With CIA help, NYPD built secret effort to monitor mosques, daily life of Muslim neighborhoods

[rug]

NEW YORK — Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.

These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.

The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.

Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what’s going on.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/with-cia-help-nypd-built-secret-effort-to-monitor-mosques-daily-life-of-muslim-neighborhoods/2011/08/24/gIQAr87haJ_story.html

[LiberalFighter]

1. Time for those being spied on to rise up

[darkstar3]

2. Are they doing this with the houses of worship of other faiths?

Are they investigating the Chasidics in NYC who have been so incredibly anti-government lately?

Are they investigating the churches across the midwest and the south where known terrorists like Scott Roeder are/were in attendance?

Because if not, that would be my only problem with this idea. Domestic terrorism and religious violence are big problems, and I think our intelligence gathering community should do what they can to be aware of the roots of those problems.

[rug]

3. No, they're not.

[darkstar3]

4. Then I think it's time to start.

Maybe if we'd had such a comprehensive program, the recent domestic terrorism attack against a Dallas area Planned Parenthood might have been prevented.

[rug]

5. Are you familiar with COINTELPRO?

[darkstar3]

6. That was illegal.

When we pay someone to go into a house of worship, which is publicly accessible, and take notes on what they hear, what rights are violated? What laws are broken?

[rug]

7. So is this. And odious.

It's a long article.

[darkstar3]

8. Then perhaps you can answer my questions.

What rights are violated? What laws are broken?

[rug]

9. Do you find this odious?

"They came up with a makeshift solution. They dispatched more officers to Pakistani neighborhoods and, according to one former police official directly involved in the effort, instructed them to look for reasons to stop cars: speeding, broken tail lights, running stop signs, whatever. The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior. An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant.

"For Cohen, the transition from spying to policing didn’t come naturally, former colleagues said. When faced with a decision, especially early in his tenure, he’d fall back on his CIA background. Cutter said he and other uniformed officers had to tell Cohen, no, we can’t just slip into someone’s apartment without a warrant. No, we can’t just conduct a search. The rules for policing are different.

"While Cohen was being shaped by the police department, his CIA background was remaking the department. But one significant barrier stood in the way of Cohen’s vision.

"Since 1985, the NYPD had operated under a federal court order limiting the tactics it could use to gather intelligence. During the 1960s and 1970s, the department had used informants and undercover officers to infiltrate anti-war protest groups and other activists without any reason to suspect criminal behavior."

The last paragraph refers to the Handschu Settlement.

http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/jlawp11&div=20&id=&page=

The full article is here.

http://www.brooklaw.edu/~/media/PDF/LawJournals/JLP_PDF/jlp_vol11ii.ashx

It begins on page 745.

[darkstar3]

10. Neighborhood policing is very different from monitoring mosques.

Stay on topic. You posted this in the religion forum, and your OP focused on the fact that intelligence officers were monitoring mosques. Now you're talking about policing of Pakistani-majority neighborhoods. These are two very different issues.

We're sending people into houses of worship, where firebrands sometimes inspire domestic terrorism, to take notes. I do not find that odious.

[rug]

11. This has as much to do with neighborhood policing as the Palmer raids had to do with littering.

This is the topic: it is the politicizing of religion to extend state power. As the state politicized political dissent. As the state politicized race. "We" are not sending people into houses of worship looking for "firebrands" any more than "we" went into Iraq to spread democracy.

I do find that odious, illegal, an affront to civil liberties and far more dangerous than "domestic terrorists".

[darkstar3]

12. Religion politicized itself, and you helped.

If you don't like the results, change the cause.

[rug]

13. The state uses religion at least as often as religion uses the state.

If you don't realize that you are part of the problem. It may lead you to support police raids on religious firebrands.

BTW, congratulations on hoding it together for six posts before reverting to ad hominem remarks. It must have been difficult.

[darkstar3]

14. It was a simple statement. I'm not shooting the messenger.

I'm simply telling you that if you want religion and politics to be separate, it would be good if you would work toward that goal, and your posting history doesn't show me that you're interested in doing that. Religion has been heavily politicized over the last few decades, and in the process has become an increasingly effective breeding ground for violence and domestic terrorism. We should watch that breeding ground, and I think we aren't watching enough of it. I support the raid on Jeffs and the FLDS, and should another group of religious extremists plot ways to skirt the law and undermine the rights of others, including their rights to survive, I think it would be great if we knew about it ahead of time.

But to return my original point: I have no problem with the monitoring of mosques by intelligence officials, as long as we're monitoring right-wing churches and synagogues as well.