Adil Imdad, 41, moved to the United States as a teenager from his native Pakistan in 1981. Five years later, he became an American citizen, and in 1995, he moved to St. Louis to pursue a master’s degree in environmental engineering at Washington University.
Imdad loves his adopted country. He also loves Islam, and his story embodies the reason the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri is launching the Muslim Rights Project. The program, which ACLU officials say may be its first nationwide, will provide volunteer attorneys for Muslims questioned by law enforcement officers.
Imdad is a devout Muslim. He wears a long beard, in honor of Islam’s prophets. His forehead is occasionally bruised from bowing to the floor in frequent prayer. He travels to Pakistan to see his family there, and to Saudi Arabia for the Muslim pilgrimage known as hajj. He’s a leader at the Bilal mosque on St. Louis University’s campus.
In 2002, Imdad says, agents from the FBI interviewed him for the first time at his job at TSi Engineering in St. Louis. Since then, he has submitted to more than 20 FBI interviews, he said, some by phone and some in person. He keeps the business cards of each agent he has met in a laminated page in a three-ring binder. Each of their phone numbers is saved in his BlackBerry.
When Imdad was first approached by agents eight years ago, his motivation in talking to them was simple cooperation.
“I know the FBI is not my enemy,” Imdad said. “I have two daughters who I want to keep safe. The FBI is trying to do that, so I wanted to help. I wanted to help my country.”
But, Imdad said, over time, FBI agents became more aggressive in their questioning.
“You get a knock on your door at home, or they show up where you work, and you’re scared,” he said. “When you talk to them, they take advantage of that fear that’s already in you.”
Imdad said that during various interviews with FBI agents, he was locked in a room, repeatedly yelled at, asked what he was hiding and accused of lying.
Assistant Special Agent in Charge Maxwell Marker, of the FBI’s St. Louis division, said he could not talk about its relationship with specific Muslims in the area. But, he said, “the Muslim community, for us, is the same as any other community in the St. Louis area.”
“For us to know what’s going on, what issues are affecting them, what crime problems might exist, we have to talk to people,” Marker continued. “That’s how we get information so we can have a positive impact in the community.”
Since Sept. 12, 2001, Muslim Americans have been under the watchful eye of U.S. law enforcement — most notably, the FBI, whose focus shifted in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks from tracking domestic criminals to preventing terrorist attacks.
About two-thirds of the estimated 2.5 million Muslim Americans were born abroad, according to a 2007 by the Pew Research Center, and they travel frequently to their native countries. Such comings and goings have given FBI agents plenty of fodder for inquiry.
In that same survey, 53 percent said it was more difficult to be a Muslim since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Most also believed the U.S. government “singles out” Muslims for increased surveillance and monitoring.
Since Sept. 11, news reports throughout the country have detailed cases of Muslims being targeted for interviews or placed on watch lists. The FBI has been criticized for infiltrating mosques and asking Muslims to spy on friends and family members.
“Talking to people in the Muslim community, you get the sense that this is a group under siege,” said Brenda Jones, executive director of the ACLU of Eastern Missouri.
Critics of the FBI say its approach with Muslims in the United States has been manipulative. They say agents take advantage of immigrants who don’t know they are not obliged to speak with the FBI, or that they should have a lawyer present if they do agree to an interview.
But Peter Joy, director of Washington University Law School’s Criminal Justice Clinic and professor of legal ethics, said that while the FBI may have made mistakes with Muslims in the past, its more recent approach of focusing on positive outreach has helped.
In the past, “they may have focused so much on crime prevention that everything sounded accusatory rather than community building,” Joy said. “But those were early missteps.”
Marker acknowledged the FBI’s outreach to the community has not been perfect.
“There’s a climate of distrust at times,” he said. “We have to do extra outreach to breach the climate of distrust and improve our relations with the Muslim community.”
On a recent Friday afternoon at Hazrat Abu Bakr Siddiq mosque in south St. Louis, about 50 men, mostly of Afghan origin, gathered for prayer. They sat on the carpeted floor, shoeless, listening to the khutba, or sermon. After the men prayed, about half stayed to hear two ACLU members discuss the Muslim Rights Project.
The project, an extension of the ACLU’s 5-year-old Muslim Rights Task Force, will provide volunteer attorneys for Muslims questioned by law enforcement officers. Other organizations, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, have founded similar programs.
Through an interpreter speaking Farsi, Jim Hacking, a St. Louis attorney and convert to Islam, told the men that the ACLU “is concerned that Muslims — both citizens and noncitizens — have had their rights violated by law enforcement officials.”
“We, as Muslims, have an obligation to report any wrongdoing we’re aware of,” Hacking continued. “But what we’re concerned about is when people like you go into an interview with the FBI or police without knowing your rights.”
Andrew McCarthy, senior fellow at the National Review Institute and former federal terrorism prosecutor, said the ACLU’s program is “perfectly legal, but it’s obviously not helpful.”
“It’ll make agents reconsider investigating in the first place,” McCarthy said. “What this is going to dry up is the normal give and take between a community and law enforcement. It should raise people’s eyebrows.”
Hacking, who said he has sat in on dozens of FBI interviews with Muslim Americans in St. Louis, said the agency has been requesting more time with Muslims in recent months after a string of incidents involving Americans who have left the country, allegedly to pursue terrorist agendas directed back at the United States.
He also called much of the FBI’s interview work with individual Muslims “a waste of resources,” arguing that agents use a sliver of information — a trip out of the country, for instance — to fish for information.
“They need to trust that Muslim Americans will do their duty, just like everyone else, and let them know when something is amiss,” he said. “You don’t build bridges by looking at someone’s bank account and credit card bills, then ask why they traveled somewhere.”
Marker said there’s a reason for every interview the FBI asks for.
“We don’t have the resources to interview people just for the purpose of harassing them,” he said. “If we’re repeating interviews, there’s a purpose behind it.”
Peter Joy of Washington University said the FBI has a “difficult line to straddle.”
“All of us are happy that the FBI is doing what it can do to try to help protect us,” he said. “But no matter who you are, if you get called in and asked to account for your movements or spending habits, that’s going to get anyone worried.”
Over the last nine months, task force representatives have visited half the area’s dozen or so mosques to tell Muslims about the program. In April, the ACLU will train eight to 10 volunteer attorneys who will be on call for the program.
After the ACLU presentation at Hazrat Abu Bakr Siddiq, several men said that while they’ve never been approached by the FBI, they were reassured to know about the ACLU program.
“I’m grateful to know lawyers are there in case,” said Rahmatullah Hassan, 31, of St. Louis.
The ACLU’s Jones said sometimes just the presence of a lawyer makes a difference.
“Often when an attorney shows up with them, the interview goes away,” she said.
All but two members of the ACLU’s Muslim Rights Task Force are Muslim. They are professors, imams, doctors, attorneys and engineers. A recent event raised $20,000 toward hiring a part-time ACLU staffer to work solely on the Muslim Rights Project. Jones said the organization will also expedite calls to its office coming from Muslims in the area as part of the project.
In Imdad’s case, he began to believe the government was harassing him after he was put on a terrorism watch list in 2004 for spending too long in an airplane bathroom while it sat on a runway in Buffalo, N.Y. Imdad, one of 23 members of the ACLU’s Muslim Rights Task Force, said he tried to be helpful, but doing so only seemed to make his situation worse.
In 2006, an FBI agent again visited him at his workplace, now Kwame Building Group, Imdad said. The agent wanted to know about a donation Imdad had made to the Islamic African Relief Agency, about a new imam — Mufti Minhajuddin Ahmed — at Daar-ul-Islam mosque in Ballwin and about Imdad’s position at the mosque. The agent, Imdad said, wanted him to take a lie detector test.
After the agent left, Imdad spent $500 on an attorney who wrote a letter telling the FBI it had violated Imdad’s civil rights, and ordering the agency to leave him alone.
“That’s when things got better,” Imdad said.