Documentary Filmmaker Suing FBI For Information About Monitoring Of Muslim Communities After 9/11

A documentary filmmaker has sued the FBI to learn how long it had been monitoring the Muslim community in Bridgeview, Illinois, after 9/11 and if investigators targeted specific groups or members of the community.

Assia Boundaoui filed the lawsuit after submitting questions to the FBI through a Freedom of Information Act in 2016. She said the questions were in response to years of monitoring by the FBI following the 9/11 attacks that included random visits by agents and the arrests of two family friends for “white-collar crimes.”

It was also the subject of her 2018 documentary, “The Feeling of Being Watched,” which talked about the monitoring of the Muslim community after 9/11.

Boundaoui said she sought information involving Operation Vulgar Betrayal, which she described as “one of the largest anti-terrorism investigations ever conducted in the United States before 9/11.” However, she said the FBI sent her more than 33,000 documents, 20,000 of which were fully redacted. They contained more than 500 names belonging to Muslims and groups from across the U.S.

“It’s weird to read how they wrote about us, to see how they saw us,” Boundaoui told the Chicago Tribune. “When we look through the files, we see names we recognize.”

One of the names was Muhammed Salah, who was arrested for alleged racketeering in 2007. He was ultimately acquitted of the racketeering charges, but served 21 months in prison for obstruction of justice. He died in 2016 from cancer at the age of 62.

Boundaoui argued his arrest came about from a spinoff investigation born out of Operation Vulgar Betrayal, and what wasn’t redacted in the documents proved it. However, FBI FOIA officer David Hardy said words like “spinoff” in the documents fell outside Boundaoui’s request.

“We completed the task at hand, which was to gather what we could,” Hardy said. He continued, saying the number of requests the FBI receives annually present idifficulties.

“When you have 32,000 requests coming in, it’s like processing documents under Niagara Falls,” Hardy said.

Boundaoui and her lawyer, Christina Abraham, argued that this was part an effort to hide FBI activities during the 2000s.

“At the end of the day we think what they’re really trying to hide is that there was a profiling investigation in the ’90s of all Muslims, all of their organizations, under the auspice of this counterterrorism investigation, and it was basically profiling,” Abraham said.