Distrust Hinders FBI In Outreach to Muslims

When two agents came to his office, one "refused to shake my hand and blocked the doorway. As if I were going to run away! They were recording everything, asking me about some guy I don't even know." He said it reminded him of officials' visits in his native South Africa during apartheid.

Khan said indignantly that he is a prominent Southern Californian who teaches at universities across the region. "I have a congregation of 1,500 people. If you treat me with this kind of doubt and suspicion," he asked, "do you think I'm going to be convincing telling people, 'Don't worry, the FBI is okay'?"

For immigrants, even the most innocuous official visit can be a source of deep anxiety. "We have many people who come from Arab backgrounds. Their historical experience is that the FBI is satan with a small 's' -- the mukhabarat," said the Shura Council's Syed, using the Arabic word for intelligence services. "When I introduce Tidwell in my community, if I say he is my friend, they're going to beat me up after he leaves. And if I don't say he is my friend, the FBI is going to beat me up after they leave."

The Local Go-Between

In his 2 1/2 years as chief of the Anaheim Police Department in Orange County, John Welter has seen no evidence of homegrown terrorism. He is uncertain but hopeful, he said, that it is "not because we're not uncovering it, but because it doesn't exist" in Anaheim.

As the FBI and Muslims wrestle toward accommodation, local law enforcement officials have come to occupy a safe middle ground for both. The FBI readily acknowledges that it will never know what goes on in a community as well as the local cops do; Muslims say they feel more comfortable among faces they see every day. Welter is widely viewed as a chief who is equally attuned to the demands of counterterrorism and the needs of Anaheim's diverse population.

But achieving that status has been hard work. Welter was greeted on arrival here in 2004 with a formal complaint of police harassment by Muslim owners of restaurants and bookstores clustered along a portion of Brookhurst Street known locally as "Little Arabia."

Anaheim officers, they charged, were barging in -- often through the back door -- to demand information about possible terrorists. When the indignant businessmen replied that they did not know any terrorists and had not seen anything suspicious, police cruisers parked outside their stores and restaurants. Officers took down license-plate numbers and advised arriving customers that the proprietors were not cooperating with terrorism investigations.

"My guys were doing what they felt was expected of them, by the FBI and the chief," Welter recalled. "No police officer wants to be responsible for not knowing what's happening in their community. No one wants to be responsible for the next 9/11."

But, he said, "the methods that some of our intelligence officers were using were offending people rather than gathering support and important information."

After an internal department investigation and an assessment by the state attorney general's office, Welter reassigned part of his 12-officer intelligence division and "we changed the whole way we did a lot of our work." To the irritation of many, the entire force of 700 was made to attend cultural training sessions taught by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

"Most people are very ignorant of what the Muslim faith is about, including me," Welter said. "I've got a book on Muslims for dummies; I can't be an expert on all the religions and cults and cultures in the world. But what I can do is be an expert in behavior that terrorists engage in prior to an attack."