The CIA announced in September it was going to review a narrow aspect of the way CIA officers set up NYPD’s domestic spying agency in the wake of 9/11. As I pointed out then, the investigation was scoped to ignore key parts of the NYPD’s program.
The NYPD program is, by all appearances, a massive ethnic profiling operation that hasn’t been all that effectiveat finding potential terrorists. DOJ ought to be conducting this investigation as a potential civil rights violation.
But instead, CIA will conduct the investigation, meaning the chances the public will know the result are slimmer even than if DOJ conducted it.
[snip]
So is CIA particularly worried? Both James Clapper and the CIA flack appear to be narrowly parsing the potential problem: whether or not there are CIA officers on the streets of NY, whether they are investigating domestically as opposed to overseas (remember, the NYPD is sticking its nose into overseas investigations, too).
And, surprise surprise! CIA’s Inspector General just announced that it found no problem in its narrowly scoped investigation.
The agency’s inspector general concluded that no laws were broken and there was “no evidence that any part of the agency’s support to the NYPD constituted ‘domestic spying’,” CIA spokesman Preston Golson said.
[snip]
David Buckley, the CIA’s inspector general, completed his review in late October. It’s not clear if his report opens the door for other municipal police departments nationwide to work closely with the CIA in the war on terror.
Let the ineffective, wasteful domestic spying continue then, I guess!