Today's FBI: Spying, Entrapment And Detention

A protest against abusive law enforcement tactics targeting Muslims.
Photo Credit: CAIR NY 

Soon after the Associated Press began publishing its expose of the New York Police Department’s widespread surveillance of Muslims, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began to speak up.

Officials like Michael Ward, the top FBI official in New Jersey, criticized the NYPD’s warrantless spying on innocent Muslims for creating “risks” — the risk of Muslims pulling “back cooperation” with law enforcement.

The latest example of the FBI voicing criticism of the NYPD comes in Ronald Kessler’s book ,The Secrets of the FBI . An updated version of the book that was recently released quotes FBI officials saying that the NYPD’s surveillance program is a “waste of money” and unconstitutional.

These FBI officials are right. But before criticizing another law enforcement agency, they should look in the mirror.

“These sorts of comments may be more the result of turf wars than different law enforcement practices between the FBI and the NYPD,” said Diala Shamas, a legal fellow at City University of New York’s CLEAR (Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility) project. CLEAR works to address the legal needs of Muslim, Arab and South Asian communities in New York. “Based on our clients’ experiences, the FBI has very similar policies,” she told AlterNet.

Shamas also noted that the policies both the FBI and NYPD pursue have the effect of “chilling…aspects of healthy community life in Muslim communities.”

Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the FBI has engaged in many of the same practices the NYPD has been criticized for: warrantless spying, entrapment and the detention of Muslims in the US.

The FBI’s record on these issues is just as bad, if not worse, than the NYPD’s. And both law enforcement agencies’ record contributes to what Andrew Rosenthal of the New York Times called “a separate justice system for Muslims,” where “the principle of due process is twisted and selectively applied.” Here is an examination of the ways the FBI has systematically violated the constitutional rights of Muslims living in the United States.

Entrapment

The FBI has been harshly criticized by civil rights groups and advocates for Muslims for its strategy of targeting young, troubled Muslim men in its zeal for preventing the next terrorist attack. Critics say that the FBI is entrapping Muslims by, in effect, creating its own terrorist plots, supplying the money and weapons to carry out those plots and then arresting the very same men it supplied.

As the Nation reported in July, “there have been 138 terrorism or national security prosecutions involving informants since 2001,” according to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School. These informants are usually the ones who cross “the line from merely observing potential criminal behavior to encouraging and assisting people to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI itself.”

The case of the so-called Newburgh Four is a perfect illustration of this strategy. In 2009, four black Muslim converts were arrested in the economically depressed city of Newburgh, 60 miles north of Manhattan. The arrests made headlines across the country, as the four men were accused of attempting to blow up synagogues in Riverdale, New York and of wanting to fire a Stinger missile at military aircraft.

But the entire plot was the work of an FBI informant, Shahed Husain, who promised the men money and cars in exchange for carrying out the plot. The men who were targeted in this scheme were poor people struggling with drug abuse. One of the men “had mental issues so severe his apartment contained bottles of his own urine. He also believed Florida was a foreign country,”

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