How One Man Refused to Spy on Fellow Muslims for the FBI—And Then Lost Everything
http://m.thenation.com/article/182096-h ... everythingArun Kundnani and Emily Keppler and Muki Najaer on
October 14, 2014 - 3:13PM ET
On the night of December 9, 2011, Siham Stewart called her husband, Ayyub Abdul-Alim, as he closed down his corner store, Nature's Garden, in Springfield, Massachusetts. She asked him to bring home a gallon of milk. A few minutes later, she watched from the window of their second-floor apartment as he was seized in the street and handcuffed by two police officers.
Forty-eight hours after Abdul-Alim's arrest, FBI agent James Hisgen and Springfield police officer Ronald Sheehan offered him the chance to walk away free of charges if he agreed to become an informant on the Muslim community. He refused the deal and is now held at the Cedar Junction maximum-security prison in Massachusetts, facing up to sixteen years behind bars.
While awaiting trial, Abdul-Alim discovered that his wife received cash payments from the FBI totaling at least $11,949. The receipts were signed by Sheehan and Hisgen. Stewart testified against Abdul-Alim in court and admitted to working as an informant. This past April, Abdul-Alim was found guilty of illegal possession of a firearm that he alleges the officers planted on him as part of their attempt to pressure him to work for the FBI.
Abdul-Alim, 36, grew up in New York City in a family of African-American and Puerto Rican heritage. Prior to his arrest, he founded and ran the Quran and Sunnah Community Center in Springfield, which offered free meals and prayer services, and Connections Transportation, which transported people to visit their loved ones in prison. He was also a small business owner, an apartment complex manager, a husband, and a father figure to Stewart's son.
His life began to change in 2010 after he returned from a three-week religious trip to Mecca. Abdul-Alim reports that he began to receive calls from James Hisgen, an agent at the FBI's Springfield field office, who asked him questions such as, "Do you love America?" and told him to call back if he was interested in working as an informant.
In early 2011, Hisgen showed up at Abdul-Alim's mosque, Masjid Al Tawheed, with two other agents. According to the Imam, Dr. Ishmael Ali, Hisgen claimed he was from the Springfield Building Department and demanded to search the mosque. Dr. Ali turned him away because he did not have a warrant. Dr. Ali recalled that in the two years leading up to his arrest, Abdul-Alim continually sought advice on how to get the FBI agents to leave him alone.
Since 9/11, a key element in the FBI's counter-terrorism tactics has been the aggressive recruitment and deployment of large numbers of informants among Muslim communities in the United States. Part of the purpose is to gather information on political or community activism, which the FBI frames as a precursor to extremist violence. But the tactics also fit a familiar pattern—one that harkens back to the FBI's history of targeting the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1960s, when it was likewise asserted that extremist ideologues were fueling violence.
At that time, FBI agents were each expected to hire at least one informant to report on the goings-on of black people. African-Americans were watched by FBI informants everywhere they congregated: churches, bookstores, bars, restaurants, college classrooms and other gathering spots. In addition to providing information on activist leaders, the informants served as "listening posts" for blanket information on black communities.
The FBI believed that the civil rights movement was a front for Communist subversion and that the urban rebellions of black youth were instigated by Communist agitators. Systematic spying, it was thought, would help prevent riots but ultimately the purpose was to disable the growing radicalism of black America. Black Muslims—branded the "extremists" of the day—were seen as especially politicized, and prominent community figures such as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X were placed on NSA and FBI watch lists. Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad had been on the FBI's radar since World War II; in 1942, agents had arrested him on charges of draft evasion.
The best-known FBI initiative directed at the black liberation movement was COINTELPRO—short for Counterintelligence Program. It was launched in 1956 to infiltrate the Communist Party but shortly afterwards was expanded to include the ongoing surveillance of black activists. Disinformation campaigns, arrests on trumped-up charges, faked evidence, and assassinations were used to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" black movements, according to the FBI's own documents. But COINTELPRO was just one initiative within the FBI's wider surveillance and criminalization of black organizations.
Abdul-Alim's parents were themselves caught up in these longer histories of FBI surveillance. His father was active with the Black Panther Party in New York and his mother was a member of the Young Lords, the radical Puerto Rican youth group that was, like the Panthers, targeted by the FBI. Both parents were involved in the Mosque of the Islamic Brotherhood, a Harlem-based Muslim congregation founded by an associate of Malcolm X and whose attendees have faced decades of surveillance.
Today, black Muslims stand at the intersection of the War on Drugs' institutional racism and the War on Terror's institutional Islamophobia: their race frames them as prone to gang violence, their religion as a terrorist threat. Abdul-Alim's case shows the extreme measures the FBI is willing to use to pressure Muslims to work as informants on the terror war's domestic front.
On the night of his arrest, Sheehan instructed two Springfield Police officers to stop Abdul-Alim as he approached a store. According to a police radio transcript, the officers pat-frisked Abdul-Alim and told Sheehan that he was clear of any weapons. Sheehan ordered them to conduct a second search and, according to one transcript, they again responded that Abdul-Alim did not have any weapons.
Sheehan asked over the police radio, "Is the subject in earshot?" and then asked one of the officers, Angel Berrios, to step away. This is where the record ends. Abdul-Alim alleges that Berrios then pushed him against the police car, pulled down his pants and boxers, probed his testicles, spread his buttocks and yelled out, "Gun!"
The officers handcuffed Abdul-Alim and placed him in a police cruiser. Abdul-Alim alleges that Sheehan then approached the vehicle and asked, "Are you ready to make the deal of a lifetime?" When Abdul-Alim protested, he was told to "think it over" on his way to the police station.
Sheehan, who is also a member of the Springfield Joint Terrorism Task Force, immediately called his FBI supervisor to notify him of the arrest.
Forty-eight hours after the arrest, it became apparent what the "deal of a lifetime" would involve. As Abdul-Alim awaited arraignment at the Springfield police station, Sheehan and Hisgen questioned him for about an hour. Abdul-Alim recalls Hisgen saying, "You may remember I called you about a year ago requesting a meeting to discuss possible information you may have that could be helpful, but you refused to meet with me. Maybe you'll be more willing to cooperate now." At this point, Abdul-Alim recognized Hisgen as the same man who had called him for months and attempted to search his mosque. He recounted these events to The Nation from behind a plexiglass barrier in Hampton County Jail.
Abdul-Alim, who had been convicted of dealing cocaine in 2003, assumed the interrogation regarded drugs or gangs. Hisgen allegedly said, "I'm not interested in that nickel and dime shit. I want the real shit. Like terrorism shit."
"They said that I was facing ten years, but I could walk away right now if I agreed to be an informant," recalls Abdul-Alim. "They said that they would give me the names of specific people who they wanted me to target, and I would use anti-government propaganda to incite them to violent action. They implied that they would provide me with guns and bombs to give people." Hisgen and Sheehan did not record the interrogation.
Abdul-Alim refused the deal and was held at the Hampden County Correctional Center for two and a half years awaiting trial. In December 2013, the prosecution introduced a new set of charges. Police officers claimed that, shortly after Abdul-Alim's arrest, they had conducted a search of the apartment complex he managed and discovered a bag of guns in an empty suite. "They supposedly sat on this information for two years, which is definitely very unusual," said Abdul-Alim's public defense attorney, Thomas Robinson.
In April 2014, a four-day trial began on the original gun charges but it was riddled with inconsistencies. The officers could not agree on simple details, including how many times they searched Abdul-Alim, or the location and time that they allegedly found the gun. The gun was originally described by police and a ballistic expert as a .22 revolver but later identified in court as a .25 semi-automatic pistol manufactured in 1908.
A police forensics analysis conducted three days after the arrest found that there were no fingerprints on the gun. In contradiction to police procedure, the arresting officers failed to retrieve surveillance videos of the arrest scene, wear gloves while handling the weapon, or write a complete police report.
In Court, Siham Stewart testified as an informant saying she had been paid by the police and the FBI but denied that the payments were related to Abdul-Alim. She said that, whenever she was short on rent money, she would call "Ron," referring to Officer Sheehan, and he would pay her in cash. Abdul-Alim says that Stewart convinced him to sign his bank accounts and store over to her while he was in jail. She sold the store, took his money, and left.
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