In 2021 kregen mijn ouders tot drie keer toe bezoek van steeds twee agenten al dan niet in uniform. Volgens de agenten willen ze mij spreken over een twitterbericht over een ‘internationale bijeenkomst’ in de huiskroeg van Johnboy Willemse ‘De Nationalist’ in Ravenstein. Het bericht is niet van mij, maar de agenten zijn naar alle waarschijnlijk bij mij terecht gekomen omdat ik politiek actief ben binnen Antifa.
Recent openbaar gemaakte documenten over preventief fouilleren in Amsterdam leveren een beeld op van een gemeentelijke organisatie gericht op beeldvorming in plaats van het formuleren van goed beleid. De openbaar gemaakte documenten (onderaan dit verhaal) zijn samen met andere beschikbare informatie gebruikt voor het onderzoek “Preventief fouilleren in Amsterdam, een evaluatie”.
Lang voordat het laatste debat met de raad had plaatsgevonden stond het besluit van de burgemeester om preventief fouilleren weer in te zetten al vast. Het Afdelingshoofd Beleid & strategie van het Openbaar Ministerie geeft in september 2020, een jaar voor de pilot, aan preventief fouilleren vooral “voor de bühne” te vinden en krijgt daarop als antwoord van een ambtenaar dat die discussie een “gepasseerd station” is. In april 2021 is in ambtelijke e-mails te
lezen: “Hoewel de BM bereid is (begrijp ik) om de proef ook zonder een meerderheid door te zetten, vind ik dat we nog een laatste handreiking moeten doen. De coalitiepartijen zullen weliswaar onvermurwbaar blijven, maar voor de beeldvorming is dit wel van belang.”
It was almost 10 p.m. on a Thursday night, and Ali Watkins was walking around the capital following instructions texted by a stranger. One message instructed her to walk through an abandoned parking lot near Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, and then wait at a laundromat. Then came a final cryptic instruction: She was to enter an unmarked door on Connecticut Avenue leading to a hidden bar.
The Sheppard, an upscale speakeasy, was so dimly lit it was sometimes hard to see the menu, let alone a stranger at the bar. But amid the red velvet upholstery, Watkins, then a reporter at Politico, almost immediately spotted the man she was supposed to meet: He was wearing a corduroy blazer and jeans and had a distinctive gap between his teeth.
If anything, the past twenty years revealed that surveillance – the enterprise of monitoring people on account of their ethnic or spiritual identity – is the touchstone of structural Islamophobia. The system whereby the state conflates Muslim identity with “terror suspects” and justifies strident measures of policing that violate foundational constitutional safeguards.
It was a skill he learned early, says Monteilh, a 47-year-old Irvine man who, according to court records, provided information to the FBI.
He learned to gain people’s trust – even while pretending to be someone else. It’s a skill that FBI agents and police officers helped him hone, he says. It’s a skill that he sharpened in his role as an informant in several investigations.
First recruited by narcotics investigators in late 2003, Monteilh says he gained the trust of law enforcement officials by giving information on bank robberies, murder-for-hire investigations and cases involving white-supremacist gangs.
In 2006, the FBI ordered an informant to pose as a Muslim convert and spy on the congregants of several large, diverse mosques in Orange County, California. The agent, Craig Monteilh, professed his conversion before hundreds of congregants during the month of Ramadan. Renaming himself “Farouk,” the informant quickly made friends and impressed members of the community with his seeming devotion. The whole time, he was secretly recording conversations and filming inside people’s homes, mosques, and businesses using devices hidden in everyday objects, like the keychain fob of his car keys.
Among those subjected to FBI spying were Sheik Yassir Fazaga, the imam of the Orange County Islamic Foundation (OCIF), and Ali Uddin Malik and Yasser Abdelrahim, congregants at the Islamic Center of Irvine (ICOI). Together, they sued the FBI in 2011 for unlawfully targeting Muslim community members in violation of their constitutional rights to religious freedom and privacy. The FBI attempted to stop the litigation of the plaintiffs’ religious discrimination claims by arguing that further proceedings could reveal state secrets. After an appeals court ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in 2019, the FBI appealed to the Supreme Court, which will hear the case on Nov. 8.
During the early 2000s, the Muslim community in Southern California was thriving. While the faith group as a whole was dealing with a deluge of Islamophobic attacks post 9/11, the Muslim community in the suburbs of Los Angeles seemed to be expanding every day.
Soon after the doors of the Islamic Centre of Irvine opened in 2004, it was regularly welcoming around a thousand people for Friday prayers.
“I don’t use this word sanctuary lightly. It was exactly that, a sanctuary. It was literally a place where you can get away from the hustle and bustle of the day to day. You can get away from the media onslaught on Muslims post-9/11 and you can come to a location where you can feel proud and at peace with being Muslim,” Ali Uddin Malik, a member of the community, told Middle East Eye.
Mohamed Bahe tries not to remember the overwhelming pain he felt the night he learned a volunteer with his organization, Muslims Giving Back, was a paid informant for the New York City Police Department.
In 2011, Bahe, a Muslim American whose family came to the U.S. from Algeria, had spent months kickstarting his community volunteer group, focused on feeding the homeless and delivering food to families in need. The group worked with different mosques near where he lived in Queens, and its members were becoming familiar faces in a community that had grown wary of outsiders. The heightened scrutiny of law enforcement on Muslim communities had mosque-goers skeptical of people they had not seen before. Mosques, once the center of social life in a community, had become a quiet place where people felt like a stranger could be an informant or an undercover police officer.
A police intelligence officer fabricated reports about a terrorism informant in a highly classified database after allegedly being instructed to by superiors, The Times has learnt.
The rogue special branch unit, linked with MI5, that the detective constable worked for was disbanded after he retrospectively altered intelligence reports
Phil Moran, a counterterrorism agent handler at British Transport Police (BTP), claimed that he was ordered by his superiors to manipulate information on the National Special Branch Intelligence System to deceive the surveillance watchdog. BTP’s director of intelligence, Detective Superintendent Paul Shrubsole, was dismissed at a secret misconduct hearing and another senior officer retired before disciplinary proceedings were brought. Shrubsole denies any wrongdoing.
In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S.-backed Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners by jamming them into metal shipping containers and letting them suffocate. At the time, Dostum was on the CIA’s payroll and had been working with U.S. special forces to oust the Taliban from power.
The Bush administration blocked subsequent efforts to investigate the mass murder, even after the FBI interviewed witnesses among the surviving Afghans who had been moved to the U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and after human rights officials publicly identified the mass grave site where Dostum’s forces had disposed of bodies. Later, President Barack Obama promised to investigate, and then took no action.
Instead, Hollywood stepped in and turned Dostum into a hero. The 2018 movie, “12 Strong,” a jingoistic account of the partnership between U.S. special forces and Dostum in the 2001 invasion, whitewashed Dostum — even as his crimes continued to pile up in the years after the prisoner massacre. At the time of the movie’s January 2018 release, Dostum was in exile, hiding from criminal charges in Afghanistan for having ordered his bodyguards to rape a political opponent, including with an assault rifle. The movie (filmed in New Mexico, not Afghanistan) was based on a book that a New York Times reviewer called “a rousing, uplifting, Toby Keith-singing piece of work.”
The scene was a familiar one as warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum jetted into northern Afghanistan this week — a promise of bloodshed and vengeance, and no apology for his vicious past.
Despite a series of war crimes linked to his forces, the Afghan government is hoping Dostum’s military acumen and seething hatred of the Taliban can help beat back the current insurgent offensive.
At 67, the greying Uzbek militia leader is not quite in the fighting shape of his youth — he has just returned from medical treatment in Turkey — but his desire to be on the frontline does not appear to have dimmed.
Loaded on a commercial jet with a contingent of commandos, Dostum headed north Wednesday to join the battle for Mazar-i-Sharif after his nearby Sheberghan stronghold was captured by the Taliban at the weekend.
Dostum was back in the fight.
“We must be accountable to the crisis we helped create.”
Afghan strike forces backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have committed abuses “amounting to war crimes”, according to a new report.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) alleges the troops “committed summary executions and other grave abuses without accountability”.
These include extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances and attacks on healthcare facilities.
Afghanistan’s government told the BBC the current situation was unacceptable.
Disputing the report, the CIA said its covert operations were carried out in “accordance with law and under a robust system of oversight”.
Both the UN and the New York Times have previously highlighted allegations of abuses by Afghan strike teams.
In February 2013, on his last day at the helm of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen described what he thought the war’s legacy will be: ”Afghan forces defending Afghan people and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory, this is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words.”
However, the picture formed by VICE News correspondent Ben Anderson as he traveled to Afghanistan in December 2012 was anything but, finding that our legacy will likely be the exact opposite of what Allen posited—not a stable Afghanistan, but one at war with itself yet again.
Last spring, the remains of 10 missing Afghan villagers were dug up outside a U.S. Special Forces base – was it a war crime or just another episode in a very dirty war?
n the fall of 2012, a team of American Special Forces arrived in Nerkh, a district of Wardak province, Afghanistan, which lies just west of Kabul and straddles a vital highway. The members installed themselves in the spacious quarters of Combat Outpost Nerkh, which overlooked the farming valley and had been vacated by more than 100 soldiers belonging to the regular infantry. They were U.S. Army Green Berets, trained to wage unconventional warfare, and their arrival was typical of what was happening all over Afghanistan; the big Army units, installed during the surge, were leaving, and in their place came small groups of quiet, bearded Americans, the elite operators who would stay behind to hunt the enemy and stiffen the resolve of government forces long after America’s 13-year war in Afghanistan officially comes to an end.