Just in time for the July 4 weekend, the LA Times reported that the Justice Department is thinking about letting the FBI open investigations on people it suspects might be terrorists without, you know, evidence or any suspicion of wrongdoing. Instead, the FBI would investigate anyone, including Americans, who fit a terrorist “profile.” On top of that, the rules would allow for FBI agents to consider race and ethnicity when trying to sort out who exactly is a terrorist. That’s bad news for Arabs and Muslims, not to mention privacy and Freedom. There’s this gem from the LA Times story (italics mine):
Currently, FBI agents need specific reasons — such as evidence or allegations that a law probably has been violated — to investigate U.S. citizens and legal residents. The new policy, law enforcement officials told the Associated Press, would let agents open preliminary terrorism investigations after mining public records and intelligence to build a profile of traits that, taken together, were deemed suspicious.
For all practical purposes, if you’re Arab, Muslim, or generally some shade of brown, you’re now guilty until proven innocent.
“We don’t know what we don’t know. And the object is to cut down on that,” said one FBI official who defended the proposed policy.
Wait…how can you cut down on “that” when you don’t even know what “that” is? This quote perfectly captures what these new guidelines are all about, and that’s to find out anything and everything about people the FBI considers dangerous to national security, even if the bureau is just going on a hunch. In this case, they’re apparently after the terrorists. Not so long ago, they were after the communists, and the infamous program was called COINTELPRO.
While the declared purposes of these programs were to protect the “national security” or prevent violence, Bureau witnesses admit that many of the targets were nonviolent and most had no connections with a foreign power. Indeed, nonviolent organizations and individuals were targeted because the Bureau believed they represented a “potential” for violence — and nonviolent citizens who were against the war in Vietnam were targeted because they gave “aid and comfort” to violent demonstrators by lending respectability to their cause.
In another sign of advancing racial profiling, the president signed a directive on June 5 that, according to the Washington Post,
gave the U.S. attorney general and other cabinet officials 90 days to come up with a plan to expand the use of biometrics by, among other things, recommending categories of people to be screened beyond “known or suspected” terrorists.
Again, bad news for Arabs, Muslims, and brown people everywhere.
Besides the fact that the FBI is planning to use race and ethnicity to figure out who might be a terrorist, I wondered what other characteristics fit the FBI’s jihadi profile (guessing that long walks on the beach isn’t one of them). Luckily, the FBI provided us with some clues over the weekend by releasing data from the biometrics operation that has been in place since 2002. Thousands of people were picked up and/or fingerprinted in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other nations since the program began, some on the battlefield and some just caught up in a sweep. The government’s review of the data found that 1 out of 100 people fingerprinted already had a criminal record in the US. On the surface, that certainly sounds like a scary development, because it suggests that jihadis came to the US and might have contacted or started sleeper cells in the US homeland. But, looking at their arrests, I’m not so sure that it’s quite as dire as it sounds. What were their US arrests all about? Weapons training? Espionage? Not exactly.
Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.
So, we’re looking for a drunk Muslim who has bad credit and disobeys traffic laws. There’s more from the Washington Post:
The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah…
Still, there is evidence that at least one high-profile detainee once tried to get into the US:
One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay.
Khatani was the “20th hijacker” and tried to come to the US in August 2001 with the intent to participate in the 9/11 attacks. So, this guy was already a jihadi hell bent on causing death and destruction. Biometrics helped the US discover that he’d been turned away in Orlando and helped the FBI piece together his involvement in the attacks. Score one for biometrics. But, all the FBI is claiming in this story is that at some people from different parts of the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan, came to the US at some point in their lives, got arrested for things like public drunkeness and writing bad checks, left the US, and now may or may not be fighting against the US. I’m not trying to say that there are no sleeper cells in the US or that jihadis are not trying to get into the US, but to me, this is another scare tactic that isn’t necessarily supported by the evidence.
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