755: The Convert

Ira Glass

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. So back in 2012, we ran this completely outrageous story about some stuff that the FBI did about an undercover informant who spied on American Muslims for over a year. And it went badly, like spectacularly badly. And some of those people who were spied on, some of the people in the story, sued the US government because of it. It's taken years to wind through the courts. But just last month, it was argued before the US Supreme Court.

So today, I want to play you the story and also talk about the court case a little. Some context for the story before we start, it's about FBI surveillance of Muslims. Ever since 9/11, there's been a ton of that. And just to give a sense of what that means, our original episode opened in Queens, New York City one Saturday night at a community center. Three dozen people show up. Their kids run around before it starts, coffee in the back. It's a workshop run by two lawyers, Ramzi Kassem and Diala Shamas, who were with a project called CLEAR from the City University of New York Law School that gives free legal aid to Muslims who get caught up in counterterrorism surveillance investigations.

Ira Glass

This is so common. It happens so often. Kassem and Shamas told me that sometimes they ask for a show of hands at these workshops, and they learn that every single person in the room has either been visited by law enforcement like this or know somebody who has. The two attorneys start with a demonstration of what happens in one of those encounters. Diala Shamas plays the plainclothes FBI agent who comes to the door. Ramzi Kassem plays the guy at home.

Ira Glass

Later, in the discussion afterwards, the audience points out that this was a mistake. He should have asked her ID before letting the FBI agent into his home. And he doesn't have to answer any questions. He could have even asked for a warrant. The crowd also points out that he seems very nervous-- another mistake.

Ira Glass

The agent asks who else lives in the house. She asks, what does he think about the political situation in Egypt?

Ira Glass

They talk a little more about politics. The agent thanks him for his cooperation, says she may come back with more questions.

Ira Glass

And the problem with that, the two lawyers tell the crowd, is that the more you say, the more you could accidentally be incriminating yourself, especially dangerous, they say, with those moments in the demonstration where Kassem was nervously stumbling around, not sure what to say, trying to remember.

Ira Glass

Because of this, he tells the group-- over and over he says this-- if the FBI or NYPD comes around asking these general questions, it is best to get a lawyer.

Ira Glass

This particular workshop happened in 2012, but CLEAR and other organizations still give workshops like it today. I called around to a bunch of lawyers from different groups, and I don't know, I had assumed that 20 years since 9/11, the surveillance of Muslim communities would have slowed some. But everybody told me the same thing. It's the same today or greater than it's been in the past.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations' Office in Southern California has more cases of law enforcement knocking on people's doors, plus, in addition to that, a real explosion in Muslim travelers being questioned at the airport. When I reached Ramzi Kassem this week on the phone, the lawyer from that workshop in 2012, he also pointed out that airports are a big deal these days.

Ira Glass

Basically, what happened was in the years after 9/11, the FBI built an infrastructure to do surveillance and look for terrorist plots, and now that it's in place, it just chugs along. Under our Constitution, the First Amendment's freedom of religion, it would be illegal for the government to go target somebody for surveillance just because they practice a particular religion. They can't go and knock on their door to ask you a few questions. They can't stop them at the airport. They can't investigate simply because they're Muslim.

And the case that you're about to hear-- the case that was argued at the Supreme Court last month; it's called FBI versus Fazaga-- at its heart is about that. It's a landmark case about whether the government's actions gathering information on Muslim citizens since 9-11 have been constitutional. The tactics used by the FBI in this particular case are tactics that they often use when they surveil Muslim communities, like using informants. The last time the FBI publicly stated how many informants it had, the number was 15,000.

But in a bunch of ways, this case is not typical. It's an outlier, a case where we can watch everything go wrong. Not just from the point of view of the people being surveilled-- the informant isn't happy how it worked out, and we presume the FBI cannot be too pleased either for reasons that you'll hear. Beyond all that, like I said, it's a compelling and very weird case. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act 1, Gym Rat. So this happened in Orange County, California in 2006. And at that point, at least one homegrown terrorist had come out of an Orange County mosque and gone to work with Osama bin Laden, was on the FBI'S most wanted terrorist list, and relations between the FBI and Muslims in Orange County, California were already on edge before this story began-- so on edge that the head of the FBI for Los Angeles, Stephen Tidwell, decided that he should do a town meeting at a mosque in Orange County-- it was the Islamic Center of Irvine-- where he said emphatically that the FBI was not monitoring Muslim student groups in the area or the mosque itself.

The crowd did not buy this. Somebody in the audience told Tidwell that it would be naive for them to believe that the FBI was not monitoring the mosque. Everyone should understand that they were being monitored, he said. Tidwell interrupted.

Ira Glass

The man in the audience replied, "You will send your agents without anybody knowing."

Ira Glass

That was June 5, 2006. As best as we can determine from people at the mosque and from testimony in court, two months after Tidwell reassured them that the FBI would not monitor them without telling them, the FBI placed an undercover informant in the mosque. And this is where our story begins. Sam Black is our reporter.

Sam Black

The informant in this story is named Craig Monteilh, and like a lot of people who go undercover to catch criminals, he used to be a criminal himself. He's done time for forging checks, embezzlement, and grand theft. At one point, he made a living stealing cocaine from drug dealers.

As I reported this story, people who know him described him as a snake, a chameleon, a thug scam artist, and, quote, a piece of [BLEEP]. And Craig says some pretty far-fetched things, like this list of aliases. He told me he used all of these in undercover stings.

Sam Black

It's unclear if any of these are real, but some of the unlikely things Craig says do check out, like the fact that he worked on a counter-terrorism operation for the FBI. The Bureau has confirmed this. In 2006, the FBI enlisted him to go undercover to catch people who were recruiting and training terrorists. Craig says it all began at a strip mall Starbucks where he met with two FBI agents, Paul Allen and Kevin Armstrong. He says they told him they wanted him to go undercover. They'd pay him to infiltrate the Muslim community in Orange County-- which is a funny thought, because Craig's not the most inconspicuous guy.

Sam Black

But according to Craig, the FBI wanted to use his lean body mass to their advantage.

Sam Black

The FBI wouldn't talk to me for this story because the operation is still classified, and because it's the subject of a lawsuit. But the FBI later confirmed in court that Craig was an undercover informant. A district attorney also stated in court that Craig did work with agent Kevin Armstrong, and that Craig had given the FBI, quote, "very, very valuable information." The FBI also confirmed one other thing-- the name of Craig's operation.

Sam Black

One Thursday in August, 2006, Craig showed up at the Islamic Center of Irvine-- one of the biggest mosques in Orange County-- and met with the imam there. Craig told him that he wanted to convert to Islam. The next day, after Friday prayers, Craig stood on a stage in front of hundreds of people and declared that he was now a Muslim with a new Muslim name-- Farouk al-Aziz. People who were in the mosque that day remember it well, the first time they saw this new convert, Farouk.

Sam Black

Over the next few weeks, Craig started showing up at the nearby 24 Hour Fitness, a gym where a lot of the guys from the Irvine mosque would work out. And when he wasn't at the gym, he was at the mosque. He attended prayer five times a day.

One of the people who noticed Craig was an Egyptian guy named Ayman. He asked that I not use his last name.

Sam Black

Ayman lived in a house just around the corner from the mosque with a few other Egyptians. One day, he decided to introduce himself to Craig.

Sam Black

Craig remembers this too.

Sam Black

That's Ayman again. He and his friends were ridiculously obsessed with Xbox. They'd play tournaments for five hours a day, and they only played one game.

Sam Black

Yasser AbdelRahim was one of Ayman's roommates, a tall, athletic guy who worked as a tech consultant. He'd lived in the US for about 10 years. Yasser and Ayman considered their house a brotherhood, but as he told me and my producer Bryan Reed, not really the militant terror cell kind Craig was looking for.

Sam Black

Craig's plan worked. Yasser and Ayman started inviting him over more and more. They'd hang out together, get coffee, go to the movies. When Craig got sick, they went to his house to keep him company. They bought him books about Islam and brought them back gifts from their trips to Egypt. Here's Ayman, and then Yasser.

Sam Black

But Craig was at work-- watching, taking notes, and recording with a hidden microphone.

Sam Black

The FBI has publicly confirmed that Craig recorded audio and video during this operation. That means, presumably, the smack the Egyptians talked during Xbox tournaments, the discussions of movies and their personal lives, the exercise tips that Craig gave them at the gym. The Egyptians would play pickup soccer on the weekends with a bunch of other Muslim guys. Craig went to some of these games, but he never played. Instead, Craig says he used the opportunity to jot down license plate numbers and film the games so his handlers could see who associated with whom. According to Craig, he also brought his handlers things from the Egyptians' house that might have their DNA or fingerprints.

Sam Black

Meeting Ayman and Yasser, it was hard to imagine why the FBI was monitoring them. They just seemed like normal guys. The FBI, of course, wouldn't talk about the case, and they wouldn't even talk in a general way, separate from this case, about how they choose who they're going to investigate. So I called Trevor Aaronson to help me make sense of Operation Flex. He's an investigative journalist who's analyzed over 500 FBI terrorism convictions looking at how informants are used to find suspects, surveil them, and build cases. I told Trevor what Craig said-- that the FBI went into the Muslim community without any specific suspects. Trevor said that's possible, but it's also possible that Craig wasn't told who the targets were.

Sam Black

In addition to Trevor, my producer and I talked to five long-time FBI agents now retired who all oversaw informants. They couldn't comment on Operation Flex specifically, and none of them knew firsthand about these Egyptian guys, but they gave us similar theories. Basically, they said if the FBI has even the smallest reason to suspect you, a reason you might not even be aware of yourself, they have to check you out.

Maybe you happened to phone someone the FBI is monitoring. Maybe they got a bad tip. One of the ex-FBI agents said to me, do innocent people get investigated? Sure, every day. They can't weed them out without looking at them. Though one agent said it was possible that this was a case that just went awry, that was badly managed and didn't follow FBI protocols.

Months passed. People noticed that Craig was acting more devout. He began reciting prayers aloud, dressing in traditional robes, and showing up so early for 5:00 AM prayers that he'd get there before the person who unlocked the mosque every morning. They also noticed something else.

Sam Black

Yasser, one of the Egyptians, had actually been asked questions about jihad before. Non-Muslims bring it up with him sometimes. He'll be on a plane, and the person next to him will ask about it.

So he and his friends told Craig what they always tell people-- that jihad isn't what you see on the news. Jihad is really about each person's internal striving to be a good Muslim. It's not holy war. Here's Ayman.

Sam Black

For instance, the guys would be talking about food or sports.

Sam Black

Craig talked to his Arabic teacher, Mohamed Elsisy about his new obsession, too.

Sam Black

It alarmed all of them. At one point, Yasser confronted Farouk-- that is, Craig.

Sam Black

But Craig didn't listen. He didn't stop talking about jihad. He says this is what the FBI wanted, because, he says, he was great at it.

Sam Black

Since the FBI isn't commenting, I ran this by Trevor Aaronson, the journalist who's examined about 500 counter-terrorism cases, to see if it was possible. He said that in all of those hundreds of cases, he's never heard of a quota like this. The FBI agents I spoke with hadn't either. Though Trevor says that once a sting operation gets going, it's common for undercover agents and informants to bait suspects by asking them about jihad.

Sam Black

Craig took this strategy and ran with it. Mohamed, the Arabic teacher, heard complaints from his friends.

Sam Black

He would whisper jihad in the phone?

Sam Black

I asked Craig, did that happen?

Sam Black

If you didn't think Craig could get any less subtle, here's another tactic he would try.

Sam Black

Ayman was working on his biceps when Craig asked him this.

Sam Black

One day, a guy named Riaz Surti showed up at the gym with a friend Riaz had owned the halal KFC/Taco Bell nearby. Craig hopped off a stationary bike and introduced himself to Riaz as a fellow Muslim. Here's Riaz.

Sam Black

Craig told us he has never been to Afghanistan, but he was trying to see if these guys at the gym who he'd never met thought it would be cool to hang out with Osama bin Laden. They didn't think that would be cool. So instead, Riaz says, he wanted to get Craig to leave him alone. So every time he saw him, he would tell him the dirtiest jokes he could come up with.

Sam Black

It worked. Craig left him alone after that. About eight months into Operation Flex, Craig says his handlers told him to start talking to people about an actual terrorist plot, a plan to blow up buildings in Southern California. That happens in lots of FBI stings-- the informant suggests the plot to the suspect, not the other way around-- according to Trevor Aaronson again, who studied hundreds of terrorism convictions.

Sam Black

But ex-FBI agents I talked to said that in the well-run operation, the informant is not supposed to suggest the plot out of the blue. First, the suspect would have to declare his intention to commit an act of violence. Without that, the whole case could get thrown out of court as entrapment.

The person Craig suggested his plot to was a guy named Ahmad Niazi. Niazi is the only person we know of that Craig helped catch, the only person the FBI arrested as a result of Operation Flex. Craig had met Niazi one night at the Irvine mosque. Mohamed, Craig's Arabic teacher, introduced them.

Niazi was a family man, very different from the Egyptian Xbox players. He had a wife and two young kids and taught at a nearby language school. Niazi grew up in Afghanistan, but he had lived in California for eight years. He and Craig went out for coffee, and they hit it off. They started hanging out a lot, sometimes with Mohamed.

One Friday, the three of them were driving to a mosque where Mohamed was scheduled to give a sermon. Niazi didn't want to do an interview for our story, but here's Mohamed.

Sam Black

And here's Craig, a.k.a. Farouk.

Sam Black

Mohamed glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Niazi staring back at him. He looked shocked. Craig's head was down. He was now playing with his phone. No one said anything for the remaining 20 minutes of the ride to the mosque. The drive back home was the same.

After they parted ways with Craig, Mohamed and Niazi talked about what had just happened. They decided they had to do something, so they did what all Americans are supposed to do in this situation, what law enforcement officials tell us we should do when someone says he has access to weapons and wants to use them. They reported Craig to the FBI as a potential terrorist.

Ira Glass

Coming up, what happens, exactly, when you turn in someone to the FBI who is working for the FBI? Sam Black's story continues in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's program, "The Convert," the story of an FBI undercover operation from 2006 that went very-- badly is, I think, a fair way to say it, and the uneasy relationship between some Muslims and the FBI, and why that might be. And as I said at the top of the show, we first ran today's program back in 2012, and we're rerunning it today because the case that it documents was argued at the Supreme Court last month.

It's hard to say what, exactly, constitutes failure if you're a government informant, but I think that being turned over to authorities as a possible terrorist yourself by the people who you think are terrorists, that's got to be on the list, right? That's not good. Sam Black picks up our story where we left off.

Sam Black

So Mohamed and Niazi wanted to report Craig to the FBI, but they weren't sure who to call or how to do it. They reached out to Hussam Ayloush. Hussam is director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Southern California, known as CAIR, and a well-known member of the Muslim community there. Just hours after the car ride, he got a phone call from Mohamed. Here's Hussam.

Sam Black

Mohamed was with Niazi. They were both afraid that if Craig went ahead with his plot, they would somehow be responsible.

Sam Black

Hussam told Mohamed and Niazi that he would call the FBI. For years, he'd been attending monthly meetings with agents who'd hoped to build a good relationship with the Muslim community, and he was friends with Steve Tidwell, the head of the FBI's LA Office. Hussam had actually organized the outreach meeting you heard about earlier, the one more Tidwell promised that the FBI wouldn't send people into mosques unannounced. So Hussam called Tidwell on his cell phone and told him what had happened to Mohamed and Niazi. They thought this guy in the car might be serious. Again, here's Hussam.

Sam Black

Tidwell wouldn't speak to me for this story, so I don't know what he thought when his own informant was reported to him as a terrorist. But not long after this phone call, the FBI launched an investigation into Craig-- which, no matter how you look at it, was a very strange undertaking. FBI agents were going around asking questions about an FBI informant, treating him as an actual suspect they were investigating. FBI Special Agents not only interviewed Mohamed and Niazi. They also questioned other people who had been hanging out with Craig.

I talked to five people who willingly took part in these interviews. At the time, they thought they were helping catch a dangerous person. Mohamed and Niazi even went in front of a judge in Orange County Superior Court and got a restraining order against Craig so that he couldn't come within 200 yards of the mosque. But looking back, the people the FBI interviewed told me there was something weird about the way the agents were acting through this whole ordeal. They just didn't seem that concerned. Yasser, one of the Egyptians, said it wasn't what he imagined would happen when you call in the feds on a possible terrorist.

Sam Black

The agents did ask questions about Craig-- how often did he come to the mosque? Who else did he hang out with? What kinds of things did he say? But with Yasser and others, they gradually began to ask more personal questions. How many times did you talk with Farouk about jihad? What do you think jihad means? When did you come to the United States? Again, Yasser.

Sam Black

Some people were visited by the FBI more than once, like Mohamed. One day, FBI agents surprised him at his house. He asked them how the investigation into Farouk was going. They told him Farouk was a dangerous guy and he would be in trouble soon. But Mohamed says the agents were there to talk about someone else.

Sam Black

This was strange for Mohamed. Niazi was the one who had helped him report Craig. Why were the FBI agents asking about him? By the spring of 2007, the FBI had honed in on Niazi. It's unclear exactly why, but court records reveal one thing that got their attention. One of Niazi's sisters was married to a man named Amin al-Haq. Al-Haq was designated as a terrorist by the US government. He'd allegedly served as a security coordinator for Osama bin Laden.

And Niazi also said things to Craig that concerned the FBI. None of Craig's recordings have been released, so we don't know what exactly they talked about, but Craig gave us dozens of emails Niazi sent him. They're mostly articles and links to videos.

Some of these are about conspiracy theories, like how 9/11 was an inside job. Others criticized the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, sometimes calling for Muslims to rise up against their enemies. This YouTube video is the most extreme thing my producer and I found in the emails. It's an email I'm talking about how he supports Osama bin Laden.

Sam Black

In case you didn't get that, he said every Muslim should be a terrorist. Niazi sent this video to an undercover FBI informant, Craig.

Sam Black

Even after Niazi turned Craig in, for nearly a year, the FBI continued to surveil Niazi. Finally, two agents came to talk to him. After they left, Niazi immediately called Hussam Ayloush at CAIR.

Sam Black

The lead agent who met with Niazi was Thomas Ropel, who handled his case inside the FBI. Niazi said Ropel threatened him, told him that the FBI had something on him, told Niazi that he'd lied to them-- which is a federal crime-- at an earlier meeting with FBI agents, one of the meetings where Niazi thought he was there to help the FBI catch Craig. Here's Hussam.

Sam Black

Thomas Ropel confirmed in court that this meeting happened, though he did not say that he pressured Niazi to work for the FBI. But ex-FBI agents my producer and I talked to said it's common to leverage people like this. Again, they weren't commenting on Niazi's case, but one retired agent who had more than 20 years' experience in the Bureau said there are people all over the country being approached by the FBI and pressured with things they said on tapes.

He laughed when we asked him about it. It was like asking a plumber if he used a wrench. He says it happens at every level of law enforcement. He told us, quote, "It sounds like a terrible thing, guys, but it's the way business is done. It's the way the American people get protected. You've got to find people who can lead you to the bad guys."

Thomas Ropel returned with a group of agents and a search warrant. They raided Niazi's house, taking computers and financial documents. Months later, Ropel returned again and arrested Niazi.

Sam Black

The government charged Niazi with immigration fraud and making false statements. They said that when Niazi applied for US citizenship, he didn't mention that his sister was married to Amin al-Haq even though you're required to disclose if you have any ties to a designated terrorist. They also charged him for using inconsistent versions of his full name on official forums and for not disclosing two trips he'd made to Pakistan years earlier.

But what's interesting about Niazi's arrest is what he wasn't charged with. He wasn't charged with associating with terrorists himself, he wasn't charged with plotting an attack, and he wasn't charged for anything he'd ever said to Craig over the course of months of recorded conversations. Still, at Niazi's bail hearing, the prosecutor argued that he was a danger to the community. To prove that, she called Agent Thomas Ropel to the stand.

Sam Black

Ropel testified that a confidential informant had recorded the Niazi talking about jihad between 15 and 20 times. In addition, he said--

Sam Black

As Ropel went on, the judge asked him to clarify who had brought up these conversations-- Niazi, or the informant?

Sam Black

Of course, the individual he supposedly instigated the conversations with was Craig Monteilh. I asked Craig about it.

Sam Black

Craig has changed his story on this. When Niazi was arrested in 2009, he basically said the complete opposite. He said Niazi recruited him for a terrorist operation. But Craig says now he's telling the truth. He says what really happened is that he went after Niazi more aggressively than anyone. Niazi wanted a friend, and he tolerated Craig's jihad talk more than most.

Sam Black

I talked to people who know Niazi, and they backed this up. Niazi mentored Craig, but at the same time, he was enthralled by him-- at least until the moment when he and Mohamed decided to turn Craig in to the FBI. The government kept Niazi under house arrest for more than a year, with a curfew and an ankle bracelet. When I reached out to Niazi for this story, he sent me a statement. It says in part, "When the FBI agent threatened to make my life a living hell unless I became an informant-- which I refused-- the FBI made true its promise and really did make my life a living hell. In the past few years, my family and I have been struggling very hard to piece back together our lives."

The government eventually decided it didn't want to pursue Niazi's case. It filed a motion to dismiss all of the charges. Operation Flex ended without a single known conviction.

One person did go to jail, though-- Craig Monteilh. Six months after Craig was reported as a potential terrorist, the Irvine Police arrested him for a bizarre, unrelated crime. It turned out that during Operation Flex, he'd been running a side hustle, conning two women out of more than $150,000 in a scheme to traffic human growth hormone. He met the women at the same gyms where he was monitoring Muslims.

He went to prison for eight months. Craig sued the FBI over this, claiming the whole thing was part of an FBI drug sting and that his handlers conspired to have him arrested after he became useless in Operation Flex. A judge recently threw the case out.

You can probably imagine what Operation Flex and its aftermath did to relations between the FBI and the Muslim community in Orange County. Hussam Ayloush, the head of CAIR in Southern California, remembers the moment at Niazi's bail hearing when the FBI revealed that Craig was an undercover informant. Hussam was in the courtroom.

Sam Black

Operation Flex didn't just make people suspicious of law enforcement, it made them suspicious of each other. So many people I talked to said they stay away from new converts now. They have a hard time believing people are who they say they are. Here's Ayman, the Egyptian guy who first befriended Craig.

Sam Black

In one of the most awkward developments of this story, the Muslim community is now teaming up with Craig Monteilh. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, along with the ACLU, is suing the FBI Operation Flex. The government is arguing in response that allowing the case to go forward would reveal state secrets and harm national security. Craig is CAIR's primary resource in the case. He's now helping the people he used to spy on.

And he's been apologizing to some of them, too. He sees them often, because he still lives around the corner from the Irvine mosque and works out in the same gym. He made a special point of calling Yasser AbdelRahim, one of the first people he got close to.

Sam Black

Craig's not the only one apologizing. After Niazi's charges were dismissed, he went to the courthouse to retrieve some of the property that the FBI had seized from his house. Thomas Ropel was there. They talked for about 20 minutes. Remember, Ropel is the agent who allegedly threatened Niazi, who later arrested him, and who then testified in court that he was a danger to society.

I spoke to the court employee who accompanied Niazi to this meeting. Before they left, Ropel went over to Niazi and shook his hand. He told Niazi that mistakes had been made. We're all human, he said. I'm sorry.

Ira Glass

Sam Black. He's a documentary filmmaker. His latest film, Kingdom of Silence, about murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, is streaming on Showtime.

Like we said earlier, the Supreme Court case that came out of these events was argued last month. The central issue in the case, FBI versus Fazaga, is whether the FBI was spying on people just because they were Muslim-- which, if true, would be unconstitutional. But the Supreme Court wasn't hearing arguments on that question. After all this time, the court system hasn't gotten to that question, because the government is trying to get the case thrown out.

The government says the FBI had good reasons to surveil all these people, but to mount a proper defense and explain what those reasons are, they would have to reveal secret information-- state secrets-- that would compromise national security. And they're saying that because there are state secrets involved, the court should throw out the case entirely. The lawyers bringing the suit on behalf of the Muslim community in Irvine argued before the Supreme Court that this goes too far. They don't have to throw out the case. There are ways the case can still move forward.

One of them, there's a law-- the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA-- that would allow a judge to look at the classified materials. The state secrets still would not be public. The judge could see them; nobody else could. And then, the judge would come to a decision in the case. Or, the lawyers say, the courts could just let the case proceed without any secret evidence at all-- just leave that stuff out of the case.

The bigger principle here, in their view, is that there should be a way for people to get their day in court, even in a case where the government claims there are state secrets. If the Supreme Court does allow the case to go forward, the lawyer who argued the case for the Muslim community, Ahilan Arulanantham, said ultimately, if they win, they want all the information gathered in the surveillance operation to be destroyed.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Lisa Pollock with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for this episode was Julie Snyder. Music help from Damien Graef and from Rob Geddes. Production help on today's rerun from Katherine Rae Mondo, Stowe Nelson, Matt Tierney, and Chloe Weiner. Special thanks today to Petra Bartosiewicz Dina Temple-Raston, Sara Goldblatt, Cyrus McGoldrick, Benjamin Anastas, Ameena Qazi, Affad Shaikh, and Lawrence Wright. Thanks also today to Michael German, Masih Faloudi, Mohammad Tajsar, Hussam Ayloush, and Trevor Aaronson, the journalist Sam interviewed about the 500 FBI cases. He has a book about those cases, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can stream our archive of over 750 episodes for absolutely free. Also, there's videos. There's lists of favorite shows. There's tons of other stuff there, too. Again thisamericanlife.org.

This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, as always, to our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia who-- and you may know this-- he wakes up early every morning, throws off the covers, looks at the alarm clock, takes a deep breath, and tells the world--

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Next week on the podcast of This American Life, stories of what happens when you follow the rules, act responsibly, look out for others' welfare, when you're the grown-up in the situation, and things do not work out for you. You do not get rewarded. Others who ignore the rules jump ahead of you. In short, we're talking about one of the most frustrating things that happens when you do everything right, and it leads nowhere. True tales next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.