Sadly, there are a few folks in the FBI who want to take us down that road again. It began with the changing of protocols after 9/11, permitting undercover agents to troll for information in houses of worship. That’s a bad idea, because if you have no leads involving real crimes, you’ll get no results, because — believe it or not — most people actually obey the laws. Soon there is pressure to produce "results," and the informant invents something. Everybody is then taken hostage to the informant’s story.

Quite often, government informants are clever sociopaths, who revel in manufacturing libelous reports. A tragic example of this was the 1999 use of an informant to bust 46 alleged cocaine users in Tulia, Texas. Curious journalists noticed that almost all the people arrested were African-Americans, the amounts seized were all about the same weight, and there’d been no effort to investigate wholesale dealers. It turned out that the informant, a seasoned criminal, had made it all up.

The people arrested were released and the "informant" was indicted, but 46 lives were devastated in the process.

When law enforcement misuses its authority, anyone can be a victim. Let’s say the Social Justice committee at a church wants to organize a peace vigil, and there’s an informant present at the meetings. The informant discovers a person in the church who once belonged to a leftwing group, and tells the FBI the church is conspiring to advocate a revolution. The FBI — or someone in it — leaks this false allegation to the press. Don’t you think it might have a chilling effect on church attendance?

Exactly these tactics are being used today against mosques and Muslim civil rights organizations. Did a Muslim organization have a volunteer ten years ago who got in trouble? Proof positive that the organization must be sheltering criminals! Also, a form of guilt by association is the ubiquitous use by the Justice Department of the "unindicted co-conspirator" label to describe any organization the prosecutor doesn’t like. It’s no accident that guilt by association is a central dynamic of religious bigotry, from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia. When directed against Muslim organizations, it’s often because of pressure from rightwing elements in the Israel Lobby, the Religious Right, or the powerful neo-conservative foundations in Washington, D.C.

In the trial of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, one of the main prosecutors against him was a man who made no attempt to conceal his prejudice against Muslims. And as InFocus News recently revealed, one of Niazi’s prosecutors has given money to the Lincoln Club of Orange County, a hotbed of religious bigots. How on earth can such people prosecute defendants fairly if they hate the religion to which a defendant belongs? They can’t, and should recuse themselves — or be held accountable if they don’t.

When there’s evidence of real crime, obviously federal agencies should investigate. But the problem here is a group of federal agents who manufactured a crisis to intimidate Muslims. An FBI provocateur tried to stir up trouble, and Niazi reported him. Then the feds turned on Niazi because he wouldn’t be a provocateur himself. But why should Niazi cooperate with them? The agents had already shown they had no respect for the law. That same contempt for the law by the FBI is now causing Muslims to stay home from their mosques in fear, and that’s a violation of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. That’s one offense I’d like to see the courts rule on.