Informant nation

It’s no secret that the 9/11 terror attacks in the US constituted a boon for various enterprises—weapons manufacturers, defence contractors, private security firms—which saw a soaring need for their products and services in the ensuing bellicosity abroad and the fortification of the homeland.

An array of new professional opportunities also sprang up, such as in the field of “terrorism expertise”. The ranks of domestic informants swelled, too, and the FBI currently boasts over 15,000 of them. Many are assigned to Muslim communities.

“Informants”, a new documentary by Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit, sheds light on this last component of the 9/11 industry and confirms that we pessimists generally aren’t exaggerating when it comes to US policy.

Convicted con artist Craig Monteilh, one of the informants interviewed in the film, summarises his motive for faking a conversion to Islam in order to enhance his employability by the FBI: “I wanted to be in on the big game, and to be paid top dollar for it.’”

Monteilh’s duties included recording conversations at a mosque in Orange County, California, where he was instructed to get close to the imam, Yassir Fazaga, perceived to be a troublesome individual. Among Fazaga’s transgressions: calling attention to the disingenuousness of a claim by an FBI official that the agency was not monitoring local Muslim student organisations.

When Monteilh’s cover was blown—incidentally, because the Muslim community reported him for suspicious behavior to none other than the FBI itself—he joined forces with Fazaga in a lawsuit against the agency for violating constitutional liberties. Monteilh’s opportunism produced no returns here, though; Al Jazeera’s Trevor Aaronson explains in the film: “The lawsuit was killed by the US Attorney General, Eric Holder. The government argued that allowing it to move forward would reveal state secrets and significantly harm national security.”

Nothing like a national security threat to justify the wanton trampling of rights.

Manufactured terrorists

Luckily for the government, such threats are easily manufactured.

Another operation showcased in “Informants” stars Darren Griffin, a drug-dealer-turned-drug-informant-turned-terror-informant. Posing as a disillusioned army vet and Muslim convert, Griffin descends upon a mosque in Toledo, Ohio, where he sets his sights on a young mosque patron by the name of Mohammad Amawi. Amawi is - as any respectable person should have been - enraged by the US war in Iraq, but his rage leads him to verbalise a desire to kill US soldiers.

To be sure, no one in the history of the world has ever said, “I feel like killing so-and-so” and not followed through with it. As far as the state was concerned, the expression of this desire was far more serious an issue than the literal slaughter and devastation it was currently unleashing on Iraq. Indeed, the charge leveled against Amawi in 2006, for which he was given 20 years in prison, seems more readily applicable to the US military. Aaronson narrates: “He was convicted of trying to kill or maim people outside the United States.”

A few pertinent details regarding the alleged attempt: Amawi did not even have enough money to pay his own rent - which was covered by the FBI, via Griffin - much less to engage in homicidal transatlantic missions. Griffin also charitably arranged for Amawi to receive training in firearms, bomb detonation, and combat tactics, and tasked him with transporting laptops to Jordan to be smuggled to “brothers” in Iraq and Syria.

According to the film, Griffin additionally provided Amawi with a satellite phone on which he promptly ran up a bill of over 40,000 dollars, while Griffin himself was paid over 350,000 dollars for his performance. As if there was any doubt that US government funds are wisely deployed in the interest of the general good of the citizenry.

Al Qaeda’s rain poncho arsenal

Another FBI sting operation investigated by Aaronson and his team involves an informant called Elie Assaad, who, posing as a member of Al Qaeda, managed in 2006 to ensnare seven men from an impoverished Haitian and African American neighborhood in Miami in an alleged plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and create other sorts of trouble. The central piece of evidence: a comically-scripted “oath” of allegiance to Osama bin Laden, recited by the men at Assaad’s urging.

As Rothschild Augustine, one of the seven, told Al Jazeera, any apparent cooperation with Assaad was merely in the interest of financial gain. Regarding then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ pronouncement that “[t]hese individuals wish to wage a, quote, ‘full ground war’ against the United States,” Augustine opined: “That’s just retarded… what type of army are we? We’re seven guys, we’re broke dudes.”

Augustine was convicted for seven years for conspiring to provide material support and resources to Al Qaeda; a good portion of his sentence was spent in solitary confinement.

Other serious blows dealt to Al Qaeda’s international support network around the same time included the apprehension of Brooklyn College alumnus Syed Hashmi, who, according to a 2007 New York Police Department report, was charged with aiding Al Qaeda plots and “delivering military equipment and funds to radical Islamists in Pakistan and Afghanistan”.

In a 2010 Huffington Post article, acclaimed author Amitava Kumar expanded on the magnitude of the government coup against terror:

“[W]hen Hashmi was extradited to the US [from Britain], the FBI revealed that a man who had stayed at [his] apartment in London had supplied ‘military gear’ to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan. Then, Hashmi's lawyer found out that the items being labeled as ‘military gear’ were socks and rainproof ponchos. The rest of the details of the indictment remain shrouded in mystery. The FBI has revealed nothing more.”

Divide and conquer

Given the long US history of criminalising people for being poor and non-white, it’s perhaps not surprising that - as in the story of Augustine and company - terrorism charges have been thrown into the mix, as well.

But the repercussions of such affronts to justice on US society as a whole are far from localised. As discussed in “Informants”, the Miami case was precedent-setting in that it confirmed to the state the usefulness of FBI emissaries in converting preordained verdicts into reality.

As a result, Muslim communities across the country have suffered disproportionately as they are assigned the latter role in state-sponsored “Us vs. Them” dichotomies. Internal communal cohesiveness is also at stake thanks to the breakdown in trust that is always a potential byproduct of informant epidemics.

Racial profiling, an all-pervasive state surveillance apparatus, and the proliferation of suspicion have meanwhile created a corrosive phenomenon of Muslim self-censorship. In a recent op-ed for Al Jazeera, Abdullah al-Arian comments on efforts by community leaders to suppress political expression in mosques and elsewhere:

“[A]bsent such healthy community spaces through which to channel passions for humanitarian concerns around the globe, it actually becomes more likely that young Muslims could channel their frustrations through alternative modes of oppositional politics. This type of quietist, disaffected atmosphere sanitised of all political expression is precisely the environment in which agent provocateurs thrive.”

The viability of the informant industry would thus appear to be guaranteed for the foreseeable future.

“Informants” concludes with Aaronson’s assessment of the US as a place characterised by “neighbor informing on neighbor, one American luring another, a nation spying on itself on orders from the FBI.” A divided and conquered nation, in other words, where supposedly abundant freedoms include the freedom from solidarity that might challenge dominant power structures.

- Belen Fernandez is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, published by Verso. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin magazine. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo credit: An image grab from Al Jazeera documentary 'Informants' (YouTube)