US high court to weigh FBI surveillance of mosque

The US Supreme Court yesterday will take up a case involving three Muslim men in California who say they were surveilled at their mosque by the FBI after the September 11, 2001 attacks based solely on their religion.

The three men – Yassir Fazaga, imam of the Orange County Islamic Foundation, along with Ali Uddin Malik and Yasser Abdelrahim – say the

FBI sent a confidential informant to several mosques in the county in 2006 and 2007, ordering the man to pose as a convert and gather information.

“The FBI employed a paid informant person with a prior criminal history to infiltrate these mosques,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer with the ACLU civil rights group who will represent the plaintiffs before the high court.

The informant, he said, “told everybody that he was a convert, that he was wanting to rediscover his French-Algerian roots.”

“He then was instructed by the FBI to gather as much information as possible on people in this community – cell phones, email addresses, conversations, which he secretly recorded,” Arulanantham told reporters.

The ACLU says the informant recorded religious prayer groups in the mosque, leaving a secret recording device hidden in his car key fob, as well as secretly making videos in mosques, homes and businesses.

Arulanantham said the informant “started, again at his FBI handlers’ behalf, to try to incite violence, but he scared a bunch of people, when he was talking about things like bombing, Jihad and the war in Iraq and Afghanistan (and) they reported him to the FBI.”

The lawyer said the informant then ‘became disgruntled’, argued with his FBI handlers, and ultimately decided to go public with his experience.

The imam and his two congregants then filed a complaint against the FBI for spying on them in violation of federal law and their constitutional rights.