Ryan Reilly and Melissa Jentsen report that the ACLU and CAIR have filed a lawsuit against the FBI over their use of an informant named Craig Monteilh, who they say was simply ordered to infiltrate California-area mosques without any actual evidence of crimes being committed. The lawsuit's bottom line, at least as far as the policy is concerned is:
This dragnet investigation did not result in even a single conviction related to counterterrorism. This is unsurprising, because the FBI did not gather the information based on suspicion of criminal activity, instead it gathered the information simply because the targets were Muslim.
There was an attempted prosecution of Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, who claims Montileh tried to entrap him. The charges were dropped, and Niazi says that what actually happened is that Montileh suggested organizing a terrorist attack, and he panicked and notified the head of a local chapter of CAIR, Hussam Ayloush, who reported Monteilh to the FBI.
This is something to think about as we head into Rep. Peter King's Muslim HUAC hearings. As the ACLU/CAIR lawsuit points out, in the years since 9/11, the FBI has revised its guidelines to allow for racial and ethnic profiling and for deployment of intrusive investigative techniques in preliminary "assessments" as long as it serves "a national security, criminal or foreign intelligence collection purpose." This kind of surveillance is already being applied so broadly to the American Muslim community that a group of California Muslims targeted by the FBI ended up warning them about the FBI's own informant.
CAIR in California is the same group that began its now-defunct version of "Stop Snitchin'," urging Muslims not to talk to the FBI. While that was obviously a very bad idea, there's no question that the sense that the entire community is under surveillance will hurt the FBI's ability to reach out to the Muslim community. American Muslims developing the kind of toxic relationship local law enforcement agencies have historically had with black Americans would be really bad for national security.
