(Courthouse News) During two hours of oral argument, the justices of the Supreme Court grappled Monday morning with how to avoid creating a broad new precedent on state secrets as it rules in a decade-old class action over the FBI spying on Muslim communities.
The case concerns the counterterrorism investigation “Operation Flex,” wherein Craig Monteilh adopted the name Farouk al-Aziz as a purported declaration of faith to obtain information for the FBI on Southern California-area Muslims. Monteilh attended mosques and even targeted certain people at a gym, but the investigation began to unravel when Monteilh laid his bait. In 2007 the leader of a mosque in Irvine called the police about Monteilh’s statements urging acts of violence. The mosque soon obtained a restraining order against Monteilh, and his identity as an informant was fully exposed during a 2009 naturalization fraud case against another member of the mosque who reported Monteilh’s statements to the police.
