NYPD Blind New York Dismantles Another Post-9/11 Antiterror Policy.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304311204579507393976730268?mod=Opinion_newsreel_4
New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has an interesting sense of timing. Tuesday was the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, in which two Muslim brothers from Cambridge murdered four people and injured nearly 300. The same day, Mr. de Blasio’s new police commissioner, William Bratton, announced that his department is formally disbanding an antiterror surveillance unit started in the wake of 9/11.
This is being hailed by the usual suspects as a triumph for civil liberties, but it’s really a bow to political correctness that removes an important defense for a city that has stopped at least 16 terror plots since 9/11. It’s also more fallout from a series of sensationalist Associated Press stories from 2011 that were riddled with distortions and have since been rebuked by a federal judge.
Some background: After the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001, the NYPD concluded that it couldn’t rely on the FBI and CIA to do its antiterror work. New York was the target of choice for Islamist terrorists and sometimes also their home. “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was a spiritual leader to the 1993 bombers, preached from three mosques in New York. Several of the 9/11 hijackers lived in Paterson, N.J., only miles from the George Washington bridge.
The result was a strikingly successful effort, under former police commissioner Ray Kelly, to keep all New Yorkers safe. Part of that effort involved a small “Demographics Unit” (later renamed the “Zone Assessment Unit”) to keep an eye on “hot spots” and “venues of radicalization,” including mosques, bookstores, barbershops and other public places. The point wasn’t to spy on entire communities, which the unit—with never more than 16 officers—lacked the resources to do in any case. It was to keep an eye on places where terrorists would seek to blend in.
Such police work might seem like ordinary prudence, but critics alleged the program was unconstitutional and ineffective. The first claim stems from ignorance of the “Handschu” rules on police surveillance, overseen by a federal judge, which note that to prevent terrorist acts “the NYPD must, at times, initiate investigations in advance of unlawful conduct” and permits officer “to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public.”
The NYPD has never been charged with violating the Handschu rules. In February, federal Judge William Martini dismissed a lawsuit brought by several Muslim associations and businesses claiming they had been stigmatized by the surveillance. The judge noted that whatever harm suffered by the plaintiffs “flow from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure” of the work of the Demographics Unit. “The harms are not ‘fairly traceable’ to any act of surveillance.”
Also false is the claim that the unit was ineffective. “The Demographics Unit was critical in identifying the Islamic Books and Tapes bookstore in Brooklyn as a venue for radicalization,” Mitchell Silber, a former NYPD director of intelligence analysis, noted in Commentary magazine. “Information the unit collected about the store provided a predicate for an investigation that thwarted a 2004 plot against the Herald Square subway station.”
Critics of the program claim that the Demographics Unit never contributed to direct “leads,” but this ignores the painstaking process of evidentiary accretion, which is how all law enforcement, particularly of the preventive kind, has always worked.
After the Boston bombings, we learned that one of the bombers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, had twice had outbursts in his Cambridge, Mass., mosque, in one case denouncing a speaker as a kafir, or unbeliever, for comparing Martin Luther King Jr. to the Prophet Muhammad. A spokesman for the mosque later told the Boston Globe that he didn’t think the comment merited police attention; perhaps a policeman in the mosque would have reached a different conclusion.
The U.S. is now in full-scale retreat from what used to be called the war on terror, with new limits on the use of drones in Pakistan, new curbs on the National Security Agency, and now this. If there is another attack, the American public should know who was responsible for the policy retreat that made it harder to prevent.
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