The Clipboard: FBI Tells Offices to Count Local Muslims and Mosques

From an article¹:

The F.B.I. is ordering field supervisors to count the number of mosques and Muslims in their areas as part of the antiterrorism effort. (link - registration required)

Who to believe? Congressional staff members were told, "the information would be used to help establish a yardstick for the number of terrorism investigations and intelligence warrants that a field office could reasonably be expected to produce... If the numbers don't compute that will trigger an automatic inspection from headquarters to figure out why they aren't living up to that". But the public is told, "Any suggestion that the number of mosques in a field division is being used to set investigative goals for that division is wrong".

Dear God, what are things coming to?

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Complete text of the article, F.B.I. Tells Offices to Count Local Muslims and Mosques, by Eric Lichtblau (registration required for offsite link)

The F.B.I. is ordering field supervisors to count the number of mosques and Muslims in their areas as part of the antiterrorism effort.

Civil rights advocates and Arab-American leaders denounced the survey as a form of racial profiling. Bureau officials said, however, that the results would not be used to establish quotas for investigations.

"Any suggestion that the number of mosques in a field division is being used to set investigative goals for that division is wrong," an assistant director of the bureau, Cassandra Chandler, said in a statement. "The survey, a small part of the F.B.I.'s much larger re-engineering effort, looked at a wide range of demographic and other measures, focused primarily on vulnerabilities, and mosques in the past have been targeted for violence."

Ms. Chandler declined to elaborate on the statement. Bureau officials would not say what other information field supervisors were directed to provide in an internal six-page questionnaire issued this month. The officials also would not say how the results would be used. The survey was first reported in Newsweek.

Ms. Chandler's explanation differs markedly from the description of the program that a senior bureau official gave Congressional staff members last week in a closed briefing. The official, Wilson Lowery Jr., executive assistant director of the bureau, told the briefing that the bureau was collecting information on mosques and Muslims in the 56 field offices, according to a senior Congressional aide familiar with the presentation.

Mr. Lowery told Congressional officials that the information would be used to help establish a yardstick for the number of terrorism investigations and intelligence warrants that a field office could reasonably be expected to produce, the Congressional aide said.

"If the numbers don't compute," the aide said, "that will trigger an automatic inspection from headquarters to figure out why they aren't living up to that."

Some officials here have been frustrated by what they see as the failure of some field offices to respond aggressively enough in chasing terrorism leads, and the information would give them a firmer means to gauge progress, the aide said.

Congressional officials were bothered because the survey would apparently lump all mosques in one category without distinguishing mosques that have reported extremist ties, the aide said.

"We need to ask a lot more questions before we know whether we're really bothered," the aide said. "On its face, it certainly sounds like the F.B.I. is pressuring agents to use a profile. It's beyond eyebrow-raising. It seems like a bloody waste of law enforcement resources, and it's pure profiling in its worst form."

Civil rights advocates and Arab-American groups called on the bureau today to revoke its directive.

"This is obviously an indication to F.B.I. field agents that they have to view every mosque and every Muslim as a potential terrorist," said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy group here.

Mr. Hooper said the F.B.I. should determine its investigative priorities based on criminal standards of probable cause, not on the number of mosques or Muslims in a particular area.

"This is really imposing a sense of siege on the Arab-American community," he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union said the survey was "tailor-made for a witch hunt" in encouraging agents to focus on mosques and Muslims. The A.C.L.U. compared the order to the ethnic census information collected in World War II, a precursor to the internment of Japanese-Americans.

Arab-American leaders estimate that the country has 2,000 mosques.

The Justice Department has made it easier for F.B.I. agents to visit mosques and other places of worship since the Sept. 11 attacks to follow investigative leads.

The bureau sought voluntary interviews last year with 5,000 Arab-Americans in its antiterrorism effort, and agents are focusing on several thousand Iraqis in the United States in voluntary interviews and secret surveillance as Washington moves toward a possible war with Iraq.

reference=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/28/politics/28MOSQ.html