I suggest reading the article in its entirety. It really is kinda sad, they need these employees yet treat them like shit.
Muslims inside FBI describe culture of suspicion and fear: 'It is cancer'
Muslims inside FBI describe culture of suspicion and fear: 'It is cancer'
FBI officials from Muslim-majority countries, a minority in a predominantly white bureau, say they are subject to an organizational culture of suspicion and hostility that leadership has done little to reform. At least one decorated intelligence analyst has been fired this year after a long ordeal which began with a routine foreign visit to see his family.
His case and others in which Muslim agents have reported a workplace culture that includes open-ended investigations predicated on their backgrounds were brought to the personal attention of the FBIs director, James Comey, throughout 2016.
Comey has publicly described the bureaus overwhelming whiteness as a problem for the bureau. But in a communication acquired by the Guardian, the director nevertheless signaled that he sees merit in keeping foreign-born FBI officials under continuous scrutiny.
Comey wrote to a Muslim analyst on 20 October: We need folks from your background and many others if we are to be effective. Of course, we must also discharge our duty to apply appropriate scrutiny when folks have significant foreign national contacts or contacts of concern with subject [sic] of criminal, counter-intelligence or counter-terrorism cases, by virtual of [sic] family friends or travel. I see that scrutiny applied in a whole lot of contexts, and none of it is based on religion, and it never should be.
He added: The challenge is figuring out what scrutiny is appropriate and how to talk to the employee about it.
A program under discussion at the meeting, known as post-adjudication risk management, or Parm, has been the subject of public and media scrutiny for years. It resembles what Barodi called a one-way street: a pathway for FBI employees of foreign backgrounds to come under suspicion and never escape it.
An FBI employees foreign background is sufficient to open a Parm investigation, the Guardian has learned, if the employee is from one of 27 countries or territories, 15 of which are in the Middle East or are Muslim-majority. It includes the seven countries initially on Trumps travel ban: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Yemen.
Visiting family in those countries is considered prima facie suspicious under Parm, even if those relatives are not themselves suspected of posing a danger. The Guardian has learned that nearly 1,000 FBI officials are involved in various stages of Parm investigations, roughly 1 in 36 of all FBI employees.
While the non-whites at the FBI are objects of suspicion, white staff have historically posed the demonstrated security risks. The biggest counterintelligence failure in FBI history came from Robert Hanssen, a white FBI agent who fed internal secrets to Russia for over 20 years.
Robert Hanssen, no one knew he was spying [inside] the FBI. Yeah, because youre not looking at your own color, youre always looking at the wrong color, said Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, who retired from the FBI in 2015 after 22 years as a special agent. A Muslim, he too was caught in Parms dragnets.
Robert Hanssen was a white American who went to the same church as the director of the FBI, so everybody thought that hes a fantastic guy.
In January 2016, Barodi visited his family in Paris, Brussels and Morocco. The FBI was aware of his travel plans; in keeping with internal regulations, Barodi uploaded his itinerary to an electronic tracking system in August 2015. But the FBI was not the only agency to learn of them.
On 30 January 2016, a plainclothes officer with the Department of Homeland Security approached Barodi in the de Gaulle terminal and asked if he was boarding a specific flight. Barodi dodged the stranger, who persisted, to the point of addressing Barodi by his last name and saying, in earshot of any travelers nearby, that he knew Barodi worked for the FBI.
According to Barodi, after about two and a half hours, customs involved the FBI, sending special agent Mark Hess and a customs official, Gregory Derricote, who was deputized as a member of the FBI-led joint terrorism taskforce. All of a sudden, it seemed to Barodi, an FBI intelligence analyst was under suspicion for a terrorism-related issue. Hess began to reference the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, weeks before Barodi set foot in France, and in San Bernardino, California, where he had not even been.
This is bullshit. Im not a terrorist, Barodi said.
Derricote said they had to ask because of the environment and the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. Barodi was incensed, all the while noting those attacks had nothing to do with any concern, cited by customs, about the Morocco leg of his trip.
At work on Monday, Georges supervisor informed Barodi that she was displeased with his behavior at de Gaulle. Higher-ups in the field office, the supervisor said, would be looking into the matter, and told Barodi to prepare a statement. She was referring him to the office of professional responsibility for disciplinary action. (The FBI asked the Guardian to withhold the identity of the supervisor.)
There was no discussion of Barodis decision to protect his FBI affiliation in a foreign airport, let alone his concern that he was profiled. By 23 February, Barodi met with security agents at the field office who also rejected the profiling claim out of hand; it might have been Morocco day, one said, implying that Barodi had the misfortune of flying on a day when CBP was checking travelers from Morocco. The agents showed Barodi copies of his Moroccan bank statement which he kept, with the FBIs knowledge, to pay his Moroccan parents mortgage and his old Moroccan ID, asking him why he never renounced his Moroccan citizenship. No one at the FBI had ever instructed him to, he said, but now, alarmed at what seemed to be an escalating situation, he reiterated his willingness to do so.
Barodi was humiliated. Appraising how he saw his status, he said: You look like a terrorist. Your credibility is shot.
He was left in a holding pattern for months. An attempt to seek redress through the equal opportunity office was rejected. He wrote to his senator, Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine, without result. On 7 September, the office of professional responsibility wrote to Barodi to inform him that it was recommending him for dismissal: he had, in two busy international airports ... refused to cooperate with customs officials, and had displayed a lack of candor by refusing to answer questions. The FBI even referred to Barodis letter with Kaine and accused Barodi of overstating his case to the senator: Your allegations against this [customs] agent in [Paris] became even more amplified, as you asserted that you had been stalked, harassed and assaulted.
Abdel-Hafiz does not believe the FBI is purging Muslims as a deliberate strategy. For him, the bureau leadership is blind to the fears of non-white officials, particularly Muslims, who cannot seem to escape internal suspicion.
Comey, in my opinion, hes a politician. He wants to ride the wave and look good. That was my opinion then, and what he did with Hillary, the Hillary investigation, sealed the deal. He just cares about how he looks, said Abdel-Hafiz, now a private investigator in Houston.
He continued: They harass the Muslims within the bureau, and then they beg for help within the Muslim community. How hypocritical is this? At the same time they put me in the Parm program, they were asking me to recruit people for them.
Barodi is now pursuing a wrongful termination claim within the FBI bureaucracy, and a potential lawsuit challenging the discrimination he faced. Accordingly, the FBI declined comment on Barodis case.
I would not advise anyone to work for the FBI under these circumstances. Fuck, stay away. It is not worth it. It is cancer, Barodi said.
Muslim employees in federal law enforcement, he continued, we are the target.