The NYPD is not abusing your civil rights, it is protecting you.
This [secret terror fighters deserve our praise] was said, without a hint of irony, by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey. Apparently the New York Daily News has become the public relations arm of the NYPD as this is at least the second such defense of the department by the paper.
Secret Terror Fighters. This is how the former Attorney General who served under President George W. Bush referred to members of the police department of the city of New York. And, we New Yorkers should be thankful because, "New Yorkers are safer as a result" of these secret terror fighting activities.
This secret terror fighting unit is so secret that
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.
Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit.
In an editorial in the New York Daily News, Mukasey defends the NYPD from accusations of 'improprieties' surrounding the arrest of terror suspect Jose Pimentel, the 'lone wolf terrorist' arrested on Nov. 19th for constructing a bomb.
The criticisms of the department were profiled in an investigation conducted by the Associated Press, which Mukasey's op-ed mocks and criticizes.
The Associated Press articles faulted the intel team for alleged racial profiling, and the FBI was also seen distancing itself from the case over suggestions that the NYPD had entrapped Pimentel.
Ironically, as attorney general, Mukasey criticized police chief Ray Kelly for abuses of power, but now is praising him.
As Attorney General, he had accused Police Commissioner Ray Kelly of breaking the law in attempting to wiretap domestic terrorism suspects.
"In effect what you ask," he wrote Kelly in the fall of 2008, "is that we disregard... legal requirements, which are rooted in the constitution." This position, he wrote, "is contrary to the law."
Now, however, in apparent collaboration with the NYPD's Intelligence Division, Mukasey is defending the department for the same abuses of power that he warned against as Attorney General.
The FBI distanced itself from the Pimentel case because of concerns of entrapment. So we should feel safer because the NYPD aggressively pursued a case which the FBI wanted nothing to do with. Mukasey describes the AP articles as 'breathless' and the improprieties as 'supposed'. From the editorial:
One source of the background noise was a series of articles by the Associated Press purporting to disclose, breathlessly and imprecisely, all manner of supposed improprieties by the Intelligence Division, ranging from accepting the cooperation of current and former CIA employees in its intelligence gathering efforts to alleged racial profiling in the random surveillance of innocent communities. Quoted sources included the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American Islamic Relations, described in the articles as “a leading Muslim civil rights organization” although it was named as an unindicted conspirator in the terrorism-financing prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate.
The 'supposed improprieties of the Intelligence Division'. Intelligence Division? Why does a city police department even have an Intelligence Division?
More justification and rationalization by Mukasey on the important work this unit is conducting:
The Intelligence Division embodies the NYPD’s collective reaction to 9/11, which was to recognize that New York is a prime terrorist target and to try to assure that such carnage never recurs by turning itself from a force mainly focused on investigating past crimes into a force focused as well on preventing future ones.
The Division engages in such diverse activities as sending its officers abroad to work with foreign police agencies that are gathering intelligence about how terrorists are radicalized in the West and which of them might represent a particular threat to New York, to using census data to map New York’s ethnic neighborhoods so as to figure out where someone from a location known to have generated highly disproportionate numbers of terrorists, such as Tetouan in Morocco, or Zarqa in Jordan — home town of the notorious Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in a U.S. air raid in Iraq in 2006 — might go if he were to try to come to New York.
Even one decade into this post 9/11 world, it is mindboggling to me that a municipal police deparment has a terrorism department, tasked with fighting 'terrorism'. And that it is doing so in a way to get around spying laws which prohibit the CIA from doing so within the United States. The federal deparment of Homeland Security exists for this purpose. And why we have NORAD. And all the other federal apparatus specifically created for keeping American citizens safe from terrorists.
But then, to claim we should appreciate it, because we are now 'safer'? Okay, so the NYPD is protecting us from lone wolf terrorists who probably couldn't blow up a trashcan. Who is supposed to protect us from the NYPD? As a resident of New York City, I feel much more threatened by the New York Police Department than any 'lone wolf terrorist' constructing a bomb in his mother's Washington Heights apartment. In terms of threats to not only my physical wellbeing, but my civil rights as well.
I certainly don't feel safe if I am a journalist trying to cover protests in the Winter Garden.
I certainly don't feel safe if I am a protestor targeted with a policeman's 'food product' and crowd control device.
I certainly don't feel safe if I am a young woman who in celebrating a promotion had too much to drink and needs the protection of the police to get home safely.
Yes, it's apolice state. And, stop complaining, it's for your own good!