Lynnae Williams: The CIA Spy Who Tweets
by Eli Lake (/contributors/eli-lake.html) March 29, 2012 12:20 PM EDT

Lynnae Williams has a beef with the CIA—and she’s using her Twitter account to tell the world about it. In the process, Eli Lake reports, she may be disclosing a few details the agency would rather not publicize.


The Twitter feed belonging to Lynnae Williams (https://twitter.com/#%21/wlynnae) at first glance looks like most Twitter feeds. There are tweets about what she is reading (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Madame Bovary); tweets about politics (leans toward the Occupy movement); and tweets about food (tuna casserole, carrot-cake muffins).

But on closer inspection, the feed features something rare for Twitter and even the Internet: detailed disclosures about the CIA. On Tuesday for example, Williams tweeted, “The #Farm is #CIA's training center near #Williamsburg, Virginia. I think it's the Kisevalter Center or something.”

In other tweets, Williams, who in 2009 spent nearly four months training to be a CIA spy, details her own experiences with CIA case officers, psychiatrists, and the special security division of the agency that serves as the CIA’s police force. In short, Williams since late February has been disclosing details of her brief CIA career in 140 characters or less.

I caught up with the 35-year-old would-be spy on Wednesday at the Washington mission for the Palestine Liberation Organization. She was interviewing for a job there in government and press relations. “The interview went well,” she said, even though “I don’t have substantial knowledge in the area. I don’t speak the language.” Williams, who does speak Japanese, added, “I don’t know enough about the [Arab-Israeli] conflict, but I hope they resolve it.”

Williams says she began tweeting because she wanted an outlet to tell the world about her disputes with the CIA and what she calls a pattern of corruption at the agency. She also publishes a blog called CIA corrupt (http://ciacorrupt.blogspot.com) . “I wanted to start the Twitter account with my blog to get out my message,” she says.

A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment for this story. Another U.S. intelligence officer, who was not authorized to speak to the press, told The Daily Beast that the agency is aware of the Twitter feed and that Williams is a hot topic on classified social networking, such as the classified intelligence community version of Facebook known as A-Space. Williams has disclosed her official medical records on her blog and other personal documents related to her time in the intelligence community.

Williams’s main grievance with the agency revolves around her termination. Williams says that as a trainee in the agency’s national clandestine service, she was sent to Dominion Hospital, a public mental-health facility in northern Virginia. Williams referred to the hospital in the interview and her Twitter feed as the CIA’s “psychological prison.” She said the place had white walls and inedible food, and that doctors there urged her to take Risperdal, a drug commonly prescribed to schizophrenics and Lithium, a drug prescribed to manic depressives.

Williams says she refused and eventually her parents drove up from Atlanta and discharged her. “They wanted to keep me for observation,” she said. “It’s not a nice place, it’s dilapidated. It’s called a hospital, but it’s a prison, you can’t get out unless they let you out.”

All told, by Williams’s account, she spent one night at Dominion Hospital in 2009 and then another five days in the hospital's outpatient program.

Melissa Ozmar, a spokeswoman for Dominion Hospital said, “We’re not going to disclose information about what patients we see that work for certain agencies. Given the proximity of our facility, it is not unrealistic to think that employees and their families for some agencies would seek help from our hospital.”

Ozmar declined to discuss Williams or her stay at Dominion. “It’s not our practice to discuss anything about our patients,” she said. When asked if she agreed that the hospital was like a prison, Ozmar said, “ For patient safety we do have restricted access. But the hospital could not in anyway be compared to a prison.”

Williams say she first applied to work at the CIA in 2006, while she was earning her master's degree at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. She landed a job instead at the Defense Intelligence Agency as an analyst. At first, Williams says, she worked on counterterrorism projects, then on studies of China’s leadership. In 2007, she says, she was shipped out to a clandestine facility in Iraq, where she worked as an Arabian Peninsula analyst.

In July 2009, Williams says she was transferred to the CIA’s national clandestine service training program, where she took the “field tradecraft course.” Williams says her life changed permanently on Oct. 27, 2009, when a colleague reported her to CIA security for what she says was "bizarre and inappropriate behavior," such as looking on classified computers for information about herself and telling colleagues that she was being followed. She had a meeting with a CIA psychiatrist that day, who ordered her to take a medical exam, with urine samples, and inquired about her self-acknowledged attention deficit disorder. “She asked me about my family’s mental-health history,” Williams says of the CIA psychiatrist. “My aunt has schizophrenia—I did not tell her that.” Later that evening, Williams had an auto accident and says she was cited by Washington, D.C., police for leaving the scene. After that, Williams says, the CIA ordered her to Dominion Hospital.

Since her time there, Williams has been fighting a largely losing battle with the agency. In 2010, she says, her security clearance was suspended and the agency stopped paying her salary. She is pursuing legal redress against the CIA for wrongful termination, but her odds don’t look good. On Wednesday, Williams posted on Twitter a response from the American Civil Liberties Union declining to take up her case.

Mark Zaid, a national-security attorney who regularly represents intelligence officers in legal actions against the U.S. intelligence community, said, “Based on the current state of the law, unfortunately the judiciary will not adjudicate adverse clearance decisions, no matter how abusive, incorrect, or absurd they may have been."

Zaid says that medical issues at the CIA can at times “be used as weapons,” adding “I have had CIA clients sent to alcohol and drug treatment. The agency has spent thousands of dollars for people to get treatment and then they fire them, which doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Without a security clearance, Williams will not likely be able to find employment with intelligence contractors, as many retired intelligence officers do. Nonetheless, she says she will continue to apply for jobs in foreign affairs. She also intends to continue tweeting. “I did not think of myself as a whistleblower.” But on further reflection, Williams acknowledges, “I suppose it would be an appropriate term.”

Two men set themselves on fire protesting Italian economy
Friday, March 30, 2012 1:33:10 AM
--iolnews.com--

Italy was in shock on Thursday after an Italian builder on trial for tax evasion and a Moroccan man who had not been paid for months set themselves on fire in separate incidents.

Giuseppe C, 58, wrote suicide notes to the tax agency, friends and his wife before setting himself alight in Bologna on Wednesday. He was saved by a traffic warden and is in a critical condition in a severe burns unit.

“It's a terrible sign of desperation, a single case of distress which sums up a moment of great difficulty,” former premier Romano Prodi said Thursday.

“I hope he survives, but he is in a very serious state,” he said.

The Moroccan, a 27-year-old resident of Verona who is also a builder, set his arms and head on fire in a street on Thursday in an apparent copycat protest after yelling that he had not be paid for four months, police said.

“He shouted out that he hadn't been paid for four months and poured petrol over himself before setting himself alight. Police raced to put the flames out and he has been taken to hospital,” Pasquale d'Antonio from Verona police said.

Giuseppe C. had been due to attend the first hearing of a court case against him for 104 000 euros ($138 000) in unpaid tax and fines dating from 2007.

“On fire for tax: the taxman is killing the country,” read the front page headline of the right-wing Il Giornale daily, while the Repubblica wrote of “the tragedy of a handyman strangled by the economic crisis.”

Prime Minister Mario Monti's government has launched a wide-ranging crackdown on tax evasion as Italy struggles under a vast debt mountain.

The builder had set himself alight in his Fiat Punto in the car park of a former tax agency office. In his note, extracts of which were published in the Corriere della Sera newspaper, he told the agency “I've always paid my taxes.”

He asked for forgiveness and told them to “leave my wife alone.”

His wife Tiziana told the Corriere that she “had never seen any sign of money problems. He didn't want to trouble me with it.”

In his letter to her, Giuseppe C. had written: “I wanted to say goodbye, but you were sleeping so peacefully. Today is a terrible day.” - AFP



Italians shocked by self-immolation protests Continue
29 March 2012 Last updated at 16:54 ET
--bbc.co.uk--

Italians have been left shocked by two cases of men setting themselves on fire in the past two days in protest at their financial hardship.

A 58-year-old builder accused of tax evasion set himself alight in his car in Bologna on Wednesday.

Another builder, a 27-year-old Moroccan, set himself on fire outside the town hall in Verona on Thursday, saying that he had not been paid for four months.

Both men are being treated in hospital.

The man in the first incident had reportedly left a suicide note to the tax agency, protesting his innocence.

With Italy in such serious economic trouble, there is now a much more rigorous pursuit of those who do not pay what they owe the state, the BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome reports.

There has been much sympathy in the Italian media for the man in Verona, with one newspaper describing him as a man who had been crushed by the economic crisis, he adds.

The same paper listed several people in Italy who it said had recently been driven to suicide by their money worries.

Particularly on the political left, stories like these are seen as symptomatic of the growing pressure and desperation felt by many as Italy's economic climate worsens, our correspondent adds.

Tibetan Protest

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Tibetan sets himself ablaze in India before Chinese leader visits
March 26, 2012 | 7:29am
Mark Magnier


REPORTING FROM NEW DELHI -- A Tibetan set himself on fire Monday before running several hundred feet down a busy New Delhi street, suffering critical burns in advance of a visit by Chinese President Hu Jintao.

The protester, identified by Tibetan activists as Janphel Yeshi, 27, attempted the self-immolation at Jantar Mantar, an open area where rallies and demonstrations are often held. Media reports, citing witnesses, said Yeshi yelled as he ran along the road dressed in a sweater and dark trousers, black smoke pouring from his hair.

“Basically he was on fire for almost 10 minutes before the police arrived,” said Rinzin Choedon, a chapter coordinator with Students for a Free Tibet, an activist group. “Personally, I’m totally against this sort of immolation. Our struggle is not just for today or tomorrow. If we lose our human power and resources, how can we continue the struggle?”

Tibet has been a vassal state of China for much of its history. In 1950, the Chinese military took control, leading to the exile in 1959 of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader.

Many Tibetans in China bridle at Chinese rule, arguing that their religion, culture and traditions are being systematically smothered by Beijing under policies aimed at relocating large numbers of Han Chinese to the plateau.

This is the second attempted self-immolation in New Delhi, which is home to thousands of Tibetans who have crossed over the Himalayan mountains from China. In November, a man suffered minor burns when he tried to set himself alight outside the heavily guarded, barbed-wire ringed Chinese Embassy before police doused the flames.

“This is very unfortunate,” said Tempa Tsering, the Dalai Lama’s representative in New Delhi. “It’s because of the policies of the repressive [Chinese] government.”

Hu is scheduled to arrive in the Indian capital Wednesday to attend a summit on the so-called BRICS nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
Since the beginning of 2011, more than two dozen Tibetans, including many Buddhist monks and nuns, have reportedly set themselves ablaze in the Tibetan area of China to protest Beijing’s rule.

Some activists described Yeshi as unemployed, a resident of the main Tibetan exiles' neighborhood in Delhi who fled China in 2005. Others said he did odd jobs at a small monastery. He reportedly had been planning the protest for days, arriving at Jantar Mantar with a bottle of kerosene he poured over himself.

The Associated Press reported that he ran about 160 feet in flames before collapsing. At the time, dozens of people were attending a Tibetan protest rally nearby. Dr T.S. Sidhu, medical supervisor at Delhi’s Ram Manohar Lohia hospital where he was taken, said Yeshi is in critical condition with burns on 90% of his body.

China often blames India for fomenting unrest in Tibet. India’s mountainous northern town of Dharamsala is home to the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile.

“China can’t even blame India for this, though,” said Mohan Guruswamy, a China expert with New Delhi’s Center for Policy Alternatives, a think tank. “There’ve been some 28 immolations in China. India urges China to talk to the Tibetans. They’re so unhappy, you have to at least talk.”

Opinions differ over how effective the drastic tactic of self-immolation is. Guruswamy said as gruesome as it is, the tactic draws attention to the Tibetan plight in the same way the self-immolation of monks during the Vietnam War helped turn public opinion worldwide against the conflict.

Others disagreed.

“I’m not sure it’s going to galvanize public opinion,” said Rukmani Gupta, an associate fellow at Delhi’s Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, a think tank. “What you have is young people losing their lives. That’s not necessarily any gain toward talks between Beijing and Dharamsala.”

Chinese See Communist Land Sales Hurting Mao’s Poor to Pay Rich
November 02, 2011, 5:34 AM EDT - Bloomberg.com

Oct. 24 (Bloomberg) -- Bulldozers razed Li Liguang’s farmhouse four years ago after officials in the Chinese city of Loudi told him the land was needed for a 30,000-seat stadium.

What Li, 28, says they didn’t tell him is that he would be paid a fraction of what his plot was worth and get stuck living in a cinder-block home, looking on as officials do what he never could: Grow rich off his family’s land.

It’s a reversal of one of the core principles of the Communist Revolution. Mao Zedong won the hearts of the masses by redistributing land from rich landlords to penniless peasants. Now, powerful local officials are snatching it back, sometimes violently, to make way for luxury apartment blocks, malls and sports complexes in a debt-fueled building binge.

City governments rely on land sales for much of their revenue because they have few sources of income such as property taxes. They’re increasingly seeking to cash in on real estate prices that have risen 140 percent since 1998 by appropriating land and flipping it to developers for huge profits.

“The high price of land leads to local governments being predatory,” said Andy Xie, an independent economist based in Shanghai who was formerly Morgan Stanley’s chief Asia economist. “China’s land policy is really screwed up.”

The evictions are alarming the nation’s leaders, who have taken steps to tackle the problem and are concerned about social stability. Land disputes are the leading cause of surging unrest across China, according to an official study published in June. The number of so-called mass incidents -- protests, riots, strikes and other disturbances -- doubled in five years to almost 500 a day in 2010, according to Sun Liping, a sociology professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

Final Insult

There’s more to come. Some 60 million farmers will be uprooted over the next two decades as the urbanization that propelled China to the world’s second-largest economy gathers pace, according to an estimate by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. In many cases, officials take land they don’t use, an August report from the academy said.

That was the final insult for Li. The rice and bean plot his family farmed for generations still lies empty, weeds sprouting from the red earth. Villagers are convinced that the city has sold it to developers, even though they can’t point to any documentation to prove it.

“They flattened the land and still haven’t used it,” says Li, a wiry man with short-cropped hair, sitting inside the hut he built in a garbage-strewn alleyway across a main road from the stadium. “They sold it for I don’t know how many millions of yuan.”

Officials in Loudi, located in central China in Mao’s home province of Hunan, wouldn’t answer questions about whether plots in Li’s village were sold or what they will be used for.

50 Million Evicted

Li is among 50 million farmers who’ve lost their homes over the past three decades since Deng Xiaoping began breaking up Mao’s collectivized farms to make way for factories, roads and airports, according to numbers from the academy. Turning people like him into more economically active citizens is part of an urbanization policy that has swelled city dwellers to about 50 percent of the population, from 21 percent in 1982, according to official census data.

Termed “chaiqian” in Chinese, the demolition and relocation of communities has become increasingly controversial. Cities have been grabbing land to finance operations and pay back or restructure mushrooming debt that reached at least 10.7 trillion yuan ($1.68 trillion) by the end of 2010. Almost a quarter of that is backed by land, according to China’s National Audit Office.

The money paid for the building spree that was designed to maintain China’s economic growth in the wake of the global recession. Loans were obtained through more than 10,000 financing vehicles cities created to get around laws prohibiting them from borrowing, according to a central bank count.

Low Compensation

Cities may have to accelerate land sales as they struggle to repay the debt, said Victor Shih, a professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, who studies China’s local- government finances. There’s also an incentive for officials to keep payments to farmers as low as possible, he said.

“Without suppressing land compensation, local governments can’t make the margins to pay back the banks,” Shih said. “In essence, they are the engines of inequality in China. Land development is the redistribution of income from average households to rich households.”

Loudi is one of 186 local authorities from Guangxi on the Vietnamese frontier in the south to Heilongjiang on the Russian border in the north that issued bonds or short-term notes through financing vehicles in the first nine months of this year. Some 105 of them said they engage in “chaiqian,” according to their prospectuses.

Rights Violated

The seizures frequently lead to local officials violating farmers’ rights that the national government has sought to improve since 1998 when it gave them 30-year tenure over their land, said Gao Yu, China director for Landesa, a Seattle-based group formerly known as the Rural Development Institute that studies global land issues.

Rules that prohibit authorities leaving land like Li’s idle for more than two years are also often broken, Gao said. Across China, compensation given to farmers is at least 15 times lower than prices for land sold to development, according to Landesa.

“The local governments earn a lot of money from the price difference between what they compensate farmers and villagers for their land and what they sell to developers,” said Wang Erping, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing who studies social unrest. “This is really objectionable, but these governments don’t have any alternative to raise money.”

Collision Course

Land sales make up 30 percent of total local government revenue and in some cities account for more than half, according to Wang Tao, a Hong Kong-based economist for UBS AG.

That’s putting city bosses on a collision course with national leaders who were already struggling to contain lending to local governments and reverse rising property prices. A central government circular in April said some local governments took excessive land for property development, resulting in the forced eviction of farmers. Such evictions are considered a “gross violation of human rights” by the United Nations.

President Hu Jintao said in August that developers should stop using arable land for building new projects, while Premier Wen Jiabao in September criticized the role local officials are playing in land grabs, according to state media.

Premier’s Criticism

“Right now, some areas just brutally destroy farmers’ homes without paying attention to their rights, and put the farmers in apartment blocks,” Wen, 69, said at a symposium in Beijing to discuss the safeguarding of China’s cultural traditions, according to the account in the state media. In March, Wen called for urbanization to be accelerated.

A crackdown has led to 57 officials being punished for 11 demolitions that resulted in deaths of residents so far this year, the government said on Sept. 25.

Videos of people being forced out of their homes, sometimes by gangs wielding sticks, have caused public outrage when posted online on websites.

One farmer from the city of Fuzhou in Jiangxi province, first took his anger out on weibo, China’s version of Twitter. Qian Mingqi wrote that he had lost 2 million yuan because of inadequate compensation after he said officials illegally demolished his home to make way for a highway.

Then, on May 26, he detonated three bombs by government buildings killing himself and two others, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Fuzhou’s investment vehicle went to the country’s bond market this year for the first time, raising 800 million yuan to build sewage treatment works and flood control works. In its prospectus, the company said its main business included construction, land development and “resettlement.”

‘Avalanche of Demolitions’

“Forced evictions are one of the biggest sources of public unrest and public dissatisfaction with the government because they are unstoppable,” said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch. “We’ve seen an avalanche of forced evictions and illegal demolitions.”

The trend is also exacerbating rural-urban wealth disparity that Landesa’s Gao says is the greatest challenge confronting China’s leaders today. Incomes in cities are now more than three times those in rural areas, wider than at any time since Deng started economic reforms.

The government is working on ways to increase farmers’ income, Zhou Qiang, the Communist Party secretary in Hunan Province where Loudi is located, said in an interview in Beijing on Oct. 19. That includes providing skills training to make them employable in cities and ensuring farmers are adequately covered by social security, he said.

Land acquisition and relocation must be done according to law and there are “clear policy and legal provisions” to protect farmers’ interests, he said.

Artificially High prices

One problem is that the value of urban land is artificially inflated because it’s kept scarce by China’s quota of maintaining 1.8 billion mu (120 million hectares) of arable land, says analyst Xie.

Officials in Loudi have run up more than 4 billion yuan in debt, expanding a provincial town into a city of 4 million people with a new railway station, six-lane expressway and a white colonnaded government building.

Where Li and about 70 other villagers for generations tended plots in Dawu village, now sits the freshly built stadium, a bulb-shaped gymnasium and a wavy-glass-covered aquatic center where kids line up to swim.

Family of Nine

Li’s family of nine -- including his wife, first child, parents and brother’s family -- had lived in a 400-square-meter two-story farmhouse on almost a half-acre of land. He said he didn’t worry about feeding them, and he was able to pay for extras by selling his vegetables a couple times a month in the city and doing odd jobs.

“It was a reliable income,” said Li. “Before we had food to eat. Now if I don’t work as a laborer, we don’t have anything.”

Then came the evictions. The sports bureau took about 47 acres of land in Dawu and another village, issuing notices -- and verbal threats -- in 2006 saying it was needed for the stadium.

“They told us that if we didn’t move, they would send a lot of people to destroy our house,” Li said. “If you didn’t agree they would detain you.”

Villagers were initially relocated to the alleyway where they built shanties with tarp and corrugated-tin roofs. The only bright notes are the red scrolls bearing the Chinese characters for good fortune that adorn some front doors.

From the lane, Li can see the stadium gleaming at one end and new luxury high-rise buildings to the other.

Temporary Home

Li’s shelter was supposed to be a temporary home while he builds a house on the 70-square-meter (754 sq. ft) plot the city gave him about 100 meters further south. He said his family of nine received 280,000 yuan in compensation, not enough to finish construction of their new home. Unable to get bank loans, he borrowed 100,000 yuan from family and friends.

That still wasn’t enough, putting Li in a Catch 22: without a loan he can’t finish his house, and without a house he has no collateral for a loan.

Most of Li’s income is spent on groceries, he said. Food inflation in China was running at 13.4 percent in September.

“The renminbi is appreciating everywhere in the world, but in China it’s depreciating,” Li said one late August evening, smoking a White Sand cigarette and sipping bootleg liquor in a restaurant overlooking paddy fields.

Putrid Stream

The only beans the family grows now are cultivated by Li’s mother on a four-square meter plot behind the temporary home, where the stench of a putrid bright green stream hangs in the air. Stooped, with gray hair, she recalls the well water they had access to before that was so clean she could wash with it.

Officials say the development is benefitting Loudi residents as it seeks to cash in on its location on a major high-speed rail route linking Shanghai in the east to Kunming in the west. The stadium was partly funded by a 1.2 billion yuan bond issue in March by the city’s financing vehicle -- Loudi City Construction Investment Group Co. -- that pledged to repay with proceeds from selling land.

“People’s lives have improved,” Yang Haibo, an official at the city’s financing vehicle, said during an interview at his office in June. Yang wouldn’t talk in follow-up calls and the company didn’t respond to faxed requests for comment. The city government also didn’t respond to calls and faxes.

‘Hoarding Land’

Some Dawu villagers say their lives have gotten worse, not better.

Wu Zifei, 27 and a father of two, takes out a compact disc with pictures of his old house one July afternoon in his family’s store in the new Dawu village. Li likes to play cards there with friends on days when they can’t find work.

“The older place was much better,” said Wu, a thin man who waves his arms as he talks. Wu continued to use the old family plot -- which like Li’s has been left unused behind a mound of earth at the edge of the stadium construction site -- until June, when a mudslide killed his crop of corn.

“They are hoarding land, waiting for the prices to rise,” he said. “I really can’t stand the way authorities do things.”

Other Dawu residents say they were left homeless because they weren’t allocated any city land. Zou Fuqiu’s home was demolished in 2010, following an eviction order in August 2009.

“It breaks my heart that they demolished my home,” said Zou, 59, a stout man who rolls his white shirt up above his stomach to cool himself from Hunan’s mid-summer heat. “It was the best house in the village, but they didn’t compensate us accordingly.”

Wife Cried

He went to see the village cadre at his office to plead for land, where he says his wife sat crying beside him for three hours. It was no use. Instead, Zou built a shack on unoccupied wasteland where he hangs two old black and white photos of his parents in revolutionary jackets and a portrait of Mao, near a small Buddhist shrine.

“They tore my house down with no regard for where I would live, but they themselves live in high-class homes,” said Zou of the officials. Behind him in the dusk, a chandelier turns on inside one of the stadium buildings.

Loudi city officials work in a building with five white domes and an archway entrance, nicknamed “the White House” by locals. There have been two separate purges for corruption in the past five years, including the removal of 16 officials in August, according to the official Hunan Daily newspaper.

Hundreds of meters from the main entrance to the building, a small door has a gold plaque that says petitioners can be received there. Petitioning is the practice dating from imperial times by which people take their complaints either to local officials or directly to the capital.

Low Compensation

The compensation that Dawu villagers say they received works out at about 6 percent of what the city was selling land for in 2008, a year after they were evicted. Dawu natives said they received 38,000 yuan per mu, a Chinese measure of land that is about one-sixth of an acre. That’s less than half the average of 85,420 yuan the Loudi city government says it paid, according to a notice on the website of its land resources bureau.

The land is worth many times even the higher figure. Loudi city in 2008 sold its land to developers for 600,000 yuan per mu, according to the bond prospectus. A similar plot to Li’s near the stadium sold in March for 1.2 million yuan per mu, according to the website of the city’s State Land Resources Bureau.

It would take Li 92 years to earn enough to buy back his still-vacant plot at that price based on his present wage rate as a day laborer.

Daily Struggle

Li’s focus is on the daily struggle to feed his family and finish his new home. He wishes officials would start building on his land, giving him the chance to pick up some work. Ultimately, he hopes to use the home as collateral to borrow money to buy a digger so he can earn more money at construction sites.

In his hut, where the only decoration is a vase of yellow plastic flowers and a 2009 calendar celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Communist state, he laments the loss of his old, simpler way of life.

“Our house was not like this before,” he said. “Five years ago I had my own house, and everything surrounding it was mine.”

--Henry Sanderson, Michael Forsythe. With assistance from Bob Ivry in New York and Neil Western in Hong Kong. Editors: Neil Western, Melissa Pozsgay.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Henry Sanderson in Beijing at hsanderson@bloomberg.net. Michael Forsythe in Beijing at mforsythe@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Melissa Pozsgay at mpozsgay@bloomberg.net. Peter Hirschberg at phirschberg@bloomberg.net Shelley Smith at ssmith118@bloomberg.net

Tibetan Self-Immolations Rise as China Tightens Grip

By ANDREW JACOBS
March 22, 2012 - NYtimes.com

MAQU, China — Like many children of Tibetan nomads, Tsering Kyi started school relatively late, at age 10, but by all accounts she made up for lost time by studying with zeal.

“Even when she was out at pasture with her parents’ flock, there was always a book in her hand,” a cousin said.

That passion for learning apparently turned to despair this month when the Maqu County Tibetan Middle School, in Gansu Province near Tibet, switched to Chinese from Tibetan as the language of instruction. The policy shift has incited protests across the high-altitude steppe that is home to five million Tibetans and a far greater number of ethnic Han Chinese.

On March 3, a few days before the start of the spring semester, Tsering Kyi, 20, emerged from a public toilet at the town’s produce market, her wispy frame bound in gasoline-soaked blankets that had been encircled with wire, relatives and local residents said.

In a flash she was a heap of flames, her fist raised defiantly, before falling to the ground, residents said. She died at the scene.

Over the past year 29 Tibetans, seven of them in the last three weeks, have chosen a similarly agonizing, self-annihilating protest against Chinese policies. Of those, 22 have died.

Beijing, alarmed about the threat to stability in a region seething with discontent over religious and cultural controls, has responded with an assortment of heavy-handed measures. Officials have described the self-immolators as outcasts and terrorists, blamed the pernicious influence of Tibetan exiles and flooded the region with checkpoints and paramilitary police officers in flak jackets.

Communist Party leaders have also introduced a “monastic management” plan to more directly control religious life. As part of the plan, 21,000 party officials have been sent to Tibetan communities with the goal of “befriending” monks — and creating dossiers on each of them. Compliant clergy members are rewarded with health care benefits, pensions and television sets; the recalcitrant are sometimes expelled from their monasteries.

At some temples, monks and nuns have been forced to publicly denounce the Dalai Lama, the exiled spiritual leader whose name is often invoked by self-immolators. The freedom of movement that allowed monks to study at distant monasteries across Tibet and four adjacent provinces has been curtailed.

“They claim we are free to practice our religion but in fact they keep pulling the reins tighter and tighter so we can hardly breathe,” said a 22-year-old monk from Qinghai Province, who like many Tibetans keeps banned pictures of the Dalai Lama in his room and on his cellphone.

Senior officials have trumpeted the new approach, which includes the distribution of one million national flags and portraits of Mao Zedong and other party leaders — with a requirement that they be displayed at homes and monasteries. “Temples have undergone a delightful change since the new management methods were put into place,” Xinza Danzengquzha, a top Tibetan official, said this month in Beijing.

Such measures, however, may be having the opposite intended effect. Robert Barnett, director of the Modern Tibet Studies Program at Columbia University, said that the government’s more intrusive approach to monasteries, the heart of Tibetan society, is a reversal of self-management policies put in place in the 1980s. “History suggests it is unlikely to work,” he said.

The antipathy, never far beneath the surface, is erupting into plain view with greater frequency. In the past week, several protests have broken out, including two in Qinghai Province that were led by students angry over the introduction of Chinese-language textbooks for subjects like chemistry, math and geography. In January, exile groups say 31 people were shot, at least one fatally, when police officers opened fire on demonstrators in Drango County, in Sichuan Province. In Diru County, in the Tibet Autonomous Region, 20 of the 22 monasteries have been closed, according to the Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

Spasms of unrest have coursed through modern Tibetan history with some regularity since 1959, when the Dalai Lama fled to India after a failed uprising. Between 1987 and 1989, the region was rocked by protests that were brutally crushed. The most recent crackdown began in March 2008, when rioting in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, led to the death of at least 19 people, most of them Han Chinese. In the weeks and months that followed, exile groups say a far greater number of Tibetans died.

But Tibetan scholars and exiles say the current resistance campaign is unlike anything seen before. The tactic — public, fiery suicides that do not harm bystanders or property — has profoundly moved ordinary Tibetans and bedeviled Chinese officials. Just as significant, they note, is that the protesters are mostly young — all but nine of them under 30.

Tsering Kyi was one of them. According to family members, she was a thoughtful student whose hard work earned her a place on the school’s honor roll. But in 2010, she joined classmates who took to the streets of this dusty county seat to protest the new Chinese-language textbooks and the decision to limit Tibetan to a single class. In the clampdown that followed, several teachers suspected of encouraging the protest were fired and the headmaster, a popular Tibetan writer, was sent to work on a dam project, according to local residents.

Tsering Kyi’s death has been widely publicized by Tibetan activist groups eager to draw attention to the self-immolations. The Chinese state news media, which has ignored most of the cases, reported that she was mentally unstable after hitting her head on a radiator. Her grades started to sag, the official Xinhua news agency said, “which put a lot of pressure on her and made her lose courage for life and study.”

In interviews, several Tibetan residents and relatives of Tsering Kyi’s contemptuously waved away such assertions. Instead, they were eager to discuss her devotion to her Tibetan heritage and the final moments of her life. When she emerged from the public toilets in flames, they said, the market’s Han Chinese vegetable sellers locked the front gate to prevent her from taking her protest to the street. No one, they claim, tried to douse the fire.

When the police arrived, they forced witnesses to remain inside the market and returned Tsering Kyi’s body to the bathroom. Then, after collecting everyone’s cellphones, they methodically went through the devices and deleted any photographs of the incident.

In interviews last week with two dozen monks and ordinary Tibetans in Qinghai and Gansu Provinces, many said that they expected the fiery suicides and protests to continue to spread beyond Aba, the county in Sichuan Province where the majority of the self-immolations have taken place. “From the outside, everything looks so pretty here, but on the inside, everyone is boiling.” said one lama at a monastery in Rebkong, a major tourist draw in Qinghai famous for its intricate thangka paintings.

The lama, who asked for anonymity because speaking to foreign reporters can lead to severe punishment, said monks were expected to attend “patriotic education” sessions that consist of pro-government propaganda. “I don’t want trouble with the authorities, but I can’t control their rage any longer,” he said of the monks.

In Gansu Province, security at the sprawling Labrang Monastery was visibly tighter, and emotions more raw. Monks there said the accumulation of indignities, years in the making, was followed by two days of street protests in 2008 that led to a wave of detentions and beatings.

Many Tibetan monks are unable to get passports and the Han, they said, often treat them with contempt. “We can’t even speak our minds on the phone because the police are listening in,” said one 39-year-old who ducked into a reporter’s hotel room to share details about life for Labrang’s 1,400 monks.

He described how the police had raided the white-walled monastery complex one night as everyone slept, kicking in doors, smashing computers and tearing up photographs of the Dalai Lama. At least 180 monks were detained that night. “They ran out of handcuffs, so they started tying our wrists with rope they found in the monastery,” he said.

The monks were eventually released but Labrang, one of the most important religious sites in Tibetan Buddhism, is a changed place. Video surveillance cameras hang from the eaves of hallowed temples and plainclothes police officers mingle with the faithful. “They never fool us because they hold their prayer beads with their right hand, and every Tibetan knows to hold them in their left hand,” one monk said.


Shi Da contributed research.


Horrific anti-China protests become Tibet's norm
By Tim Sullivan Associated Press

Wednesday, March 21 2012 6:30 a.m. MDT


For more than a year the deadly protests have swept the Tibetan plateau, waves of people burning themselves alive in a widening challenge to Chinese rule.

The prime minister of Tibet's government-in-exile calls them acts of desperation. The Dalai Lama says they give China an excuse for even harsher crackdowns. But to many Tibetans, they are carefully reasoned attempts to bring attention to an often-forgotten cause.

"These are intelligent people who knew what they were doing," said Tenzin Choekyi of the Tibetan Youth Congress, a prominent Dharmsala, India-based activist group. "What is the ultimate thing you can offer? It's your life."

In Tibet, the horrific has become normal.

More than two dozen Tibetans, many in their teens or 20s, have set themselves on fire since early 2011 in an unprecedented series of suicide-protests. In the moments before they are overwhelmed by pain or tackled by Chinese security, they cry out for the Dalai Lama's return to Tibet, for an end to China's crackdowns or for their homeland's independence.

There is little sign that the immolations could lead to a broad uprising. But they have embarassed Beijing and are testing Chinese policies across the Tibetan plateau. The protests also have taken place far from the Tibetan heartland, showing opposition to Beijing's rule is geographically more widespread than ever.

Most of the immolations have occurred in ethnic Tibetan regions in China's Sichuan and Qinghai provinces.

While the most restive towns have been effectively sealed off, some details have emerged: the Buddhist monk who drank gasoline before dousing himself with fuel and setting himself alight; the two young men who set themselves on fire, then ran together into the streets shouting for the return of the Dalai Lama; the nun, seen in a video distributed by activists, walking along a busy street engulfed in flames.

At one point, a woman tosses a white scarf — a Tibetan offering of respect — at her feet.

"The self-immolations don't hurt anybody else. They just want people to see that there are problems here," said a young schoolteacher in trendy faded jeans in the small Tibetan town of Hongyuan, in China's Sichuan province. He spoke on condition of anonymity fearing retribution by Chinese officials.

Until recently, though, such protests were rare among Tibetans, raised in an enveloping Buddhist culture that normally discourages suicide.

While there had been a handful of earlier Tibetan suicide protests, the recent surge began March 16, 2011, when a 20-year-old monk at Sichuan's Kirti monastery burned himself alive, apparently to mark the anniversary of a 2008 protest brutally crushed by Chinese forces.

The burnings spiked in October, and then again in January. There have been at least seven so far in March, activists say.

The Kirti monastery, which has emerged as a center of political activism, has been the focus of the protests, with at least 14 current and former monks among the self-immolators.

The monastery and the town around it, Aba, have been flooded with Chinese forces. Soldiers and police in riot gear now line the town's streets, and more have been posted inside the monastery. But they have been unable to stop the protests.

The roots of the self-immolations lie along Tibetan periphery. Aba, like most of the towns that have seen recent suicides, is well over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) from the Tibetan capital of Lhasa.

Until the 1990s, China's most repressive policies were concentrated on the official Tibetan Autonomous Region, with Tibetans living to the east, in Sichuan and Qinghai, given freer reign. When protests shook Lhasa in the 1980s, they barely touched Sichuan.

"These areas had not been part of a Tibetan state for centuries, and were outside the administration of the old Tibetan government, yet now we often hear of people there raising the Tibetan flag or calling for freedom for Tibet," Robert Barnett, a professor of modern Tibetan history at Columbia University, said in an email.

"It's not that these people are radical, it is that China's policies, especially since its decision in the 1990s to insult the Dalai Lama and to treat monasteries as threats, has turned a formerly complex Tibetan cultural sphere into a relatively unified sphere of political dissent."

The trouble began in the late 1990s, as a divide between Beijing and Tibetans began growing over the Panchen Lama, the second-highest Tibetan religious leader. In 1995, the Dalai Lama named a 6-year-old boy as the reincarnated Panchen Lama. But the boy and his family soon disappeared, and Beijing gave another boy the title.

When monks in Sichuan spoke out, Beijing's policies began reaching deep into monastic life. Monks were pressed to accept the Panchen Lama, to declare their fealty to China, to denounce the Dalai Lama. As senior monks died, China forbade the traditional searches for reincarnated successors, forcing the monks to look abroad for guidance, toward more politicized monasteries in exile.

In Tibet, where monasteries often serve encompassing roles — school, cultural center, home to the sons of local families who have become monks — Beijing's moves created a bitter cycle of revolt and repression, with Tibetan protests leading to ever-more official interference, which in turn sparked more protests.


Aba now looks like an occupied town.

During a clandestine late February visit by an Associated Press reporter, roadblocks guarded every road into the town, while members of Chinese security forces massed along the main street and outside the monastery.

"People have never seen the type of restrictions that exist now in Aba," said Lobsang Yeshe, a monk from the town who fled to India more than a decade ago. He is now based at Kirti's brother monastery, in Dharmsala, which keeps in close contact with Aba.

He said the crackdown and what he calls "the invisible troubles" — everything from the influx of ethnic Han Chinese to Tibetan nomads encouraged to settle into permanent homes — have nurtured the self-immolations. Tibetans, he said, have no choice but to harm themselves in protest.

"The Tibetans who made the decision to self-immolate, who can question them?" he demanded. "This is their choice. This is their own method of nonviolence."

But why suicide by self-immolation? No one knows. Some see inspiration in the Arab spring, and the Tunisian vegetable seller who helped inspire it by setting himself on fire. Others look to a history of Buddhist immolators: Vietnamese monks who burned themselves alive in the 1960s, angry over government crackdowns; Chinese monks who killed themselves in political protests during the last imperial dynasty.

Beijing, though, sees them as part of a decades-long campaign by the Dalai Lama to carve Tibet away from China. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters that the Dalai Lama and his aides were trying to incite more self-immolations, calling their activities "terrorism in disguise."

The Dalai Lama, who fled Lhasa in 1959 and now lives in exile in India, insists he only wants more autonomy for Tibet.

A year after the suicides began, many details are unanswered. Many protesters have been dragged away by police, and it is unclear how many survived. Activists say dozens of people have been arrested, accused of encouraging the immolations.

Meanwhile, a handful of Tibetans have begun to speak out against the self-immolations.

Tsering Woeser, a well-known poet living under virtual house arrest in Beijing, posted a recent online appeal calling for an end to the suicides, signing the appeal with two other Tibetan intellectuals.

"Tibetans must cherish life and live with resilience. Regardless of the magnitude of oppression, our life is important, and we have to cherish it," the March 8 appeal said.

At least four Tibetans have set themselves on fire since then.

Sullivan reported from New Delhi and Dharmsala; Wong reported from Aba and Hongyuan; Associated Press writer Charles Hutzler contributed from Beijing.








22 self-immolations reported in past year
Published: March. 23, 2012 at 10:15 AM


MAQU, China, March 23 (UPI) -- Seven people have set themselves on fire in recent weeks in protest of Chinese policies against Tibetans, activists say.

The New York Times said China has tightened controls against the 5 million Tibetans who live in Gansu province, near Tibet. The newspaper said 22 Tibetans have died in the past year by self-immolation.

China blamed the deaths on the influence of Tibetan exiles and has boosted the police and military presence in the region. Thousands of Communist Party leaders have been sent to Tibetan communities to develop relationships with monks, rewarding those who are cooperative and sometimes expelling, from their monasteries, those who are not.

Monks and nuns have been forced to publicly denounce Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, the newspaper said Friday.

Student protests were reported in China's Qinghai province after the introduction of Chinese-language textbooks. Exile groups say one person was killed and 30 others injured when police fired at demonstrators in Drango County in Sichuan province.

The Tibetan Center for Human Rights and Democracy said 20 of 22 monasteries have been closed in Diru County in the Tibet Autonomous Region.

The New York Times said the most recent self-immolation death, that of a 20-year-old student named Tsering Kyi, has been widely publicized by Tibetan activists. The official Xinhua news agency said the young woman set herself on fire after a head injury caused her grades to decline.


© 2012 United Press International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: 'There is no real hunt. It's fixed'

Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the bureau's more ethically murky practices


Paul Harris in Irvine, California

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 March 2012 12.50 EDT



Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow talk.

"They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did," Monteilh told the Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.

It is an astonishing admission that goes that goes to the heart of the intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire religious group as suspicious.

Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial tactics: the use of "confidential informants" in so-called entrapment cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist "attacks" at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net suspects.

In the case of the Newburgh Four – where four men were convicted for a fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx – a confidential informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for help with the attack.

In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a New Jersey military base, one informant's criminal past included attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.

Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens. "The way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment … I know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It's such a joke, a real joke. There is no real hunt. It's fixed," he said.

But Monteilh has regrets now about his involvement in a scheme called Operation Flex. Sitting in the kitchen of his modest home in Irvine, near Los Angeles, Monteilh said the FBI should publicly apologise for his fruitless quest to root out Islamic radicals in Orange County, though he does not hold out much hope that will happen. "They don't have the humility to admit a mistake," he said.

Monteilh's story sounds like something out of a pulp thriller. Under the supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor created a fictitious French-Syrian altar ego, called Farouk Aziz. In this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange County – the long stretch of suburbia south of LA – and pretended to convert to Islam.

He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist sympathizers.

Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange County's Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI: unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.

Monteilh does not look like a spy. He is massively well built, but soft-spoken and friendly. He is 49 but looks younger. He lives in a small rented home in Irvine that blends into the suburban sprawl of southern California. Yet Monteilh knows the spying game intimately well.

By his own account Monteilh got into undercover work after meeting a group of off-duty cops working out in a gym. Monteilh told them he had spent time in prison in Chino, serving time for passing fraudulent checks.

It is a criminal past he explains by saying he was traumatised by a nasty divorce. "It was a bad time in my life," he said. He and the cops got to talking about the criminals Monteilh had met while in Chino. The information was so useful that Monteilh says he began to work on undercover drug and organised crime cases.

Eventually he asked to work on counter-terrorism and was passed on to two FBI handlers, called Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen. These two agents had a mission and an alias ready-made for him.

Posing as Farouk Aziz he would infiltrate local mosques and Islamic groups around Orange County. "Paul Allen said: 'Craig, you are going to be our computer worm. Our guy that gives us the real pulse of the Muslim community in America'," Monteilh said.

The operation began simply enough. Monteilh started hanging out at mosques, posing as Aziz, and explaining he wanted to learn more about religion. In July, 2006, at the Islamic Center of Irvine, he converted to Islam.

Monteilh also began attending other mosques, including the Orange County Islamic Foundation. Monteilh began circulating endlessly from mosque to mosque, spending long days in prayer or reading books or just hanging out in order to get as many people as possible to talk to him.

"Slowly I began to wear the robes, the hat, the scarf and they saw me slowly transform and growing a beard. At that point, about three or four months later, [my FBI handlers] said: 'OK, now start to ask questions'."

Those questions were aimed at rooting out radicals. Monteilh would talk of his curiosity over the concepts of jihad and what Muslims should do about injustices in the world, especially where it pertained to American foreign policy.

He talked of access to weapons, a possible desire to be a martyr and inquired after like-minded souls. It was all aimed at trapping people in condemning statements. "The skill is that I am going to get you to say something. I am cornering you to say "jihad"," he said.

Of course, the chats were recorded.

In scenes out of a James Bond movie, Monteilh said he sometimes wore a secret video recorder sewn into his shirt. At other times he activated an audio recorder on his key rings.

Monteilh left his keys in offices and rooms in the mosques that he attended in the hope of recording conversations that took place when he was not here. He did it so often that he earned a reputation with other worshippers for being careless with his keys. The recordings were passed back to his FBI handlers at least once a week.

He also met with them every two months at a hotel room in nearby Anaheim for a more intense debriefing. Monteilh says he was grilled on specific individuals and asked to view charts showing networks of relationships among Orange County's Muslim population.

He said the FBI had two basic aims. Firstly, they aimed to uncover potential militants. Secondly, they could also use any information Monteilh discovered – like an affair or someone being gay – to turn targeted people into becoming FBI informants themselves.

None of it seemed to unnerve his FBI bosses, not even when he carried out a suggestion to begin seducing Muslim women and recording them.

At one hotel meeting, agent Kevin Armstrong explained the FBI attitude towards the immense breadth of Operation Flex – and any concerns over civil rights – by saying simply: "Kevin is God."

Monteilh's own attitude evolved into something very similar. "I was untouchable. I am a felon, I am on probation and the police cannot arrest me. How empowering is that? It is very empowering. You began to have a certain arrogance about it. It is almost taunting. They told me: 'You are an untouchable'," he said.

But it was not always easy. "I started at 4am. I ended at 9.30pm. Really, it was a lot of work … Farouk took over. Craig did not exist," he said. But it was also well paid: at the peak of Operation Flex, Monteilh was earning more than $11,000 a month.

But he was wrong about being untouchable.

Far from uncovering radical terror networks, Monteilh ended up traumatising the community he was sent into. Instead of embracing calls for jihad or his questions about suicide bombers or his claims to have access to weapons, Monteilh was instead reported to the FBI as a potentially dangerous extremist.

A restraining order was also taken out against him in June 2007, asking him to stay away from the Islamic Center of Irvine. Operation Flex was a bust and Monteilh had to kill off his life as Farouk Aziz.

But the story did not end there. In circumstances that remain murky Monteilh then sued the FBI over his treatment, claiming that they abandoned him once the operation was over.

He also ended up in jail after Irvine police prosecuted him for defrauding two women, including a former girlfriend, as part of an illegal trade in human growth hormone at fitness clubs. (Monteilh claims those actions were carried out as part of another secret string operation for which he was forced to carry the can.)

What is not in doubt is that Monteilh's identity later became public. In 2009 the FBI brought a case against Ahmad Niazi, an Afghan immigrant in Orange County.

The evidence included secret recordings and even calling Osama bin Laden "an angel". That was Monteilh's work and he outed himself to the press to the shock of the very Muslims he had been spying on who now realised that Farouk Aziz – the radical they had reported to the FBI two years earlier – had in fact been an undercover FBI operative.

Now Monteilh says he set Niazi up and the FBI was trying to blackmail the Afghani into being an informant. "I built the whole relationship with Niazi. Through my coercion we talked about jihad a lot," he said. The FBI's charges against Niazi were indeed later dropped.

Now Monteilh has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against the FBI. Amazingly, after first befriending Muslim leaders in Orange County as Farouk Aziz, then betraying them as Craig Monteilh, he has now joined forces with them again to campaign for their civil liberties.

That has now put Monteilh's testimony about his year undercover is at the heart of a fresh legal effort to prove that the FBI operation in Orange County unfairly targeted a vulnerable Muslim community, trampling on civil rights in the name of national security.

The FBI did not respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.

It is not the first time Monteilh has shifted his stance. In the ACLU case Monteilh is now posing as the sorrowful informant who saw the error of his ways.

But in previous court papers filed against the Irvine Police and the FBI, Monteilh's lawyers portrayed him as the loyal intelligence asset who did sterling work tackling the forces of Islamic radicalism and was let down by his superiors.

In those papers Monteilh complained that FBI agents did not act speedily enough on a tip he gave them about a possible sighting of bomb-making materials. Now Monteilh says that tip was not credible.

Either way it does add up to a story that shifts with the telling. But that fact alone goes to the heart of the FBI's use of such confidential informants in investigating Muslim communities.

FBI operatives with profiles similar to Monteilh's – of a lengthy criminal record, desire for cash and a flexibility with the truth – have led to high profile cases of alleged entrapment that have shocked civil rights groups across America.

In most cases the informants have won their prosecutions and simply disappeared. Monteilh is the only one speaking out. But whatever the reality of his year undercover, Monteilh is almost certainly right about one impact of Operation Flex and the exposure of his undercover activities: "Because of this the Muslim community will never trust the FBI again."