Tag Archives: Ray Kelly

Ray Kelly: Please Call My Spying “Enhanced Police Investigation”

By:  Monday February 27, 2012 12:19 pm

In the city in which the NYT news page insists on calling torture “harsh” or “enhanced interrogation” when America does it, I’m not surprised that NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly objects to news outlets calling his spying spying.

“I just wish the media would show some responsibility and use the words ‘surveillance’ or ‘police investigation’ rather than ‘spying.’ To use that term, to be accusing you of ‘spying,’ is, to me, really offensive,” Mr. [Peter] King said, asking Mr. Kelly what he thought of the issue.

“It’s a pejorative term, it sells well,” Mr. Kelly responded. “They forget we’ve the subject of 14 plots since 9/11 … We’ve been lucky. We just have been lucky.”

Mr. King also discussed the political implications of the debate. He said the “spying” rhetoric “puts a cloud over what you’re trying to do. That’s why I worry about the campaign and whoever the next mayor happens to be, if it’s against the back drop of ‘spying’ charges.”

I can see why Peter King worries about the political implications of spying. He heartily approved of the NYPD spying on 28 businesses in his own district. He even applauded the NYPD spying on kosher businesses–after having mocked such an idea as ridiculous–after CBS stole my reporting on the topic and confronted him with the fact that NYPD was, indeed, spying on Iranian Jews as well as Muslims.

So King, who faces voters in November, celebrates NYPD’s baseless spying on his constituents and, even when confronted with the stupidity of the NYPD’s spying choices, ultimately supports them unquestioningly. But he’s beginning to worry about the political implications of such brainless boosterism.

And Kelly just thinks (unsurprisingly given the treatment he’s usually accorded) the press should supinely heed his demand that they use euphemisms to dress up his spying program (while not objecting to the accuracy of the term, I might add).

While we’re discussing supine treatment, what is the word Kelly would prefer we use to describe the decision to have a booster like Peter King, guest hosting a radio show, invite Ray Kelly in to attack his critics and defend the department’s spying?

“Enhanced fellatio”?

I always seem to get this particular euphemism wrong.


White House Drug Czar Helps Pay for CIA-on-the-Hudson

By:  Monday February 27, 2012 7:48 am

In its latest update on NYC’s spying on Muslims, the AP reports the program is partially funded by the White House Drug Czar in grants associated with the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Program.

Some of that money — it’s unclear exactly how much because the program has little oversight — has paid for the cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods. It also paid for computers that store even innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events.

When NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly was filled in on these efforts, his briefings were prepared on HIDTA computers.

What the article notes but doesn’t emphasize–but which is the entire point of White House czar positions–is that there is little oversight over how these funds get used. Congress did not get to see a breakout of how the NYPD uses its “war on drugs” funds.

Congress, which approves the money for the program, is not provided with a detailed breakdown of activities. None of the NYPD’s clandestine programs is cited in the New York-New Jersey region’s annual reports to Congress between 2006 and 2010.

The problem with programs run by White House czars is that White Houses of both parties routinely argue that Congress has no legitimate oversight over them.

The White House, typically, refuses to comment.

The White House last week declined to comment on its grant payments.

And, as the AP has pointed out repeatedly in its reporting on this program, no one in New York City is exercising oversight either.

It’s unclear how much HIDTA money has been used to pay for the intelligence division, in part because NYPD intelligence operations receive scant oversight in New York.

The main point of the AP article is that the White House owns this ineffective, abusive spying, just as much as Ray Kelly.

But just as importantly, the use of Drug Czar funds for a program that is every bit as counterproductive and wasteful and stupid as the war on drugs symbolizes just how far those running this program have shielded it from any oversight.


After Ray Kelly Proved Incapable of Hosting a Terrorist Trial, His Supporters Shouldn’t Call OTHER Cities Overmatched

By:  Sunday February 26, 2012 8:52 am

The NYDN and NYPost continue their uncritical defense of the NYPD’s spying on residents of other cities. In response to continued outrage that NYPD’s officers profiled Newark’s and Paterson’s Muslim community, the New York fearmonger papers’ response is basically a taunt that New Jersey should be grateful the NYPD has invaded their state because New Jersey can’t prevent terrorism on its own.

What is the matter with New Jersey politicians that they are raising a stink because the NYPD keeps an eye out for terrorists on their turf?

Have Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Corey Booker forgotten that 746 residents of the Garden State were killed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11?

Have they forgotten that ringleader Mohammed Atta met with co-conspirators in Newark?

Have they forgotten that the van used in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was rented in Jersey City?

(The NYDN, which claims to have read the profile reports on things like girls’ schools, seems to have missed that none of the profiling reports we’ve seen from the NYPD have targeted any of the kinds of NJ establishments the terrorists have used in the past.)

But as a MI resident, what I’m really amused by is the NYPD boosters’ claim that Newark is “overmatched” and “incapable.”

So why wouldn’tthe NYPD bring its unmatched skills to bear in Newark, whose overmatched police department is simply incapable of monitoring threats as they develop far out of sight?

I can remember only one police department in recent years which has been “overmatched.” And that’s the NYPD, when faced with the prospect of hosting a terrorist trial in Manhattan.

When DOJ first announced plans to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other 9/11 plotters in New York, Ray Kelly started making the same kind of complaints about not being consulted as New Jersey’s politicians are making now.

NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly said the Justice Department did not consult the city officials before deciding to send Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four others to New York City for trial.

“There was no consultation, no consultation with the police department. That decision was made. We were informed,” Kelly said Tuesday.

When asked if the NYPD should have been asked about security and other considerations in advance of sending the accused terrorist to the scene of the attack, Kelly said,” The fact is we weren’t asked. And we will make the best of a situation. We weren’t.”

At first Kelly said the NYPD would be up to the task. But then he started rolling out a plan to effectively militarize lower Manhattan and demanded first $90 million then $200 million to pay for his war zone. Ultimately, the DOJ gave up the plan for a civilian trial.

Because Ray Kelly wasn’t up to the task of hosting a terrorist trial, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has had at least two years added to his life.

Continue reading →


If Radical Muslims Aren’t Found at Kosher Delis, Then Why Did NYPD Look for Them at Kosher Butchers?

By:  Friday February 24, 2012 2:56 pm

Congressman Peter King applauds that the NYPD is spying on–among others–some of his own Long Island constituents, including 28 businesses in Oyster Bay. He rather snidely quips that you wouldn’t look for radical Muslims at a kosher deli.

Ray Kelly and the NYPD should get a medal for what they are doing. They are–This is good police work. If you are going after radical Muslims you don’t go to Ben’s Kosher Deli.

There’s just one problem with that–a big one.

Among the businesses the NYPD profiled are at least five kosher butchers, delis, or restaurants not far from King’s home in Long Island (as well as several other stores, including food stores, run by Great Neck, NY’s Iranian Jewish population).

  • Emouna Glatt Kosher Meat
  • Shish Kabob Palace, which uses Glatt Kosher meats
  • Kandi King Gourmet store
  • Great Neck Glatt
  • Eilat Prime Meats

So Peter King suggests it would be stupid for the NYPD to look for radical Muslims at kosher delis. But he’s still celebrating the NYPD for having done just that.

(h/t George Zornick)


Why Won’t the NYT Report on Ray Kelly’s Spooks?

By:  Friday February 24, 2012 8:35 am

On the NYT’s homepage, the story of the ongoing protests in reaction to the burning of Korans at Parwan prison occupies a fairly prominent position.

What you won’t find anywhere on the NYT homepage, though, is the story of how the NYPD monitored local response to Dutch cartoons of the prophet Mohammed, culled from informants at mosques across the metro area and summarized in a report for Ray Kelly. It’s a similar story–the Muslim reaction to perceived blasphemy–but it’s local. The NYT’s own city. Yet the NYT doesn’t consider it news.

Nor will you find a report on the NYPD’s press conference yesterday, an effort to insist all this surveillance of First Amendment speech is perfectly legal. Both the NYPost and the NYDN reported on that. (Admittedly, the WSJ is silent on the story today, though they have reported on it before.)

The New Jersey press was reporting on the NYPD’s spying in their own neighborhoods, both Newark–in the AP’s latest installment, Paterson.

Has the NYT moved to FL for the winter? Because every newspaper in the NY area seems to think this is news.

I’ve noted before the contortions the NYT went through to downplay (or even dismiss) this spy program in a profile of Ray Kelly. That almost felt like petulance over being beat–except for a few stories from Michael Powell–on a big story in its own backyard.

But the NYT’s silence on the story is beginning to get creepy.


Close, But No Cigar: NYPD within 3 Miles of Faisal Shahzad’s Hawala, Missed It

By:  Wednesday February 22, 2012 11:45 am

On April 10, 2010, Mohammad Younis, of Centereach, NY, met with Faisal Shahzad at the Ronkonkoma train station and gave him $7,000 in cash. That money went to buy fertilizer, propane, and gasoline that Shahzad used to build a bomb he tried to set off in Times Square three weeks later–the last real Islamic terrorist attack launched on New York City.

I was particularly interested to see the NYPD’s intelligence profile of Suffolk County released by the AP this morning. As I noted last year, the NYPD’s extensive intelligence programs failed to identify the two most significant attacks on NY in recent history: those attempted by Najibullah Zazi and Shahzad.

With Zazi, that failure was epic; the NYPD used his imam as an informant, and actually tipped Zazi off to the investigation.

But Shahzad’s attack would have been harder to find. He plotted the attack from Connecticut–outside the city, though well within the range of the NYPD’s intelligence efforts. The one lead squarely within the NYPD’s profiling activities, though, would have been the hawala Shahzad used–Younis’ hawala–to get money from Pakistan.

It turns out the NYPD’s profiling efforts got within 3 miles of Younis’ house. They profiled his house of worship, the Islamic Association of Long Island. They profiled about 10 businesses in his community–though they focused on the halal restaurants, not the 7-11 where Younis used to work or the Lowes where he worked at the time he met with Shahzad. They also profiled a mosque and an auto repair shop in Ronkonkoma, the town where Shahzad met with Younis.

They never found Younis or his hawala activities, which he did not operate for profit.

Mind you, even if they had profiled the 7-11 or the Lowes, they still wouldn’t have found anything. Younis himself had no knowledge of Shahzad’s plot (Younis plead guilty to one count of unlicensed money remitting and was sentenced to three years of probation in December).

Which all goes to show that even profiling the precise neighborhoods through which terrorist money flows will not–did not–serve to discover or prevent attacks.


The Girls’ School that Terrifies Ray Kelly

By:  Wednesday February 22, 2012 8:19 am

This is the Al Muslimaat Academy, a school for fifth through twelfth grade girls certified by New Jersey’s Department of Education. It is one of the many locations in Newark spied on by Ray Kelly’s spies in 2007.

They considered it a “Madrassah.”

They even mapped it out, along with a different school teaching first through fourth graders. I guess in case they needed to find a bunch of Muslim kids quickly.

Today’s installment of the AP’s CIA-on-the-Hudson series takes us out of the city altogether, to Newark, where the NYPD mapped out the Muslim community without even informing with Cory Booker, Newark’s Mayor, first.

According to the report, the operation was carried out in collaboration with the Newark Police Department, which at the time was run by a former high-ranking NYPD official. But Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, said he never authorized the spying and was never told about it.
“Wow,” he said as the AP laid out the details of the report. “This raises a number of concerns. It’s just very, very sobering.”

Booker says he will investigate.

After the AP approached Booker, he said the mayor’s office had launched an investigation.
“We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

Now, the NYPD might be forgiven for looking for terrorists in Newark. After all, in the summer of 2001, the 9/11 hijackers used Newark as a staging ground to prepare for their attack.

But they didn’t, as far as we know, frequent mosques at all. They spent time in cheap motels and cheap restaurants, gyms, and cybercafes. They had the operational security to do most of these things in separate places, heading to Patterson and Wayne.

They certainly didn’t plot out 9/11 in a girls’ school.

All of which shows, yet again, how futile this whole program is and was. Futile, that is, if you’re actually trying to stop terrorism. It’s perfect if you want to cow members of an entire faith by criminalizing their schools, butchers, and places of worship.


“Terror” by Scare Quote

By:  Monday February 20, 2012 11:45 am

Ten invented or scare quotes. That’s what the NY Post employs in an effort to discredit the AP’s latest report on the CIA-on-the-Hudson, this time describing surveillance of Muslim college students extending across the Northeast:

“civil rights”

“gotcha”

“workplace violence”

“workplace violence”

“civil rights”

“racist”

“racist”

“students”

“oppressed minority”

“suspect pool”

The concepts of civil rights, racism, oppressed minorities, and suspect pools are bracketed, presumably marking them as facetious or illegitimate concepts.

The Pentagon, currently seeking the death penalty for Nidal Hasan’s attack on Fort Hood, is accused of treating the attack as “workplace violence.”

The 9/11 hijackers, who did in fact enroll in flight schools to learn how to turn passenger jets into missiles, are accused of just posing as “students,” presumably in an effort to suggest that young adult Muslims studying at colleges ranging from Yale to Laguardia Community College who were surveilled by the NYPD must also be posing too.

And it’s not just by using quotation marks that the Post invents its own reality.

It suggests the NYPD has stopped “countless” terrorist attacks, when the number of total attacks in the last decade was fewer than 20, and the two most important–Faisal Shahzad and Najibullah Zazi–the NYPD missed.

Closely watching wannabe jihadis not only at home but across the country and around the world, the NYPD has foiled countless terror operations,

It supports the claim that the targets of surveillance here are wannabe jihadis by suggesting that Mike Bloomberg and Ray Kelly are simply not telling the public the evidence justifying their profiling of innocent Muslims.

The AP story also breathlessly notes that “the latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students,” even though “Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly have said that the police only follow legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity.”

Was the AP born yesterday?

There’s always a gap between what public officials say to the “gotcha” media and what they actually must do — especially when it comes to terrorism. If officials could candidly talk about the daily reports they get about possible lethal jihadist activity, the country would be in a state of permanent panic.

Never mind that the AP has published at least two documents showing reports sent directly to Kelly reviewing surveillance that admits no underlying leads. The Post is willing to assert, presumably having seen less raw data than the AP, that there must be more terrorism there, terrorism worthy of permanent panic if only we knew.

Continue reading →


How Do You Profile J. Edgar Kelly with Almost No Mention of Domestic Spying?

By:  Saturday February 4, 2012 1:26 pm

In 1974, the NYT made history with a story that reported,

An extensive investigation by the NYT has established that intelligence files on at least 10000 U.S. citizens were maintained by a special unit of the CIA

In 2005, the NYT again made history by exposing illegal domestic wiretapping.

Yet today’s NYT managed to publish a 2,500-word story depicting Ray Kelly as some sort of J. Edgar Hoover figure with little mention–much less criticism–of the domestic spying Kelly’s NYPD conducts on New Yorkers.

Much of the article vents complaints that Kelly has gotten remote, that he no longer cooks spaghetti for his officers. It buries an on the record quote from the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association saying, “Among the rank-and-file, and even among the brass when I have talked to them, they are dying for a change” in the second-to-last paragraph.

But the five paragraphs addressing the rising number of scandals associated with the NYPD are striking for the way they deal with revelations of the domestic spying operation Kelly now oversees.

After years of undeniable success, Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly is going through turbulent times, confronted with a steady drip of troublesome episodes. They include officers fixing traffic tickets, running guns and disparaging civilians on Facebook, and accusations that the Police Department encourages officers to question minorities on the streets indiscriminately. His younger son has been accused of rape, though he has not been charged and maintains his innocence. On Thursday, in an episode that Mr. Kelly said concerned him, an officer killed an 18-year-old drug suspect who was unarmed.

[snip]

He has built a counterterrorism machine with tentacles in 11 foreign cities, irritating federal agencies. There has been no successful terrorist attack on his city while he has been commissioner. He has instead been engulfed in the past year largely by familiar police corruption story lines, of human beings succumbing to greed or audacity.

Over the past year, two officers charged with raping a woman were fired after being acquitted of rape but found guilty of official misconduct. A broad ticket-fixing scandal flared in the Bronx; when the accused officers were arraigned, hundreds of officers massed in protest, some denouncing Mr. Kelly. Eight current and former officers were charged with smuggling illegal guns. Narcotics detectives were accused of planting drugs on innocent civilians. An inspector needlessly pepper-sprayed four Occupy Wall Street protesters, invoking memories of the scrutiny and mass arrests of protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention, and giving the nascent movement its first real prime-time moment.

Civil rights advocates have assailed the department’s expanded stops of minorities on the streets. Several officers denigrated West Indians on Facebook. Muslims have denounced the monitoring of their lives, as Mr. Kelly has dispatched undercover officers and informants to find radicalized youth.

This year began with the revelation that a film offensive to Muslims, which included an interview with Mr. Kelly, had been shown to many officers.

The foreign intelligence “irritates federal agencies.” “Muslims have denounced” domestic spying. An inaccurate and counterproductive film is “offensive to Muslims.” The NYT seems anxious to dissociate itself from any criticism of the domestic spying, as if it’s something only the targets should worry about, as if incorporating Islamophobia into police training has no negative effects.

Worse, the juxtaposition of the irritated federal agencies with the proclamation that there has been no successful attack seems to be an attempt to justify the domestic spying. Never mind that the two most serious attempted attacks–by Faisal Shahzad and Najibullah Zazi–were not discovered by Kelly’s domestic spying. Never mind that the investigation into Zazi’s plot was significantly harmed when the NYPD tipped Zazi off to it through his imam, whom the NYPD believed to be a reliable informant.

With the transition, “[h]e has instead been engulfed … by familiar police corruption story lines, of human beings succumbing to greed or audacity,” the article logically distinguishes the domestic spying from the other things, the real scandals, according to the NYT.

Continue reading →


Target of New Year’s Day Firebombing Also Target of NYPD Intelligence Collection

By:  Thursday February 2, 2012 12:50 pm

The latest Goldman and Apuzzo report on the CIA-on-the-Hudson provides proof that Ray Kelly and Mike Bloomberg’s claims that religious institutions are not profiled are false.

The New York Police Department recommended increasing surveillance of thousands of Shiite Muslims and their mosques, based solely on their religion, as a way to sweep the Northeast for signs of Iranian terrorists, according to interviews and a newly obtained secret police document.

[snip]

The secret document stands in contrast to statements by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who said the NYPD never considers religion in its policing. Kelly has said police go only where investigative leads take them, but the document described no leads to justify expanded surveillance at Shiite mosques.

The 2006 intelligence document they obtained shows not just affirmative spying on Shiites as Shiites, but also a really muddled sense of the religious faiths of Iranians, Lebanese, and other Middle Eastern groups in this country.

But I’m particularly interested in one target of intelligence collection, according to the intelligence document: the Al-Khoei Islamic Center. That’s the mosque Ray Lazier Lengend firebombed on New Year’s Day.

The intelligence report includes the following on the mosque:

Source reporting indicates that members of Alavi Foundation are worshipping and conducting business at the Al-Khoei Islamic Center located in Jamaica, Queens,

[snip]

Expand and focus intelligence collection at the Al-Khoei Islamic Center.

[snip]

Hassan Fares [alleged to be a Hezbollah member or sympathizer and accused of extorting money for the mosque] has been observed in attendance at the Al-Khoei Center and has close ties to Fadhel al-Sahlani, the Imam of Al-Khoei. The Iraqi-born al-Sahlani is alleged to be the highest Shi’a religious authority in North America. On January 13, 2006, al-Sahlani was quoted by media sources stating that the Holocaust “has been exaggerated,” that “the numbers which have been mentioned are too much.” Al-Sahlani added that the “killing of innocent Jews during the war was an injustice,” but that the extent of Nazi persecution needed further examination. This was in support of statements made [sic] the Iranian President in regard to Holocaust. The Al-Khoei Center and al-Sahlani have been the subjects of law enforcement investigations by NYPD, JTTF, and the FBI. Al-Sahlani is the subject of a JTTF investigation for “attempting to depart the country with excess funds” and in late 2003, he was the subject of a lead investigation conducted by the Queens Case Team that alleged al-Sahlani was providing funds to a terrorist organization overseas. In January 2004, the case was closed as “unfounded.”

Open source research suggests that the UK-based Al-Khoei Benevolent Foundation, of which Al-Khoei Islamic Center is part, is the largest Shi’a organization in the world. Treasury Enforcement Communication System (TECS) inquiries reveal the Al-Khoei Benevolent Foundation allegedly imported Islamic books from Lebanon into the US. In addition, according to the California-based Islamic Education Center’s (IEC) newsletter, an “Al-Khoei Center” in New York was identified as an organization where IEC members (in this case, California State prison inmates) can obtain books and other similar resources.

[The intelligence report includes an additional allegation about the UK parent organization's potential ties to purchasing information about chemical propulsion in violation of sanctions against Iran.]

To be clear, there is much that merits investigation–and it looks like appropriate authorities have done so and in at least some of the cases, proved the allegations to be unfounded. There is much that doesn’t merit investigation, such as the provision of religious materials to prisoners.

But in this instance, the stated reason to conduct this heightened investigation of Al-Khoei (as well as other Shiite, Iranian, and Palestinian) institutions is because,

The present diplomatic conflict between the US and Iran over Iran’s nuclear proliferation has the potential to evolve into armed confrontation between the two nations.

The report, dated May 15, 2006, preceded the Israeli attack on Lebanon by just a few months.

So maybe the NYPD claims it only profiles religious institutions if the US is drumming up war against them? And is it the NYPD’s stance, then, at times of increased Iranian-US tensions (like, say, now), the Al-Khoei Islamic Center is a fair target?