[wvns] Imam refuses to be an informant

After Imam Foad Farahi declined to become a federal informant, the government tried to destroy him.

FBI tries to deport Muslim man for refusing to be an informant
By Trevor Aaronson
published: October 08, 2009http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2009-10-08/news/unholy-war-fbi-tries-to-deport-north-miami-beach-imam-foad-farahi-for-refusing-to-be-an-informant/

Imam Foad Farahi says he turned down the FBI's invitation to be an informant.

Now the local Muslim leader and his attorney, Ira Kurzban (shown), are fighting the government's efforts to deport him to Iran.

Foad Farahi believes the FBI targeted him as an informant because of his previous encounters with José Padilla (shown) and Adnan El Shukrijumah, who are linked to Al-Qaeda.

Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards signs littered the lawns of North Miami Beach as Imam Foad Farahi walked from a mosque to his apartment a
few blocks away. It was November 1, 2004, the day before George W. Bush would win a second term in office. But the Muslim holy man had been too busy fasting and praying to pay much attention to the presidential election.

For Farahi, an Iranian citizen who had lived in the United States
for more than a decade, it was simply another month of Ramadan in South Florida. Then, around 5 p.m., as he neared his apartment, he saw two men standing outside. They were waiting for him.

"We're from the FBI," one of the men said.

"OK," he responded.

They wanted to know about José Padilla and Adnan El Shukrijumah, two
South Florida men linked to the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. Padilla,
the so-called Dirty Bomber, was arrested in May 2002 and initially
given enemy combatant status. He eventually stood trial in Miami, was
convicted on terrorism charges, and sentenced to 17 years in prison.
Shukrijumah is a Saudi Arabian and an alleged Al-Qaeda member whose
last known address was in Miramar. The FBI is offering up to $5 million for information leading directly to his capture.

"I know José Padilla, but I don't know Adnan," Farahi told the agents.

Of course, Farahi knew of Shukrijumah. As imam of the Shamsuddin
Islamic Center in North Miami Beach, Farahi was in a unique position to know about local Muslims, including Padilla and Shukrijumah. Padilla had prayed at Farahi's mosque and was once among his Arabic students. Shukrijumah was the son of a local Islamic religious leader.

"I have had no contact with Padilla since 1998, when he left the
country," Farahi told the government agents. He had once met
Shukrijumah but had no contact with him after that. "I don't know
anything about his activities."

"We want you to work with us," Farahi remembers the agents telling him.

And this is when the imam's five-year battle with the federal government began.

"I have no problem working with you guys or helping you out," Farahi
said. He could keep them informed about the local Muslim community or
translate Arabic. But the relationship, he insisted, would need to be
public; others would have to know he was helping the government.

But that wasn't what the FBI had in mind, Farahi says. The agents
wanted him to become a secret informant who would investigate specific
people. And they knew Farahi was in a vulnerable position. His student
visa had expired, and he had asked the government for a renewal. He had
also applied for political asylum, hoping one of those legal tracks
would offer a way for him to stay in the United States indefinitely.

"We'll give you residency," the agents promised. "We'll give you money to go to school."

Farahi considered the offer for a moment and then shook his head.

"I can't," he told them.

The slender, bearded 34-year-old Farahi frowns as he recalls all of
this while sitting on a white folding chair in the Shamsuddin Islamic
Center on a recent afternoon. "People trust you as a religious figure,
and you're trying to kind of deceive them," he says, remembering the
choice he faced. "That's where the problem is."

Farahi soon discovered the FBI's offer wasn't optional. The federal
government used strong-arm tactics — including trying to have him
deported and falsely claiming it had information linking him to
terrorism — in an effort to force him to become an informant, he says.

The imam has resisted the government at every step, having most
recently taken his political asylum case to the U.S. Court of Appeals
in Atlanta.

"As long as you're not a citizen, there are lots of things [the
government] can do," says Ira Kurzban, Farahi's attorney. "They can
allege you're a terrorist and try to bring terrorist charges against
you, or they can get you deported." Terrorism, he explains, can even be defined as giving "money to a hospital in the West Bank that turns out to be run by Hamas."

Farahi asserts unequivocally he is innocent of any terrorism charges
the government could bring against him. In fact, he says, he would
report anyone in the Muslim community supporting terrorism. "From the
Islamic perspective, it's your duty to respect the law, and if there's
anything going on, any crime about to be committed, or any kind of harm to be caused to people or property, it should be reported to the
police," he says.

The FBI's intense efforts to pressure Farahi into becoming an
informant reveal the bureau's desperation to infiltrate local Muslim
communities. The hard-line tactics have become so widespread in the
United States that the San Francisco-based civil rights group Muslim
Advocates distributes a video advising how to respond if FBI agents
approach.

In fact, relations between the FBI and U.S. Islamic communities are
so strained that a coalition of Muslim-American groups in March accused the government of using "McCarthy-era tactics" and threatened to sever communication with the FBI unless it "reassessed its use of agent provocateurs in Muslim communities."

Despite this public conflict, few specific cases of Muslims being
recruited as informants have become public. Farahi's battle with the
government is not only daring but also unusual.

"People have two choices," Farahi says. "Either they end up working
with the FBI, or they leave the country on their own. It's just
sometimes when you're in that situation, not many people are strong
enough to stand up and resist and fight — to reject their offers."

----------

By law, Foad Farahi is an Iranian. But by every other measure, the North Miami Beach imam is something else. In his 34 years, he has never set foot in Iran. He speaks Arabic, not Farsi, and while the majority of Iranians are members of the Shia sect of Islam, Farahi
is a Sunni. He is an Iranian only because he inherited his father's
citizenship.

But Farahi grew up in Kuwait. His father was an Iranian businessman
who operated a currency exchange business in Kuwait City. His mother, a Syrian, raised him and his younger sister to speak Arabic and worship as Sunnis. But he knew his future would never be secure in Kuwait.

"Even if I married a Kuwaiti woman, I wouldn't become a citizen," he
says. "Kuwait could deport me to Iran at any time for any reason."

At age 19, he applied for and received a student visa from the
United States. He chose to come to South Florida, where his family once vacationed when he was a teenager, and enrolled in Miami Dade College.

He received an associate's degree there and transferred to Barry
University, the private Catholic school in Miami Shores, where he
earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry.

While at Barry, he served on the university's interfaith committee,
several faculty members recall. This continued even after he graduated.

He helped put together interfaith dinners and talked about Islam. In
addition, he participated as a teacher in a Barry University peace
forum attended by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children. "He has had a positive influence at this university," says Edward R. Sunshine, a
theology professor at Barry. No one who knows Farahi, Sunshine says,
would suspect he is radical or militant in any way.

Farahi went on to obtain a master's degree in public health from
Florida International University. He also began an intensive,
three-year imam's training course administered by the director of
Islamic studies at a mosque in Miramar. In 2000, the Shamsuddin Islamic Center opened near his home in North Miami Beach. Six months later, its imam returned home to Egypt, and Farahi was a logical successor.

In Islam, an imam is among the designated leaders in a community or
mosque. The imam leads prayers during gatherings and helps others
understand the teachings of Islam. Farahi earns a modest salary funded
by donations to the mosque.

It was through this position that he met several South Floridians
who have been linked to terrorism. In addition to Padilla and
Shukrijumah, he encountered Imran Mandhai, a 19-year-old Pakistani man
living in Hollywood who was arrested in 2002 for an alleged plot to
bomb power plants.

"Imran came here once years ago during Ramadan," Farahi recalls as
he sits in a corner of the mosque. "It was a big event for him at the
time. He memorized and recited the Koran."

When Farahi met with the FBI agents November 1, 2004, he said he
couldn't spy on members of his mosque in good conscience. Two days
later, FBI agents phoned him. They requested he come to their office to take a polygraph. "I had nothing to hide," Farahi recalls. "They asked the same questions over and over, to see if my answer would change, and it didn't."

The agents were still focused on Shukrijumah.

"What is your relationship with him?"

"When was the last time you were in contact with him?"

"Where is he now?"

For two and a half years after the polygraph, Farahi didn't hear
from the FBI. Then, in summer 2007, he received another call from the
bureau. An agent asked to meet with him immediately. In Cooper City,
two FBI agents — a man and a woman — again asked Farahi if he would
work with the government. He again declined, and the meeting ended
amicably.

Farahi didn't know the pushback would come later.

----------

On a November day in 2007, Farahi arrived at Miami Immigration Court for what he thought would be a routine hearing on his political asylum case. The imam had requested asylum because he is a Sunni, a persecuted religious minority in Iran. Fear of religious persecution is one of the internationally recognized grounds the United States considers in granting asylum from Iran.

As Farahi entered the courthouse, he saw four men from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They wore body armor and had guns
holstered at their sides. All followed Farahi from the security
checkpoint on the ground level to the third-floor courtroom of Judge
Carey Holliday.

Farahi's attorney at the time, Mildred Morgado, spoke with the ICE
agents and then asked to talk to Farahi in private. "They have a file
with evidence that you're supporting or are involved in terrorist
groups," Farahi recalls Morgado telling him. (Morgado did not return
repeated calls seeking comment.)

Farahi says the ICE agents gave him an ultimatum: Drop the asylum
case and leave the United States voluntarily, or be charged as a
terrorist. He was afraid.

Indeed, luck wasn't on Farahi's side when drawing a judge for his
asylum claim. Appointed to the immigration court in October 2006 by
then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Holliday was a Louisiana
Republican who had quickly earned a reputation for being tough on
immigrants in Florida. In one case, he declined to hear arguments from
an Ecuadorian couple who alleged they were targeted for deportation
because their daughter, Miami Dade College student Gabby Pacheco, was a well-known activist for immigration reform. "People who live in glass houses should not throw stones," Holliday wrote. (The judge resigned this past January, after the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General found Bush administration officials had illegally considered political affiliation when selecting judicial candidates for immigration court.)

So Farahi told Judge Holliday he would voluntarily leave the country
within 30 days. Although Farahi's Iranian passport was expired — a
bureaucratic problem that should have given him more time to consider
the government's threat — Judge Holliday granted the order of voluntary departure.

Soon, Farahi realized the government's claim that it would prosecute
him as a terrorist was a bluff — nothing more than leverage to coerce
him into becoming an informant. To this day, the government has not
shared with Farahi or his attorney any information about this professed evidence, and he has not been charged with a crime.

"If they have something on Foad, they should make it public. They
haven't done that," says Sunshine, the Barry University theology
professor. "They are intimidating and bullying, and I resent that type
of behavior being paid for by my tax dollars."

Farahi's assertion that the government is trying to coerce him to
become an informant cannot be verified independently because the FBI
won't comment on his case. "It is a matter of policy that we do not
confirm or deny who we have asked to be a source," says Miami FBI
Special Agent Judy Orihuela. But similar claims from other would-be
informants seem to support Farahi's assertion.

In November 2005, for example, immigration officials questioned
Yassine Ouassif, a 24-year-old Moroccan with a green card, as he
crossed into New York from Canada. The officials confiscated his green
card and instructed him to meet an FBI agent in Oakland, California.
The bureau's offer: Become an informant or be deported. Ouassif refused to spy and won his deportation case with the help of National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights on behalf of Muslims and immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia.

The government employed a similarly tough tactic against Tarek
Mehanna, a 26-year-old U.S. citizen living in Sudbury, Massachusetts.
After FBI agents failed to persuade Mehanna to spy, the government
charged him with making a false statement. Prosecutors allege Mehanna
told FBI agents a suspect was in Egypt when he knew that person was in
Somalia. Mehanna is awaiting trial, and his attorney has alleged the
prosecution is a form of revenge for Mehanna's unwillingness to be an
informant.

Among more recent cases is that of Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, a
naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan. Charged with making a false
statement to obtain citizenship, he alleged in a February detention
hearing in Orange County, California, that he was arrested and indicted for refusing to be an informant.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) suspects there are
hundreds of similar cases in which the government has used deportation
or criminal charges to force cooperation from informants. Most of these cases will never be made public. What's more, the FBI is now working under guidelines, approved in December 2008 by then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey, that allow agents to consider religion and ethnic background when launching undercover investigations. Today, many Muslims in the United States simply assume informants are working
inside their mosques.

"This is becoming increasingly common," says Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR's
national communications director. "Law enforcement authorities seek to
use some vulnerability of the individual, whether it be business,
immigration, or personal, to try to gain some sort of informant status.

"The issue is law enforcement's basic understanding of the
community. Is it one that law enforcement needs to have blanket
suspicion toward or is it... well integrated into our multi-faith
nation and wants to preserve public safety as well as civil liberties?"

----------

Ira Kurzban's law office in Miami is a mile from the alfresco
restaurants of Coconut Grove. On a hot day in late August, Kurzban
wears a white guayabera and shows no concern for the disheveled gray
hairs on the sides of his balding head.

He leans forward at his desk, having been asked a question about
Farahi. "He's an imam in his mosque," Kurzban says as he throws his
hands in the air in a sort of protest. "He's basically, you know, the
rabbi."

Kurzban has become a well-known advocate for immigrants' rights,
having argued more immigration-related cases before the U.S. Supreme
Court than any of his peers. He is also on the board of directors of
Immigrants' List, the first political action committee in Washington,
D.C., established to support candidates who endorse immigration reform.

Farahi, desperate not to leave the country but frightened after
government agents threatened to charge him as a terrorist, hired
Kurzban to take his case on appeal.

In November 2007, Kurzban asked the Board of Immigration Appeals to
throw out Farahi's voluntary departure order and reopen his political
asylum case, arguing the imam was illegally intimidated. The board
denied the request, so Kurzban petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals in
Atlanta. Farahi's order of voluntary departure has been stayed.

For now, the legal battle makes Farahi a kind of no-land's man. He
no longer has an official immigration status in the United States, and
in asking for political asylum, he has rejected his Iranian
citizenship. As he was in Kuwait, Farahi is home in a land that could
expel him at any time.

"I think the real issue is, does the government have the right to
pressure people... to make them informants?" Kurzban says. "It's
clearly modus operandi of the FBI to (a) recruit people who are going
to be informants and (b) to use whatever leverage they can."

A few weeks later, in North Miami Beach, Ramadan is nearing its end.
For Farahi, this year's religious festival marks nearly five years
since the FBI first asked him to be an informant. "I'm not bitter about what has happened," the imam insists.

Dressed in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, he walks
barefoot through the mosque as members begin to arrange food on folding banquet tables. After sundown, everyone will eat and drink together to break the fast. Farahi is distracted as he waves at attendees and hugs others entering the mosque.

"I'm not bitter," he repeats after a few moments. "I wouldn't say
I'm bitter at all. But I'm tired. I want to live my life in this
country. I want to stay here. That's all."

Farahi stops and waves to another man. The imam shakes his head
quickly. "I wish the case would be over," he says. "I just wish I could stay here."

Research for this story was supported in part by a grant from
Political Research Associates, with funding from the Atlantic
Philanthropies.

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