 | Buy or sell tickets for concerts, sports, or theater. You'll find a huge and affordable selection at Ticket Liquidator! From our sponsors |
| Kavkazcenter.com |
| Latest events from Kavkaz-Center |
WAR ON ISLAM. Spied on for being Muslim
7/13/2014 12:18:04 PM
A new investigation reveals how racist anti-Muslim neocons are driving the nation's espionage agenda.
The latest of the Snowden revelations is a about how for years the NSA and FBI spied on Muslim-American leaders, covertly monitoring their e-mail communications under the trumped-up pretext that these men were agents of foreign governments. There is a spreadsheet listing 7,485 e-mail addresses (at least 202 of them belonging to US citizens and legal permanent residents) that were monitored between 2002 and 2008. Their story focuses on five prominent Americans on this list: a Navy veteran, a highly respected lawyer, two professors and a civil rights activist.
Besides being male and American, what unites all of these men? It can't be partisan politics, since they are Democrats and Republicans. It's not religious conviction, since some are secular and others religious. They are naturalized citizens and first-generation Americans. They have family ties to South Asian, Iran and the Arab world. They have different political outlooks. In fact, the only significant common denominator among the men is their Muslim-sounding names. There is another document that instructs American spies personnel on how to properly fill out memos to justify their criminal esspionage. In the space where the target's name would be written, the memo offers a cute placeholder name: "Mohammed Raghead."
If the spying is legal, it was likely authorized under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a notorious piece of legislation that bends as easily as a saw making music. Under FISA, warrants are issued in secret by an American criminal, a judge who hears only the claims put forward by the government. No other side is offered and, because the court is a secret one, what constitutes "probable cause" is impossible for anyone outside the process to determine. What we do know is that in FISA's thirty-five-year history, the court has approved 35,434 warrants and rejected only twelve.
The fact that the American government would waste its resources on spying on someone like Faisal Gill (one of the five men named in the story) illustrates how ridiculous or paranoid—or both—this program is. A life-long Republican, Gill is a Navy veteran who joined the Bush administration after 9/11 and worked in the Department of Homeland Security, having obtained a top-level security clearance. He was also the Republican nominee for the Virginia House of Delegates in 2007. In 2001, he had worked as a consultant with the now-defunct American Muslim Council, whose founder, Abdurahaman Alamoudi, was arrested in 2003 for taking part in a plot to assassinate Saudi crown prince Abdullah and for illegally receiving money from the Libyan government. Alamoudi pleaded guilty, and the anti-Muslim right wing tarred Gill with Alamoudi's crimes.
In the giant game of telephone that the American government plays, any association, however slight, constitutes probable cause for suspicion. Publicly, Gill was investigated and completely exonerated of suspicion in 2005, and he resumed his duties at Homeland Security with a full security clearance. But in 2006, after he left government and started a law practice with Asim Ghafoor (also one of the five named in the article), the surveillance began, continuing through his 2007 candidacy for the Virginia legislature.
The fact that the anti-Muslim right wing's smear campaign against Gill probably triggered the FBI and NSA's surveillance should be emphasized. The same is probably true for Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). Awad was also spied on by the American government, and CAIR is vilified, basically every hour, by the right-wing anti-Muslim machine. Withstanding the constant onslaught of suspicion that is meted out daily on Muslims in this country by anti-Muslim professionals (like Frank Gaffney and Pamela Geller) and their legions of amateurs is exhausting.
Over and over again, we see that what's suspicious to the FBI, the CIA, the NYPD and the NSA is the simple fact of being a Muslim. When Ghafoor represented the country of Sudan in litigation, he was placed under surveillance, while no lawyer from Hunton & Williams, a high-powered DC law firm that also represented Sudan in similar litigation, appears to be a target of NSA surveillance.
Nor did the anti-Muslim right-wing tilt of law enforcement stop in 2008. In 2011, the FBI trained its counterterrorism agents that "'main stream' [sic] American Muslims are likely to be terrorist sympathizers," and that American thought police "must identify the elements of verbal deception in Islam." (In other words, all Muslims, not even just the "radical" ones, lie.)
The same year, the NYPD, as part of its training for new recruits, screened a film claiming "the true agenda of much of Islam in America" is "a strategy to infiltrate and dominate" the country. In another undated memo, the FBI told its agents that "under certain circumstances, the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others." Those circumstances include "the ability to gather information on individuals which would normally be protected under the US Constitution through the use of FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act], Title 3 monitoring [general surveillance by law enforcement], NSL [National Security Letter] reports, etc."
Source: Agencies
Kavkaz Center
You are receiving this email because you subscribed to this feed at feedmyinbox.com
If you no longer wish to receive these emails, you can unsubscribe from this feed, or manage all your subscriptions
No comments:
Post a Comment