Mosque infiltration by FBI mole debated at US Supreme Court

Three residents of California assure that the FBI had introduced an informant in their mosque to collect, between 2006 and 2007, information on the faithful.

That man “who had a criminal record, presented himself as a convert eager to revisit his Franco-Algerian roots“, specified Ahilan Arulanantham, lawyer of the powerful association of defense of civil rights ACLU which supports the plaintiffs.

The police have “asked to collect as much information as possible about the members of this community: phone numbers, email addresses, and to secretly record conversations“, added the lawyer during a presentation to the press of the file.

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“She asked him to incite violence, but he scared people so much with his comments about the bombings, the jihad, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that they reported him to the police.“, says M. Arulanantham.

After the incident, he had an argument with agents and decided to go public with his actions as a paid FBI informant, according to the lawyer.

The imam and two worshipers had then filed a complaint against the FBI for violating religious freedom and discrimination.

The Ministry of Justice replied that it had started this monitoring program for objective reasons, and not because these people were Muslims. However, he sheltered behind state secrecy to refuse to give details of these reasons and asked the courts to close the complaint.

A lower court ruled in his favor, but an appeals court then ruled that the court should have examined the material protected by secrecy behind closed doors.

The highest American court has agreed to intervene and will answer the following question: can a court consider classified elements to judge the merits of a complaint calling into question the legality of a surveillance program of State ?

The file is “Extremely important“because it is a question of whether the government can prevent any prosecution of its surveillance programs,”even when there are very well-founded accusations, as here, of religious discrimination“commented Mr. Arulanantham.