Mr. Speaker, since the tragic Islamist terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 no law enforcement agency has been more effective in preventing another successful terrorist attack than the New York Police Department. Under Commissioner Ray…
Mr. Speaker, since the tragic Islamist terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 no law enforcement agency has been more effective in preventing another successful terrorist attack than the New York Police Department. Under Commissioner Ray Kelly's leadership the NYPD has had 1000 police officers working 24/7, building a counterterrorist infrastructure and taking proactive action to stop at least 14 terrorist plots against New York City.
Despite this outstanding record which should warrant national acclaim, the NYPD has been viciously and falsely attacked in a disgraceful series of articles by the Associated Press, aided and abetted by such politically correct apologists as the New York Times and the ACLU.
As Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and a member of the Intelligence Committee I am proud to stand with the NYPD. I am also proud to introduce into the record an article written by Mitchell D. Silber entitled ``Who Will Defend the Defenders'' from the June issue of Commentary. Mr. Silber, who retired from his position yesterday, worked directly for the deputy commissioner of the NYPD's Intelligence Division, overseeing all the city's terrorism investigations.
I thank Mitchell Silber for his service and commend this article to my colleagues.
[From the Commentary Magazine, June 2012]
Who Will Defend the Defenders?
(By Mitchell D. Silber)
In April, the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting
was awarded to the Associated Press for a series of articles
it published about the New York Police Department's
``clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in
Muslim communities.'' The AP's assertions were so extensive
that they filled more than 50 separate pieces, the first
published in August of last year. Its reporters alleged that
since the attacks of September 11, the New York City Police
Department's Intelligence Division had placed entire Muslim
communities under scrutiny with ``no evidence of
wrongdoing.'' The department, they wrote, had infiltrated
mosques and Muslim student groups with no legal basis to do
so. It had operated far outside its geographical jurisdiction
and had cast too wide a net when monitoring and analyzing
American Muslims.
The NYPD had joined the CIA in an ``unprecedented
partnership,'' blurring the line between foreign and domestic
intelligence-gathering, and had operated in secrecy with
``scant oversight.'' It had run afoul of legal constraints,
especially a series of limitations on its intelligence-
gathering to which the NYPD itself had agreed following a
court case in 1985. It had violated civil-liberties rules in
a way that would not be permitted of federal institutions.
And after all this misbehavior, the results were mixed in any
case.
The articles were quickly and widely disseminated and
elicited expressions of deep outrage among Muslim Americans
and civil-liberties activists. They created fissures between
the police and the communities it sought to protect,
undermined confidence in the NYPD, and attracted national
attention--which, according to the AP's Pulitzer citation,
``result[ed] in congressional calls for a federal
investigation and a debate over the proper role of domestic
intelligence-gathering.'' As well they should have. A free
citizenry relies on a free press to uncover civil-liberties
abuses.
But any serious discussion about the alleged methods and
practices of the NYPD Intelligence Division should have begun
with one question: Was the AP's investigation accurate? The
answer is no.
The articles misrepresent the scope, purpose, and rationale
behind many of the NYPD Intelligence Division's programs.
They confuse events and policies in ways that are misleading
and cast the tale they are telling in the worst possible
light. I know all this to be true, because I worked directly
for the deputy commissioner of the Intelligence Division for
the last seven years, first as a special assistant and then,
for the last four years, until May 2012, as his director of
intelligence analysis, overseeing all the city's terrorism
investigations.
Nonetheless, the articles were accepted as gospel--perhaps
because the accuracy of the work was beside the point. They
were celebrated precisely for what they alleged, not what
they proved. Their purpose was not to foster serious debate
about NYPD anti-terrorism activities, and there has been no
such serious debate in their wake.
The legal and policy questions surrounding how to safeguard
civil liberties while defending society from acts of
terrorism are certainly complex. There is, inevitably, a
difficult balance we most strike between security and
liberty, and it demands rigorous and ongoing debate about
American anti-terrorist methods. Rather than raising these
issues in a thoughtful way to inspire reasoned discussion,
however, the series of articles made broad allegations and
cherry-picked and misconstrued examples to support
particularly damaging charges.
This article is intended to restore the context, accuracy,
and critical detail left out by the AP and thereby convey the
truth of what is an honorable and successful story of
sustained, life-saving police work in a climate of
unprecedented threat. It is impossible to respond to every AP
allegation and distortion even in this generous space. I will
therefore focus on the three subjects that have dominated
headlines about alleged NYPD misconduct since the articles
were published: first, a supposed human-mapping program run
by the department; second, counterterrorism efforts outside
New York City; and third, actions involving universities. In
honing in on these hot-button issues, twill also refute a
number of attendant accusations about the ethics and efficacy
of NYPD methods.
But first, some background on the evolution of the
Intelligence Division and its strategy.
On February 26, 1993, a massive car bomb was detonated
below the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The 1,336-
pound device was intended to knock the North Tower into the
South Tower, bringing both down and killing thousands. The
plot failed but still killed six people and injured 1,042
more.
Although the suspects were dismissed as incompetent, their
associates were already plotting another attack. The
extremist cleric Omar Abdel Rahman, also known as the Blind
Sheikh, was at the heart of this follow-up plan to attack the
United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George
Washington Bridge, and the FBI's New York office. That so-
called Landmarks Plot was thwarted by an informant who had
infiltrated the group.
Almost all the participants in both plots were ultimately
arrested, tried, and brought to justice, and that temporarily
closed the case for most Americans. But on the morning of
September 11, 2001, Islamist terrorism crashed back into New
York City when 19 al-Qaeda members hijacked four commercial
passenger airliners and rammed two of them into the World
Trade Center, killing 2,749 people and completing the mission
begun in 1993.
Having been attacked twice successfully in the span of
eight years, the city could no longer completely defer the
responsibility of counterterrorism to the federal government,
determined Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. While the NYPD
was prepared to work with the federal agencies, the
department determined it would have to make systemic and
autonomous changes in how to protect the city from further
attacks.
To meet that challenge, in January 2002, the NYPD became
the first police department in the country to develop its own
Counterterrorism Bureau. The new mayor, Michael Bloomberg,
and Commissioner Kelly appointed Marine Corps Lieutenant
General Frank Libutti to run it. To head a restructured
Intelligence Division, the department recruited David
Cohen, a 35-year veteran of the CIA who had led both the
operational and analytical branches of the agency.
This was no mere cosmetic relabeling or shuffling of the
bureaucratic deck. The department increased its
representation on the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force from
17 detectives to 120. It reassigned fluent speakers of
Arabic, Pashto, Farsi, and Urdu to counterterrorism duties.
And it posted senior officers in 11 cities around the world
to build relationships with local police agencies and visit
the scenes of terrorist attacks abroad.
The NYPD also incorporated a crucial civilian component to
fight terrorism. A corps of expert analysts in foreign
affairs, intelligence, and counterterrorism were recruited
from top graduate schools as well as from the intelligence
community inside the Beltway. These well-trained and well-
educated civilians were tasked with studying evolving methods
of attack and terrorist hot spots around the world.
Additionally, the department cast a wide net for
collaboration, working with law-enforcement agencies
throughout the northeast and mid-Atlantic and partnering with
11,000 members of the region's private-security industry
through a program called NYPD Shield.
Preventing another 9/11 meant studying the attacks of 1993
and 2001 and the thwarted Landmarks Plot. The 1993 attack and
the plot were local affairs, planned by groups of regionally
based conspirators, six of whom originated from the
Palestinian territories, Egypt, and Kuwait. The men lived in
New York City and New Jersey, and the sites of their
radicalization included the Al Kifah Refugee Center and Al
Farouq Mosque, both on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and the
Al Salam Mosque in Jersey City. These mosques were in thrall
to the Blind Sheikh.
The 9/11 attack was carried out by men from Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. They had been
trained overseas before blending into the population of the
United States. At least six of them chose to live in
Paterson, New Jersey, specifically because there was ``an
Arabic-speaking community there,'' as the 9/11 Commission
Report says. Vitally, in the Landmarks Plot (the only one
against New York that was derailed during this eight-year
period) a confidential informant who was able to penetrate
the conspiracy was the critical factor in detecting and
disrupting the plan before it became an attack.
These trends meant that the department had to figure out
how to (a) find individuals from abroad who had buried
themselves in local communities and (b) utilize human
intelligence (confidential informants) to penetrate
conspiracies before they came to fruition.
If the task wasn't challenging enough, the NYPD also had to
contend with a piece of legal architecture known as the
Handschu Guidelines, a binding agreement overseen by a
federal judge following the settlement of a lawsuit in 1985.
No other police department in the country is bound by these
rules, which at the time stipulated in part that police were
not allowed to investigate political activity before having
specific knowledge of criminal activity. After 9/11, the
department was understandably concerned that prohibitions in
the guidelines might interfere with its ability to prevent
terrorist attacks. As a result, in 2002, the NYPD proposed to
a federal court that the terms of the guidelines be modified;
the court agreed.
The modified guidelines begin by stating a general
principle: ``In its effort to anticipate or prevent unlawful
activity, including terrorist acts, the NYPD must, at times,
initiate investigations in advance of unlawful conduct''
Clearly, conducting an investigation following a successful
attack, as was done in 1993 or 2001, was no longer
acceptable. Plots had to be disrupted before they went
operational.
The new Handschu rules also state: ``The NYPD is authorized
to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the
public'' and ``to conduct online search activity and to
access online sites and forums on the same terms . . . as
members of the public.'' The department is further authorized
to ``prepare general reports and assessments . . . for
purposes of strategic or operational planning.'' It is
therefore entirely legal for the Police Department to search
online, visit public places, or map neighborhoods.
I. The Demographics Unit
The AP Claim: The NYPD has engaged in a ``human-mapping''
program without citing any evidence of wrongdoing. This
program has placed entire Muslim communities under scrutiny.
For some, the very act of gathering intelligence is an
illegitimate use of police power. But to find and stop
terrorists, the Police Department uses many of the same
methods that are used to arrest drug dealers, human
traffickers, and gang leaders. Detectives develop detailed
information about the nature of the crime and the people
involved. While tips from the public are useful, the police
cannot rely on them exclusively to detect terrorism
conspiracies.
In 2003, with that in mind, the Intelligence Division
created the Demographics Unit. Its mission was to identify
``venues of radicalization'' or ``hot spots'' in order to
detect and disrupt terrorist plots in their beginning stages.
The unit was also charged with identifying the locations in
certain communities where foreign operatives might hope to
lie low, just as the 9/11 hijackers did in Paterson, New
Jersey. Given the rich diversity of the ethnic and cultural
landscape of New York City, officers in the unit were
specifically chosen for their unique language capabilities
and cultural knowledge. Individuals were matched to
geographic areas where they would be best able to distinguish
the benign from the threatening. Proud to be Americans and
members of the NYPD, the majority of these officers were
Muslims.
A September 22, 2011, AP article paints a frightening
portrait of the Demographics Unit and the work it did: ``The
New York Police Department put American citizens under
surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed, and
worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of
their ethnicity, according to interviews and documents
obtained by the Associated Press,'' runs the article's
opening paragraph. ``The documents describe in extraordinary
detail a secret program intended to catalog life inside
Muslim neighborhoods as people immigrated, got jobs, became
citizens, and started businesses. The documents undercut the
NYPD's claim that its officers only follow leads when
investigating terrorism.''
But this police-state nightmare bears no resemblance to the
nuanced work of the Demographics Unit. The unit employed what
is called a risk-basis model. In the three Islamist plots
against New York between 1993 and 2001, the vast majority of
the conspirators were from a limited group of countries:
Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, Saudi
Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The risk-basis
model would therefore indicate that these countries could be
deemed ``higher risk'' or ``of concern'' in relationship to
terrorism.
A similar risk-based model is exactly what the
Transportation Safety Agency (TSA) recently adopted in the
wake of a different terrorist plot--that of the 2009
Christmas Day Bomber, who failed to bring down a plane above
Detroit only because he couldn't ignite the explosive device
concealed in his underwear. The TSA made a list of
``countries of concern,'' and now passengers from those 14
states face additional scrutiny, such as pat-downs and having
their carry-on luggage examined under the new rules. (There
is a great deal of overlap between the countries on the TSA
list, developed by the Department of Homeland Security and
the State Department, and those states the NYPD has
considered ``countries of concern.'')
Plainclothes officers of the Demographics Unit were
deployed for this mission. They went into neighborhoods that
had heavy concentrations of populations from the ``countries
of interest'' and walked around, purchased a cup of tea or
coffee, had lunch and observed the individuals in the public
establishments they entered. This is an important point: Only
public locations were visited. Doing so was perfectly within
the purview of the NYPD, for, as the Handschu Guidelines say:
``The NYPD is authorized to visit any place and attend any
event that is open to the public.''
Here's what they did not do: Plainclothes officers did not
conduct blanket ongoing surveillance of communities. Not only
is that an impossible task, but it also would have been
inefficient and had a low likelihood of identifying terrorist
plots in their early stages. At its largest, during a brief
period after the July 7, 2005, attacks in London, the unit
had 16 officers--hardly enough to monitor a neighborhood,
much less whole communities. Officers would take a first pass
to familiarize themselves with luncheonettes, dollar stores,
and other legitimate businesses and record what they saw.
They would be very unlikely to return unless there was reason
to believe that a location might be a ``venue of
radicalization.''
How did the AP treat this? Its writers claimed that ``the
department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known
as `rakers,' into minority neighborhoods as part of a human-
mapping program, according to officials directly involved in
the program.'' As mentioned above, individuals involved were
not undercover officers. Undercover officers are provided
with fake identities and misrepresent who they are.
Plainclothes officers of the Demographics Unit carried no
false identification and did not purport to be anyone in
particular. This was a blatant error on the part of the AP.
In addition, the AP claimed, ``Police have also used
informants, known as `mosque crawlers,' to monitor sermons,
even when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.'' As a matter of
Police Department policy, undercover officers and
confidential informants do not enter a mosque unless they are
following up on a lead vetted under the terms of the Handschu
Guidelines. The AP's description of ``mosque crawlers''
roving from mosque to mosque without express legal permission
to enter that location is pure fiction.
Still, there was the collection of information, and that is
really what troubled people. So why cover social and
recreational sites to begin with? The answer: Radicalization
frequently occurs in nontraditional locations, not only
religious centers. One of the key findings of the 2004 attack
on a Madrid train station (inspired by al-Qaeda) and the 2005
attack on the London Underground (committed by al-Qaeda) was
that the plotters had not radicalized in mosques. In Spain,
different members of the terrorist cluster were radicalized
in a barbershop, an apartment, and an unidentified store
where some ``watched videos containing images of exercises in
training camps, as well as images that exalted the value of
the jihad,'' according to court testimony. In the U.K., the
venues of the radicalization of the 7/7 bombers included the
Iqra Learning Center bookstore and the ``al-Qaeda gym'' (the
Hamara Healthy Living Centre), both in Beeston.
The AP articles claimed that the NYPD ``kept files on
individuals'' gathered by the Demographics Unit. This is a
significant distortion of reality. Yes, to be sure,
observation reports were prepared. Naturally, such reports
included the names of store owners and customers and the
information gleaned from conversations. However, no flies
about particular individuals were created. The Word-document
reports and area-familiarization summaries about visits to
public locations were kept on the shelf so that they might be
accessed in the event of a fast-moving plot. It would give
the department a head start on geographically based
knowledge, including data about venues of radicalization and
potential ``flophouses'' or other locations where operatives
from specific countries might seek to conceal themselves.
For example, the Demographics Unit was critical in
identifying the Islamic Books and Tapes bookstore in Brooklyn
as a venue for radicalization. Information the unit collected
about the store provided a predicate for an investigation
that thwarted a 2004 plot against the Herald Square subway
station. The unit also played a role in forming the
initiation of an investigation that led to the 2008
identification of Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, a New Yorker who was
arrested and is currently facing federal charges for
allegedly lying about his plans to travel to Afghanistan in
order to kill U.S. servicemen. Both operations were conducted
in accordance with the Handschu Guidelines.
Anyone who suggests that the efforts of this unit (which
was renamed the Zone Assessment Unit in September 2010) did
not comport with legal rules either has not read the Handschu
Guidelines, has misunderstood them, or has willfully
overlooked their meaning. The AP's reporters and editors were
in one of these categories. Anyone who denies the success of
the demographics initiative is fortunate not to carry the
burden of responsibility should there actually be a
counterterrorism failure resulting in an attack. I, for one,
would have borne that responsibility. The AP team would not
have.
II. Outside City Limits
The AP Claim: The NYPD's Intelligence Division operates far
outside its geographical jurisdiction without the knowledge
of local agencies.
If vast oceans and international borders cannot hinder
terror plots against the United States, invisible lines
separating states and counties certainly cannot. The 1993
attack on the World Trade Center was launched from Jersey
City. The 2005 attack on the London Underground was launched
from Leeds, 180 miles north of the capital. More recently,
Faisal Shahzad's 2010 plot to explode a bomb in an SUV in
Times Square on a summer Saturday night on behalf of the
Pakistani Taliban was launched from Bridgeport, Connecticut.
It is perfectly legal for the NYPD to travel beyond the
boundaries of New York City to investigate cases or visit
commercial establishments where terrorists might be
radicalizing. Similarly, it is legal to obtain information
outside of New York that the Intelligence Division may use
``to prepare general reports and assessments concerning
terrorism and other unlawful activities or the purposes of
strategic or operational planning.''
In order to help its partner agencies better understand
their own jurisdictions, the Demographics Unit was deployed
on select occasions to jurisdictions in New Jersey and Long
Island. This led the AP to determine that ``the NYPD operates
far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in
ways that would run afoul of civil-liberties rules if
practiced by the federal government.'' What's more, according
to the August 23 article, ``it does so with unprecedented
help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the
bright line between foreign and domestic spying.''
The notion of the NYPD as a rolling team of rogue spies
would be comically preposterous if it weren't so damaging.
First, the NYPD is not the federal government. Second, these
operations were not unilateral.
Local agencies were involved. Any reports or assessments
were shared with the local police agencies. What local police
chose to tell or not to tell the politicians in their areas
was beyond the NYPD's purview.
As the New Jersey Star-Ledger reported on March 6, 2012:
Although recent disclosures that in 2007 the New York
Police Department spied on Muslims in New Jersey have
unleashed a furor, interviews with a dozen former state and
federal officials show the department's presence was widely
known among the state's law enforcement officials. In fact,
it seems that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, almost
everyone--including Gov. Chris Christie, who was U.S.
Attorney for New Jersey at the time--knew to varying degrees
the NYPD was scouring the state, where some of the hijackings
were planned and one was launched.
A different initiative included the selective use of
undercover officers and confidential informants outside city
limits. As with the investigation of the 1993 plot against
the World Trade Center, which refused to be limited to one
side of the Hudson River, a number of terrorist
investigations that began inside city limits bled over into
adjacent jurisdictions. Any such investigative activity
involving human sources had to be conducted in strict
accordance with the Handschu Guidelines, just as if those
investigations were limited to New York City.
NYPD efforts beyond city limits led to the arrests of the
New Jersey-based Mohamed Alessa and Carlos Almonte at John F.
Kennedy Airport in June 2010. They were headed to Somalia to
join the terrorist organization al Shabaab. Their
apprehension marked the conclusion of a three-and-a-half-year
investigation by the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Forces in
New York and New Jersey. Also involved: the New Jersey Office
of Homeland Security and Preparedness and the U.S. Attorney's
office in Newark. The case against Alessa and Almonte was
developed through the careful work of an NYPD undercover
officer who made contact with the men in 2009 and became a
trusted confidant in northern New Jersey.
Similarly, the investigation that led to the arrest of Jose
Pimentel began with an investigation in New York City and
moved upstate to the Albany region. In November 2011,
Pimentel was one hour away from completing the construction
of a pipe bomb intended for detonation in New York City when
he was nabbed by police. The department's intelligence
program was built to facilitate exactly the kind of regional
collaboration that made his detention possible.
One AP headline blared, ``NYPD's spying programs yielded
only mixed results.'' Strictly speaking, ``mixed results'' is
accurate in that for the programs to have yielded non-mixed
results, they would have been 100 percent successful or 100
percent unsuccessful. But the implication of the headline is
that results have been disappointing. The record of just one
aspect of these initiatives tells a dramatically different
story. Read on.
III. On Campus
The AP Claim: The NYPD has investigated and infiltrated
Muslim student groups without any legal basis to do so.
At universities students are expected to explore new ideas,
challenge themselves, and engage in robust debate involving
multiple dissenting opinions. The NYPD has been especially
sensitive in any operational work that risks infringing on
this protected space. Allegations that police have been
infiltrating Muslim student groups at colleges in the city
and schools beyond city limits, including Yale and the
University of Pennsylvania, are serious and need to be
addressed.
But in covering this topic, the AP conflated two different
elements of investigative work: open-sourced Internet
searches and undercover officers. ``Investigators have been
infiltrating Muslim student groups at Brooklyn College and
other schools in the city, monitoring their Internet activity
and placing undercover agents in their ranks,'' reads an
October 11 story. ``Legal experts say the operation may have
broken a 19-year-old pact with the colleges and violated U.S.
privacy laws, jeopardizing millions of dollars in federal
research money and student aid.'' This is a dramatic
misinterpretation of the nature and scope of the department's
actions.
The first investigative initiative involving students began
in 2006 and involved the NYPD Intelligence Division's Cyber
Unit. Officers reviewed Muslim Student Association (MSA)
websites, all of which were publicly available, for a period
of six months--and with good reason.
Consider the following stories from Great Britain: On March
30, 2004, British authorities disrupted an al-Qaeda plot to
mount a bomb attack in the United Kingdom. The individuals
involved had obtained 1,300 pounds of ammonium nitrate
fertilizer for making bombs. They considered targeting a
shopping mall, a nightclub, the U.K.'s 4,200-mile network of
underground high-pressure gas pipelines, various British
synagogues, Parliament, and a soccer stadium. Four of the
seven conspirators were either current university students,
dropouts, or graduates of London Metropolitan University, the
University of Hertfordshire, and Brunel University. One was
an active member of the latter's Islamic society.
The 2005 London subway plot killed 52 commuters, injured
700, and severely disrupted the city's transport
infrastructure. One of the suicide bombers was a recent
graduate of Leeds Metropolitan University, one a recent
dropout from the same university, and one a university
student at Thomas Danby College in Leeds at the time of the
attack.
Next summer, on August 9, British authorities disrupted an
al-Qaeda conspiracy to detonate liquid explosives on nine
transatlantic airliners traveling from the United Kingdom to
the United States and Canada. Four of the nine conspirators
were either current university students, dropouts, or
graduates from London Metropolitan University, City
University, Brunel University, and Middlesex University. One
had been president of London Metropolitan University's
Islamic Society.
Most important, the trend is not limited to the U.K. Right
here in New York, Mohammed Junaid Babar and Styled Fahad
Hashmi, who were arrested in connection with the previously
referenced 2004 plot in the U.K. and pled guilty to al-Qaeda-
related terrorist activities, had been radicalized through
the university-based New York branch of al-Muhajiroun, an
Islamist student group in Britain to which several of the
subway bombers were linked. The group actively recruited at
the Muslim Student Associations of Brooklyn College, Queens
College, and other universities in New York City. More
recently, the NYPD learned that Adis Medunjanin, indicted for
his participation in the most serious plot on American soil
since 9/11--the 2009 Najibullah Zazi plot to detonate
explosives in the New York City subway system--was an active
member of the Queens College Muslim Student Association.
So what did the NYPD do about campus radicalization and
recruitment? For a six-month period, beginning in November
2006 and ending in May 2007, Intelligence Division detectives
conducted public-information Internet searches to determine
if radicalization and recruitment to terrorism were occurring
on local university campuses and, if so, to what extent.
Detectives visited publicly available websites of
universities and colleges in and around New York City,
catalogued what they saw, and assembled the information into
23 biweekly reports. (Once again, NYPD members investigating
counterterrorism activities are authorized by the Handschu
Guidelines to search websites open to the public for the
purpose of developing intelligence information to detect or
prevent terrorism or other unlawful activities.) They were
looking mostly at speakers, conferences, and events held at
MSAs that might--even if inadvertently--support terrorism or
provide a recruiting venue for extremist Islamist groups.
Fortunately, the vast majority of speakers, conferences,
and events held at Muslim Student Associations in the
tristate area were nonthreatening in nature, and in May 2007
the initiative was closed. The information from the biweekly
reports was not entered into any database.
Nevertheless, not everything going on at universities was
benign. Detectives learned that Jesse Curtis Morton, who has
just recently pled guilty to ``using his position as a leader
of Revolution Muslim Internet sites to conspire to solicit
murder, make threatening communications, and use the Internet
to place others in fear,'' according to the Eastern District
of Virginia, spoke at Stony Brook University as a leader of
the Islamic Thinkers Society. In April 2007, detectives
learned that Morton's co-founder of Revolution Muslim, Yousef
al-Khattab, spoke at Brooklyn College's Islamic Society.
Wholly separate from this initiative is the use of
undercover officers in investigations that sometimes involved
MSA-related activities. Of course, one could be forgiven for
thinking that an investigation involving students from City
University of New York on a whitewater-rafting trip was a
direct consequence of these open-source Internet searches,
given how the AP conflated the two. It was not.
Here is how the AP managed to conflate the discrete
phenomena in a February 18 article: ``Police talked with
local authorities about professors 300 miles (480 kilometers)
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. Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day
and, although professors and students had not been accused of
any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared
for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.''
The trip fell under a classic investigative framework after
information obtained by the NYPD raised the possibility that
an individual or group of individuals were engaged in or
planning to engage in unlawful activity.
Much has been made of the benign nature of this particular
event where no discussion of terrorism occurred. A post about
the trip on New York magazine's website claims, ``What has
civil-liberties advocates really worried is just how far the
NYPD has stretched the parameters of its domestic espionage
program--until now, at least, the official line was that the
force only pursued leads about suspected criminal activity.
Clearly, that's no longer the case.''
Such histrionics are hardly warranted. In the subway-bomb-
plot trial of Najibullah Zazi and Adis Medunjanin, it was
disclosed that operational planning for the plot occurred on
the basketball courts of Kissena Park and while hiking on
Bear Mountain, north of New York City. Neither a bucolic
setting nor a recreational endeavor guarantees peaceful
intentions.
The AP also has claimed that these and other investigations
have occurred with insufficient oversight. One article
uncritically quoted New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer
Christopher Dunn, who declared of the NYPD anti-terrorism
program: ``At the end of the day, it's pure and simple a
rogue domestic surveillance operation.'' He continued: ``One
of the hallmarks of the intelligence division over the last
10 years is that, not only has it gotten extremely aggressive
and sophisticated, but it's operating completely on its own.
There are no checks. There is no oversight.''
In particular, the AP has asserted that the modified
Handschu Guidelines gave the NYPD operational carte blanche.
``He scrapped the old rules and replaced them with more
lenient ones,'' reads an August 23, 2011, article describing
U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr.'s decision to
modify the guidelines in 2002. ``It was a turning point for
the NYPD.''
But far from providing evidence of this charge, the
whitewater-rafting case reveals it as folly. The Handschu
Guidelines require written authorization from the deputy
commissioner of intelligence when utilizing human
intelligence. That requirement was met here as it has been in
every other case. Moreover, an internal committee reviews
each investigation to ensure compliance, and a legal unit
based in the Intelligence Division evaluates every field
intelligence report generated through an investigation. This
committee meets regularly every month, and at one meeting at
the end of my tenure, no fewer than 10 attorneys and five
assistant or deputy commissioners were in attendance. It is
important to note that investigations are discontinued unless
they reasonably indicate that an unlawful act has been, is
being, or will be committed.
As a matter of Police Department policy, undercover
officers and confidential informants do not enter a mosque
unless they are doing so as part of an investigation of a
person or institution approved under the Handschu Guidelines.
Likewise, when undercover officers or confidential informants
have attended a private event organized by a student group,
they have done so only on the basis of a lead or
investigation reviewed and authorized in writing at the
highest levels of the department.
Given my dual role as a former director of intelligence
analysis at the NYPD and a visiting lecturer at Columbia
University, I took a special interest in this issue and
personally reviewed the documents in question to see the
number of times that NYPD human sources were present on local
campuses in the last five years. The numbers are very small
and almost always involved intelligence-collection efforts
limited to individuals who were under investigation, not the
broader student body.
So, yes, in 2006, given the trends observed both here and
overseas, the NYPD thought it prudent to learn more about
what was occurring at Muslim Student Associations in the
region via open sources, and the six-month initiative
generated six months' worth of public-information reports.
The NYPD did not send undercover sources to infiltrate MSAs
throughout the northeast. Both the open-source initiative and
the few investigations where undercover officers examined the
activities of university students as part of an ongoing
investigation authorized by Handschu Guidelines have led to a
greater understanding of the relationship between terrorism
and university organizations and have, as a result, kept New
York City safer.
In total, the NYPD has helped to prevent 14 terrorist
attacks on New York City and its surrounding areas and
permitted exactly zero deadly plots to materialize in the 11
years since 9/11. Its success, based on the math alone, is
indisputable. But in a free country, success is not enough.
Civil libertarians are correct in asserting that safety at
the cost of political freedom would betray the highest
American ideals. And the unlawful targeting of New York
City's minorities would constitute nothing less than a
cultural and spiritual gutting of the greatest, most diverse
city history has seen. But neither of those travesties have
occurred, thanks to the genius of America's Constitution and
the NYPD's exquisite adherence to it.
Sadly, the absence of wrongdoing goes only so far in a
media-driven society shaped by the 24-hour news cycle and
explosive headlines. The damage the AP inflicted upon the
NYPD's reputation cannot be mitigated wholly by this or any
other honest airing of the facts. Indeed, one can argue that
inflicting such damage--not debating police methodology--was
the point of the AP's series.
The war on the NYPD's method of combating terrorism is a
war on the war on terror by proxy--an effort to portray the
least controversial aspect of homeland security as instead a
matter of great civil-libertarian concern. Long before the AP
series, the war on the war began with efforts to discredit
the federal government's endeavors to collect intelligence
from combatants and terror suspects captured on the
battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. It zoomed in on the
rights of those detained overseas and at the American base in
Guantanamo Bay. Now it has come home, to take on a once
universally heralded and supported effort at domestic
counterterrorism at the epicenter of the 9/11 attacks, New
York City.
Having impugned military and intelligence efforts to fight
terrorism, these foes are now taking aim at the most
conventional kind of anti-terror approach--one that works
within the domestic criminal-justice system, is overseen by
courts, and is being managed by a police department that has
rigorously kept to the terms of legal limits to which it
agreed nearly 30 years ago.
By portraying the NYPD efforts as rogue operations, the AP
and the Pulitzer committee are seeking to slacken attempts
inside the United States to stop terrorist plots before they
happen. Letting these false and misleading stories alter
local counterterrorism work would be catastrophic. It has
taken many hard years to craft the effective anti-terrorism
policies that serve us so well today. Now, with al-Qaeda on
the ropes, our renewed sense of security can morph easily
into complacency--and terrorists will be sure to exploit any
new opportunities to attack. The price of maintaining the
safety of New Yorkers has been kept remarkably low, not only
for residents but for the country as a whole. Preventing
another devastating attack from occurring in the city after
2001 was much more than a local necessity. Such an attack
would have been devastating to national morale.
And it still would be.