh had once been a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad—but his membership had been years before the U.S. government had designated the group as a terrorist organization. Saleh has alleged in court documents that the government is retaliating against him for refusing to be an informant. The Council on American-Islamic Relations suspects there are hundreds of similar cases in which the government has used deportation or criminal charges to force cooperation from informants. Unlike Farahi’s, Ouassif’s, and Saleh’s, most of these cases will never be made public.
For his part, Foad Farahi continues to maintain that he is not affiliated with any terrorist groups, and that he would report any Muslim who was supporting terrorism to the authorities. “From the Islamic perspective, it’s your duty to respect the law, and if there’s anything going on, any crime about to be committed, or any kind of harm to be caused to people or property, it should be reported to the police,” he said.
Ira Kurzban’s law office is a mile from the alfresco restaurants of Miami’s Coconut Grove. It was a hot day in late August 2009 when I met with him, and he was wearing a white guayabera and looking disheveled gray hairs. Kurzban is a well-known advocate for immigrants’ rights, having argued three immigration-related cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also on the board of directors of Immigrants’ List, the first political action committee in Washington, D.C., established to support candidates who endorse immigration reform. Foad Farahi, desperate not to leave the country but frightened after government agents threatened to charge him as a terrorist, hired Kurzban in 2007 to take his case on appeal. “He’s an imam in his mosque,” Kurzban said of Farahi as he threw his hands in the air in a sort of protest. “He’s basically, you know, the rabbi.”
In November 2007, Kurzban asked the Board of Immigration Appeals to throw out Farahi’s voluntary departure order and reopen his political asylum case, arguing that the imam had been illegally intimidated by the government. The board denied the request, so Kurzban petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which agreed that Farahi’s case should be reopened. “The government has many weapons in its arsenal in terms of seeking to remove somebody from the country, and in his case, they were using it, in my view, as leverage to try to get him to cooperate with them or be an informant for them, and when he wouldn’t do it, they applied the penalty,” Kurzban said. “When it looked like, well, even if he doesn’t cooperate with us, he may be able to get away with seeking political asylum, they show up at the hearing and say, ‘If you do that, we’re going to arrest you now. We just want you out of the country.’ I think the real issue is, does the government have the right to do that, to pressure people in that way to make them informants? But I think that’s what’s going on,” Kurzban continued. “It’s clearly the modus operandi of the FBI to (a) recruit people who are going to be informants and (b) to use whatever leverage they can to get them to be informants.”
The end of Ramadan in September 2009 signaled the five-year anniversary since the FBI had first approached Foad Farahi. Dressed in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, Farahi walked barefoot through his mosque as members began to arrange food on folding banquet tables. After sundown, everyone would eat and drink together to break the fast. Farahi was distracted as he waved to attendees and hugged others entering the mosque. I asked him if his legal fight with the U.S. government had made him bitter. “I’m not bitter,” he answered. “I wouldn’t say I’m bitter at all. But I’m tired. I want to live my life in this country. I want to stay here. That’s all.”
Farahi’s political asylum case has so far been unsuccessful, and in late 2012, he applied for residency based on his recent marriage to a U.Sc citizen.
To coerce people into becoming informants, the FBI must exploit vulnerabilities, and the greatest vulnerability in U.S. Muslim communities today, as the Farahi case shows, is immigration. Sixty-three percent of Muslims in the United States are first-generation immigrants, and forty-five percent of all Muslims in the country have immigrated here since 1990.6 Through increased interagency coordination, the FBI has access to officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Therefore, when an agent has someone who is reluctant to become an informant, he or she can turn to colleagues at ICE and inquire about that person’s immigration status. Together, they can comb through the individual’s personal information as they search for any kind of immigration violation—such as, in the case of Foad Farahi, how he was three credit hours shy of being a full-time student when his visa required him to carry nine graduate credit hours per semester—and then use that violation as leverage to force cooperation. If the immigrant chooses to cooperate, the FBI will tell the court that he is a valuable asset, averting deportation; if the immigrant chooses not to work as an informant, as Farahi did, the FBI will not support him, and the person may face deportation.
Officially, the FBI denies that it uses the threat of deportation as leverage against possible informants. “We are prohibited from using threats or coercion,” FBI spokesperson Kathleen Wright told me when I asked her about this form of pressure. But the FBI does acknowledge that it assists helpful informants when they appear in U.S. Immigration Court. “There have been instances when an individual with immigration issues has assisted in investigations and/or been willing to share information,” Wright said. “While we do not have the authority to make deportation or immigration decisions, we can advise immigration authorities of the level of cooperation for whatever use they deem appropriate.” In other words, work as an informant and the FBI will help stop you from being deported; refuse and the FBI won’t use its considerable influence in court to prevent the issuing of a one-way ticket out of the country.
Immigration violations aren’t the only type of pressure that the FBI uses to coerce reluctant informants. Another tried-and-true method the Bureau uses to flip people is the threat of criminal charges. When the FBI aggressively pursued Italian American organized crime in the 1980s, informants were critical to infiltrating these sophisticated, hierarchal organizations. Often, agents were able to use a crime—such as car theft or fraud—to pressure lower-level Mafiosi to become informants. However, there is one key difference between organized crime soldiers and members of Muslim American communities, namely that the latter aren’t nearly as likely to break the law. Not only are devout Muslims religiously bound not to violate society’s laws, but U.S. Muslims are often of such affluence that they are an improbable group to be involved in serious crime, particularly in comparison to organized crime figures. In the year after 9/11, for example, 26 percent of Muslims in the United States earned more than $100,000 annually, according to a Cornell University study.7 Go to any mosque in this country, and you’re more likely to find an expensive Mercedes in the parking lot than a rusted-out Chevy.
Yet another form of leverage that the FBI uses to recruit reluctant informants is “trash covers,” which is the practice of searching through someone’s garbage—without obtaining a warrant—in order to uncover incriminating or embarrassing information. Although the FBI has performed trash covers for decades, the Justice Department officially blessed the practice in approving the most recent Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, which specifically allows federal agents to go through people’s trash.8 The FBI’s search for incriminating or embarrassing information isn’t limited to people’s physical trash, however. More and more, agents are searching publicly accessible databases on social networks—Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, for example—to mine digital cast offs that could provide information about individuals who are reluctant to become informants.
For agents working counterterrorism investigations, informants are critical, and applying leverage—from immigration violations to criminal charges to even something as personal as extramarital relationships—is the best, and sometimes only, way to recruit informants. “We could go to a source and say, ‘We know you’re having an affair. If you work with us, we won’t tell your wife,’” a former top FBI counterterrorism official told me, asking that he not be identified because he wasn’t authorized to discuss informant recruitment on the record. “Would we actually call the wife if the source doesn’t cooperate? Not always. You do get into ethics here—is this the right thing to do?—but the legality of this isn’t a question. If you obtained the information legally, then you can use it however you want.”
It’s an oppressive prospect that the full power of a federal law enforcement agency could be directed at someone not even suspected of having committed a crime, but FBI agents are quick to defend the search for information that can be leveraged in the recruitment of snitches. Mike Rolince, a retired FBI agent who spent thirty-one years at the Bureau and specialized in counterterrorism, is among the defenders of this practice. I asked Rolince if he thought the Bureau was going too far today in trying to leverage cooperation from informants in Muslim American communities. He told me that he didn’t think the fact that the FBI applied pressure to informants was a problem by itself. Instead, he said, the problem was the perception that the FBI does so willy-nilly and frequently. “The reality at the end of the day is that these tactics are used sparingly,” Rolince told me. “Maybe Italian Americans felt offended we went after John Gotti and recruited informants in Italian communities. But we needed to do that then, just as we need to recruit informants in Muslim communities today.”
While the threat of deportation is the prime weapon the FBI uses to coerce would-be informants, that tactic has its limitations, as it cannot be used against people who are already U.S. citizens. In those situations, the Bureau relies on other pressure points, the most prominent of which is putting someone on the government’s no-fly list. Maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, an FBI group charged with identifying suspected or potential terrorists, the no-fly list prevents an individual from boarding a flight in the United States. Created after 9/11, the list has an infamous history of false positives—the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts was repeatedly stopped at airports, for example, because the vague name “T. Kennedy” was on the list—and at one point even Nobel Peace Prize winner and former South African president Nelson Mandela made the list, a problem then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described to a 2008 Senate committee as “frankly a rather embarrassing matter.”9
In spite of these high-profile incidents, since at least 2010, the FBI has used the no-fly list as a tool for coercing cooperation from would-be Muslim informants who are American citizens. As an example, one of the FBI’s informant recruitment efforts focused on Ibraheim “Abe” Mashal, a thirty-one-year-old living in St. Charles, Illinois, with his wife and three children. Mashal, who was honorably discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps in 2003, was working as a dog trainer with clients in twenty-three states when he received a call from a woman in Spokane, Washington, asking him to come work with her dog. The woman agreed to pay for an airplane ticket, hotel, and fee for Mashal—a typical arrangement for him. On April 20, 2010, Mashal arrived at Chicago’s Midway Airport for a flight to Spokane, only to be turned away by the ticketing agent, who told him he was on the no-fly list.
FBI agents later arranged to interview Mashal, and he assumed the embarrassing affair was a mix-up that the agents would sort out. But that didn’t happen. Instead, on June 23, 2010, Mashal received a call from an FBI agent. “We’ve got good news,” Mashal remembered being told.10 “Meet us at Embassy Suites.” The hotel wasn’t far from his home, and when he arrived at the room, Mashal found two FBI agents sitting in chairs, with a spread of cold cuts and cheese on the table. The agents explained to Mashal that he’d come to their attention after sending emails to a religious cleric in the Middle East whom they were monitoring.
“So you guys were in my email?” Mashal asked the agents.
“We cannot confirm or deny,” one of them responded.
Mashal told the agents he knew exactly what they were referring to and was up front about what he had written in the emails. Mashal, whose wife is Christian, had sought an imam’s advice on raising children in an interfaith home. “You obviously read the emails,” he told the agents. “It was about stuff that has nothing to do with terrorism at all.”
The agents didn’t respond to the fact that the emails were innocuous, Mashal said. Instead, they asked him if he would like to help them out by providing information about a large suburban Chicago mosque. If he would work as a paid informant for the FBI, the agents told him, the government would remove his name from the no-fly list. “We have informants in your mosque. We have informants in Ann Arbor mosques. We have informants all over the Midwest,” Mashal remembered one of the FBI agents telling him.
“Even if I wanted a position like that, I don’t have the time. I don’t even speak Arabic,” Mashal told the agents in response. He then asked to have a lawyer present, and the FBI agents ended the meeting.
Mashal, who to his knowledge is still on the no-fly list, is now one of fifteen plaintiffs in an ACLU lawsuit filed in Oregon against Attorney General Eric Holder and the directors of the FBI and the Terrorist Screening Center for misuse of the no-fly list. “Thousands of people have been barred altogether from commercial air travel without any opportunity to confront or rebut the basis for their inclusion, or apparent inclusion, on a government watch list,” the ACLU complaint alleges.11 “Some of them may be on the list as a result of mistaken identity, but for others, there seems to be this McCarthy-era naming of names going on,” Nusrat Choudhury, one of the ACLU lawyers working on the case, told me. “The problem is that there is no way to stand up for yourself, to petition to have your name removed from the list. For that reason, it’s the perfect bargaining chip in FBI and law enforcement investigations.”12
In addition to the no-fly list, another way that the FBI coerces U.S. citizens to become informants is the threat of criminal prosecution. In what has become an embarrassing case for the FBI, the Justice Department in February 2009 charged Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan who was living in Orange County, California, with lying in order to obtain citizenship. Niazi, whose estranged brother-in-law was at one time Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard in Afghanistan, came to the FBI’s attention as part of an undercover operation code-named Operation Flex, the purpose of which was to gather intelligence and recruit informants in Orange and Los Angeles counties. The main actor in the operation was a well-muscled forty-nine-year-old informant with a shaved scalp named Craig Monteilh, a convicted felon who had made his money ripping off cocaine dealers before becoming an asset for the DEA and later the FBI, for which he had posed in previous investigations as a white supremacist, a Russian hit man, and a Sicilian drug trafficker.13
In Operation Flex, the FBI asked Monteilh to pose as a French-Syrian Muslim named Farouk al-Aziz and search for information—such as immigration problems, extramarital relationships, criminal activities, and drug use—that might help the Bureau pressure local Muslims into becoming informants. “They wanted information that they could use to blackmail people,” Monteilh told me in 2011.14 Monteilh also claimed that the FBI encouraged him to use any means necessary—including engaging in sexual relationships with women—to engender trust in the communities he was tasked with infiltrating.
During the course of the investigation, Monteilh met Niazi, and once the FBI realized that the Orange County man had a distant connection to Osama bin Laden, they asked Monteilh to get close to him. Monteilh became so aggressive in talking about terrorism, however, that Niazi told the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations about the conversations. A representative from the organization, in turn, reported Monteilh to the FBI as a possible terrorist. Just as Monteilh was being exposed, police in Irvine, California, charged him with bilking two women out of $157,000 as part of an alleged scam. He had asked the women to front him money for human growth hormone, with the promise that he could double their money. But there were no drugs, and the women lost their cash to Monteilh, who pleaded guilty to a grandtheft charge and served eight months in prison. Monteilh claimed the human growth hormone transaction was part of an FBI investigation, and after the FBI failed to have the charges removed, as Monteilh said he had been promised, the informant went public and exposed Operation Flex. He also filed a lawsuit against the FBI and began cooperating with the ACLU in a civil rights complaint against the U.S. government.
After Monteilh was sidelined, the FBI tried to recruit Niazi as an informant, threatening to charge him with lying in answers to a host of questions on his naturalization application, including, among other things, about whether he’d used other names or had connections to terrorist organizations. Once Niazi refused to be an informant, the Justice Department filed the charges. Ultimately, though, just as Operation Flex had, the prosecution against Niazi imploded—primarily due to Monteilh’s poisoning of the case through comments he made to the press—and in October 2010, prosecutors dropped the charges against the Orange County man. Niazi has stated publicly that he believes his prosecution was in retaliation for his refusal to work with the government.
Others who have refused to cooperate with the FBI haven’t been so fortunate. Tarek Mehanna is one of them. A resident of Sudbury, Massachusetts, Mehanna has a doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and no criminal record. After FBI agents failed to persuade Mehanna to become an informant, however, the government charged him with making a false statement, alleging that Mehanna told FBI agents that his friend Daniel Maldonado was in Egypt when Mehanna knew he was in Somalia attending a terrorist training camp. Evidence collected during the FBI investigation found that Mehanna had traveled to Yemen when he was twenty-one years old in an unsuccessful attempt to find a terrorist training camp. Mehanna, who never came into contact with terrorists in Yemen or in the United States, seemed fascinated with extremist texts and jihadi videos. He translated “Thirty-Nine Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and posted it online through Al-Tibyan Publications, a company which has not been linked to Al Qaeda or any of its affiliates. (The text is widely available online in Arabic and English, including on the Internet Archive.) Mehanna also distributed a video online showing the mutilation of the remains of two U.S. soldiers, which may have been done in retaliation for the rape of a young Iraqi girl. When asked by a friend if the legal system could have been used instead to bring justice to the raped girl, Mehanna answered: “Who cares? Texas BBQ is the way to go.”15
In November 2008, the FBI arrested Mehanna in Massachusetts, where prosecutors charged him with lying to the FBI, for allegedly providing false information about Maldonado’s travels. He was also charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. While Mehanna awaited trial, authorities kept him in solitary confinement and limited his communications. I therefore had to correspond with him through letters. In one dated October 19, 2010, Mehanna described to me how federal authorities tried to coerce him into becoming an informant:
There were explicit threats that if I refused to work as a confidential informant, I would be charged with material support for terrorism. Essentially, everything I am going through now is an implementation of the threats they directed towards me that day. Their exact words were: ‘We can do this the easy way’—i.e., I work for them—‘or we can see you in court. You have a lot to think about.’ Then they left. A few months later, I was arrested and charged not with terrorism, but with the false statement regarding Maldonado. I was allowed out on bail for that charge for the majority of 2009. Towards the middle of September ’09, they approached me one more time through a friend, sending me the message that I had ‘one last chance,’ or things would get worse. A month later, October 21, 2009, you know what happened. And here I am today.
During his trial in late 2011, which included thirty-one days of testimony, federal prosecutors told the jury that Mehanna had traveled to Yemen in 2004 to train with terrorists but failed to locate a training camp. After returning home, prosecutors said, Mehanna conspired with Al Qaeda to promote jihad on the Internet. He was, they said, part of Al Qaeda’s “media wing”—in spite of the fact that the government did not provide any evidence directly linking Mehanna to the terrorist organization. Following ten hours of deliberation, a jury found him guilty of conspiring to support Al Qaeda, never specifying whether the jurors found him guilty of supporting terrorists by traveling to Yemen—where he never located any terrorists—or by posting extremist literature on the Internet, material which wasn’t even written by terrorists.
Since most of the evidence prosecutors presented dealt with Mehanna’s watching jihadi videos, discussing suicide bombings, translating texts freely available on the web, and researching the 9/11 attackers, civil liberties groups characterized his conviction as a setback for the First Amendment. “It’s official,” wrote Nancy Murray, education director of the ACLU of Massachusetts, in a guest editorial in the Boston Globe. “There is a Muslim exemption to the First Amendment.”16 Andrew F. March, an associate professor of political science at Yale University who specializes in Islamic law, described the Mehanna case in a New York Times opinion piece as “one of the most important free speech cases we have seen since Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969.”17 In that case, Clarence Brandenburg, a Ku Klux Klan leader in rural Ohio, gave an inflammatory speech that was recorded during a KKK rally in 1964. Ohio prosecutors charged him under a 1919 state law that prohibited advocating, among other acts, “unlawful methods of terrorism as a means of accomplishing industrial or political reform.” Brandenburg was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison. His appeal went to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969, and in a landmark decision, the justices voted unanimously to overturn Brandenburg’s conviction, writing that the government cannot punish speech unless it is intended and likely to result in “imminent lawless action.” The type of speech Mehanna engaged in wasn’t very different from Brandenburg’s, but prosecutors in his trial were able to get around the Supreme Court precedent by claiming that Mehanna’s advocacy of Al Qaeda and violence represented material support to the terrorist organization, which was involved in imminent lawless action, lending support to Nancy Murray’s provocative claim that there is a Muslim exemption to the First Amendment.
At his sentencing on April 12, 2012, Mehanna addressed U.S. District Judge George A. O’Toole in an eloquent speech that emphasized his belief that he was not a terrorist but rather the victim of a vengeful prosecution for his refusal to be an FBI informant:
I was approached by two federal agents. They said that I had a choice to make: I could do things the easy way, or I could do them the hard way. 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. Here I am, having spent the majority of the four years since then in a solitary cell the size of a small closet, in which I am locked down for twenty-three hours each day. The FBI and these prosecutors worked very hard—and the government spent millions of tax dollars—to put me in that cell, keep me there, put me on trial, and finally to have me stand here before you today to be sentenced to even more time in a cell.18
Judge O’Toole, unmoved by Mehanna’s statement, sentenced the twenty-nine-year-old to seventeen years in prison. Mehanna’s lawyers have filed an appeal.
For every Foad Farahi, Sheikh Tarek Saleh, Yassine Ouassif, Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, or Tarek Mehanna who resisted FBI pressure to become spies in their communities, there are hundreds of cases—most of which we will never hear about—in which the Bureau succeeded in exerting enough pressure to turn resistant Muslims into informants. Overall, these aggressive tactics have been very effective for the FBI, helping swell the informant ranks to more than 15,000, the largest number in the history of the Bureau. However, the FBI’s actions have come with a heavy price, as they have alienated Muslims throughout the United States, with many reporting they are hesitant to talk to federal law enforcement for fear they might be targeted for recruitment as informants. Muslim Advocates, a San Francisco-based civil rights group, distributes a video online that counsels Muslims not to talk to an FBI agent without a lawyer present and never to allow agents into private residences without a search warrant. “If you are contacted by law enforcement, don’t answer any questions beyond giving your name,” the video instructs.19 In mosques around the country, newcomers are met with a suspicion that didn’t exist before 9/11—a particularly sad state of affairs, as for centuries mosques had been considered welcoming places for strangers and travelers, a tradition that dates back to the nomadic tribes of the Middle East and the earliest days of Islam. “Every Muslim I know just assumes that the person praying next to them is an informant,” Hussam Ayloush, the executive director of the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), told me in 2010.
This frayed relationship between Muslim communities and the FBI has resulted in a restricted flow of voluntary information from these communities to federal law enforcement, contrary to the Bureau’s rationale for using informants in the first place. Muslims today see FBI agents as potential enemies, not as neighbors with a mutual interest in keeping the local community safe from harm. This means that credible and actionable tips from within Muslim communities—from the people with the best vantage points to see early problems or threats—are going unreported, as Muslim Americans are afraid that providing information to the FBI will make them the subjects of investigations or candidates for recruitment as informants. “It has a chilling effect on our ability to work with the FBI,” said Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates and the National Association of Muslim Lawyers.20 Instead of going directly to the FBI, Muslims today are more likely to pass on any information about threats in their communities through a third-party organization, such as CAIR. When Ahmadullah Sais Niazi suspected that undercover FBI informant Craig Monteilh might be a terrorist, for example, he didn’t call the Bureau directly but instead gave the information to CAIR’s Hussam Ayloush, who then reported it to the FBI.
The irony in this is that, as a result of aggressively recruiting informants in Muslim communities when the goal of increasing the amount of information available to its agents, the FBI is receiving even fewer credible tips, since very little of the information flowing to federal law enforcement from Muslim communities today is of a non-coerced nature. This is in spite of the fact that data suggests that Muslim Americans would be valuable partners for law enforcement if they felt comfortable talking to agents, since the interests and values of Muslims in this country are nearly identical to those of the general U.S. population. A 2011 study by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press, which interviewed more than 1,000 Musli Americans nationwide, found that Muslims in the United States reject religious extremism by large margins; that 70 percent of Muslim Americans who were born outside of the country become U.S. citizens, a much higher citizenship rate than in other immigrant groups; and that more than half believe Muslims come to the United States in order to adopt American customs and ways of life.21 The Pew data also shows that Muslims would not tolerate violent extremists in their communities any more than, say, Christians or Jews would. Yet because of the FBI’s dragnet approach in Muslim communities, there is less willingness among Muslims to report a tip to the FBI than there is in other religious communities, meaning that the Bureau’s alienation of Muslim communities is stifling the very flow of information its agents are working to increase through their aggressive and widespread use of informants.
As a result, instead of local businessmen or community and religious leaders voluntarily providing information to the FBI about suspicious people worshipping in their mosques or living in their neighborhoods, the FBI now relies on coerced informants to provide this information. The credibility of the information these sources offer is questionable, particularly when compared to the potential value of information coming from people with families, businesses, and vested interests in their communities. FBI informants have vested interests too, of course, but they do not include the health and safety of local Muslim communities. They are instead primarily interested in money and working off criminal charges, as was perhaps most evident in Albany, New York, where federal agents used fraud and immigration charges to recruit as a snitch an accused murderer from Pakistan who would become an FBI terrorism superinformant.