MPAC said mosque members were shocked when FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Ropel III testified that the convert reported by Niazi was actually an FBI informant who had infiltrated several mosques in Orange County, California.
In its complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security, the ADC asked for "a full and comprehensive investigation" into a program known as 'Operation Frontline,' run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is part of DHS.
ADC said Operation Frontline was ostensibly designed to prevent terrorist activity around the 2004 Presidential election, but it primarily targeted men from Muslim-majority countries without links to any national security-related activity. ADC filed numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to gain access to data on the nationalities and religions of those detained and deported. It says these requests were not addressed by DHS. ADC then filed a separate FOIA request and lawsuit against DHS and its ICE component to compel them to release the data.
As a result, a sample of 300 Operation Frontline investigation files data was released as part of a court settlement.
ADC says analysis of this data shows that Operation Frontline targeted foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries. For example, 79% of the foreign nationals targeted by Operation Frontline were from Muslim-majority countries; deportable foreign nationals from Muslim-majority countries were 1,280 times more likely to be targeted by Operation Frontline than were similar individuals from other countries; Operation Frontline investigations included in the sample released by ICE led to no charges and no convictions for national-security related crimes.
These developments seem to add credibility to results of the new poll. "Muslims are the most negatively viewed religious community among Americans," said Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center, which is a nonpartisan research center affiliated with the Gallup polling organization.
Despite the fact that millions of Muslims have been living in the U.S. for generations, the poll presents a portrait of an often-misunderstood community -- one that is integrated socio-economically but culturally alienated; that succeeds in the workforce but struggles to find contentment.
And though the report states that while Muslim Americans are more likely than the general public to hold a professional job, they expressed less satisfaction with their standard of living and community.
The disparity is a sign of the alienation some Muslim Americans may feel,
experts say. Ahmed Younis, a senior Gallup analyst, said some Muslim Americans feel a sense of "otherness" created by outside perceptions of their religion and a lack of involvement in their larger community.
The poll numbers suggest economic and career success among Muslim Americans -- they have a higher employment rate than the national average and are among the nation's most educated religious groups. Yet only 41% described themselves as "thriving."
Muslim Americans ranked highest among American religious groups who believed their communities were getting worse. Muslim Americans ages 18 to 29 in particular reported discontent with their jobs and communities. Approximately 35 percent of American Muslims are African-American.
And contrary to conventional beliefs - largely based on overseas models - American Muslim women enjoy a high degree of equality with men.
The poll results are based on a sample of 941 Americans who identified themselves as Muslim in a survey of more than 300,000 Americans over the course of 2008.
So the question is: Will ordinary Americans pay any attention to the poll results, much less the transgressions of the FBI and the DHS? Will they even know about law enforcement's totally avoidable errors?
Well, if they read the so-called Mainstream Press, the likelihood is less than nil. For years, the American Muslim community has been one of the most under-reported groups in the U.S. For most cable news channels, the subject has become one of the third rails of American journalism since 9/11. And the print media's silence on this issue began long before circulation and ad revenue began to fall off a cliff and the print media started decimating their newsrooms to cut costs.
And if American voters don't care about the outrageously clumsy performance of their law enforcement agencies, neither will Congress.
Meanwhile, the CIA will doubtless continue its expensive efforts to polish its image so that it can try to recruit more language-savvy Arab- and other Muslim American agents and analysts.
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