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CIA, NYPD spying on US Muslims

Since the September 11 attacks, with “unprecedented” help from the CIA, the NYPD “dispatched undercover officers, known as ‘rakers,’ into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program,” an investigation by AP found.

This is while the CIA is banned from spying on US citizens.

The investigation showed that the “rakers” have gathered information on the citizens’ “daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs.”

The report added that the NYPD has employed intelligent agents, known as “mosque crawlers,” to spy on Muslims and “monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.”

The Associated Press says it wrote the report based on documents and interviews with over 40 “current and former New York Police Department and federal officials.”

It added that most of the officials were “directly involved in planning and carrying out these secret operations.”

The report also said that the NYPD “operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government.”

Civil liberties groups have slammed the alleged practice and called for an investigation into the claims.

Following an investigation demand by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a leading Muslim civil rights organization, the US Justice Department said it will launch an investigation into the report.

“This is potentially illegal what they’re doing,” said Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney with the CAIR.

The NYPD has dismissed the report as “fiction.”

“We follow leads wherever they may happen to go. We don’t have any such thing as ‘mosque crawlers’,” NYPD Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Browne said on Wednesday.

© Copyright 2011 Press TV – Published at Set You Free News with license

From Associated Press:

New York’s police commissioner confirmed Thursday that a CIA officer is working out of police headquarters there, after an Associated Press investigation revealed an unusual partnership with the CIA that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying. But he and the CIA said the spy agency’s role at the department is an advisory one.

Speaking to reporters in New York, commissioner Raymond Kelly acknowledged that the CIA trains NYPD officers on “trade craft issues,” meaning espionage techniques, and advises police about events happening overseas. Kelly also said he was unaware of any other U.S. police department with a similar relationship with the CIA.

“They are involved in providing us with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas and providing it to us for, you know, just for our purposes,” Kelly said.

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