“Where you have indicators of illegal activity, the FBI should get a warrant and go after the guy. But the government should not be involving itself in creating terrorists through confidential informants targeting the Muslim community,” Saylor told Sputnik on Tuesday, reacting to the release of a new film entitled (T)ERROR, which documents the FBI using paid informants not to capture existing terrorists, but to cultivate them.
The use of FBI informants to drive terrorist plots is a phenomena that has been around for a long time, Saylor explained, but up until the rise of the Islamic State, he felt things were headed in a better direction.
“But the focus is back on broad surveillance of the American Muslim community, which encourages the use of these confidential informants,” he added.
“The [US President Barack Obama’s] administration on the one hand wants to enlist the Muslim community in pushing back against violent extremism, which we’re doing already,” the CAIR spokesperson elaborated. “But on the other hand it will not discuss its use of informants in mosques and other forms of surveillance when there was no indicator of criminal activity taking place, and where US law enforcement was actually driving terrorist plots.”
Saylor cited a case in Southern California a few years ago wherein a suspicious person was targeting young Muslims to take negative actions, which prompted CAIR’s local chapter to report the issue to authorities. One year later, according to Saylor, they found out the person in question had been on the FBI payroll.
(T)ERROR filmmakers claim that Muslims' constitutional right to freedom of religion has evidently come under threat. While the stated purpose of the FBI is to protect American society from terrorism, the bureau has created "a pervasive climate of fear and suspicion among Americans." Undermining trust between the state and Muslim American communities, the agency is damaging US collective national security, the documentary stresses.
