Muslim monitoring case goes to US Supreme Court. What’s at stake?
The United States Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a case that will determine whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) can invoke “state secrets” privilege to avoid a lawsuit over its monitoring of Muslim communities and places of worship in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Plaintiffs in the case, which stems from a lawsuit originally filed in 2011, say the US government has for years used national security to dodge accountability. That has deprived them of a chance to present in court a mountain of evidence they say shows the FBI pursued a “dragnet” surveillance campaign against the Muslim community in Southern California that included secret audio and video recording and was motivated solely by the religion of those monitored.
That surveillance came amid a slew of early 2000s US government tactics targeting Muslims in the name of national security that continue to cast a long shadow, even as they remain shrouded in secrecy.
“We’ve been feeling violated for the past 15 years now, at least since the time that I found out what the FBI was doing,” said Sheikh Yassir Fazaga, who was an imam at the Orange County Islamic Foundation in Mission Viejo, California, when the agency sent a paid informant posing as a convert to monitor his mosque and others in the area beginning in 2006.
SOURCE: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/11/7/muslim-monitoring-case-goes-to-us-supreme-court-whats-at-stake