Where criminal activity – planning for terrorist attacks – is taking place.

HereÂ’s the background.

As federal authorities press their case against a Tustin man accused of lying about ties to Al-Qaeda, they disclosed this week that some evidence came from an informant who infiltrated Orange County mosques and allegedly recorded the defendant discussing jihad, weapons and plans to blow up abandoned buildings.

On Wednesday, a man who claims to be that informant stepped forward, filing court documents saying that he had served as a confidential informant for the FBI from July 2006 to October 2007 to identify and thwart terrorist operations in the Orange County Islamic community.

* * *

Monteilh said in interviews that he had alerted the FBI to Niazi after meeting him at the Islamic Center of Irvine in November 2006 and spending eight months with him. Monteilh said he called himself Farouk Al-Aziz and posed as a Syrian-French American in search of his Islamic roots. Monteilh told the FBI that Niazi befriended him and began to lecture him about jihad, gave him lessons in bomb-making and discussed plots to blow up Orange County landmarks.

"He took me under his wing and began to radicalize me," Monteilh said.

The fine folks at CAIR, however, reacted to the arrest of Ahmadullah Sais Niazi with expressions of deep concern – that the FBI would dare look for jihadis at a mosque.

Ayloush said he was "100% sure" that Monteilh was the informant in question and expressed anger and disappointment that the FBI would infiltrate mosques. He accused officials of trying to entrap innocent Muslims, noting that Monteilh has been convicted of grand theft and forgery in the past. He said Muslims had worked hard to develop a partnership with the FBI -- and had been assured by J. Steven Tidwell, then assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles field office, at an Irvine forum in 2006 that their mosques were not being monitored. Now, Ayloush said, he has doubts about future relations with the FBI.

"This is religious profiling at its worst," Ayloush said about the FBI operation.

“Religious profiling at its worst”? Really? Given the nature of the enemy we fight, an enemy with an ideology explicitly grounded in Islam and which operates with the blessing of Muslim religious leaders around the world, why wouldn’t we look for wannabe jihadis in mosques? Indeed, how could it possibly be seen as responsible for law enforcement to not look for them there? And why is CAIR more concerned about the fact that the FBI looked for potential terrorists in mosques than it is that the Bureau actually FOUND one there?

Of course, given CAIRÂ’s well-documented ties to terrorist organizations over the yearsÂ….

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