According to the Rand Corporation, a global policy think tank based in Santa Monica, California, of almost 30 homegrown terror plots uncovered in the United States following the September 11 attacks, 10 surfaced in 2009, making it a record year for homegrown terror plots.
Muslim-American communities have been key in helping uncover and report these plots, but many claim that police infiltrations of mosques and pressure put on congregants to spy on fellow Muslims has gone too far.
When five young Muslim Americans went missing last November, their parents met with Muslim elders and then reported their flight to the FBI. The men were later arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks.
Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, told the Voice of America (VOA), “This could have been much worse than what it appears to be today had it not been that the families, the mosque and the Muslim community responded in both a lawful and responsive manner.”
In the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a Detroit-bound jet on Christmas Day 2009, his father contacted authorities before his son acted to report the youth’s growing extremism.
The Muslim community in New York City said it wanted to help law enforcement officials root out terrorists from among the community, but some say the FBI is pushing too hard, infiltrating mosques and threatening congregants if they refuse to cooperate.
“If I see somebody will make attack here, I will go to stop it in every way. Even I will lose my life,” Shaikh Tarek Saleh, a Brooklyn cleric, told VOA. But the shaikh said there is a limit to what he can and will do to help police.
Shaikh Saleh told VOA the FBI scuttled his green card application after he refused to go to Afghanistan for the agency and spy on a distant relative in Al-Qaeda, who Saleh said he is not in contact with. “To use me as a bait to trap people, I cannot do this job,” he told VOA. Shaikh Tarek’s deportation hearing is set for this month.
Fares al Basir, president of Shaikh Tarek’s mosque, said, “If you send him to Afghanistan, he is finished. If you live in the United States, you are already infidel.” Basir said the FBI even sent an informant to gather information on the shaikh. It was intimidating, he recalled. “He asked that since I am president of the mosque, if I have any influence on the shaikh so I can convince him to work with the FBI, but we as people, me, the shaikh and everybody sitting here, it’s not our job. This is not our job to do,” he said.
A spokesman for the FBI said the bureau has formed solid relationships with many Muslim communities and the outreach is positive and ongoing. But complaints persist about FBI tactics to get members of the Muslim community to act as informants.
Linda Sarsour, who directs the Arab American Association of New York, told the VOA, “If you are instilling fear into people and you are not allowing people to live a comfortable life where everywhere they go into the mosque and they look at the person next to them and they say ‘is this an informant, is that an informant?’ The fact that they have to have these thoughts in their minds is really not fair to this community.”
But many analysts defend the use of informants, as well as incentives and disincentives practiced by law enforcement agencies.
“It is not unique to the Muslim community. Informants are a major source of intelligence to law enforcement. They operate on the basis of the fact that the community which they are infiltrating has been uncooperative with law enforcement and is not providing the intelligence they need,” said Steven Emerson, who runs the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a non-profit group that taped American Islamic leaders even before the September 11 attacks. Emerson said Muslim leaders themselves are instilling a fear of the FBI in their congregants.
“We know that many Islamic groups tell their followers, don’t talk to the FBI, and, number two, the United States is involved in a conspiracy against you. Those are incendiary allegations,” he said.