Religious Group Demands NSA Documents in Ethnic-Slur Probe

A Sikh or­gan­iz­a­tion is ask­ing in­tel­li­gence au­thor­it­ies to dis­close in­tern­al com­mu­nic­a­tions that con­tain eth­nic epi­thets.

The Sikh Co­ali­tion on Thursday filed a Free­dom of In­form­a­tion Act re­quest to the Na­tion­al Se­cur­ity Agency and the FBI for em­ploy­ee emails sent from Sept. 11, 2001, un­til the present that con­tain the slurs “ra­g­head” or “tow­el­head.”

The move is in re­sponse to a new Ed­ward Snowden leak pub­lished last week that re­vealed the NSA and the FBI have spied on the emails of five high-pro­file Muslim-Amer­ic­ans who are not pub­licly known to be guilty of any ter­ror­ist activ­ity. In the same leak, one dis­closed file from 2005 shows an uniden­ti­fied tar­get’s name be­ing logged in a spread­sheet as “Mo­hammed Ra­g­head.”

“As Amer­ic­ans, we ex­pect law-en­force­ment of­fi­cials to be­have like adults,” said Am­ardeep Singh, pro­gram dir­ect­or of the Sikh Co­ali­tion, in a state­ment. “The Sikh Co­ali­tion will not tol­er­ate the use of ra­cial or re­li­gious slurs by people who are sup­posed to pro­tect us.”

Shortly after the re­port’s pub­lic­a­tion, a White House spokes­wo­man said it had asked James Clap­per, the dir­ect­or of na­tion­al in­tel­li­gence, to “un­der­take an as­sess­ment of in­tel­li­gence com­munity policies, train­ing stand­ards, or dir­ect­ives that pro­mote di­versity and tol­er­ance, and as ne­ces­sary, make any re­com­mend­a­tions changes or ad­di­tion­al re­forms.”

The White House and the Of­fice of the Dir­ect­or of Na­tion­al In­tel­li­gence did not im­me­di­ately re­spond Thursday to a re­quest for a status up­date on the in­tern­al re­view.

The Sikh Co­ali­tion is a non­profit or­gan­iz­a­tion formed shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, ter­ror­ist at­tacks.

Last week, Jason Leo­pold, a well-known and pro­lif­ic open-re­cords re­port­er, also filed a re­quest with the FBI ask­ing for sim­il­ar doc­u­ments.