By Meghna Padmanabhan ’17, Commentary Editor

21-year old Khalil Abu-Rayyan, a Muslim man from Detroit, went through a sudden break up with a woman he had wished to propose to. A couple months later, he poured out his sorrows to another woman over the phone, believing her to be a 19-year-old Iraqi-American Muslim woman named Jannah. He told her that he wanted to “just tie a rope on the ceiling fan, then put a chair, and tie my neck around the rope, and then take the chair. And only like a minute or two, it’d be over”^[1]. This woman was, in fact, an undercover FBI employee investigating Abu-Rayyan, and she responded saying that, when it’s for a larger religious cause or in the name of Allah, suicide would be legitimate. Two days after this call, Abu-Rayyan was arrested for talking of “committing acts of terror and martydom on behalf of the Islamic State”^[2].

Abu-Rayyan had been manipulated by not one, but TWO FBI agents, one who posed to be a woman who loved him and another who offered consolation after the first woman cut off this relationship, leaving him in a state of extreme depression. The second woman introduced conversations about ISIS and was able to illicit a response from the emotionally drained man when he mentioned attacking a Detroit church, which instantly led to his arrest and prosecution. Todd Shanker, Abu-Rayyan’s attorney, angrily insisted that “the government resorted to a mind-boggling double-team against Rayyan with not one, but two young, fictitious Islamic women, who mercilessly manipulated him…a young U.S. citizen with no prior criminal history before the government’s aggressive involvement in his personal life.”^[3]

This recurring pattern of manipulation and government abuse is an extremely prevalent concern among civil-rights advocates and Muslim-American leaders, and the FBI’s usage of these undercover informants has only increased in recent years. In Detroit alone, there have been two other cases involving these investigations, involving Mohammad Hamdan and Sebastian Gregerson, both who were said to have been linked to terrorists in some way. However, neither of these men have actually been charged with terrorism crimes, drawing concern from activists who strongly believe that their rights to privacy have been invaded and that the FBI is targeting men who may be unstable and easily manipulated. The U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh ordered that Abu-Rayyan undergo a competency exam because the psychologist who spoke in court was not qualified to evaluate his mental competence, meaning that the man’s mental health and stability had been severely affected by this abuse, and he may not have been well enough to go through such a rough break up in the first place.

When reaching out to people about this story, many were appalled, yet when I asked if they thought that this was justifiable for security reasons, they had some difficulty choosing a firm stance on the issue. Sam Pensiero ‘19 said, “I guess they have a right to go undercover if they perceive a threat, but it’s not right for them to actually create the threat.” This idea of “speeding up the inevitable” was also addressed in a conversation I had with my dad, Krishnan Padmanabhan, when I proposed this idea to him. I asked him, as someone who experienced post-911 sentiments in the United States, whether or not he believed that our public safety was truly and honestly being secured by this method. He replied, “There are a lot of these bad people out there, and the nuanced usage of secret agents to reveal these criminals is justifiable, but I guess I’m torn between the line where the agent is accelerating something that is unavoidable and actually speeding up something that they only perceive to be inevitable. When you illicit someone into committing a crime that they may not have intended to commit, that is when it is not okay.” Two perspectives from people of different ages, races, and backgrounds confirm that, while this act to prevent terrorism from growing within the United States may be somewhat successful, the ends do not always justify the means.

^[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/10/17/fbi-informants-muslims/92296964/

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/wayne/2016/04/18/no-bond-dearborn-hts-man-accused-plotting-isis-attack/83197392/