The Terror Factory (12 page)

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.
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“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.
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“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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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:

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.”
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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.”
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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:

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.
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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.