Originally Posted by TheSquealer

Because of my experience, language experience and background, I have had the FBI on a few different occasions attempt to recruit me to gather and collect info on a certain community. The first two times were both in 04, I told them to fuck off. The third and final time was in 09', my wife was a month or so from getting her citizenship and I was again approached under the guise of "routine" investigation which again led to proposals to go to certain events, certain restaurants, observe/report etc. this was done outside any official capacity on his part that I could determine though I couldn't possibly know for sure. though I was able to confirm his identity, he went through a great deal of effort to conceal his identity and actual position. I only continued to speak to him a couple more times because he was targeting my wife and coercing her. He contacted her and asked to meet her while I was gone and working with a partner again was asking for both of us to help him gather information on certain people and places. Not being the brightest, he and his partner started in with the "good cop/bad cop" routine where he was asking for help and his partner was making joking remarks about it affecting her immigration statues. She texed me letting me know where she was and what was happening, I drove there as quick as I could (Panera). I walked up to them and the shock was clearly visible on their faces so I already had a solid idea as to what was happening. I sat calmly at the table and warned them to cut he shit and find someone else to play their games with - the partner tried to get tough at which point, I then screamed loudly a lot of things, but in short making it clear that if they didn't stand up and walk away, they would exit on a gurney. They stood up and walked away and that was it. That might sound a little insane or movie-like, but it helps if you understand that is a job where a newspaper headline "FBI agent gets into fist fight in Panera Bakery" ends your career. Definitely not what a guy who is trying to be invisible wants to hear or happen. Further, when you are percieve to be wildy unpredictable or irrational and ill tempered, you are no longer looked at as a potential asset but rather a potential liability.

Though I wasn't surprised at any of this, I couldn't help standing there at the citizenship ceremony where they were probably 1500-2000 people, and they announcing how many people from different countries like "Pakistan - 125 people", "Afghanistan - 87 people" and so on and thinking "wow, I wonder how many of these people they were able to get to and just how big that program is". I always assumed that it could not have been too large because human intelligence, in the absence of the threat of death or harm to ones family who is providing the information is incredibly unreliable. People are unreliable. People's interpretations of anything, even an eye witness account of an event that happened right in front of them is unreliable. I guess it wasn't too big as we are still not hearing anything about it apart from random mentions such as this one, many years after the fact.

I think that anyone who believes the government didn't make an active effort to identify Islamic extremists in the US and monitor them, post 9/11 is beyond naive. That means putting people in mosques. Thinking you can only gather intelligence with a warrant approved by a judge and be effective is also silly. The enemy is fluid, dynamic, ever moving and ever changing. The law... not so much.

Blathering on about "rights" to people with no concept of rights is pointless. Religion is not about rights, it's about which side of the fence you sit on. You are taking about rights to people who view themselves as Muslim first, tribe second, ethnicity third, former nationality 4th and "American" barely cracking the top 10 in terms of self identity.

At the end of it all, we are nothing but a bunch of self deluded bacteria - all the victims of what is little more than a genetic mandate of selfish genes, to survive and multiply at any cost, ... All while thinking we matter as we sit on a big blue rock flying through space. You are going to die. I am going to die. Your children are going to die. Your children's children are going to die. War will still be the natural state of man... and death and destruction will always exist to balance joy and prosperity. And in the middle of it all will be those who somehow think they are going to change things. Nothing will change. Millions of years of evolution brought us to this. Only millions more can undo it.

It is who and what we are.

My best advice to all is that you embrace the idea that you have to fight to survive. This is true of ALL living organisms, including humans. It has always been true. It will always be true until our genetic code mutates towards different behaviors which somehow also provide equal or greater safety/survivability to offspring and the same to everyone in the tribe. Until that time, others will want what you have. Those with less will always want more. Those who have suffered will always make others suffer. You may never want war, but war will always want you.

Republicans aren't making you life worse
Democrats aren't making your life better

To quote Shakespeare "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

We are what we are
It all is what it is