The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  The Libya example illustrates the extent to which the FBI’s counterterrorism activities are intimately linked to military operations abroad. In the command-and-control center at the FBI’s new office building in Houston, along with clocks for each of the time zones across the United States, there is also one for Iraq and one for Afghanistan. Before 9/11, the Houston field office had led the investigation into the financial crimes of Enron executives. But it no longer regards such work as a top concern; rather, its highest priority is ensuring Houston’s strategic oil and gas infrastructure is secured from the threat of terrorism. According to one estimate, around a third of the office’s agents working on counterterrorism have had military experience in the Middle East prior to joining the bureau. One such is Brad Deardorff, a supervisor of one of the city’s five counterterrorism squads, who, like former FBI director Robert Mueller, used to be a marine. Deardorff believes the counterinsurgency principles he learned in Somalia have proved useful in his work on countering radicalization in the Muslim communities of Texas. In both places, he says, step one is to understand the culture of the community from which the threat emanates; step two is to identify the centers of influence in the community and build relationships with them that can result in both sources of intelligence on radicalization and the basis for an ideological campaign in the community against extremism.64

  We’re looking at the social networks around people who are centers of influence. With more refinement, we’ve got youth groups who are either associated with subjects [of investigation] that we have, or we understand there’s a vulnerability to recruitment there, or there’s mobilization that we need to understand, political activism that we need to understand.

  This kind of detailed knowledge of community social networks, says Deardorff, allows agents to contextualize intelligence that is coming in from other sources. But it also becomes the basis for a wider strategy of using soft power to fight an ideological battle, using centers of influence as more credible messengers than the US government would be itself.

  Deardorff studied the UK’s Prevent policy for his master’s thesis, entitled “Countering Violent Extremism,” that he wrote in 2010 when studying at the Naval Postgraduate School for a degree in homeland security. He was attracted to its “application of ‘soft power’ [to] combat terrorism at the ideological level.”65 The US, he wrote, was engaged in “an ideological war that will be fought on American soil, [a] war of ideas” that needed to draw on the lessons of counterinsurgency operations around the world.66 Building relationships between federal agents and “centers of influence from both religious and cultural groups” was, he learned, essential for two reasons.67 First, as sources of information on political and religious expressive activity that might count as an indicator of radicalization, they would bring “radicalizing individuals, as well as individuals who ‘drop out’ of the mainstream religious education, to the attention of law enforcement early in the radicalization process.” Second, those relationships would enable centers of influence to promote messages on behalf of the government about the correct way to be a Muslim in America by promoting a greater affinity to “American-ness” and communicating “the moral and theological foundations of an alternative ideology to Islamist extremists.”68

  Whatever the legal definitions of free speech, in practice the right to free expression is also a matter of informal norms of acceptability—the unwritten rules that determine what kinds of opinions can be shared openly. The kinds of soft power arrangements Deardorff advocated and put into practice worked by shifting these norms, making it difficult to express certain opinions. Bombaywala’s instructions to Houston’s Muslim population on the new limits of free speech after 9/11 were entirely consistent with this program. Muslim businessmen have played this center of influence role in several parts of the US, claiming to represent communities which their wealth had distanced them from. Often well-meaning but with little understanding of the importance of civil rights, they see their main task as reforming Muslim immigrants to make them more culturally American, while working with the government to combat a loosely defined extremism. Having absorbed the official narrative of radicalization, they end up, in effect, helping the government to manage dissent. The result is that strongly expressed criticisms of Western foreign policy become unacceptable and an atmosphere of self-censorship pervades. Bombaywala, for his part, feels he cannot be transparent with the community about his work with the FBI. “There is a lot of stuff the common man does not understand,” he says. “You cannot talk openly about these kinds of things.”69

  In the imaginations of FBI agents, immigrant Muslim communities are made up of monolithic blocs headed by patriarchs—like the “tribes” many ex-military FBI agents thought they were confronting in Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan before they joined the bureau. What this ignores is that communities are complex tapestries, not only with different ethnic strands, but with multiple interwoven power relationships of class, gender, and age. Who represents Muslims is not something that can be decided by empirical indicators such as influence or the number of members in a congregation or an organization. Communities do not come ready-made with leaders—to identify one is to make a political choice. And potential leaders who take a civil rights stand are often vilified as conveyors of the extremist ideas that supposedly make people into terrorists. While the Obama administration has rhetorically embraced the idea of forging community partnerships with moderate Muslims in its domestic war on terror, in practice the role communities are allowed to play in preventing terrorism has been reduced to intelligence gathering and the self-policing of radical views.

  Nor are community representatives always aware that their engagement with the bureau has an intelligence-gathering function. Documents released to the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act in 2011 showed that the FBI in California used community outreach as an intelligence initiative to systematically collect and store information about Muslim Americans’ religious and political opinions and affiliations, as part of the domain management program. Muslim participants in these outreach programs assumed their purpose was to provide a mechanism of FBI accountability, so that concerns about its practices could be addressed. Little did they realize the programs were yet another means of surveillance. Agents made records of social security numbers and other identifying information, and, on at least one occasion, data on political opinions. In another case an agent checked motor vehicle records on someone encountered at a Ramadan dinner at a San Francisco Islamic association. One attendee was described in the FBI’s records as “very progressive” and another was described as “very Western in appearance and outlook.”70

  Many conservatives reject community partnerships outright, because they see Islam itself as the problem and view engagement with Muslim organizations as pandering to the West’s enemies. In its place, they want every Muslim treated with suspicion. On the other hand, liberals generally find law enforcement partnerships with communities attractive, basing their views, in large part, on the turn to community policing in the 1990s, which seemed to many to have successfully reduced crime while minimizing violations of rights. William Bratton’s time as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is often cited as a model. The assumption is that when police departments build relationships with community leaders, a mutually beneficial exchange is enabled in which the police are educated on the needs of the community while the community grows to trust the police, and is more willing to share information. Conflict is reduced, and the apparent tension between fighting crime and respecting rights seems to fall away. The picture is one in which the police are neighborhood problem solvers, making sophisticated use of intelligence and building genuine relationships of trust with communities. In practice, community-oriented policing has never worked like this. Usually it has been subsumed within a “broken windows” approach to law enforcement that emphasizes large numbers of arrests for “quality of life” and petty drug offenses to maintain ord
er in working-class neighborhoods and to demonstrate that law enforcement is “invested” in the community. What is called community policing is, in most cases, anticommunity policing: it has resulted in huge increases in the numbers of African-American and Latino young people incarcerated for drug offenses that would not lead to indictments if they were committed by wealthier and whiter young people. True community policing would address itself to the underlying causes of America’s social fractures rather than rely on a racialized criminal justice system to control disaffected populations.71

  Whatever the merits of community-oriented policing to tackle drugs and gang-related crime, using it for counterterrorism is a different proposition. Community partnerships are unable to provide any means of accountability or shared decision making, because how the FBI investigates terrorism is decided in Washington, DC, and driven by political forces that Muslim-American organizations have been unable to challenge. Moreover, there is next to no information on terrorism that American Muslims can share with law enforcement agencies, no matter how much trust they have in them, because hardly any have come across terrorist recruitment. In practice, partnerships between the FBI and Muslim communities to tackle terrorism have been part of a top-down strategy to prevent radicalization that goes way beyond knowing about imminent crimes. The moderate Muslims who are recruited to such roles are rarely civil rights advocates with a commitment to government accountability; more often they are, in effect, advocates for the government, conveying its political message to community members rather than the other way around.

  CHAPTER 7

  Postboom

  Woke up this morning

  FB eye under my bed

  Said I woke up this morning

  FB eye under my bed

  Told me all I dreamed last night, every word I said.

  —Richard Wright, The FB Eye Blues

  During the evening of November 4, 2008, as it was becoming clear that Barack Obama was headed for victory in the presidential election, Osman Ahmed received a phone call from his cousin to say her seventeen-year-old son, Burhan Hassan, was missing.

  We went to hospitals and police stations and couldn’t find anything. Around midnight, we stopped, and slept, and thought, because of the election, he might have gone to a friend’s home, to watch the results. [His] mum of course could not sleep. At seven in the morning, we reported to the police station that our child was missing.

  Ahmed was told that two other Somali-American families in Minneapolis had reported their children missing that morning. He started to contact other families to try to find out whether anyone knew more. One family went to their son’s apartment and found a flight itinerary listing all of the missing children bound for Somalia. They realized that their sons had gone to fight for al-Shabaab (“the youth” in Arabic), the Somali insurgent movement. Ahmed reflected:

  We never thought he would go back home, from where we fled civil war and chaos. That never came to our mind, that one day he would go back to Somalia and start fighting. It was a surprise.1

  The family spent the following months working closely with the FBI to try to locate Burhan and facilitate his return to the US. Osman Ahmed appeared on national television to draw attention to the case and in March 2009 testified at a US Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing on al-Shabaab recruitment in America. Then, in May, Burhan called his mother. “If I come back to America,” he asked, “will they arrest me and put me in Guantánamo?” She tried her best to reassure him and send him money to leave Somalia. It seemed as if he had decided to leave al-Shabaab.2 But the family was told the following month that Burhan had been killed, most likely to prevent him from becoming an intelligence source for the US government.3 Ahmed says:

  We used any effort, any money we had, any relatives back home to get him back. By the time we convinced him to come back, and sent him the money to buy a ticket and go across the border, they found out, and they killed him immediately, because he was an asset to the US government.4

  Burhan was one of twenty-one young men thought to have traveled from Minnesota’s Twin Cities between 2007 and 2009 to attend training camps in Somalia run by al-Shabaab, which was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the US State Department in February 2008. Recruits from Minneapolis were reported to have been involved in an ambush of Ethiopian troops in the summer of 2008. In October, Shirwa Ahmed, a twenty-six-year-old former college student in Minneapolis, carried out a suicide attack in northern Somalia, killing twenty-two people—which the FBI claimed was the first time a US citizen had carried out a terrorist suicide bombing. Mohamoud Hassan, who had studied engineering at the University of Minnesota and been vice president of the Minnesota Somali Student Union, was reported killed in September 2009, ten months after traveling to Somalia; he was the fifth from Minneapolis to die. He was twenty-three years old.5 He was buried alongside his friend, Troy Kastigar, who had also been killed fighting for al-Shabaab. Kastigar was a young white man who grew up in suburban Hennepin County, became friendly with Somalis in Minneapolis, converted to Islam, and called himself Abdirahman.

  In response to the disappearances, the FBI launched Operation Rhino, its largest terrorism investigation since 9/11. Bureau director Robert Mueller announced that Somalis were being radicalized in Minnesota. Senator Joseph Lieberman warned that the missing Somalis might “return to the US at any time—fully radicalized and trained in the tactics of terror—to launch attacks here—bringing to our cities the suicide bombings and car bombings we have so far escaped.”6 It was reasonable to ask whether al-Shabaab’s American recruits presented a threat to the US, given the organization’s acknowledged links to al-Qaeda. But the available evidence indicated al-Shabaab was exclusively focused on the regional war in East Africa, and its foreign recruits were useful for local propaganda purposes rather than as potential perpetrators of terrorist attacks in the West. Asked about the possibility of an al-Shabaab attack on the US, E. K. Wilson, who leads a team of FBI agents in the Minneapolis field office responsible for investigating terrorist threats from the Horn of Africa, told me: “There’s no real information, no credible intelligence that it is in the works, or imminently in the plans, or it’s going to take place.”7 Nevertheless, many attempted to talk up the threat. Tellingly, Congressman Peter King told a committee hearing on Muslim radicalization in July 2011 that to think of al-Shabaab as only engaging in attacks in East Africa was “a failure of imagination”; the ability to conjure fear scenarios was prized above evidence-based analysis.8

  Counterterrorism officials refer to the period immediately following a terrorist attack, when investigators rush to identify the perpetrators and prevent any follow-up incidents, as the “postboom” moment. From late 2008 onward federal agents were in postboom mode regarding Somali Americans, even though there had been no incidents within the US. The Somali communities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were besieged.9 Those who had volunteered to fight in Somalia may have been combatants only in a distant civil war, with no intention of attacking the US, but under American law they were guilty of terrorism, because al-Shabaab was a proscribed organization. By extension, anyone assisting others to travel to Somalia to volunteer for al-Shabaab by, for example, giving them money, could face charges of material support for terrorism. On this basis, federal agents claimed a wide-ranging pretext to place themselves everywhere that young Somalis gathered—on college campuses and in high schools, shopping malls, and libraries—to question them about those who had disappeared. Agents talked their way into homes without warrants, staked out mosques, and sought to recruit informants. Somali students reported being approached by FBI agents in campus libraries or receiving phone calls from agents instructing them to leave classes in order to answer questions.10 To students at the University of Minnesota it appeared that FBI agents were compiling a list of Muslim students on campus and questioning them one by one about their identities, religious beliefs, and political opinions.11 Somali Americans were stopped at airports and questioned for ho
urs by officials of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). In 2010, an off-duty TSA officer assaulted a Somali man in Minneapolis, saying that he hated Muslims and that Somalis should go back to Africa. He had threatened another Somali man with a loaded gun on a separate occasion.12

  A few miles south of Minneapolis, at the Mall of America, where young Somalis often hung out, especially during Eid celebrations, security guards stopped and questioned an average of twelve hundred individuals a year as part of a counterterrorism initiative in which they shared information with law enforcement authorities. The mall staff collected personal information, including birth dates, ethnicity, and names of employers, along with surveillance images, all of which were then passed to the FBI via the local fusion center, a federally funded hub where surveillance data from various official and private sources is collated. Those questioned in nearly two-thirds of the cases were described as African American, people of Asian or Arabic descent, or other minorities.13 Meanwhile, sending money to family members in Somalia became harder, as local banks came under government pressure to refuse to handle transactions with the country. In 2012, Somali Americans in Minneapolis protested outside branches of Wells Fargo after it refused to process wire transfers to Somalia, leaving no financial institutions in Minnesota willing to handle such transactions—at a time when a devastating famine was hitting thousands of families dependent on remittances from the diaspora.14