NOVANEWS
Federal Agents Offer to Get Muslim Veteran off No-Fly List if He Becomes Undercover Informant at Mosques
Abe Mashal, a 31-year-old dog trainer, says FBI agents told him he ended up on the government’s no-fly list because he exchanged e-mails with a Muslim cleric they were monitoring. The topic: How to raise his children in an interfaith household.
Mashal, a former Marine from St. Charles, Ill., found out he’d been flagged last April, when he tried to board a flight to Spokane, Wash., to train dogs for a client. Since then, his family members and friends have been questioned, and he said he has lost business because he is not allowed to fly.
Mashal, who says he has never had any links to terror or terrorists and is a “patriotic,” honorably discharged Marine Corps veteran, is one of 17 plaintiffs in lawsuit filed in June by American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit over the list.
FBI agents questioned him at Chicago’s Midway Airport, then in his home. Finally he was summoned to a hotel in Schaumburg, where more FBI agents told him he’d been placed on the no-fly list because of an e-mail he had sent to an imam, or Muslim cleric, that they had been watching.
Mashal said he had sought the iman’s advice about raising children in a mixed-religion household. Mashal is Muslim, and his wife is Christian.
The agents offered to get him off the list if he would become an undercover informant at mosques, Mashal said. He refused and said he feels he was being blackmailed.
“I feel like I’m living in communist Russia, not the United States of America, for someone to jump into my life like that,” he said.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, which enforces the no-fly list, would not comment on Latif’s case. In October, Homeland Security sent Mashal a letter saying that it had reviewed his file and that “it has been determined that no changes or corrections are warranted at this time.”
source–chicagotribune.com
