The Muslims Are Coming!

by Arun Kundnani

  Race, Rights, and Radicals

  The Somali population in the Twin Cities is the largest in North America; thirty thousand people of Somali ancestry live in Minnesota, according to surveys carried out between 2008 and 2010.15 The heart of the Somali community in Minneapolis is the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood east of the downtown area, which is known as Little Mogadishu. The tower blocks of Riverside Plaza, with their signature Mondrian-style colored panels, house more than three thousand Somalis in cramped conditions.16 In St. Paul, two thousand people, the majority Somali, live at the Skyline Tower on St. Anthony Avenue; it is a similarly brutal concrete high-rise, appropriately nicknamed the Titanic. Somalis started arriving in Minnesota in the late 1980s, and the numbers increased in the following decade, as that country’s civil war raged. Many families spent years in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camp before becoming among the select few given admittance to the US. Minnesota has a history of refugee settlement, and it became the principal location for Somalis settling in the US. But the public assistance available to refugees since the 1990s has declined, affecting access to adequate housing, food, and health care. There is a local stereotype that Somali refugees are lazily relying on welfare payments rather than searching for work, but it is inaccurate. Many families have a single parent struggling with mental health problems resulting from the civil war. Surveys carried out at the beginning of the twenty-first century found 37 percent of Somali women and 25 percent of Somali men in the Twin Cities had been tortured before arriving in the US and suffered ongoing physical and psychological problems as a result. More generally, their poverty is rooted in a lack of job opportunities coupled with discrimination. As researcher Ihotu Ali of Columbia University put it in a 2011 study, Somalis in Minnesota “are beginning to feel the wall and feel that they can’t advance and move up … It’s like they’re learning what institutional racism is.” That racism also takes violent forms. Shortly after 9/11, a sixty-six-year-old Somali man was assaulted while waiting at a bus stop, and later died in the hospital.17

  As the federal investigation into the missing young men developed, dozens of friends and associates of those who had disappeared were subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury. The mass questioning by federal investigators gave rise to an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and confusion among Somalis in the Twin Cities. Nimco Ahmed, a Somali-American community organizer who now works for the Minneapolis City Council, remembers a group of young college students she knew who were subpoenaed.

  They just didn’t know what to do. These kids were just in school. A lot of them knew that some of their friends ended up in Somalia, but they just didn’t know how, when, why. People had a big phobia about what the FBI is. All of a sudden we became the target of the country. We were just the center of all investigation, and all types of people were told they had to talk to the FBI. So it was just a moment where everybody was just scared.18

  Technically, most of the FBI interviews were voluntary, but those targeted were led to believe they were compulsory. The vague parameters of the legislation on material support of terrorism meant it was difficult to know whether speaking openly about contacts with the missing Somalis might be self-incriminating, and giving misleading information to the FBI could itself result in a conviction for the offense of making false statements to a federal agent. As part of the investigation, Abdow Munye Abdow, a twenty-six-year-old Somali American from Minnesota, was questioned at his place of work; he was later convicted of making false statements to FBI agents about who was in a car with him on a drive to San Diego. He received an eight-month sentence.19 “There was just a broad sense of mistrust of the US government in general, and specifically of a national security agency like the FBI,” notes special agent E. K. Wilson.

  In early 2009, the local branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the national Muslim civil rights organization, began to assist Somalis who were looking for advice on how to handle the FBI’s questioning. “It was especially important during that time for individuals to know and assert their constitutional rights,” recalls Lori Saroya, executive director of CAIR’s Minnesota office.

  We did training sessions across Minnesota, reaching over 30,000 Somalis. Our message was simple: “If you have information on any criminal activity taking place in your community, this is the time to speak out; you need to report it. But you need to protect and educate yourself too.”

  CAIR organized an attorney-referral network so that those being interviewed could have legal representation. “Having an attorney present was a safe way for community members to help with the investigation,” says Saroya.20 But CAIR’s provision of legal representation in FBI interviews provoked condemnation from the organization’s enemies in Washington. Congressman Peter King accused CAIR of fostering a policy of noncooperation with the FBI—evidence, he said, of a general lack of Muslim-American cooperation with law enforcement.21 The question of whether attorneys could be present at interviews touched a raw nerve, because it threatened to set limits on what kinds of investigations the FBI could conduct. Applying the FBI’s model of radicalization implied widening them beyond cases of suspected criminal activity and tracking individuals who displayed the indicators that they might be drifting toward becoming extremists. But a competent lawyer would resist the kind of informal questioning of young people’s religious and political opinions that was aimed at detecting would-be radicals, on First Amendment grounds; broad-based questions about their social networks and everyday life would also likely be challenged. The presence of an attorney in interviews forced investigators to focus narrowly on terrorism rather than on the wide gamut of potential radicalization indicators.

  The families affected by the disappearances faced a difficult dilemma. Should they work with the FBI to try to locate their sons, only for them to possibly receive lengthy jail sentences upon their return to America, or were there other ways to track down their children and help them leave al-Shabaab without involving the US government? After all, some of the young men who left in 2007 had grown disillusioned with the movement in Somalia and quietly returned to the US of their own accord. Stoked by the sense of fear, conflicts erupted in the community over this question, and over the wider one of whether the government could be trusted to treat Somalis fairly. Previous experience suggested not. After 9/11, police officers would drive around the Somali neighborhoods in Minneapolis, pick young kids up off the streets, take them to an alley across the city, beat them up, racially abuse them, and say things such as: “Fuck Islam.” Somalis got used to police officers descending en masse onto the community over the smallest of altercations and using excessive force. Community activists had been trying to address these issues for years, using the conventional community liaison channels, and some progress had been made. But, unsurprisingly, suspicion of law enforcement agencies remained high.22

  On the other hand, Osman Ahmed, and another of Burhan Hassan’s uncles, Abdirizak Bihi, tried to convince the community that the best course of action was to not insist on the right to an attorney in FBI interviews, to identify any young person who seemed to have an Islamist ideology, and to accept that the Somali community had a deep problem of radicalization. They painted a wildly inaccurate picture of the Minnesota Somali community as inundated with al-Shabaab sympathizers, blurring the distinction between a vague belief in defending Somalia from foreign invaders and concrete activity in support of al-Shabaab. Ahmed warned a Senate committee hearing that al-Shabaab recruiters were

  well represented not only in certain mosques, but wherever Somali children and young adults are concentrated, such as community centers [and] charter schools operated by Somalis. They could sometimes pose as Somali community leaders and advise politicians and other agencies that are reaching out to the Somali community.23

  And he informed FBI agents of his suspicions of other people’s political opinions.

  We know individuals who are in favor of al-Shabaab, and any information or any suspicions we have, we share
with law enforcement agencies.24

  Assuming the young recruits must have been groomed by a hidden terrorist kingpin based in Minneapolis, Bihi and Ahmed accused the leaders of the largest of the city’s mosques, the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, where many of the young recruits to al-Shabaab spent their spare time, of being the hidden brainwashers and financiers behind the disappearances. After placing the Salafi mosque under surveillance, and putting its officials on the no-fly list, the FBI eventually exonerated its leaders of these accusations. The mosque, in turn, charged Bihi and Ahmed with not having the community’s interests at heart and of being stooges for the US government. Each side in the feud competed for federal favors and resources by claiming it was better placed to prevent the radicalization of young people. Bihi was one of the few American Muslims willing to support Peter King’s congressional hearings on Muslim radicalization, at which he testified, and he was featured in the Washington Post as an exemplar of a new kind of Muslim community leader, one willing to take an active role in countering radicalization.25 In a similar vein, Ahmed tried to convince Washington senators that they needed to fund Sufi theology within the American Muslim community which, he said, was inherently antiextremist.26 Both Bihi and Ahmed hoped they could attract federal funding for counterradicalization work. Ironically, it was only by highlighting their supposed radicalization that the deeply impoverished Somali-American communities of the Twin Cities were likely to garner increased government resources. Ahmed did eventually become part of a federally funded project. He partnered with Stevan Weine, a psychiatrist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to research the radicalization of Somali-American young men in Minnesota, with funding from the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Human Factors and Behavioral Sciences Division.27

  For their part, the Abubakar As-Saddique mosque leaders found that after an initial period of mutual suspicion, they could develop an even closer relationship with the FBI, leaving Ahmed and Bihi feeling betrayed by the federal government they had so publicly defended. Intelligence on the young Salafis who attended this mosque was the greatest prize for the FBI, and if mosque leaders could play a self-policing role in directing the congregation away from interest in Somali politics, then so much the better. In July 2011, a fight broke out at the mosque during a talk by the imam, in which he had tried to tell young people to focus less on what was happening in Somalia and more on their lives in Minneapolis. A young man stood up and accused mosque leaders of turning their back on Somalia and the struggle there, and then punched the mosque’s executive director.28

  For imams, community organizers, and other significant figures in the Somali community, this was a time of regular engagement with a range of federal agencies. The TSA, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and Customs and Border Protection began programs of community outreach to Somali Americans in the Twin Cities. The US military funded a young Somali-American woman from Minnesota to make a documentary video about radicalization. Community activists were funded by the State Department to visit Somali communities in Europe to talk about being American Muslims. The FBI’s Minneapolis field office organized town hall events, meetings with elders, youth conferences, and community round tables to try to improve its credibility. Ostensibly these were opportunities for community members to raise their concerns about the way the investigations were being handled. But, as the FBI privately acknowledged, there was no possibility of the community influencing how the investigations were carried out. Rather, the FBI saw the meetings as a way to correct what its agents called “misperceptions” circulating in the community, such as that suspects in Somalia might be imprisoned without trial or targeted for drone killings (such community fears were consistent with official US policy, even in cases of suspects who were American citizens).29 Another aim was to encourage community leaders to pass information to federal agents about young people. Special agent E. K. Wilson, for example, noted that “an absent father, without an older brother or uncle to step into that role” is a common denominator in a lot of cases of Somali radicalization. To this can be added other indicators of risk:

  An abrupt change in religious practices, a deviation from one group of friends, or one mosque, to another, for no apparent reason. Or maybe removing themselves from one peer group and becoming a loner and kind of deviating away from a particular religious group.

  As a result of the bureau’s outreach, said Wilson, Somali community leaders had been taught to treat these indicators as signs to watch out for and share with FBI agents. Thus, the bureau began to receive tips about young people exhibiting these behaviors, or about situations in which “this kid has all of a sudden been acting differently.”30

  In St. Paul, the local police department played a substantial role in counterterrorism intelligence-gathering, masking its activities with the language of community policing. The St. Paul Police Department (SPPD) developed a program called African Immigrant Muslim Community Outreach Program (AIMCOP), partly funded by a $670,000 grant from the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2009. The idea of AIMCOP was to develop a community policing approach “to prevent radicalization, reduce violent crime, and increase crime prevention” in St. Paul’s Somali-American community. Much of the program involved police officers conducting community outreach work, mentoring, and developing police-sponsored athletic leagues for young people. The thinking was that the more young Somalis could be given opportunities to interact with people outside their own community, the more they would likely integrate successfully into mainstream American society; moreover, it was hoped that such interactions would help them trust police officers.31 The program also listed as one of its goals to “identify and intervene with individuals at risk of radicalization, gang involvement, and violent crime.” “Radicalized youth” were to be identified, their details maintained in a database, and “up-to-date intelligence” shared with other law enforcement partners.32 The SPPD presented itself to the DOJ as having a useful role to play in counterterrorism, being able to build relationships with the community more easily than federal agencies and thereby generate intelligence of use in preventing radicalization. And as the city’s policing budget had been cut in an era of austerity, overtime opportunities for police officers were maintained through this program’s federal funding.

  The architect of AIMCOP was Assistant Chief Dennis Jensen, who based the program on a thesis he wrote while studying for a master’s in homeland security at the Naval Postgraduate School’s Center for Homeland Defense and Security, which had been created after 9/11 to cater to the demand for counterterrorism expertise in local and state law enforcement. Jensen’s thesis stated:

  In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, it became abundantly clear that law enforcement agencies, both federal and local, lacked the ability to gather investigative data from the Muslim community. On a federal level, investigators not only lacked the contacts in the community, they actually harmed some relationships by their lack of cultural understanding when attempting to gather information … It is clear that building a strong relationship between the local police and the Muslim community is essential in defending America against acts of terrorism. Key to this relationship is trust between the groups and an understanding of cultural differences.33

  Just as the counterinsurgency theorists emphasized the importance of cultural knowledge in fighting colonial wars, so ideas of culture had become important in domestic counterterrorism. The notion that there was a fixed, singular entity called Somali culture which could be an object of police knowledge took hold in law enforcement circles in the Twin Cities. Manipulation of this knowledge by government agencies would, it was believed, help integrate the community into the wider society and win its trust. Meetings with members of the community were the means by which this knowledge was to be both acquired and applied. “I don’t know how old you are,” Jensen asked me, “but do you remember in Vietnam they talked about winning the hearts and minds of people?”34

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p; The starting point for Jensen was to approach those he called the “elders” in the community: “If the elders of the community come to trust the police officers, then most of the community will also cooperate wholeheartedly with the department.”35 Thereafter police officers were assigned to mentor young people at eight different public housing sites in St. Paul, for example, by helping with homework, and three hundred young Somalis were recruited to the Police Athletic League. Jensen hoped that getting involved in sports would mean “they’re thinking about stuff like that instead of, you know, the ties to home.”36 Out of these relationships, Jensen claimed, the police department developed the cultural knowledge he hoped for (although the kinds of knowledge this process produced seemed bizarre: for example, he believed that, “with Somalis, particularly in their culture, it’s okay to lie to people if it benefits the family”).37 The project also delivered significant intelligence in relation to radicalization. As an example, he said, information was obtained on mosques that were perceived as radicalized. That information was then passed on to FBI agents, with whom he met twice a week to share intelligence.38 Jensen’s pitch was that the local police department, less feared than the FBI, could be a richer source of community intelligence. He said:

  They really hate the FBI, for some reason. Sometimes the FBI did a little roughshod stuff after 9/11. But we get information from the community telling us who’s bad, who’s up to no good. Because we’ve had this five-, six-year relationship with them.39