[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 6]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 8193-8197]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     WHO WILL DEFEND THE DEFENDERS?

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. PETER T. KING

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                          Friday, June 1, 2012

  Mr. KING of New York. 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 1,000 police officers working 24/7, 
building a counterterrorist infrastructure and taking proactive action 
to stop at least 14 terrorist plots against New York City.

[[Page 8194]]

  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

[[Page 8195]]

     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

[[Page 8196]]

     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

[[Page 8197]]

     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.

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