The Terror Factory (11 page)

On a November day in 2007, Farahi arrived at Miami Immigration Court for what he thought was a routine hearing on his political asylum case. The imam had requested asylum because he is a Sunni, a persecuted religious minority in Iran. As Farahi entered the courthouse, he saw four men from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They were wearing body armor and had guns holstered at their sides. All four followed Farahi from the security checkpoint on the ground level to the third-floor courtroom of U.S. Immigration Judge Carey Holliday.

Farahi's lawyer at the time, Mildred Morgado, spoke with the ICE agents, then asked to talk to her client in private. “They have a file with evidence that you're supporting or are involved in terrorist groups,” Farahi recalled Morgado telling him. Farahi was then given an ultimatum: drop the asylum case and leave the United States voluntarily, or be charged as a terrorist.

Unfortunately, luck wasn't on Farahi's side when drawing a judge for his asylum claim. Appointed to the immigration
court in October 2006, Carey Holliday was a Louisiana Republican who had quickly earned a reputation for being tough on immigrants. In one case, he declined to hear arguments from an Ecuadorian couple who alleged they were targeted for deportation because their daughter, Miami Dade College student Gabby Pacheco, was a well-known activist for immigration reform. “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones,” Holliday wrote in his ruling.
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(Holliday resigned in January 2009 after the Justice Department found that Bush administration officials had illegally selected immigration judges based on their political affiliation.)

After the ICE agents threatened Farahi with terrorism charges, he told Holliday he would voluntarily leave the country within thirty days. Although his Iranian passport was expired—a bureaucratic problem that should have given him more time to consider the government's threat—Holliday granted the order of voluntary departure. The agents let Farahi go free after he promised to leave the country. However, Farahi later changed his mind and decided to appeal the government's action, as he believed that the claim that Justice Department lawyers would prosecute him as a terrorist was a bluff—nothing more than leverage to coerce him into becoming an informant. To this day, the government has never shared with Farahi or his lawyer any information about the professed evidence that he is a terrorist, and he has never been charged with a crime. “If they have something on Foad, they should make it public. They haven't done that,” said Sunshine, the Barry University theology professor. “They are intimidating and bullying, and I resent that type of behavior being paid for by my tax dollars.”

Farahi's assertion that the government tried to coerce him to become an informant could not be verified independently
because the FBI won't comment on his case. “It is a matter of policy that we do not confirm or deny who we have asked to be a source,” Miami FBI Special Agent Judy Orihuela told me. However, other individuals whom the FBI wanted to use as informants have been targeted in a similar manner as Farahi. In November 2005, for example, immigration officials questioned Yassine Ouassif, a twenty-four-year-old Moroccan, as he crossed into New York State from Canada. The officials confiscated his green card and instructed him to meet an FBI agent in Oakland, California. The Bureau's offer: become an informant or be deported. Ouassif refused to spy and won his deportation case with the help of the National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights on behalf of Muslims and immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia.

Another case involves Brooklyn religious leader Sheikh Tarek Saleh, who has been fighting deportation since refusing to become an informant against his estranged cousin, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the Egyptian-born man the 9/11 Commission identified as Al Qaeda's “chief financial manager.” Even after al-Yazid was killed in a Predator drone strike in Pakistan in early 2010, the government continued to press for Saleh's deportation, alleging that the religious leader had lied on his visa application about never having been part of a terrorist group.
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Saleh had once been a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad—but his membership had been years before the U.S. government had designated the group as a terrorist organization. Saleh has alleged in court documents that the government is retaliating against him for refusing to be an informant. The Council on American-Islamic Relations suspects there are hundreds of similar cases in which the government has used deportation or criminal charges to force cooperation from
informants. Unlike Farahi's, Ouassif's, and Saleh's, most of these cases will never be made public.

For his part, Foad Farahi continues to maintain that he is not affiliated with any terrorist groups, and that he would report any Muslim who was supporting terrorism to the authorities. “From the Islamic perspective, it's your duty to respect the law, and if there's anything going on, any crime about to be committed, or any kind of harm to be caused to people or property, it should be reported to the police,” he said.

Ira Kurzban's law office is a mile from the alfresco restaurants of Miami's Coconut Grove. It was a hot day in late August 2009 when I met with him, and he was wearing a white guayabera and looking disheveled gray hairs. Kurzban is a well-known advocate for immigrants' rights, having argued three immigration-related cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also on the board of directors of Immigrants' List, the first political action committee in Washington, D.C., established to support candidates who endorse immigration reform. Foad Farahi, desperate not to leave the country but frightened after government agents threatened to charge him as a terrorist, hired Kurzban in 2007 to take his case on appeal. “He's an imam in his mosque,” Kurzban said of Farahi as he threw his hands in the air in a sort of protest. “He's basically, you know, the rabbi.”

In November 2007, Kurzban asked the Board of Immigration Appeals to throw out Farahi's voluntary departure order and reopen his political asylum case, arguing that the imam had been illegally intimidated by the government. The board denied the request, so Kurzban petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which agreed that Farahi's case should be reopened. “The government has many weapons in
its arsenal in terms of seeking to remove somebody from the country, and in his case, they were using it, in my view, as leverage to try to get him to cooperate with them or be an informant for them, and when he wouldn't do it, they applied the penalty,” Kurzban said. “When it looked like, well, even if he doesn't cooperate with us, he may be able to get away with seeking political asylum, they show up at the hearing and say, ‘If you do that, we're going to arrest you now. We just want you out of the country.' I think the real issue is, does the government have the right to do that, to pressure people in that way to make them informants? But I think that's what's going on,” Kurzban continued. “It's clearly the modus operandi of the FBI to (a) recruit people who are going to be informants and (b) to use whatever leverage they can to get them to be informants.”

The end of Ramadan in September 2009 signaled the five-year anniversary since the FBI had first approached Foad Farahi. Dressed in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, Farahi walked barefoot through his mosque as members began to arrange food on folding banquet tables. After sundown, everyone would eat and drink together to break the fast. Farahi was distracted as he waved to attendees and hugged others entering the mosque. I asked him if his legal fight with the U.S. government had made him bitter. “I'm not bitter,” he answered. “I wouldn't say I'm bitter at all. But I'm tired. I want to live my life in this country. I want to stay here. That's all.”

Farahi's political asylum case has so far been unsuccessful, and in late 2012, he applied for residency based on his recent marriage to a U.Sc citizen.

To coerce people into becoming informants, the FBI must exploit vulnerabilities, and the greatest vulnerability in U.S.
Muslim communities today, as the Farahi case shows, is immigration. Sixty-three percent of Muslims in the United States are first-generation immigrants, and forty-five percent of all Muslims in the country have immigrated here since 1990.
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Through increased interagency coordination, the FBI has access to officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Therefore, when an agent has someone who is reluctant to become an informant, he or she can turn to colleagues at ICE and inquire about that person's immigration status. Together, they can comb through the individual's personal information as they search for any kind of immigration violation—such as, in the case of Foad Farahi, how he was three credit hours shy of being a full-time student when his visa required him to carry nine graduate credit hours per semester—and then use that violation as leverage to force cooperation. If the immigrant chooses to cooperate, the FBI will tell the court that he is a valuable asset, averting deportation; if the immigrant chooses not to work as an informant, as Farahi did, the FBI will not support him, and the person may face deportation.

Officially, the FBI denies that it uses the threat of deportation as leverage against possible informants. “We are prohibited from using threats or coercion,” FBI spokesperson Kathleen Wright told me when I asked her about this form of pressure. But the FBI does acknowledge that it assists helpful informants when they appear in U.S. Immigration Court. “There have been instances when an individual with immigration issues has assisted in investigations and/or been willing to share information,” Wright said. “While we do not have the authority to make deportation or immigration decisions, we can advise immigration authorities of the level of cooperation for whatever use they deem appropriate.”
In other words, work as an informant and the FBI will help stop you from being deported; refuse and the FBI won't use its considerable influence in court to prevent the issuing of a one-way ticket out of the country.

Immigration violations aren't the only type of pressure that the FBI uses to coerce reluctant informants. Another tried-and-true method the Bureau uses to flip people is the threat of criminal charges. When the FBI aggressively pursued Italian American organized crime in the 1980s, informants were critical to infiltrating these sophisticated, hierarchal organizations. Often, agents were able to use a crime—such as car theft or fraud—to pressure lower-level Mafiosi to become informants. However, there is one key difference between organized crime soldiers and members of Muslim American communities, namely that the latter aren't nearly as likely to break the law. Not only are devout Muslims religiously bound not to violate society's laws, but U.S. Muslims are often of such affluence that they are an improbable group to be involved in serious crime, particularly in comparison to organized crime figures. In the year after 9/11, for example, 26 percent of Muslims in the United States earned more than $100,000 annually, according to a Cornell University study.
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Go to any mosque in this country, and you're more likely to find an expensive Mercedes in the parking lot than a rusted-out Chevy.

Yet another form of leverage that the FBI uses to recruit reluctant informants is “trash covers,” which is the practice of searching through someone's garbage—without obtaining a warrant—in order to uncover incriminating or embarrassing information. Although the FBI has performed trash covers for decades, the Justice Department officially blessed the practice in approving the most recent Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, which specifically allows federal agents to
go through people's trash.
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The FBI's search for incriminating or embarrassing information isn't limited to people's physical trash, however. More and more, agents are searching publicly accessible databases on social networks—Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, for example—to mine digital cast offs that could provide information about individuals who are reluctant to become informants.

For agents working counterterrorism investigations, informants are critical, and applying leverage—from immigration violations to criminal charges to even something as personal as extramarital relationships—is the best, and sometimes only, way to recruit informants. “We could go to a source and say, ‘We know you're having an affair. If you work with us, we won't tell your wife,'” a former top FBI counterterrorism official told me, asking that he not be identified because he wasn't authorized to discuss informant recruitment on the record. “Would we actually call the wife if the source doesn't cooperate? Not always. You do get into ethics here—is this the right thing to do?—but the legality of this isn't a question. If you obtained the information legally, then you can use it however you want.”

It's an oppressive prospect that the full power of a federal law enforcement agency could be directed at someone not even suspected of having committed a crime, but FBI agents are quick to defend the search for information that can be leveraged in the recruitment of snitches. Mike Rolince, a retired FBI agent who spent thirty-one years at the Bureau and specialized in counterterrorism, is among the defenders of this practice. I asked Rolince if he thought the Bureau was going too far today in trying to leverage cooperation from informants in Muslim American communities. He told me that he didn't think the fact that the FBI applied
pressure to informants was a problem by itself. Instead, he said, the problem was the perception that the FBI does so willy-nilly and frequently. “The reality at the end of the day is that these tactics are used sparingly,” Rolince told me. “Maybe Italian Americans felt offended we went after John Gotti and recruited informants in Italian communities. But we needed to do that then, just as we need to recruit informants in Muslim communities today.”

While the threat of deportation is the prime weapon the FBI uses to coerce would-be informants, that tactic has its limitations, as it cannot be used against people who are already U.S. citizens. In those situations, the Bureau relies on other pressure points, the most prominent of which is putting someone on the government's no-fly list. Maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, an FBI group charged with identifying suspected or potential terrorists, the no-fly list prevents an individual from boarding a flight in the United States. Created after 9/11, the list has an infamous history of false positives—the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts was repeatedly stopped at airports, for example, because the vague name “T. Kennedy” was on the list—and at one point even Nobel Peace Prize winner and former South African president Nelson Mandela made the list, a problem then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described to a 2008 Senate committee as “frankly a rather embarrassing matter.”
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