CAIR-WA staff met with their counterparts from OneAmerica on February 1, 2012 as part of a fortnightly discussion on National Security and Surveillance held at the OneAmerica office.  Executive Director Arsalan Bukhari, Civil Rights Coordinator Jennifer Gist, and Journalism Volunteer Shijith Kunhitty were present at the meeting.

Kendra Anderson, Lead Organizer at OneAmerica, explained the need to bring the two organizations together. “(In December 2011) Jennifer and I saw each other in San Francisco for the Securing our Rights Conference and I left reenergized, after understanding many new things about surveillance and the intersections between what the Arab Muslim Community is facing on many levels and what the immigrant community is facing with increased enforcement, especially in the border areas. I really believe this is an important discussion for us to have with our staff at OneAmerica.”

In its presentation, CAIR-WA highlighted several issues, the first of which was the misinformation disseminated in the training of law enforcement officers in Washington, both federal and local. In some trainings, one of the ways that local police personnel were told to identify potential terrorists was to look for signs of “radicalization” which were identified as having a beard or attending morning prayers. The sum result of this is that federal agents and local personnel often target innocent people. Said Arsalan, “It is bad training, and not ill intent, that leads these agents to (go after innocents).” Apart from issues with the materials used, there were also problems with the trainers at these sessions. Said Jennifer, “We found issues with the kind of vetting process – or lack of one-- they have for trainers. They just invited people who wrote popular books instead of getting someone who actually knows something about the subject.”

A related concern is the duplicitous way in which many agents dealt with many of CAIR’s clients. “What they hear from the agents directly is different from what they see when it’s all typed up.” The Freedom of Information Act, which is supposed to help keep the high-handedness of government agencies in check is limited in how much information can be obtained from a federal agency on any individual or case. “The FBI apparently doesn’t have to give out any details if the information relates to counter-terrorism or an ongoing investigation,” said Jennifer, “They’re even allowed to lie and say that there aren’t any records, so it is difficult to get to the bottom of things.”

Jennifer also talked about the lack of procedure and legal redress for all American citizens, and not just American Muslims, in many situations. “If you’re told you’re on a watch-list, there is essentially no procedure for getting off it… And the procedures that are supposedly in place for doing that are ineffective.”

She then proceeded to discuss the problems of people who get confused with others on the no-fly list. If someone has a name similar to another person on the no-fly list, s/he often gets flagged for extra scrutiny while travelling. They could however avoid this problem though by availing of a Redress Control Number (RCN) through the government’s Traveler Redress Inquiry Program (TRIP). The RCN acts like a separate individual ID which distinguishes you from the person actually on the list. The problem with this though is that any time an agency updates the file of the person actually on the No Fly list, the RCN that was obtained becomes invalid and you would have to get a new one all over again.

The presentation then shifted to the topic of profiling. A number of American Muslims, who later became CAIR clients, have been visited at their homes and workplaces by federal agents -- people with otherwise clean criminal records having jobs at reputed companies such as Microsoft. “These guys may have remitted money to families abroad which is why they were flagged,” said Arsalan. A number of American Muslims are also being stopped at the Northern border with Canada when driving in and out of the US. “These are people not necessarily in any legal limbo, in terms of their citizenship or residency status, but they end up in situations where they have guns being drawn upon them at the border.”

Arsalan ended the presentation by bringing up the subject of informants in the American Muslim community. According to him, informants are not so much people revealing information to law enforcement agencies about criminal activities but are agent provocateurs, encouraging otherwise innocent but vulnerable American Muslim youths to commit crimes through coercion and offers of thousands of dollars to commit a crime, and then blowing the whistle on them.

An example was given of a group of men in New York who were offered over $200,000 and money for one of the men’s relative’s liver transplant to put a (fake) bomb in a synagogue. This offer was rejected initially, though they eventually accepted it and agreed to place the (fake) bomb. Said Arsalan, “This is not effective law enforcement, you’re not really catching the criminals who are planning actual attacks. (By focusing on such entrapment) you’re leaving the field wide open for those people who are engaging in real attacks,” citing a terror attack in Arizona which left a Congresswoman critically injured and six persons dead, the foiled 2011 MLK Day bomb plot in Spokane, and other major terror attacks on US soil, all carried out by persons who practised faiths other than Islam.

At the end of the presentation, Otts Bolisay, communications specialist at OneAmerica, spoke about how American Muslims share a lot of common ground with communities such as Latinos that OneAmerica works closely with. “It may be difficult to see what the connections are but if you step back, with all that’s going on with the Patriot Act, you see the difficulties (American Muslims) are going through are similar (to that of other communities).”