CQ Politics reports:
Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.
The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.
The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.
6 comments ↓
Americans have started to mate with vegetables
And how idiotic does that sound? Analyzing falafel sales? Seriously, the FBI has nothing better to do?
I wonder, do Iranians eat felafel anyway, or is this just conflating Arabs with Persians.
they would have got a better result and leads if they would have traced the tehiny and homous sauces
yes, and baklava syrup is a dangerous element, bound to radicalize – anytime you have a coffee shop with the radical mixture of maghrebi mint tea with Turkish coffee, you can be sure the officious elements inside will be imbibing radical Islam with their sugar-syrup-laden sweets.
Seriously, tho – is this happy-clappy hour at the FBI? Did the dress-wearing Hoover-hangover elements dream this up as a ‘dangerous deviation from whitebread America’?
Cuz I know lots of teenagers, Jewish liberals and neo-con heartland Americans who like to eat the mideastern hummus – I do hope there is a joke here, and at some point, the idiots involved will jump out from behind the wall and say ‘ha! did you really think we were that stupid?’
Nope, this is typical Bush idiocy. Remember this is lot that hoovered up all the phone calls and e-mails from every one in the USA that used AT&T as a provider. This also the lot that dismissed a whole passle of Arabian speaking translators from the Army because the administration objected to their sleeping partners. 428 days before these guys get shown the door.
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