WH money helps pay for NYPD Muslim surveillance
A group of Muslim students gather outside Rutgers' Paul Robeson Campus Center in Newark, N.J., Friday, Feb. 24, 2012, after the New Jersey chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-NJ), along with the Rutgers University Muslim Alumni Association and other groups held a news conference to address concerns about the spying conducted by the New York City Police Department on the Muslim community in New Jersey. / AP Photo/Mel Evans
WASHINGTON - Millions of dollars in White House money has helped pay for New York Police Department programs that put entire American Muslim neighborhoods under surveillance.
The money is part of a little-known grant intended to help law enforcement fight drug crimes. Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135 million to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA.
Some of that money — it's unclear exactly how much because the program has little oversight — has paid for the cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods. It also paid for computers that store even innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events.
When NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly was filled in on these efforts, his briefings were prepared on HIDTA computers.
The AP confirmed the use of White House money through secret police documents and interviews with current and former city and federal officials. The AP also obtained electronic documents with digital signatures indicating they were created and saved on HIDTA computers. The HIDTA grant program is overseen by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.
The disclosure that the White House is at least partially paying for the NYPD's wholesale surveillance of places where Muslims eat, shop, work and pray complicates efforts by the Obama administration to stay out of the fray over New York's controversial counterterrorism programs. The administration has championed outreach to American Muslims and has said law enforcement should not put entire communities under suspicion.
The Obama administration, however, has pointedly refused to endorse or repudiate the NYPD programs it helps pay for. The White House last week declined to comment on its grant payments.
John Brennan, Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, last year called the NYPD's efforts "heroic" but would not elaborate. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, whose department also gives grant money to the NYPD and is one of the lead federal agencies helping police build relationships with Muslims, has refused in recent months to discuss the police tactics. Tom Perez, the Justice Department's top civil rights lawyer, has repeatedly refused to answer questions about the NYPD.
Outside Washington, the NYPD's efforts drew increased criticism last week. College administrators at Yale, Columbia and elsewhere issued harsh rebukes for NYPD's infiltration of Muslim student groups and its monitoring of school websites. New Jersey's governor and the mayor of its largest city have complained about the NYPD's widespread surveillance there, outside New York's police jurisdiction.
The White House HIDTA grant program was established at the height of the drug war to help police fight drug gangs and unravel supply routes. It has provided about $2.3 billion to local authorities in the past decade.
After the terror attacks, law enforcement was allowed to use some of that money to fight terrorism. It's unclear how much HIDTA money has been used to pay for the intelligence division, in part because NYPD intelligence operations receive scant oversight in New York.
Congress, which approves the money for the program, is not provided with a detailed breakdown of activities. None of the NYPD's clandestine programs is cited in the New York-New Jersey region's annual reports to Congress between 2006 and 2010.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not respond to questions the AP sent to him in two emails about the White House money and the department's intelligence division.
Most of the money from the White House grants in New York and New Jersey has been spent fighting drugs, said Chauncey Parker, director of the program there. He said less than $1.3 million was spent on vehicles used by the NYPD intelligence unit.
"Those cars are used to collect and analyze counterterrorism information with the goal of preventing a terrorist attack in New York City or anywhere else," Parker said. "If it's been used for specific counterterrorism effort, then it's been used to pay for those cars."
Former police officials told the AP those vehicles have been used to photograph mosques and record the license plates of worshippers.
In addition to paying for the cars, the White House money pays for part of the office space the intelligence division shares with other agencies in Manhattan.
When police compiled lists of Muslims who took new, Americanized names, they kept those records on HIDTA computer servers. That was ongoing as recently as October, city officials said.
Many NYPD intelligence officers, including those that conducted surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods, had HIDTA email addresses. Briefing documents for Kelly, the police commissioner, were compiled on HIDTA computers. Those documents described what police informants were hearing inside mosques and which academic conferences Muslim scholars attended.
When police wanted to pay a confidential informant, they were told to sign onto the HIDTA website to file the paperwork, according to a 2007 internal document obtained by the AP.
Parker said the White House grant money was never used to pay any of the NYPD intelligence division's confidential informants. The HIDTA computer systems, he said, are platforms that allow different law enforcement agencies to share information and work.
"I am shocked to hear that federal dollars may have helped finance the NYPD's misguided efforts to spy on Muslims in America," said Rep. Judy Chu, D-Calif., one of 34 members of Congress who have asked the Justice Department and House Judiciary Committee to investigate the NYPD.
The connection between NYPD and the White House anti-drug grant program surfaced years ago, during a long-running civil rights lawsuit against police. Civil rights attorneys asked in court about a "demonstration debriefing form" that police used whenever they arrested people for civil disobedience. The form carried the seal of both the NYPD Intelligence Division and HIDTA.
A city lawyer downplayed any connection. She said the NYPD and HIDTA not only shared office space, they also shared office supplies like paper. The NYPD form with the seal of a White House anti-drug program was "a recycled piece of paper that got picked up and modified," attorney Gail Donoghue told a federal judge in 2003.
The issue died in court and was never pursued further.
Last week, the controversy over NYPD's programs drew one former Obama administration official into the discussion.
After the AP revealed an extensive program to monitor Muslims in Newark, N.J., police there denied knowing anything about it. The Newark police director at the time, Garry McCarthy, has since moved on to lead Chicago's police department where President Barack Obama's first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, is now the mayor.
"We don't do that in Chicago and we're not going to do that," Emanuel said last week.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the NYPD surveillance in his state was "disturbing" and has asked the attorney general to investigate. Christie was New Jersey's top federal prosecutor and sat on the HIDTA executive board during 2006 and 2007 when the NYPD was conducting surveillance in New Jersey cities. Christie said he didn't know that, in 2007, the NYPD catalogued every mosque and Muslim business in Newark, the state's largest city.
"I kind of think I would have remembered that," he said on Fox Business News last week.
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1972-1973 various acts
2/26/1993 World trade center truck bomb
3/23/1997 Empire State building-7 shot
9/11 remember?
4/13/2004 5 people run down
6/25/2006 4 shot plus a police officer
7/28/2005 6 women shot
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These were dine by; a girls scouts b) boy scouts c) European tourists
d)handicapped people e) Muslims
Figure it out yet?
No one ever said living in a free democracy would be risk-free.
The NYPD's activity hardly comprises a willful, wonton and dangerous policy of oppressing US Citizens and all this scrutiny could be diminished by the Muslim community making a legitimate effort to police their own ranks. They aren't doing it, so someone has to do it for them. if they're not doing anything wrong, they've got nothing to worry about. And George does make a point - all attacks thwarted by New York were precipitated by islamic extremists.
Sure you can shout about "principles" all day long. But if you're not going to protect yourself, you aren't going to be around long. Go NYPD.
Several qualities connect these groups. Among other things, the refusal to admit that it's possible to act honorably and not be attacked. If you are honorable, you act in a manner that God approves,and He will protect you. The NWO wants an "excuse" for creating a universal police state, the sociopaths just enjoy seeing a group brutalized, and the cowards often are cowards because they are so far outside God's grace they don't feel they deserve protection. In any evet, there is never an excuse for violating fundamental ethics for any reaons whatsoever. Nor has it ever been proved that protection requires foregoing principle and honor!
Among the strongest protections is simply being someone else's friend. Friends will not attack friends. The shills, sociopaths and cowards depict Muslims as just waking up one day and deciding they want to kill Americans. They absolutely refuse to acknowledge or countenance the fact that the U.S. has a record of clandestine brutality against Muslim nations for decades! In fact, the capitalist corporatist New World Order lives, and fashions American policy, on the basis on fundamental tenets of corporations, among them, making money is the only goal worth pursuing, and no one is your friend. Since at least the days of the "robber barons" the U.S. has defined foreign policy solely around trying to rape smaller nations' peoples of their resources and rights, and, since at least the end of World War II, the U.S. has emphasized the hanging of the flag vertically in the unnatural position of the starred canton to the upper left, which is similar to wartime configurations of nations such as the Philippines. Since at least the end of World War II, the U.S. has seen itself as at war with the entire rest of the planet.
Calm down, please. Acting honorably is a wonderful sentiment and requiring it of a country will give you plenty to rail against for the rest of your lifetime. If you really think that acting honorably is a guarantee against other attacking your interests or trying to further their own interests at the expense of yours, then you must have learned about the world by something you read in a book.
The NYPD violated the rules of the Muslim student club specifically and the student activities program of the university more generally.
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This is a funny statement: "A spy does not qualify as a legitimate participant in the student activities program"
So they check a box on their app that says "I am a spy" and are then denied admission to the club? LOLOLOL
Here's the deal folks. The bottom line is if an abnormally high percentage of threats to this country and its citizens come from your demographic or ethnic minority group, then your group is going to come under some unwanted scrutiny. If you want to minimize that scrutiny, then loudly denounce those bad apples and proactively approach law enforcement showing them your extensive efforts to weed out and bring extremists to justice.
If you can't do that, then tough, you are just going to have to put up with surveillance and profiling. I don't have sympathy for people who don't make an effort to clean up their own garbage but then scream to high heaven when someone else comes in to clean it up for them. Just gratuitous and contrived indignation.
Hopefully they are doing same for all groups to prevent
any acts of terror whether Muslin, left wing or right wing extremists. We should have learned by now after the fact does not save lives.
Is there some media source reporting that the NYPD currently has a bunch of mosques and law-abiding muslim citizens under surveillance for no reason other than they are muslim? If not, then this is not a story and there is no news here.
Is this the media stirring up all kinds of controversy where there is none?
Sometimes they leave things as well, I found what appeared to be blood in the floor vent for the air conditioning and heating, probably about a quart.
Police are extremely sick, humans.