The NYPD’s Surveillance of Muslims and Occupy Wall Street Converges

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I started my morning reading with this AP Q&A on the significance of their series on the NYPD’s spying on Muslims. There are several things missing: why does the NYPD profile only businesses they believe to be owned by Muslims, and not the American chains at which recent immigrants also congregate? Why doesn’t the Q&A discuss how the NYPD-on-the-Hudson got close to, but missed the two most significant plots of recent years; what does that say about the efficacy of all this spying? And why doesn’t the Q&A discuss the many informants the NYPD has deployed?

That said, the AP does get to the core reason why the NYPD’s program abuses the First Amendment:

Bloomberg and his aides have not addressed, however, why police kept intelligence files on innocuous mosque sermons and plans for peaceful protests. They’ve not explained why police noted which restaurants served “devout” Muslims, why police maintained lists of Muslims who changed their names or why innocent people attending Friday prayer services were photographed and videotaped.

Those activities, many Muslims said, make them feel like they’re under scrutiny just because of their religion.

After reading that Q&A, I then read this NYT article, talking about how the NYPD’s intelligence division–the CIA-on-the-Hudson again–has preemptively arrested some Occupy Wall Street protestors before they engaged in protest.

On Nov. 17, Kira Moyer-Sims was near the Manhattan Bridge, buying coffee while three friends waited nearby in a car. More than a dozen blocks away, protesters gathered for an Occupy Wall Street “day of action,” which organizers had described as an attempt to block the streets around the New York Stock Exchange.

Then, Ms. Moyer-Sims said, about 30 police officers surrounded her and the people in the car.

All four were arrested, said Vik Pawar, a lawyer for Ms. Moyer-Sims and two of the others, and taken to a police facility in the East Village. He said officers strip-searched them and ignored their requests for a lawyer.

These are the same tactics–or worse–as used when the NYPD targeted Muslims planning a peaceful protest of cartoons deemed blasphemous. But most troubling is the last anecdote the NYT reports (which the NYT might have known to contextualize if they had been reporting on the NYPD spying on Muslims). In one case, they NYPD and the FBI are targeting an Occupy activist who, as someone who appears to have changed his name from his birth name, would have been targeted closely under the NYPD program. And they appear to be insinuating a tie with Islamic terrorism.

Mark Adams, a 32-year-old engineer from Virginia, said he was arrested in November at an Occupy Wall Street protest in Midtown and was questioned by a police detective and an agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who asked about his involvement with Occupy Wall Street, requested his e-mail address and inquired whether he had ever been to Yemen or met anyone connected to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Adams, a naturalized United States citizen who was born in Pakistan, said he was arrested during another protest in January and questioned by intelligence division detectives. In that instance, he said, the detectives asked him about specific names and addresses, asked about his work history, education and family, and questioned him about a trip he had made to Ireland.

Mr. Adams said he was disturbed that anyone would consider him a threat because of his ethnicity or political views. “It’s scary,” he said. [my emphasis]

As the AP reported last October, the NYPD conducts extensive checks and keeps records on those within the city who change their names from Arabic or Muslim-sounding names to something Americanized.

The NYPD monitors everyone in the city who changes his or her name, according to internal police documents and interviews. For those whose names sound Arabic or might be from Muslim countries, police run comprehensive background checks that include reviewing travel records, criminal histories, business licenses and immigration documents. Read more →

Time to Start Profiling All the Dunkin’ Donuts

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With the exception of the time CBS borrowed my post on the Iranian Jewish butchers profiled by the NYPD, the NY news outlets cheering the NYPD apparently haven’t actually looked closely at what the AP was reporting. The NY Post, the NYDN, they seem to blindly accept whatever Ray Kelly or Mike Bloomberg claim about the program, without checking.

Yesterday, the NYDN actually did some reporting. And they discovered that almost none of the businesses reported to be owned by Syrian Muslims actually were.

NYPD anti-terror detectives compiled lists of businesses, stores and mosques linked to Muslim New Yorkers with Syrian, Albanian and Egyptian roots.

But they didn’t do a very thorough job.

The owners of most of the establishments listed in the “Syrian Locations of Concern Report” told The Daily News Friday they are neither Syrian nor Muslim.

Though rather curiously, that didn’t stop the NYDN from doing an op-ed today claiming such files had nothing alarming–as if there’s nothing alarming about NYPD files riddled with errors.

Nevertheless, the sudden outbreak of reporting did have one interesting result: a new spin from NYPD spokesperson Paul Browne on what these reports were supposed to capture: not Muslim-owned businesses, but Muslim-frequented businesses.

Told of the discrepanies in the reports, NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the listed establishments were “frequented by” Syrian, Albanian and Egyptian Muslims.

Now, as I noted in my post showing how narrowly the NYPD had missed the hawala Faisal Shahzad used to fund his attack on Times Square, they actually missed some of the key locations: things like the Lowes where hawala operator Mohammad Younis worked or, perhaps even more problematic, the 7-11 where Younis had worked earlier with other recent Muslim immigrants, not long after he arrived in this country, which seems to have been where he met his friends.

The entire NYPD demographic set reads as if white people never frequent Muslim businesses (except for the Bianky Cafe on Coney Island Avenue, which “is patronized predominantly by young Caucasians”) and Muslims never frequent the same kind of generic American chains the 9/11 hijackers used when planning their attack.

The sole exception seems to prove the rule: the Suffolk set profiles the Dunkin’ Donuts in Seldon, describing a hopping business of people it judged were Bangladeshis coming over after Friday prayer. The Newark set profiles the Dunkin’ Donuts on South Orange, which is operated “by persons of Bangladeshi descent” but doesn’t appear to be in a particularly Bangladeshi neighborhood.

According to the NYPD (and we know they’re never wrong), in addition to a whole slew of Muslim cafes and halal butchers, Muslims also patronize Dunkin’ Donuts.

Just like most everyone else in the Northeast.

So why aren’t the Dunkin’ Donuts franchised by non-Bangladeshis listed? Why aren’t corporate-owned 7-11s in Muslim areas profiled?

Why has the NYPD decided it’s a smart idea to waste time and money profiling just businesses they believe (correctly or not) to be Muslim-owned that are frequented by Muslims (and occasionally, “young caucasians,” while ignoring the more generic American chains that tend to hire recent immigrants and would tend to attract people trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves?

Of course if the NYPD started rebranding American chains like Dunkin’ Donuts as terrorist hideouts, I would imagine the entire profiling program would end rather quickly.

NYPD Makes Work But Not Knowledge

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When I read the Judy Miller/Richard Clarke op-ed defending Ray Kelly (this is Judy’s second go-around defending Kelly, btw), I realized something about the NYPD CIA-on-the-Hudson program. They write,

Yet NYPD efforts to engage with and selectively surveil at-risk populations are not only legal but essential. In 2002, Mr. Kelly decided that a “broad base of knowledge” about who lives in the New York area was crucial to preventing terrorism. “It was precisely our failure to understand the context in 1993″—after the first World Trade Center bombing—”that left us vulnerable in 2001,” he said. So police tried to determine “how individuals seeking to do harm might communicate or conceal themselves. Where might they go to find resources or evade the law?” Such “geographically-based knowledge” saved “precious time in stopping fast-moving plots,” he said last weekend. [my emphasis]

Ray Kelly and his defenders claim that the process of mapping out all the Muslim communities in the NYC area produces “knowledge.”

But after reading the two latest sets of documents released by the AP: mapping the Syrian and Egyptian communities, it became clear that this is less about knowledge and more about make work. The Egyptian packet, in particular, reads more like the kind of crappy composition papers you see from college freshmen learning how to write and think critically–complete with significant portions just cut and pasted from online sites (in this case, the NYC and CIA sites). How much “knowledge” did an officer gain by copying the NYPD’s own website to include this information in a report on Egyptians in the 68th precinct? (Note, the NYPD appears to have taken this tour guide information down in 2006 after this particular report was completed.)

The 68th Precinct provides police service to the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Bay Ridge, Dyker Heights and Fort Hamilton. These middle-class neighborhoods are culturally and ethnically diverse. Over recent years there has been a significant influx of people of Middle-Eastern and Asian descent into the area. One and two family homes dominate the landscape; however, there are also many four and six story apartment houses throughout the precinct. Residents and visitors enjoy the recreational amenities afforded by the area’s seven major parks, two theaters, golf course and spectacular waterfront along “The Narrows” between Brooklyn and Staten Island. Independent merchants, as well as some chain stores, provide for ample retail shopping and other services along Third, Fifth, Eleventh and Thirteenth Avenues as well Fort Hamilton Parkway and 86th Street. Over one hundred restaurants, bars and nightclubs provide for a vibrant nightlife. Fort Hamilton is the only active duty military installation in New York City.

Does repeating the NYPD’s own assessment that The Narrows is a spectacular waterfront really help find terrorists?

Then there’s the sheer repetition of it, which becomes apparent if you compare the Moroccan mapping report to the Egyptian and Syrian one. Between them the reports many of the same sites, including at least the following.

  • Nassem meat market
  • Egyptian coffee shop
  • Eastern Nights Cafe
  • Bay Ridge International Cafe
  • Egyptian Cafe
  • Ramalla Coffee Shop
  • Tutankhamun

Of what value is it for the NYPD has paid officers to go twice in the same year to the same businesses to do these completely new profiles?

Egyptian Cafe, Moroccan Version, undated (other reports in same packet dated December 19, 2006 and April 13, 2007)

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Is Our War-Mongering on Iran Making Syria Go Dark?

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Greg Miller has a story describing how little decent intelligence we’ve got on Syria. Now, Jeff Stein suggests that denials in the story of any CIA covert actions in the story are just an effort to knock down fairly widespread allegations that we are already intervening.

According to the Al-Manar news agency, a mouthpiece for Hezbollah, Homs has been crawling with U.S. and allied spies.

It said “a coordination office was established in Qatar under American-Gulf sponsorship. The office includes American, French, and Gulf – specifically from Qatar and Saudi Arabia – intelligence agents, as well as CIA, Mossad, and Blackwater agents and members of the Syrian Transitional Council.”

Not us, protested Israeli intelligence, through its unofficial mouthpiece, Debka File.  “Recent reports confirm that British and Qatari Special forces are on the ground in the city of Homs, involved in training rebel forces as well as organizing the supply of weapons in liaison with the Turkish military.”
The Russians, meanwhile, were giving reports of Western intervention the full Phil Spector.

“A general in the opposition militia known as the Free Syria Army has told journalists that the rebels have received French and American military assistance…” Russia Today reported last week.“We now have weapons and anti-aircraft missiles and, God willing, with all of that we will defeat Bashar [President Assad],” it said.

Now, call me a cynic, but it seems entirely possible that the U.S. officials who talked with Miller were anxious to knock down such reports.

And the degree to which the article seems to deny we’ve managed things in Syria that we did in Libya–even while so many characteristics of our involvement in Syria do appear to be Libya 2.0, such as the cooperation with the UK and Qatar–makes me believe Stein is right.

But I’m just as interested in two of the main claims: that we’re relying on watching murky financial transfers and don’t have much HUMINT.

Consider, first, the article’s focus on financial transfers.

Searching for any sign of splintering in Syria’s ruling class, the United States has tracked what it suspects is the transfer of millions of dollars in foreign accounts by elites with ties to President Bashar al-Assad.

But the flow of money is murky. U.S. intelligence officials said they cannot estimate the total amount and are still trying to assess what the transfers mean: Is Assad’s inner circle starting to fray, or are wealthy Syrians simply hedging their bets?

[snip]

U.S. officials said the money transfers, which probably involve accounts in such countries as Dubai and Lebanon, are seen as potential flares of trouble for Assad. But analysts at the Treasury Department and other agencies have only shards of information on the flows and little ability to discern what they mean.

Treasury has had sanctions on Syria going back years, but it has slapped three new sets of sanctions on the country in the last year. As a money laundering suit against Lebanese businesses was announced last year, anonymous experts suggested Hezbollah was increasingly relying on money laundering to fund its activities. And, of course, we’re in the process of evicting Iran from the international banking system altogether.

Has the fact that we’ve been pushing Syria’s top leaders and its allies off the banking grid contributed to the fact that we’re seeing only “shards of information” about what they’re doing with their money now? Have we sanctioned Iran and its allies so deeply that we’ve also eliminated all the easiest ways to track their money?

And as to HUMINT, both Hezbollah and Iran have made a series of boasts about rolling up US-supported spies targeting them, reports anonymous officials confirmed with respect to Hezbollah late last year. Did this counterintelligence disaster extend into Syrian as well?

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Why Doesn’t the FBI Follow SAC Michael Ward’s “Specific Articulable Basis” Standard?

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The Special Agent in Charge of the Newark FBI, Michael Ward, laid into the NYPD’s CIA-on-the-Hudson program for its spying on New Jersey’s Muslims. He raised several legitimate gripes: that the NYPD was picking and choosing the information it shared, that the NYPD wasn’t focused on centers of terrorism, that it has created distrust between the Muslim community and law enforcement.

But there is one complaint that Ward should direct closer to home: that law enforcement officers have a specific articulable basis for mapping out the location of ethnicities. (Ward’s comments in this start after 7:00–note what he says on video is slightly different from what he appears to have said later to the NJ Star-Ledger journalist.)

[The public needs to know] you’re following leads that are warranted and that you’re not out chasing anything but you have a–there’s a specific law enforcement reason behind what you’re doing, and that you use the least intrusive means possible, when available.

[snip]

It’s also important that [the public] know that Joint Terrorism Task Force, the FBI, and law enforcement in New Jersey in general, that we take the guidelines which we’re supposed to follow very very seriously.

Mind you, I think there should be an articulable basis to map out locations of specific ethnicities.

But just as the NYPD doesn’t agree, neither does the FBI. In fact, as the ACLU’s FOIA is showing, the FBI is doing precisely the same kind of demographic mapping around the country as the NYPD is doing in NYC with their Domain Assessment program.

While the office is dawdling over releasing the unredacted copies, here’s the plan the FBI put into place for mapping out Muslims in Detroit, just as the NYPD did in NYC.

There are more than forty groups designated as terrorist organizations by the US State Department. Many of these groups originate in the Middle-East and Southeast Asia. Many of these groups also use an extreme and violent interpretation of the Muslim faith as justification for their activities. Because Michigan has large Middle-Eastern and Muslim population, it is prime territory for attempted radicalization and recruitment by these terrorist groups. Additionally, Sunni terrorist groups always pose a threat of attack on U.S. soil since it is the stated purpose of many of these groups. The Detroit Division Domain Team seeks to open a Type IV Domain Assessment for the purpose of collecting information and evaluating the threat posed by international terrorist groups conducting recruitment, radicalization, fund-raising, or even violent terrorist acts within the state of Michigan.

And here’s how Ward’s own office used census data to map out the Latino population in New Jersey as part of their efforts to fight the MS-13 gang (this was done in 2008, before Ward got appointed to Newark, but while Chris Christie was still US Attorney).

MS-13 is comprised of members from Central American countries, primarily El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. According to the 2000 Census, there are 67,320 individuals from these countries living in New Jersey. [redacted] from these countries during the time period of January. 2008 to July 2008. An analysis of Hispanic populations and [redacted] helps the Domain Team assess where [redacted] The Domain Team assesses [redacted] The Domain Team notes that New Jersey has the fifth largest Central American population in the United States. [redacted]

[snip]

According to the 2000 Census, the largest Hispanic communities in New Jersey are Puerto Rico with 366,788, the Dominican Republic with 91,316, Columbia with 69,754, Mexico with 67,667, and Cuba with 55,241. In addition tthheerree are an estimated 1,265,000 African Americans living in New Jersey from which [redacted]

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Congress and Killing Oversight: Eric Holder v. Ron Wyden

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Eric Holder today said that giving “appropriate members of Congress” information on the “legal framework” of its operations where “lethal force is used against United States citizens” is a key part of robust oversight.

That is not to say that the Executive Branch has – or should ever have – the ability to target any such individuals without robust oversight.  Which is why, in keeping with the law and our constitutional system of checks and balances, the Executive Branch regularly informs the appropriate members of Congress about our counterterrorism activities, including the legal framework, and would of course follow the same practice where lethal force is used against United States citizens.

Well, then, there simply hasn’t been robust oversight over the Anwar al-Awlaki killing.

As of a month ago–four months after Awlaki was killed–the Senate Intelligence Committee had not been provided with the legal framework for Awlaki’s kill. This, in spite of the fact that SSCI member Ron Wyden had been requesting that framework for over five months before Awlaki was killed.

I said when Wyden made that clear that it showed there had not been adequate oversight of the killing. By his words–if not his deeds–Holder effectively made the same argument.

NYT Finally Weighs in on CIA-on-the-Hudson

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Perhaps six months late, the NYT figured out (with no sense of irony about that delay) that if Ray Kelly can spy on Muslims with impunity–as he appears to have done–he can do it to anyone.

It is a distressing fact of life that mistreatment of Muslims does not draw nearly the protest that it should. But not just Muslims are threatened by this seemingly excessive warrantless surveillance and record-keeping. Today Muslims are the target. In the past it was protesters against the Vietnam War, civil rights activists, socialists. Tomorrow it will be another vulnerable group whose lawful behavior is blended into criminal activity.

The editorial focuses on one of the many areas that should have offered a reasonable middle ground months ago: if it’s true nothing is wrong with this spying, than the NYPD should provide more information about what leads the cops were actually following.

Mr. Bloomberg has reacted in the worst possible way — with disdain — to those raising legitimate questions about the surveillance program. Asking about its legality, and about whether alienating innocent Muslims is a smart or decent strategy, does not translate into being soft on terrorism, or failing to appreciate that it is a dangerous world.

The mayor insists that the actions reported by The A.P. were “legal,” “appropriate” and “constitutional.” He also says the police were only “following leads.” But he has yet to explain what sort of leads, why they justify police surveillance of so many Muslims, or whether the type of surveillance depicted in the news reports continues.

If only the NYT knew of a newspaper that employed some good reporters who could do some reporting on such questions. I wonder where they might find that?

Perhaps most curious, though, is the NYT’s focus on Bloomberg, not Kelly, even while they admit that this program is Kelly’s baby.

It’s all a very curious focus from the NYT.

But it’s a good start.

The King/Schumer Christie/Booker Smackdown

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I confess I’m enjoying the spat developing between New York and New Jersey’s top politicians over the NYPD’s spying on New Jersey Muslims. First Christie dared to call Kelly arrogant.

“He’s Ray Kelly, so what’re you gonna do? I mean, he’s all-knowing, all-seeing,” Christie said.

“And I don’t know all the details yet, but my concern is, you know, why can’t you be, you know, communicating with the people here in New Jersey, with law enforcement here in New Jersey. Are we somehow not trustworthy?” said Christie.

[snip]

“This is New York Police Department. I know they think their jurisdiction is the world. Their jurisdiction is New York City. So if they’re going to leave their jurisdiction and go to investigate a case in another jurisdiction, it could be dangerous,” Christie said. “This is the way law enforcement people get hurt or killed, is when they’re not cooperating with each other, not communicating with each other.”

“I’m not saying they don’t belong in New Jersey, but tell us! Share it with the appropriate law enforcement agency,” Christie said. “My concern is this kind of obsession that the NYPD seems to have that they’re the masters of the universe.”

Then there’s the spectacle of King defending Ray Kelly as if the latter is a shrinking violet, with neither access to the press nor taste for a fight himself.

Rep. Peter King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said Gov. Chris Christie crossed a line when he mocked Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as “all-knowing, all-seeing” and said the NYPD’s intelligence operation in Newark may have been “born out of arrogance.”

[snip]

“I just found it a real disappointment the way he was conducting himself, the way he was taking cheap shots at Ray Kelly,” King said.

Sure, aside from Booker, who seems genuinely concerned either with his actual constituents or appearing that way, this is a giant pissing contest between men defending their turf.

Part of me wonders why most of these men have reacted so strongly. Christie, after all, must have close ties to Newark’s FBI officers from his time as US Attorney. That seems to be what this dig is about:

“His main objection seems to be that he wasn’t … brought in. But the fact is that he wasn’t governor. He was U.S. attorney. And I’m not aware of any major terror plots that he ever uncovered while he was U.S. attorney in New Jersey.”

(King forgets, of course, that the NYPD didn’t find any of the major terrorist attacks since 9/11–street vendors and the FBI did.)

Part of me wonders whether Kelly, channeling J. Edgar Hoover as he increasingly seems to be doing, has some dirt on King and Schumer to make cow them like this.

But the real sick part of my personality can’t help but visualize this ending in a giant wrestling match pitting King and Schumer against Christie and Booker. In fact, I’m even thinking of taking bets.

Sorry about the abundance of brain bleach posts this morning folks–it must be the weather.

NYPD’s Fearmongers Are Arguing It’s More Useful to Spy on 2nd Graders than Disrupt Real Plots

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Chuck Schumer, the NYDN, and the NYPost keep up their attacks on the AP’s exposure of the NYPD’s spying program. Increasingly, NYPD’s fearmongers are getting cornered on the question of efficacy.

Schumer, rarely a courageous man, made full use of the passive when he tried to claim everyone knew the spying program makes NY safer.

There is nothing wrong with the NYPD collecting and assessing publicly available information from New York, New Jersey, the other 48 states or around the world in the effort to prevent another terror attack like 9/11. In fact, it is widely understood that the NYPD’s actions have kept us safer. Looking at public information and following leads is perfectly acceptable as long as any one group, in its entirety, is not targeted based only on its religious or ethnic affiliation. [my emphasis]

Nevermind that the NYPD uses techniques–like informants and permanent cameras–that aren’t exactly available to the public. Nevermind that Schumer’s backing himself into a corner with his new caveat that profiling is okay so long as not the entire ethnic group is profiled (though arguably, they are).

Schumer proves unable to say, in the affirmative, that he knows this makes NY safer. And he ought to consider that question seriously.

More offensive is the NYPost’s insinuation that the AP is just in this for a Pulitzer.

Columbia is also where they keep the Pulitzers in the off-season; American journalism’s most treasured self-affirmation program is more or less run from the university’s J-school. Since the awards are soon to be presented, and since the AP’s lust for one is almost comically transparent, its show-the-flag campus visit is wholly unsurprising.

[snip]

Strip away the emotive rhetoric and what’s left is a series of stories over several weeks that show pretty clearly that the NYPD works very hard to keep the city safe — operating an aggressive and imaginative program, but staying well within both the law and the bounds of post-9/11 propriety from beginning to end.

Perspective matters.

At least twice in the decade before the NYPD program began, Islamist sleeper agents attacked New York City. The first time, six people died; the second, thousands.

Since then, the department has disrupted a number of Islamist-initiated plots; there is no way of telling how many more were never undertaken because the city is so aggressively anti-terrorist. And there have been no terror-related fatalities since 9/11.

That could change tomorrow — presumably the AP’s Pulitzer prospects would tail off sharply if it did — but that would prove only that there are no guarantees in counterterrorism.

Here, the NYPost is just flat out wrong–or should be.

If there were a terrorist attack tomorrow, the inevitable commission would finally give the NYPD spying program the scrutiny it needs, scrutiny which the AP has tried to offer. And that commission will discover that the NYPD has spent its time spying on girls’ and grade schools, hunting out Muslims at Jewish businesses, scamming whitewater rafting trips off of taxpayers.

Sure, such efforts have led to hyped busts of folks it took 31 months for the NYPD to coach how to drill holes into a pipe. Such busts only discredit Mayor Bloomberg, Ray Kelly, and ultimately everyone defending this program.

What those efforts didn’t find were the real terrorist attacks. They didn’t find Najibullah Zazi and they didn’t find Faisal Shahzad–even though both were right under their nose. Read more →

If the Drug Czar Does Not Supervise the Money It Doles Out, Who Does?

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At the Daily Press Briefing today, Jay Carney was asked whether the White House approves of the NYPD spying on New York and New Jersey’s Muslim communities.

He responded by claiming that the Office of National Drug Control Policy–the Drug Czar!–has no authority over the money.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy is a policy office that has no authority–no authority to and does not conduct, direct, manage, or supervise any law enforcement operations. The funding is provided to the H-I-D-T-A, HIDTA program, of New York and New Jersey, which then provides it to law enforcement agencies to assist in the procurement of resources like computers and other items.

[snip]

This is not an Administration program or a White House program. This is a program of the NY Police Department.

Now, there’s reason to believe the response was bullshit. As the Drug Czar org chart above shows–and Deputy Drug Czar Benjamin Tucker’s biography makes clear–HIDTA is solidly in the chain of command in the Drug Czar’s office.

In his position, Mr. Tucker oversees ONDCP’s High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) program , Drug-Free Communities (DFC), National Youth-Anti-Drug Media Campaign, and Counter-Drug Technology Assessment Center (CTAC).

With 40 years of experience in the fields of law enforcement and criminal justice, Mr. Tucker is a recognized expert in community policing.

Furthermore, the Director of HIDTA, Dr. Ellen Scrivner, has her office in the Executive Office of the President.

Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske “coordinates all aspects of Federal drug control programs” and one of those programs is HIDTA, which apparently funds spying on Muslims. And the Drug Czar’s Policy Coordination Circular–which was updated on August 3, 2011–requires that the Drug Czar review any chances to “drug policy.”

Pursuant to 21 U.S.C. §1704(b), agencies are required, except under exigent circumstances, to notify ONCDP of any proposed change in policies relating to their activities under the National Drug Control Program prior to implementation of such change.

[snip]

The Director of ONCDP reviews such proposed changes and certifies in writing whetehr such change is consistent with the National Drug Control Strategy.

In other words, Obama’s Deputy Drug Czar oversees this program, its Director works in EOP, and any changes on anything pertaining to drug policy must be approved by the Drug Czar.

That kind of micro-management inside the White House is the whole point of having a Czar rather than a congressionally-supervised agency head.

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