Reverse Ethnic Profiling

As Americans are wrapping their minds around the extent of NSA surveillance of telephonic and internet communications, they are missing the more important point.

Let’s grant that the government was data mining all these messages because it was trying to protect the citizens from Islamic terrorism. If that is true, why did it exclude those jihadi production factories called mosques.

Yes, indeed. The government was mining a gazillion emails and text messages, but it placed mosques off limits.

Investor’s Business Daily has the story, and it is frightening, indeed. If you, as I, were wondering why PRISM missed the Boston Marathon bombers, the reason is that their mosque was excluded from the program, as a matter of government policy.

If racial and ethnic profiling involves singling people out for belonging to a racial or ethnic group that is more likely to commit a crime, then reverse profiling is willfully ignoring members of a group that is more likely to produce terrorists because you might hurt their feelings.

Investor’s Business Daily reports:

Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI agents. No more surveillance or undercover string operations without high-level approval from a special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee.

Who makes up this body, and how do they decide requests? Nobody knows; the names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret.

We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel's formation, the Council on American-Islamic Relations teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques there.

Here we are not dealing with a hold-over Bush administration policy. We are talking about an Obama administration policy that might have stopped the Tsarnaev brothers. Shouldn't someone be held accountable?

The extent of the dereliction is astounding:

Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast, the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown jihadists — inside mosques — and disrupted dozens of plots against the homeland.

If only they were allowed to continue, perhaps the many victims of the Boston Marathon bombings would not have lost their lives and limbs. The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers worshipped.

The bureau didn't even contact mosque leaders for help in identifying their images after those images were captured on closed-circuit TV cameras and cellphones.

One of the Muslim bombers made extremist outbursts during worship, yet because the mosque wasn't monitored, red flags didn't go off inside the FBI about his increasing radicalization before the attacks.

If this is true, the failure for not stopping the Boston Marathon terrorist attack lays firmly with the FBI and the Justice Department. How does it happen that only IBD is reporting the story?

To the best of my knowledge it has not been brought up at any Congressional hearings. Why?