With the help of documents obtained by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain reported that the NSA and the FBI were electronically spying on at least five prominent Americans solely because of their connections to the Middle East and Islam — not because they were involved with or connected to any terrorist organization.
According to documents Greenwald obtained from Snowden, 7,485 email addresses were monitored by the FBI and NSA between 2002 and 2008. The bulk of the list contains email addresses for foreigners that the U.S. government reportedly believes belong to groups that are listed as terrorist organizations by the United States, such as al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah.
Americans Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan, who were killed in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen, were included on the list, along with 200 other Americans whose identities Greenwald anticipates to keep protected. In an Ask Me Anything event on Reddit on Wednesday, the journalist explained he doesn’t want to embarrass those innocent people on the list or want to tip off anyone who should be on the list.
There could be more Americans on the list, as there are 5,501 instances in which an individual’s nationality was either marked as “unknown” or left blank.
Greenwald and Hussain were not able to determine and confirm the identities of all of the Americans because all they had to work with were their email addresses, but during a three-month investigation, the reporters discovered at least five email addresses on the list that belong to law-abiding American citizens who are prominent lawyers, academics and even a civil rights leader.
Those five individuals are:
- Faisal Gill, a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush;
- Asim Ghafoor, a prominent attorney who has represented clients in terrorism-related cases, including the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi charity, whose accounts were frozen after claims were made that the organization was funding terrorism;
- Nihad Awad, executive director of the leading Muslim civil liberties group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations;
- Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor of international relations at Rutgers University;
- Agha Saeed, a former political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and Palestinian rights.
Religious targets
During their Reddit AMA, Greenwald and Hussain shared that while there were other innocent Americans included in the list of email addresses, they based their story on five people whose identities they were able to confirm based on their email addresses and who agreed to be part of the story.
Greenwald added that while Muslims were largely targeted following 9/11, they are not the only group of Americans who have been surveilled by the NSA and other intelligence groups. He also said the public should prepare for similar reports in the near future disclosing unfair treatment other groups of Americans have faced.
Though some may be startled by revelations that the FBI and NSA have surveilled people based on their national origins or religion, this is not the first time people have been targeted for a belief they hold.
For example, it was reported last year that the Department of Defense had listed Catholics and Evangelical Protestants as members of “extremist” religious groups, along with members of al-Qaida and the Ku Klux Klan, even though more than 50 percent of the American population identifies with one of those two Christian faiths.
“The most egregious civil rights abuses historically tend to start with unpopular subgroups within society before inevitably broadening to target the entire population, once such practices become normalized and entrenched,” Hussain said during the Reddit AMA. “If people take a stand in deeming violations of Muslim-American civil liberties unacceptable, it will help ensure that other groups are not targeted in future.
“However,” he warned, “if such practices become the norm, it is inevitable that other groups (especially those who engage in any form of dissent) will be subject to similarly intense levels of government scrutiny.”
Whether because of religious ideals or a political viewpoint, there have always been groups of Americans in the U.S. who have been targeted, which is why 45 civil rights, human rights, privacy rights and faith-based organizations sent a letter to President Barack Obama on Wednesday, asking for “a full public accounting of these practices,” following the publication of the story.
Led by the American Civil Liberties Union, the groups have asked the Obama administration to “strengthen protections against the infringement of civil liberties and human rights,” and requested a meeting with Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and FBI Director James Comey, noting that training materials for intelligence officials appear to be Islamophobic.
“While we do not know all of the facts of the individual reported cases, we believe the government has an obligation to explain the basis for its actions,” the letter explained. “Moreover, we cannot presume that the government acted without prejudice or bias. Too often,both in the past and in the present, we have observed the government engaging in patterns of discriminatory and abusive surveillance.”
The groups also made sure to point out that “during the 1960s and 1970s, civil rights leaders, activists and members of minority communities such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and athlete Muhammad Ali, were subjected to unlawful and abusive government surveillance based not on what they had done, but what they believed and who they were.”
“Despite reform efforts, abusive practices continue today,” they continued. “Federal, state, and local law enforcement are targeting entire communities — particularly American Muslims — for secret surveillance based on their race, religion, ethnicity or national origin.”
In order to preserve democracy in the U.S., the groups urged federal agencies to work to ensure that law enforcement abides by the laws set forth under the U.S. Constitution — specifically, the rights to freedom of speech, association and worship.
“Legal” surveillance
One of the groups that signed the letter to Obama, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has a specific interest in seeing the end of religious discrimination: the group’s executive director, Nihad Awad, was targeted by the FBI and NSA.
Following the publication of The Intercept report, the council released a statement, arguing that Americans are less likely to become politically active or involved in religious activities if they know the government is monitoring them. CAIR says such surveillance creates a “chilling effect” on what are supposed to be constitutionally protected activities.
While CAIR recognized the government’s reasoning for expanding surveillance practices after the 9/11 terror attacks, the group also said these attacks didn’t change American society, warning that the “surveillance society” that has been created in the name of freedom and protection from terrorist activity “threatens to undo generations of commitment to minimizing government intrusions into people’s personal lives.”
Greenwald told Wired that of the five men profiled in the story, Awad was the only one surveilled without a warrant, likely because Awad was frequently traveling to the Middle East when he was being monitored from 2002 and 2008.
Although Awad is an American citizen, frequent travel allows the government to skirt around some laws and surveil an individual without a warrant. Though no warrant was reportedly obtained for Awad, it could be argued that the warrants obtained to allegedly surveil the other four men don’t hold much clout, since requests made by the intelligence community are rarely denied.
Since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, Greenwald and Hussain point out it that its rulings are “notoriously one-sided: In its 35-year history, the court has approved 35,434 government requests for surveillance, while rejecting only 12.”
Despite these concerning statistics, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the NSA maintain that the surveillance of U.S. citizens requires a warrant, “except in exceptional circumstances,” and deny that U.S. officials monitor an individual because of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity or opinion — as those factors are all protected by the First Amendment under the Constitution.
In a joint statement, the two agencies didn’t mention The Intercept report or deny that the five individuals had been surveilled, but said an individual is not exempt from monitored solely because of their occupation.
“The United States is as committed to protecting privacy rights and individual freedom as we are to defending our national security,” the statement said, after emphasizing that accusations that U.S. intelligence agencies are illegally targeting specific groups of individuals are false.
Islamophobia
Muslims may not be the most popular or supported group in the U.S. at the moment, largely due to what Hussain calls “scary, paranoia-inducing abstractions” that surfaced following 9/11, but the journalist said that the NSA and FBI’s electronic surveillance of innocent Americans, which was supposed to catch spies and terrorists, is being abused — and warned this surveillance will expand to other groups of Americans if nothing is done.
Hussain and many others involved in the case have frequently paraphrased Martin Niemöller’s famous quote regarding the importance of speaking out when an individual’s rights are threatened or hampered, as it’s only a matter of time before every person’s rights will be threatened, as well.
As Niemöller so famously described the actions of intellectuals as the Nazis’ rose to power in Germany:
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
“Part of the message we’d like to drive home with this story is that civil rights are the shared inheritance of all citizens, if they degrade for Muslim-Americans they inevitably degrade for everyone,” Hussain said in the Reddit AMA. “To this end we’ve added video to let you hear from surveillance targets in their own voice that they’re just as American as anyone else. As such our hope is that this has a broader impact and it is not just seen as a ‘Muslim issue’ (which it isn’t).”
Meanwhile, in The Intercept’s report, Awad warned, “I think all Americans should be worried about NSA surveillance and the targeting of American Muslims, because if it is American Muslims today, it is going to be them next.”
Wired reported in 2011 that the FBI instructed agents to treat “mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, consider charitable donations from Muslims as a “funding mechanism for combat,” and view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that must be destroyed in order to thwart terrorism.
As The Intercept reported, an internal memo from 2005 explaining how to fill out documents justifying Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act monitoring showcases an Islamophobic stance. For example, in order to demonstrate how to fill out the form, the NSA filled out a sample, using the name “Mohammed Raghead” for their fictitious target.
An NSA spokeswoman released a statement to Greenwald and Hussain stating that the agency “has not and would not approve official training documents that include insulting or inflammatory language.”
“Any use of racial or ethnic stereotypes, slurs, or other similar language by employees is both unacceptable and inconsistent with NSA policy and core values,” the statement continued.
But John Guandolo, a former FBI counterterrorism official who claims to have developed a training program for FBI agents on the “Muslim Brotherhood and their subversive movement in the United States” and who participated in the surveillance of individuals on the email list, said many active Muslims in the U.S. have successfully infiltrated the intelligence community and the Pentagon, which is why this kind of surveillance is necessary.
Guandolo also warned that CIA Director John Brennan is not to be trusted, either. His claims that Brennan secretly converted to Islam have prompted the intelligence community to clarify that Guandolo does not speak on their behalf and attempt to distance themselves from him.
Accountability moving forward
Though not all Americans agree that the Snowden revelations are an asset to democracy in the U.S., but rather view the NSA leaks as harmful to the country, Hussain said he and Greenwald proceeded with the story despite government objections because “[h]istory has shown that government institutions function best when they are subjected to public oversight and accountability.”
“While operating in the dark we can see that there were many practices being conducted at the NSA which were in fact objectionable to many American citizens,” he said in the Reddit AMA. “Our hope is that this story and future stories to come will generate the necessary political shift to ensure greater accountability in [the] future.”
The Intercept report was supposed to be released last week, but Greenwald tweeted on June 30 that he had to postpone the story’s release in order to clarify some information with government officials. Although Greenwald and Hussain reached out to the Justice Department and asked for an interview, no one responded to their media query.
However, Greenwald and Hussain discovered last week that officials within the Justice Department had been reaching out to leaders within the Muslim community across the U.S., telling them that the piece would be riddled with errors and misrepresentations and cautioning them to not trust it.
Spying on patriots
Faisal Gill’s inclusion on the list has been especially puzzling to many. The Pakistani immigrant and U.S. citizen has lived in the U.S. since he was eight years old. He served as a Judge Advocate General’s Corps officer in the U.S. military and held a top-secret security clearance while he worked for the White House Office of Homeland Security and the Department of Homeland Security.
It is believed Gill was added to the list because he is a practicing Muslim and has ties to attorney Asim Ghafoor, who served as a legislative assistant to Congressman Ciro Rodriguez of Texas in the 1990s, before working as a lobbyist on behalf of the Muslim community in Washington, D.C.
In 2003, Ghafoor was hired by the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi charity group accused by the U.S. Treasury Department of funding terrorist operatives, to represent the organization against the U.S. government in court.
Non-Muslim politicians including former House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, former Rep. Bob Livingston, and former Clinton adviser Lanny Davis, have all represented foreign governments such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Libya, Sudan and a post-coup Honduras, yet none of these individuals appear to have been surveilled by the U.S. intelligence community.
While journalists, attorneys and groups of Americans have challenged the U.S. government’s surveillance practices in recent years, the defendants were never able to prove without a doubt that they were unfairly targeted by the government, which is reportedly why the courts opted to not intervene.
Release of the latest Snowden documents may shift the views of the courts during future proceedings and help some individuals prove they were targeted by the U.S. government, which could lead to the beginning of the end of the government’s dragnet surveillance tactics.
Talking to Wired, Greenwald said the documents are the proof that people like Ghafoor have been looking for and confirmed that the lawyer was targeted because of his religion. As the attorney told The Intercept, “I believe that they tapped me because my name is Asim Abdur Rahman Ghafoor, my parents are from India, I travelled to Saudi Arabia as a young man, and I do the pilgrimage.”
Though the U.S. government has insisted that lawyers and innocent Americans have never been targeted for surveillance, Greenwald and Hussain noted that several attorneys without ties to Islam or the Middle East who worked on some of these same cases were not electronically surveilled, which is why some are calling foul on what appears to be a deliberate effort to target those who practice Islam.
“There were former Bush Administration officials representing Saudi entities, and I doubt their emails were tapped,” said Ghafoor. “And if they were, at some point some official would’ve said, ‘Why are we tapping [former Bush Justice Department official] Viet Dinh?’ I’d be shocked if they were tapping Viet Dinh. But Asim Ghafoor—’Oh, well he’s Muslim.’”