(Photo via ArabianBusiness.com)
(Photo via ArabianBusiness.com)A senior Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) official called the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) intelligence activities “felonious” and a “violations of US citizen’s rights” in an e-mail message sent last November.
The message, revealed by Truthout’s Jason Leopold and Matthew Harwood, was part of a trove of 5 million emails that the hacker group Anonymous obtained from the well-connected intelligence firm Stratfor and then turned over to WikiLeaks. The FBI official’s e-mail was sent to Fred Burton, the vice president for intelligence at Stratfor.
Truthout notes that the full e-mail message “hints at even worse civil liberties violations not yet disclosed.” The senior FBI official also says that the NYPD’s activities would make “[former FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover, COINTEL[PRO], [and the] Red Squads” look like “rank” amateurs.
The NYPD’s intelligence division is responsible for the department’s widespread practice of spying on Muslims in the Northeast with no probable cause. NYPD informants infiltrated mosques, Muslim student groups and Middle Eastern-owned restaurants, eavesdropped on conversations and recorded what they heard in police files. The Associated Press began revealing the NYPD’s surveillance program last August.
It is the latest instance of the FBI voicing criticism of the NYPD’s activities. Back in March, the head of Newark’s FBI division said that the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims was harming counter-terrorism efforts. But it’s important to note that the FBI routinely engages in similar practices that the NYPD is being criticized for.
Since 9/11, the FBI has entrapped young Muslim men and conducted widespread surveillance of mosques. Speaking to Truthout, Mike German, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the FBI email “ironic.” More from German:
The FBI has engaged in widespread spying on the Muslim American community as well, including counting mosques and mapping Muslim neighborhoods, infiltrating mosques with informants, and using the guise of community outreach to spy on Muslim religious and advocacy organizations…
This agent suggests the FBI knew the NYPD Intelligence agents were involved in widespread ‘felonious’ activity in violation of Americans’ civil rights, yet the FBI does not appear to have opened a civil rights investigation or done anything to stop this illegal activity. Our laws are designed to apply equally to protect all of us, including to protect us from illegal police activity. When the FBI abdicates this responsibility, all Americans suffer
So let the speculation begin! What would be worse than unconstitutional surveillance, and also something the NYPD would be inclined to do? …This is not unlike speculation about what is in Romney’s tax returns that he wants to keep hidden. The difference, of course, is that the NYPD activity is likely, even certain, to include serious violations of human rights.
We already know that the FBI and NYPD have entrapped people, doing everything they could do ‘encourage’ those who might otherwise have done nothing to attempt acts that might be considered violence. (Glenn Greenwald has written extensively on the constitutional issues regarding this.)
So what else is there? Is the NYPD engaging in ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ as in the 1970s and earlier? Are they stealing identities, creating false ones? In the 1960s, the FBI and police forces infiltrated groups, tried to encourage rifts and also encouraged acts of violence. During the 2004 RNC in New York, there was at least one instance of the NY cop committing a criminal act with the NYPD trying to pass it off as protester violence. In Central America during the Reagan atrocities, US-supported terrorists dressed up as Nicaraguan soldiers, committed atrocities, then blamed them on the Nicaraguan government under Daniel Ortega.
Speculation like this borders on the irresponsible. Sadly, the track record of the NYPD and FBI and others in the US make it necessary.
it’s time for someone to sue the nypd.
Judges, like Congresspersons, administration officials and media pundits, do not want to bring onto themselves the full smear campaign that could threaten their careers, if they do something that puts them on the wrong side of the line dividing the community from the major existential threat to it. Daylight is needed around permissible positions on the whole variety of issues important to Zionists and Neocons, yet daylight itself is considered an existential threat. It reminds me of what it was like in the Deep South, when white children in their segregated schools were intimidated about saying anything sympathetic to the Civil Rights movement or the plight of African Americans. Ugly racists would taunt such comments loudly, “Oh, so you’re a N—– lover, HaHaHa. So&so is an N—– lover. So&so is an N—– lover. [no further conversation possible – much easier to avoid bringing the subject up in the first place.]” Federal judges, however, have lifetime tenure, and are sworn to uphold the constitution, so you’d expect better. There needs to be room – daylight – in our culture for people to question whether the threat is real, or merely a distorted view through racist glasses.
No wonder, look who they are learning from.
NYPD Now Has an Israel Branch
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/nypd-opens-branch-israel-veteran-charlie-ben-naim_n_1860733.html?utm_hp_ref=new-york
When our security services act in this way-I’m thinking of operation Gladio in Europe, the CIA facilitating the crack cocaine trade in Los Angeles, I wonder how “secure” they really make us?