Muslims inside FBI describe culture of suspicion and fear: 'It is cancer'

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Muslims inside FBI describe culture of suspicion and fear: 'It is cancer'

Said ‘Sam’ Barodi was fired after he refused to cooperate with customs
agents who he believed were targeting him because of his ethnicity and
religion. His and other accounts paint a stark picture of the bureau in the
era of Trump

Spencer Ackerman in Washington
Wednesday 22 March 2017 13.10 GMT

Muslim special agents and intelligence analysts at the FBI are reporting a climate of fear inside the agency coinciding with the political ascendance of Donald Trump, the Guardian has learned.

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 FBI’s director, James Comey, throughout 2016.

Muslim FBI officials are alarmed that their religion and national origin is sufficient for the bureau’s security division to treat them as a counterintelligence risk, a career-damaging obstacle that their native-born white FBI colleagues do not encounter.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/22/fbi-muslim-employees-discrimination-religion-middle-east-travel

[matt819]

1. You know what's particularly troubling?

That this anti-Muslim (and any number of other anti-) attitudes were right there all along, bubbling just under the surface. That Muslim employees' colleagues really just tolerated them because to do otherwise might have gotten them fired. Now, the cover is off the cauldron, and anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-Black, anti-Gay is just fine.

And what's also troubling is how you put the genie back in the bottle when change comes in 2018 & 2020, if not sooner.

And I have little doubt that this applies throughout the federal government.