“A lot of people are ashamed, being in prison…I was never ashamed”
According to a new article published by the the New York Times, those were the words of Terry Albury, former FBI agent, when asked to reflect on his dismissal from the government agency he’d given his life to serving, and his subsequent incarceration in a federal prison.
Terry, who was indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917, was sentenced to 48 months for leaking confidential FBI policy documents to the press. He said he felt “a moral imperative to do [so because]…It became too hard to ignore the human cost of what we were doing.”
In this highly revealing account of what happens when the highest authorities in our country create dangerous and reactive policies, we are given a glimpse into the hidden machinery of an agency that, since the events of 9/11, has increasingly overstepped its bounds.
“We’ve built this entire apparatus and convinced the world that there is a terrorist in every mosque, and that every newly arrived Muslim immigrant is secretly anti-American, and because we have proposed that false notion, we have to validate it.”—Terry Albury
Albury gives an extraordinary account of nearly two decades with the FBI. He joined the agency to help protect people’s rights, but became increasingly disillusioned with the policies and practices that violated those same rights. For millions of American-Muslims these policies have lasting real-life consequences, essentially setting them apart as citizens on probation.
Read the article on the New York Times website.
“Spying on innocent people doesn’t help catch guilty people” – Michael German, former FBI agent and author of “Disrupt, Discredit, and Divide”, a 2019 critical analysis of the post-9/11 FBI
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