The Sikh Coalition July 17 filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Security Agency and the FBI, asking for immediate release of all documents and e-mails that used the words “Mohammed” or “raghead” to identify targets for surveillance.
“The use of this epithet wasn’t surprising, and confirmed our belief that there are elements of the U.S. government that are bigoted,” Amardeep Singh, national director of programs at the Sikh Coalition, told India-West. “There is bias in creating and executing these documents,” the Indian American stated.
The term “raghead” is used by young bigots on school playgrounds, said Singh, adding: “It is really disturbing that an agency charged with protecting us is acting like a school bully,” he said.
The Coalition has asked for copies of all NSA and FBI documents which use this term, including e-mails. Singh said he did not know how many such documents exist, but said: “It is important to know how much or how little the government used this bigoted epithet, which employees used it and received it, and at what level.”
The agencies must respond within 20 days. Singh said the government may use the traditional defense: the documents contain security-sensitive information and releasing them would be detrimental to national security. But it could get around this by redacting security-sensitive information, countered Singh.
The government could also use the defense that the FOIA request is too broad or too onerous for review, said Singh.
At press time, the NSA had not returned calls for comment. But NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines told The Guardian newspaper that the NSA “has not, and would not, approve official training documents that include insulting or inflammatory language.”
“Any use of racial or ethnic stereotypes, slurs, or other similar language by employees is both unacceptable and inconsistent with NSA policy and core values,” Vines told The Guardian.
The White House has mandated U.S. intelligence agencies to review their training and policy documents for evidence of bias.
On July 9, NSA watchdog Edward Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald released documents revealing that five prominent Muslim American civil rights activists had been spied upon for several years by both agencies (I-W, July 18). The five are among 7,485 alleged targets the NSA spied on from 2003 to 2008; more than 200 are Americans.
The NSA, however, has stated it does not spy on Americans.
Among the documents Snowden and Greenwald released on the Intercept Web site was a template advising employees how to identify potential spying targets. A top-secret memo, sent out on July 5, 2005 to U.S. surveillance agents in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Great Britain and New Zealand uses as a placeholder “Mohammed Raghead (ASG Sales Associate)” where the target’s real name would go, according to the released documents. ASG Software Solutions is an actual company based in Palo Alto, Calif. It is unclear why the NSA used this company in its template.
“Blatant prejudice against Muslim Americans is documented in the Snowden archives,” wrote Greenwald and journalist Murtaza Hussain.
The disparaging term “raghead” – along with “sand nigger,” “towelhead,” “dune coon,” and “camel jockey” – first appeared in the American vocabulary during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, in which 52 U.S. diplomats working at the U.S. embassy in Tehran were kidnapped and held for more than a year.
The racist phrases came back into widespread use after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which killed an estimated 3,000 people in New York and Washington, D.C.
“Since the 9/11 attacks, Sikh Americans have repeatedly endured violence and bigotry because of their religiously-mandated turbans. Many have been called ‘ragheads’ or ‘towelheads’,” noted the Sikh Coalition in a press statement announcing the FOIA request. The statement noted several heinous attacks against Sikh Americans, most notably the 2012 Oak Creek, Wisconsin massacre, in which neo-Nazi Wade Michael Page stormed a gurdwara during Sunday morning services, killing six people and wounding four others.
Killed in the tragic event was former temple president Satwant Kaleka, who died heroically while attempting to prevent Page from entering the temple kitchen, where women were preparing the Sunday afternoon meal as their children played nearby.
“Disclosure of the requested information to us is in the public interest because it is likely to contribute significantly to public understanding of the extent to which [agency] employees have used epithets indicating prejudice in official correspondence,” wrote the Coalition in its FOIA request.