New York mayor defends monitoring of Muslims in area

By David B. Caruso, The Associated Press

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Rutgers students attend a news conference Friday on the campus in Newark, N.J., to address allegations over surveillance of students and other members of the Muslim community by the New York Police Department.

NEW YORK -- New York's mayor served notice Friday that his police department will do everything within its power to root out terrorists in the United States, even if it means sending officers outside the city limits or placing law-abiding Muslims under scrutiny.

"We just cannot let our guard down again," Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned.

The mayor laid out his doctrine for keeping the city safe during his weekly radio show, following a week of criticism of a secret police department effort to monitor mosques in several cities and keep files on Muslim student groups at colleges in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

Several college administrators and politicians have complained that the intelligence-gathering, exposed in a series of Associated Press stories, pried too deeply into the lives of innocent people.

With about 1,000 officers dedicated to intelligence and counterterrorism, the New York Police Department has one of the nation's most aggressive domestic intelligence operations. Its methods have stirred debate in legal circles over whether it has crossed the line and violated civil liberties of Muslims.

In perhaps his most vigorous defense yet of some of the NYPD anti-terrorism efforts, Mr. Bloomberg said it is "legal," "appropriate" and "constitutional" for police to keep a close eye on Muslim communities that terrorists might use as a base to strike the city. And he said investigators must pursue "leads and threats wherever they come from," even across state lines.

"It would just be naive to think we should stop following threats when they get to the border," Mr. Bloomberg said.

In the past few days, the department has come under fire from university officials and others after the AP revealed that police agents had monitored Muslim student groups around the Northeast and had sent an undercover agent on a white-water rafting trip with some college students.

More criticism came from New Jersey public officials after another AP report detailed a secret NYPD effort to photograph every mosque in Newark and catalog Muslim businesses. That operation was an extension of a similar tracking effort within New York's city limits. Mr. Bloomberg acknowledged that Newark mayor Corey Booker hadn't been briefed by the NYPD but that the Newark police department had been.

Plainclothes officers swept through Muslim neighborhoods, photographing mosques and eavesdropping on businesses. Informants reported on what they heard inside mosques. Police monitored and kept files on Muslims who Americanized their names. They also infiltrated Muslim student groups.

Critics have said it isn't appropriate for police to spy on citizens without reason to believe they committed a crime. The American Civil Liberties Union issued a statement Friday accusing the NYPD of turning the city into a "surveillance state."

Faiza Patel, co-director of a civil rights program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school, said guidelines in federal court rulings do not allow the department to hold onto files detailing conversations of mosque worshippers "unless the information relates to potential terrorist or criminal activity."

Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., questioned why the NYPD was assembling volumes of data on people not suspected of breaking any laws. "It's bad policing. It's profiling, fishing expeditions. They're looking around saying, 'Surely in this community there must be bad people. If we look long enough, we'll find them,' " he said.

Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar and former law school dean, wrote an open letter Friday that the NYPD shouldn't have been monitoring websites of the school's Muslim student groups unless one had been suspected of a crime. He said the police tactics could have a "chilling effect" on free speech and association.

Mr. Bloomberg warned of dire consequences if the city fails to detect plots.

"We are not going to repeat the mistakes that we made after the 1993 bombing," he said. "We cannot slack in our vigilance. The threat was real. The threat is real. The threat is not going away."

Copyright Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

First published on February 25, 2012 at 12:00 am

Source: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/12056/1212629-84.stm?cmpid=nationworld.xml

jack del rio fired made in america made in america icam patrice o neal. osteopathy osteopathy