The Lessons of Paris and 9/11 Unlearned Surveillance is not just about making arrests, but knowing where the next threat might come from By Jason L. Riley
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lessons-of-paris-and-9-11-unlearned-1448406152
The timing could have been worse, but not by much. Exactly one month before the Nov. 13 attacks in Paris, a federal appeals court reopened a discrimination lawsuit filed against New York City over a counterterrorism program begun in the wake of 9/11.
The 2001 World Trade Center attack was the second time the buildings had been hit in eight years—a car bomb was detonated underneath the complex in 1993, killing six and injuring more than 1,000. Follow-up plots to bomb the George Washington Bridge, the United Nations and the FBI’s New York office were thwarted by an informant who had infiltrated the terrorists. But after 9/11, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly stepped up the city’s offense against Islamic extremists bent on killing innocent Americans.
Among other things, the New York Police Department developed a Counterterrorism Bureau that collaborated with law-enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. and around the world. Most of the conspirators in the 1993 and 2001 attacks came from places like Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. They settled in Arabic-speaking neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey, where some were radicalized in mosques and through Islamic organizations. The NYPD has long used confidential informants to infiltrate the mafia, gangs and drug rings, and it determined that an effective way to stop future terror attacks would be to employ the same tactics. Thus a so-called Demographics Unit was created in 2003 to identify specific “venues of radicalization” and “locations of concern” and provide early warning of any terrorist activity.
By 2011, the media had learned about the covert unit and promptly began misreporting that “unprecedented” methods were being used to place entire Muslim communities under surveillance with no legal basis and “no evidence of wrongdoing,” in the words of the Associated Press. Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly stood by the program, which they insisted helped to protect New York from terrorism. But some Muslims and civil-liberties organizations objected and the city was sued in 2012 by two advocacy groups who charged that the program was religiously discriminatory. Last year, Judge William Martini of the U.S. District Court in Newark, N.J., dismissed the suit and said the plaintiffs hadn’t shown that they were targeted based solely on their faith.
“The more likely explanation for the surveillance was a desire to locate budding terrorist conspiracies,” Judge Martini wrote. “The most obvious reason for so concluding is that surveillance of the Muslim community began just after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.” However, a three-judge panel of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia now says the plaintiffs have standing to sue and has sent the case back to the district court for further proceedings. To his credit, New York’s current mayor, Bill de Blasio, has defended the NYPD against the discrimination allegations, but he and the new police commissioner, William Bratton, remain vocal critics of the Demographics Unit, which they disbanded.
At a panel discussion hosted by the Manhattan Institute last week, Mr. Bratton was asked if the city should reconsider that decision given the Paris massacre, Islamic State’s rise and the fact that thousands of Westerners have joined jihad in the past year. He responded that the unit was a waste of resources. It “was performing no useful function in the counterterrorism realm,” said Mr. Bratton. “Not one single piece of actionable intelligence ever came out of that unit in its years of existence.”
But in his recent memoir, “Vigilance,” Mr. Kelly explains that “actionable intelligence” wasn’t the primary goal of the unit. The NYPD wanted better familiarity with communities. “The idea was a simple one: We should know who lived where. That could help us in many ways,” writes Mr. Kelly, whose book recounts no fewer than 16 attempts “by Islamic extremists intent on causing damage and killing people in New York City” during his 12-year tenure as the city’s top cop. “If one small town in Libya produced twelve suicide bombers, wouldn’t it be worth knowing where their cousins lived in New York?” Critics complained, he writes, that “the unit’s work didn’t result in any arrests. Well, that wasn’t the point. The investigators were gathering information. They weren’t supposed to be making arrests.”
Of late, the security debate in the U.S. has largely focused on how terrorists could exploit our refugee programs. But law-enforcement officials are much more worried about the homegrown threat that detectives in the Demographic Unit were trained to detect. Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bratton insist that political correctness isn’t compromising the security of New Yorkers. As a candidate, however, Mr. de Blasio said that he was “deeply troubled” by the idea of surveilling mosques. Which makes you wonder.
“I want these people properly spied on, properly watched,” wrote London Mayor Boris Johnson following the Paris attacks, “and I bet you do, too.” New Yorkers might feel a lot safer if their city leaders expressed similar resolve.
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).
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