WASHINGTON (Al Jazeera) – The United States Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case that will determine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) can invoke “state secrets” privilege to avoid a lawsuit over its monitoring of Muslim communities and places of worship.
Plaintiffs in the case, which stems from a lawsuit originally filed in 2011, say the U.S. government has for years used national security to dodge accountability. That has deprived them of a chance to present in court a mountain of evidence they say shows the FBI pursued a “dragnet” surveillance campaign against the Muslim community in Southern California that included secret audio and video recording and was motivated solely by the religion of those monitored.
That surveillance came amid a slew of early 2000s U.S. government tactics targeting Muslims in the name of national security that continue to cast a long shadow, even as they remain shrouded in secrecy.
“We’ve been feeling violated for the past 15 years now, at least since the time that I found out what the FBI was doing,” said Sheikh Yassir Fazaga, who was an imam at the Orange County Islamic Foundation in Mission Viejo, California, when the agency sent a paid informant posing as a convert to monitor his mosque and others in the area beginning in 2006.
The religious leader is a plaintiff in the case, Fazaga v FBI, along with Ali Uddin Malik and Yasser Abdelrahim, both congregants at the Islamic Center of Irvine in Irvine, California.
A lower court in 2012 dismissed the trio’s initial lawsuit, ruling in favor of the FBI’s position that, in part, argued that letting it proceed would pose a national security risk. A federal appeals court later sided with Fazaga, Malik and Abdelrahim, saying the lawsuit should proceed, advancing the case to the U.S.’s top court.
For a decade spanning three presidential administrations, the government’s line of defense to the lawsuit has remained the same, said Ahilan Arulanantham, the faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, who will argue on behalf of Fazaga, Malik and Abdelrahim at the Supreme Court on Monday.
“The government’s position has been, ‘We don’t (monitor) people solely because of their religion’,” he said. “Anything more that we tell you at all would risk national security and therefore can’t be shared with anyone, even the court in secret.
“The government’s position amounts to: ‘Sorry, but you have to just trust us’,” he said.
The FBI, to date, has been shielded from offering a full account of its surveillance activities in Southern California, but has confirmed in unrelated court proceedings that Craig Monteilh was working as an informant for the agency at several mosques in Orange County in 2006 and 2007.