Andre Tartar
writes:
A few months ago an AP investigation uncovered an intensive NYPD effort to spy on Muslim students in several New York City colleges. The latest update from the AP finds that the program has actually included surveillance operations at a much wider network of schools, including several outside New York. (Just a few: Yale, Rutgers, Syracuse University, SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Albany.) In many cases, like in the example below, the police used student informants or outright infiltrated Muslim student meet-ups.
Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.
Many of the students reached by the AP were understandably shocked that their names were showing up in reports prepared for NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly, often simply for being active in Muslim student associations or for receiving and forwarding e-mails about upcoming Islamic conferences. [...]
Ultimately, it seems little or no evidence was ever provided of wrongdoing (or even suspicious behavior) on the part of any of the students, and the same largely goes for the Islamic scholars participating in targeted seminars. [...]
Secret (often illegal) police spying is nothing new. Neither is reaching outside municipal boundaries to do it. The late Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department Daryl Gates
ran a covert spy, infiltration and
agents provocateurs operation that was exposed in the early 1980s but didn't cost Gates his job. Sometimes, departments work hand-in-glove with federal agencies; sometimes, they do it all on their own.
Always they have their excuses. And always, no matter how many times such behavior has been documented, it takes the media for friggin' ever to get around to exposing it.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2006:
The debate over the administration's decision to bless a $6.8 billion dollar port security bill intensified this morning, with Homeland Security Chief Chertoff defending the deal. I'd like first to provide some background on the deal which is receiving little attention from critics of the takeover. Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation, a U.K. company, currently controls the U.S. ports in question. Those ports are located in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia. It's the fourth largest port company in the world. The shareholders of that company agreed to the deal, in which Dubai Ports World (DP World) would pay $6.8 billion to take over that company. (DP world has since announced it will take out a loan to finance the cash deal). The Bush administration gave the green light to the deal. This deal makes DP World the third largest port operator in the world. Before the deal, it was the seventh largest.
Port security is the neglected middle child of our national security debate. Only some 5% of containers coming into the U.S. are inspected. According to 2004 figures, in the three years after 9/11, we spent about $500 million on port security. That's what we spend every 3 days in Iraq. [...]
Tweet of the Day:
I'm looking forward to when this brief period of having to care what Rick Santorum says comes to an end.
— @drgrist via TweetDeck
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