July, 09 2014, 02:14pm EDT

NSA and FBI Targeting Muslim American Community Leaders, Experts Available
WASHINGTON
The NSA and FBI monitored the e-mails of prominent Muslim American leaders and attorneys, including the head of the largest American Muslim civil rights group, reported The Intercept today. Faiza Patel and Elizabeth Goitein, co-directors of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Michael German, former FBI agent and Fellow at the Brennan Center, are available for your coverage.
Despite repeated assurances from officials that the government only uses its intelligence authority only to target "bad guys," new NSA documents indicate that the FBI collected, sometimes for several years, the emails of prominent Muslim American civil rights leaders and activists. According to the story, the FBI obtained authorization from the secret FISA court for some targets by alleging that they were agents of foreign powers, apparently based on their civil rights, legal, and political work. There is also a suggestion that in at least one case, there was no warrant at all. Notably, the monitoring of lawyers' emails raises concerns that some of the information collected may be protected by the attorney-client privilege, which the intelligence agencies are bound to respect.
"Since 9/11, American-Muslim communities have been fair game for law enforcement tactics of the sort that were used against African American civil rights groups in the 1960s and '70s," said Faiza Patel. "By targeting the leaders of these communities for secret full scale monitoring, the FBI has taken this tactic to another level. How can any of us who work to advance justice for American Muslims feel free to do our work if we fear the government is watching our every step?"
"Two other aspects of the story should raise big red flags for all Americans. The administration's assertion that they use court-approved warrants 'except in exceptional circumstances' suggests that there are instances in which they are avoiding the very judicial scrutiny they hold out as legitimizing surveillance operations," said Patel. "It also seems that the intelligence community doesn't take attorney-client privilege very seriously -- it feels free to look at information that courts have long recognized as protected."
"These documents raise the specter that the government may be spying on Americans based on their religion or political activities," said Elizabeth Goitein. "At a minimum, the targeting of these community leaders under a law reserved for terrorists and agents of foreign powers raises very serious questions. And the use of the term 'Raghead' in a tutorial for intelligence officers is sickening. The burden is now on the administration to explain and justify what looks very much like an abuse of the intelligence community's surveillance powers."
"The FBI has a long history of abusing intelligence authorities to impede Americans' First Amendment rights," said Michael German. "The loosened restrictions on such collection have re-opened the door to this abuse, and distracted the FBI from the search for real threats. We must have stronger intelligence guidelines that protect Americans from undue racial and religious profiling and better oversight to end intelligence programs that are unnecessary, ineffective, or prone to abuse."
This would not be the first time the FBI has targeted groups based on race, ethnicity, national origin, or religion. Despite efforts to reform FBI surveillance abuse in the 1970s, Freedom of Information Act documents obtained in 2011 revealed the FBI was collecting racial and ethnic data to map and investigate American communities across the U.S. without reasonable suspicion. Other documents show that the FBI was targeting individuals and organizations due to their First Amendment-protected activities, including exploiting a mosque outreach program to secretly collect information on law-abiding Muslims and investigations of environmental advocacy groups.
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Faiza Patel has commented on Muslim surveillance programs in The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, Al Jazeera America, MSNBC.com, The Guardian, Salon, The Huffington Post, the New York Daily News, and The Washington Post. She has also commented extensively on secret data collection in The New York Times, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Los Angeles Times, Wired Magazine, CBS News, Christian Science Monitor, Al Jazeera America , and Boston Review and has appeared on Bloomberg and Current TV.
Elizabeth Goitein has written on surveillance in The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Christian Science Monitor, Reuters, USA Today, Time, and the Boston Review; has appeared to discuss the NSA on The Today Show, Andrea Mitchell Reports, All in with Chris Hayes, The Rachel Maddow Show, Up with Steve Kornacki, and The Shepard Smith Show; and has been quoted on this subject in The Washington Post, USA Today, the Daily Beast, The Guardian, Reuters, McClatchy, and Bloomberg, among other outlets.
Michael German, a former FBI agent, has discussed government spying and Muslim surveillance in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, The Guardian,The Intercept, The Washington Post, MSNBC, Rolling Stone, NPR, National Law Journal, McClatchy, Reuters, The Telegraph, Wired, NBC News, and Democracy Now.
The Brennan Center for Justice is a nonpartisan law and policy institute. We strive to uphold the values of democracy. We stand for equal justice and the rule of law. We work to craft and advance reforms that will make American democracy work, for all.
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Stateless Palestinian Woman Details 'Very Traumatizing' Abuse Suffered in ICE Detention
Trump administration immigration officials reportedly dismissed Ward Sakeik's ordeal as a "sob story."
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A newlywed Palestinian woman from Texas released from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention earlier this week says she was shackled for long periods, denied food and water, and subjected to other human rights abuses during nearly five months in ICE custody—all because she is a stateless person.
Ward Sakeik, 22, was born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents from Gaza. Because Saudi Arabia does not grant birthright citizenship to the children of foreign nationals, Sakeik was officially stateless when her family legally emigrated to the United States when she was 8 years old.
“I was moved around like cattle.”
Ward Sakeik, US college graduate and homeowner, speaks out following 140 days in ICE hellhole pic.twitter.com/bNTgs7362h
— World Socialist Web Site (@WSWS_Updates) July 5, 2025
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After graduating high school and the University of Texas, Arlington, starting a wedding photography business, marrying a U.S. citizen, and beginning the process of obtaining a green card, Sakeik and her husband went on their honeymoon in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She was detained shortly after arriving back in the United States after Customs and Border Protection agents flagged her for flying over international waters—a move that Department of Homeland Security officials said violated immigration policy.
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Sakeik said unhygienic conditions at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas—where an ICE officer was shot in the neck during a Friday evening attack—caused widespread illness among detainees.
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Sakeik said she now plans to advocate on behalf of women and girls imprisoned by ICE.
"I... want the world to know that the women who do come here come here for a better life, but they're criminalized for that," she said. "They are dehumanized, and they're stripped away from their rights. We have been treated as a 'less-than' just simply for wanting a better life."
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As the death toll from catastrophic flooding in Texas continued to rise, climate scientists this weekend underscored the link between more frequent and severe extreme weather events and the worsening climate emergency caused primarily by humans burning fossil fuels.
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While some local officials blamed what they said were faulty forecasts from the National Weather Service—which has been hit hard by staffing cuts ordered by the Trump administration's Department of Government Efficiency in line with Project 2025—meteorologists and climate scientists including Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles have refuted such allegations, citing multiple NWS warnings of potentially deadly flooding.
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As Jeff Masters and Bob Henson wrote Saturday for Yale Climate Connections:
Many studies have confirmed that human-caused climate change is making the heaviest short-term rainfall events more intense, largely by warming the world's oceans and thus sending more water vapor into the atmosphere that can fuel heavy rain events. Sea surface temperatures this week have been as much as 1°F below the 1981-2010 average for early July in the western Gulf [of Mexico] and Caribbean, but up to 1°F above average in the central Gulf. Long-term human-caused warming made the latter up to 10 times more likely, according to the Climate Shift Index from Climate Central.
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It’s hard to make the Texas flood tragedy worse, except to know that on the same day Trump signed a bill to stop our efforts to defeat the climate change that is causing increased frequency of disastrous floods. And giving us more expensive electricity. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/05/c...
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— Governor Jay Inslee (@govjayinslee.bsky.social) July 5, 2025 at 9:29 AM
Instead of taking action to combat the planetary emergency, the Trump administration is ramping up fossil fuel production while waging war on clean energy and climate initiatives. The so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law by Trump on Friday slashes the tax credits for electric vehicles and other renewable technologies including wind and solar energy that were a cornerstone of the Biden-era Inflation Reduction Act.
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Metropolitan Police arrested at least 27 protesters who gathered in central London on Saturday to publicly support Palestine Action, a nonviolent direct action group now officially designated a terrorist organization by the U.K. government.
According to Middle East Eye, Palestine defenders including 83-year-old Rev. Sue Parfitt, a former government attorney, an emeritus professor, and health workers gathered by a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Parliament Square, where they held signs reading, "I OPPOSE GENOCIDE, I SUPPORT PALESTINE ACTION."
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"If we cannot speak freely about the genocide that is occurring... democracy and human rights in this country are dead."
"We would like to alert you to the fact we may be committing offenses under the Terrorism Act tomorrow, Saturday 5 July, in Parliament Square at about 1pm," the group said in an open letter to Met Commissioner Mark Rowley.
"If we cannot speak freely about the genocide that is occurring, if we cannot condemn those who are complicit in it and express support for those who resist it, then the right to freedom of expression has no meaning, and democracy and human rights in this country are dead," the letter argues.
Parfitt told Novara Media that members of Defend Our Juries were "testing the law."
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Members of the group Defend Our Juries publicly declare their opposition to Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza and their support for the proscribed group Palestine Action while Metropolitan Police officers look on before arresting them during a July 4, 2025 demonstration in London. (Photo: Kristian Buus/In Pictures via Getty Images)
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"It's a relief to know that counter-terrorism police have nothing better to do," the group quipped.
Last week, British lawmakers voted to ban Palestine Action as a terrorist group after some of its members vandalized two aircraft at a Royal Air Force base in Oxfordshire on June 20. The group—which was founded in 2020 and has also vandalized U.S. President Donald Trump's golf course in Turnberry, Scotland—is known for taking direction action against companies that supply weapons to Israel, which is accused of genocide in an ongoing International Court of Justice case concerning the war on Gaza.
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Palestine Action tried to delay the ban via legal action. However, the High Court on Friday denied the group's appeal for interim relief was denied on Friday, a decision that was upheld by the Court of Appeal.
The nonviolent group is now on the same legal footing in Britain as Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. Joining or supporting Palestine Action is now punishable by up to 14 years behind bars.
At midnight, Palestine Action will be proscribed under the Terrorism Act.Their real “crime”? Exposing the UK’s role in arming Israel’s genocide.This is a dark day for our democracy.Criminalising non-violent resistance won’t silence the truth.We are all Palestine Action 🇵🇸
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— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana.bsky.social) July 4, 2025 at 2:38 PM
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