Army Apologizes for Spying on Law School Conference

March 15, 2004

When Sahar Aziz, a third-year law student at the University of Texas Law School in Austin, organized a campus conference February 4 on "Islam and the Law: A Question of Sexism," she didn't expect any trouble.

"It was nothing out of the ordinary for a law school conference," she says. "It was an academic conference discussing the sociological, political, historical, and legal perspectives."

The press release announcing the event was hardly eye opening. "This conference addresses a variety of issues where Muslim women's rights in Islam facially appear to be compromised by Islamic Law," it said. "This interdisciplinary conference aims to discuss and analyze these issues in a balanced manner. . . . The objective is to reveal the complexity of Islamic Law through the different scholarly interpretations on the same subject matter. In contrast, the conference is not meant to support a certain interpretation or school of thought, nor to be a venue for religious propaganda."

But for some reason, the conference caught the eye of two Army lawyers based at Fort Hood, Texas, who attended the conference.

"We didn't know there was any Army personnel there," says Aziz. "No one was in uniform. There was no one who identified themselves as being with the Army. The optimist view is they were there to learn. The pessimistic view is they were there to spy. We don't know."

The Army takes the optimistic view.

The Army lawyers attended the conference to "help prepare them for their assignments in Southwest Asia, where they will deal with legal issues between the American Forces and the largely Muslim populace," says a March 12 press release from the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command.

At the conference, the Army lawyers took a grilling from at least one person attending the conference. They "were persistently questioned about their identity, occupation, and status by a man who appeared to be attending the conference with two associates," the press release says. "The tone and repetition of the questions made the army lawyers suspicious. They subsequently reported the matter to local military intelligence officials."

That's when things got even messier.

"On February 9, two U.S. Army counterintelligence special agents went to the law school to request a roster of attendees in an attempt to identify the suspicious individual and his two associates," the press release states.

One of the agents was Jason Treesh, Special Agent, Army Intelligence.

"He was looking for me," says Aziz, who has Treesh's card, which he left in her box at the law school. "He knew I was the main organizer. He basically went from office to office asking where I was."

Friends contacted her, she says, telling her: "Someone is looking for you, and you should be careful."

"I was freaking out," Aziz recalls. "I was very stressed, thinking, 'Oh, my God, I can't believe this! You kind of wrack your brain and wonder how the conference might have ignited such scrutiny."

Other law students were also rattled, she says. "People were intimidated, to say the least," she recalls. "He was not in uniform, but he was flashing his badge around and looking for a roster and a video recording." He never received either, Aziz says.

Fearing he would come to her home with a warrant or a subpoena, Aziz called her attorney, Malcolm Greenstein, who ascertained that Aziz herself was not in trouble.

"Why is the military doing domestic surveillance?" he asks.

Douglas Laycock, associate dean of research at the University of Texas Law School, agrees that the Army did not have jurisdiction to come on campus. "We think they overreacted," he adds. "It cannot be that everybody who attends an academic conference becomes a suspect."

The Army itself said it overstepped its bounds. "The special agents and their detachment commander exceeded their authority by requesting information about individuals who were not within the Army's counterintelligence investigative jurisdiction," says the statement of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command. "To prevent this from happening again, INSCOM has provided refresher training on the limits of Army counterintelligence investigative jurisdiction to all counterintelligence personnel performing duties in the United States."

But not everyone is reassured.

Will Harrell, the executive director of ACLU of Texas, doesn't buy the whole story. He believes that the Army lawyers who attended the conference did so with the full knowledge of their superiors. "It was a direct attempt to stifle dissent on that campus. It worked! Students are still traumatized over there. Others are terrified about what this means, and they're wondering whether they're on some list somewhere. I don't care if it's FBI or Army intelligence. The aim is the same: to intimidate."

As for Aziz, the presence of the Army at her conference casts a pall. "I'm very disappointed," she says. "They rained on my parade. Here was this conference that was very successful and that I had worked hard to put together, and then suddenly, it was like something straight out of the movies. If you're the Muslim or the Arab, you think surely nothing will happen to me, and then boom."

Before this incident, Aziz says, she questioned her own fears about the loss of civil liberties in today's America.

Not anymore.

"I thought my own concerns as a Muslim about civil rights were exaggerated. But wow! This is confirmed. This country is changing."