The FBI's Portland Problem

The FBI's Portland Problem
Nerly 15 years after Somali-born American citizen, Sheikh Mohamed Kariye's initial arrest, both he and his Portland community continues to be the subject of intense interest from the government's counter-terrorism apparatus. In July 2015, prosecutors moved to strip Kariye of his citizenship, claiming that he lied to immigration authorities about his alleged prior affiliation with terrorist groups. Since then, Kariye has ping-ponged among institutions which have been trying to deport him to Somalia, without success thus far.

"Dig beneath the surface of the government's portrait of Kariye; however, and it's possible to see him as a case study in the way that domestic counterterrorism operations since 9/11 have singled out Muslims for intensive surveillance and selective prosecution, based on things they've said, people they've known, and things they would do in the future." As-Saber is one of the largest mosques in the Pacific Northwest. and those who attend the mosque have been subjected to intense surveillance. The mosque's leader is on a no-fly list and his his daily actions are closely watched by counterterrorism agents.[1]

Some 47,000 people are on the no-fly list, a subset of a larger watch list of "known or suspected terrorists," called the Terrorist Screening Database. According to documents obtained by The Intercept, the U.S. government acknowledges that more than 40 percent of those on the watch list have " no recognized terrorist affiliation." Marc Sager, a former CIA officer, [says] "More fundamentally, the government's predictive judgments are necessarily unreliable and the risk of error associated with them is extremely high." [2]

Footnotes
[1] Zoe Carpenter, "The FBI's :Portland Problem," The Nation, January 4, 2016.

[2] Ibid.