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How the Bush administration recruits Muslim informers?
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
The Bush administration has launched an operation seeking Muslim informants in its ‘War on Terror.’ A Wall Street Journal report of July 11, 2006 gives an insight into the covert operation.
The WSJ report titled, "A Muslim's Choice: Turn U.S Informant or Risk Losing Visa," detailed the case of Yassine Ouassif whose green card was taken away from him when he crossed the border from Canada in November 2005. Ouassif was then sent home to San Francisco and told to contact a counterterrorism agent at the FBI. The agent made him an offer: become an informant and regularly report to the FBI on what his Muslim friends in San Francisco were saying and doing. In exchange he would get back his green card." According to Ouassif, if he refused, the agent threatened to deport him back to Morocco.
The WSJ said that Ouassif’s story provides a window into a largely covert front of the war on terror: the FBI's aggressive pursuit of Muslim informants. Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the bureau has had the difficult task of penetrating a culture that few agents know anything about. It has responded with a forceful effort to conscript eyes and ears within Muslim communities.
The paper said that some of the recruitment is public. FBI agents plead for community assistance in meetings at mosques and other Muslim conclaves. Agents also are under pressure to develop confidential sources. The WSJ gave the following graphic details of Ouassif’s case:
Ouassif's troubles began September 2005 after he visited his wife in Morocco. He took off from Paris on a flight back to San Francisco. Three hours later, the pilot announced the flight was returning to Paris. Two French policemen escorted Ouassif off the plane. French authorities told him that the U.S. would not permit the plane to land with him onboard, he says. They told him they didn't know why, he says. They put him on the next flight to Casablanca.
Moroccan security officials met Ouassif at the airport and grilled him all night and for much of the next day. At one point they told him he'd "never see the sun again" if he didn't tell them why the U.S. would turn back a French jet just because he was aboard.
One month later, a Moroccan agent informed Ouassif that he'd been cleared of suspicion by Moroccan intelligence. The agent warned him not to return to the U.S., but didn't elaborate. Nearly broke from the extended stay, Ouassif bought a plane ticket to Montreal. His plan was to return to the U.S. by bus and to resolve his problem with U.S. authorities at the border.
When he arrived there, an inspector wondered why he had flown through Montreal. Concerned about arousing further suspicion, Ouassif said nothing about the incident in Paris. He was handcuffed and placed in a holding cell for several hours, he says. An immigration officer interviewed him at length about his life and religious views. Then he was introduced to Special Agent Michael Lonergan of the FBI's office in Plattsburgh, N.Y.
Immigration officers had taken his green card. Under normal circumstances, Lonergan told him, he would have been sent to a Buffalo detention center to await deportation proceedings. He'd been spared, Lonergan told him, by a call from Dan, his FBI colleague in San Francisco. Special Agent Dan Fliflet wanted Ouassif to come to San Francisco, but not by plane, and to call him as soon as he arrived. Lonergan told him that Fliflet would decide whether he would get back his green card or be deported. Ouassif was ordered to report to an immigration interview in San Francisco three weeks later, on Dec. 14, 2005.
One week later, as Ouassif and Mr. Fliflet walked the streets of Oakland, the FBI agent accused him and his friends of having "jihadi" beliefs. Ouassif responded that they were observant Muslims interested in peace and personal betterment, not jihad and politics. Fliflet said he didn't believe that, and asked Ouassif if he had any information to share.
Ouassif told the agent about the only suspicious character he knew, an Afghani man who prayed on Fridays at a San Francisco mosque and claimed to have fought with the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviets. The man supported Muslim insurgents in Iraq and once asked him to wire $5,000 for him from Morocco to Iraq. Ouassif told the agent he had refused, and had told the Afghani that he didn't believe the Iraq conflict was a true jihad.
Fliflet gave Mr. Ouassif one week to consider the FBI's offer to become an informant in exchange for his green card. If he didn't hear from him, the FBI agent said, he'd assume Ouassif "prefers to help extremists" instead of America. Fliflet warned him the FBI had ample evidence to prove he was an extremist.
Two weeks later, Ouassif reported for his scheduled immigration interview. Ignoring Fliflet's instruction, he brought a lawyer, Banafsheh Aklaghi, founder of a San Francisco nonprofit group, National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement. Fliflet was there. An immigration agent peppered Ouassif with questions. Clues emerged as to why the authorities had taken such an interest in him.
Much of the interview focused on one of his former roommates, a San Francisco cabdriver who had returned home to Baghdad shortly after Ouassif moved in with him in 2003. Ouassif says he inferred from the questions that his ex-roommate had been arrested or killed in Iraq. Ouassif's cellphone number had been on the man's phone, the immigration agent said. Ouassif told the agent they hadn't been close friends, and that he hadn't thought the man was dangerous or he wouldn't have lived with him.
The agents told Ouassif they intended to detain him for deportation. His lawyer asked why. Ouassif says the agents didn't answer. He was handcuffed and put in a holding cell. Through a cell window, his lawyer told him he was slated for detention in Eloy, Ariz., one of the highest-security facilities in the federal system.
About three hours later the immigration agent took him aside without his attorney and asked if he still wanted to fight deportation. He said he did. Within minutes another immigration officer gave him surprising news: he was free to go. The Homeland Security lawyer on duty had refused to sign his detention order, citing a lack of evidence, his attorney, Ms. Aklaghi, was told. (FBI and immigration agents can recommend detention and deportation, but it is up to Homeland Security lawyers to review the legality of the decisions.) Ouassif was given another immigration appointment.
On April 6, 2006 Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement branch gave Ouassif his green card back. Ms. Aklaghi says she learned more at that point about why federal authorities were so interested in him. Ouassif had been secretly recorded by an FBI informant talking to friends in a San Francisco mosque. A Homeland Security lawyer, she said, did not specify what Ouassif had said, but told her that his statements did not indicate criminal intent and were fully protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, his statements had landed him on the no-fly list, Ms. Aklaghi said, and led to all his subsequent travails.
The informer was a ‘walking camera' among the New York Muslims
On May 19, 2006, the New York Times reported testimony of a Muslim informer that confirmed what many Muslims have believed since the Sept. 11 attacks: that law enforcement agencies have worked to infiltrate their community during terrorism investigations.
A young police detective testified at the Herald Square bombing plot trial that he was recruited from the Police Academy 13 months after 9/11 to work deep undercover in the Muslim community to investigate Islamic extremists. The detective, a Muslim who came to America from Bangladesh when he was 7, testified that he was a 23-year-old college graduate when he was plucked from the academy in October 2002. He took an apartment in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where, he testified, his assignment was to be a "walking camera" among Muslims there.
He said he had no regular contact with the department other than through his handler, to whom he reported by e-mail at first. During two years of living in Bay Ridge, he was involved in "numerous" investigations, he testified, and was at times shadowed by a field team to ensure his safety.
The New York Times said that the Police Intelligence Division's program to post detectives overseas has been widely publicized. But this detective's testimony in federal court in Brooklyn provided the closest look yet at how the division is using undercover investigators to penetrate mosques, bookstores and other places where Muslims gather in the city.
The detective was the final witness at the four-week trial of Shahawar Matin Siraj, 23, a Pakistani immigrant who is charged with plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in 2004. His lawyers have argued that he was entrapped by a paid police informer, a 50-year-old Egyptian-born nuclear engineer who they say was the driving force behind the plot. They have argued that their client was an inept dupe who was not predisposed to commit an act of terrorism until the informer inflamed him. The undercover detective was called as a witness to rebut the defense arguments that the informer had drawn Siraj into the plot.
The detective testified that he graduated from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and entered the Police Academy in July 2002. In the middle of October, roughly halfway through his academy training, he left early when he was recruited to join the Intelligence Division, where he was assigned to the Special Services Unit, which runs the undercover program.
Within three weeks he made his first appearance at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, a mosque on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, next door to the Islamic bookstore where Siraj worked. He testified that he spent time there periodically. One of Siraj's lawyers, Martin R. Stolar while questioning the detective, indicated that his reports showed he had seen Siraj 72 times over the two years, mostly in the bookstore.
The police had planted two agents in this case. The other informer was an Egyptian-born police informer, Osama Eldawoody, who secretly recorded roughly two dozen conversations about the plot with the immigrant, Shahawar Matin Siraj, in the summer of 2004 many of them incriminating. His visits to mosques in Brooklyn and Staten Island occurred over roughly 13 months in 2003 and 2004, both before and after the informer met Mr. Siraj. He recorded the license plate numbers of worshipers at a mosque. On May 24, 2006, after two days of deliberations, a jury convicted Shahawar Matin Siraj of plotting to blow up one of Manhattan's busiest subway stations in retaliation for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
FBI Informer was paid $250,000 to infiltrate the Lodi Muslim community
In another high profile terror trial of two Pakistani Americans a Muslim informer was paid $ 250,000 to infiltrate the large Muslim community in Lodi, California. In the trial of Hamid Hayat, 23 and his father Umer Hayat, 48, in February 2006, defense attorney Washma Mojaddidi told the court that the government case was founded on cultural ignorance that confused a wedding party for a terrorist gathering and depended heavily on the testimony of an informer who was paid $250,000 by the FBI to infiltrate the Muslim community in Lodi.
On May 31, 2006, federal prosecutors agreed to drop terrorism-related charges against Umer Hayat in exchange for a guilty plea in a 2003 customs case. Hayat, 48, who spent nearly a year in jail and under house arrest on the charges, was released for time served. On April 25, 2006, a split jury failed to reach a verdict in his case and his attorney asked for retrial. As a result, the government allowed Umer Hayat to plead guilty to charges that he lied to customs agents at Dulles International Airport in Virginia on April 19, 2003, about the amount of money he and his family were carrying on their way to Pakistan. Federal law requires individuals to declare amounts exceeding $10,000. Customs officials found that the Hayat family had more than $28,000 they said they were planning to use for Hamid Hayat's upcoming wedding. Defense attorney Johnny L. Griffin described the plea bargain as a victory for Umer Hayat, who he said had been unfairly branded as a terrorist. "There is no way we were ever going to agree to any plea involving terrorism," Griffin said outside the Sacramento Federal Courthouse, "because it was not true."
A separate jury, also on April 25, 2006, found Hayat's 23-year-old son, Hamid Hayat, guilty of providing material support to terrorists by undergoing firearms training in Pakistan and returning to Lodi 11 months ago ready to wage violent jihad against his fellow U.S. citizens. However, two days later, a juror disavowed her verdict saying that she was coerced into giving a guilty verdict.
In a seven-page affidavit, the juror, Arcelia Lopez, stated: "I never once throughout the deliberation process and the reading of the verdict believed Hamid Hayat to be guilty. . .I never believed that Hamid Hayat was guilty. My fellow jurors knew it and as a result of changing my vote a unanimous verdict was reached. I deeply regret my decision." She went on to say: "Joseph Cote, as the foreman, told the jury that we had to reach a verdict and he refused to accept my position. He personally attacked me repeatedly as someone who couldn't process the information and who just couldn't see that he was guilty because he thought I didn't have the mental capacity to understand."
Both Hamid and Umer Hayat were detained, June 2005, along with two Pakistani religious leaders in what authorities suggested was part of a terrorist movement in Lodi, 35 miles south of the California state capital. The two imams and one man's son were deported for immigration violations, however, and the Hayats were the only people criminally charged in the probe.
The Lodi case was built mainly on the witness of a FBI mole, Naseem Khan who befriended the Hayat family after he went to Lodi specifically to infiltrate Lodi's Muslim community. He was paid $ 250,000 for his nearly three years job. He was hired after he told agents that he had seen Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden’s top lieutenant in 1998 or 1999 at a mosque in Lodi, the farming town just south of Sacramento where the men on trial lived. However, terrorism experts say the bin Laden lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian, last visited America in 1995.
Lodi trial was one of the show case trials that was heralded, during the debate over the renewal of the USA Patriot Act, as an important milestone in the fight against terrorism. "I was very impressed by the use of intelligence and the follow-up," President Bush said at the time of the high profile arrest of the Hayats. "And that's what the American people need to know, that when we find any hint about any possible wrongdoing or a possible cell, that we'll follow up," the president added.
The FBI informer worked at the Muslim charity for three years
An operative of the FBI, Darren Griffin, known as the Trainer was a part-time employee for three years at KindHearts, the Toledo-based Muslim charity shut down by the government in February 2006. During the three years Darren Griffin worked a $7-an-hour, part-time job at KindHearts, his co-workers knew him as Bilal and considered him to be a faithful Muslim and an American patriot who served in the U.S. military in Iraq. His work led to the arrests of three men on terrorism charges in February 2006. KindHearts' attorney and a board member Jihad Smaili said he believes investigators planted Griffin inside KindHearts in an effort to link the charity with terrorists. A U.S. Treasury undersecretary already has labeled KindHearts the offspring of both Global Relief and Holy Land Foundation, the two charities shut down in December 2001.
FBI paid key informants $56,000 to trap the Miami seven
The FBI paid almost $56,000 to two confidential informants who are key to the case against seven men accused of being involved in a terrorist plot to blow up the Sears Tower and other targets. According to a document filed by federal prosecutors, the FBI paid one unnamed informant $10,500 and an additional $8,815 in expenses. They also paid a second informant $17,000 with another $19,570 for expenses. U.S. officials also granted the second informant a "significant public benefit" -- immigration parole so he could remain in the country. The seven men, part of a religious group headquartered in the Liberty City area of Miami-Dade County, are facing various charges in connection with attacks they allegedly planned. Much of the case hinges on the two informants, one of whom knew the men and participated in the investigation after alerting authorities. The second man posed as an al-Qaida operative at the FBI's direction, according to prosecutors. Secret recordings made by the informants are also central to the case.
Updated August 8, 2006
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