Matthew Llaneza (Part 4)
Fragments of a future narrative
The Bay Area FBI’s involvement in Matthew’s life—its clear-eyed effort to rouse him to violence—raises a range of ethical questions:
Why steer a mentally ill man to crime, instead of the care he needed?
Why exploit his susceptibility to manipulation?
Why introduce another element of unreality—a law enforcer, posing as a man with Taliban connects—into his world?
Whatever the answers, this Bureau duplicity was already entrenched by the mid-2010s. “The FBI has been illegally using its community outreach programs to secretly collect and store information about activities protected by the First Amendment for intelligence purposes,” the ACLU, citing FOIA documents, reported in 2011.
Among the violations by San Jose and San Francisco agents:
tracking the names, affiliations, and “demographics” of 50 attendees at “a mosque outreach meeting” in 2007;
“documenting participants’ names, conversations and presentations” at Ramadan Iftar dinners in 2007 and 2008;
filing reports on three community leaders attending “a career day sponsored by an Assyrian community organization” in 2009.
“Our California offices,” Rachel Roberts, an attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, added, “have received several complaints from family members of mentally ill Muslims that the FBI or a cooperating agency expressed a need to question their disabled loved one as part of a terrorism investigation.”
These interrogations, too often, “exacerbat[ed] the illnesses of the Muslims approached”—resulting in “psychotic episodes” and even suicide attempts, sometimes.
It’s a decline familiar from Matthew’s emails. His writing suggests acute mental suffering, a sharp break from reality.