Liberal Talk Radio

Federalism sucks when it comes to natural disasters (think Katrina, for example) and waging fourth-generation war against the nihilistic forces of international terrorism. Which is to say, I actually don’t see what’s so great about New York City’s aggressive counter-terrorism program:

The cutting edge of the NYPD’s antiterrorism efforts, though, is David Cohen’s Intelligence Division. “We’re looking at ‘clusters,’ at how and where people get together, what they do and where they go, how they raise funds,” [Police Chief Ray] Kelly says during an interview at One Police Plaza. “This analytical work is not being done anywhere else in government. It’s all about prevention.”

Before September 11, the Intelligence Division mainly developed intelligence on narcotics and violent crimes, and sought to protect visiting dignitaries to the city—a glorified “escort service,” Kelly once scoffed. Now, its personnel devote 95 percent of their time to terrorism investigations, the PERF report concludes (and sources confirm). Kelly says that the division has 23 civilian intelligence analysts, with master’s degrees and higher from Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and other universities; some have come from leading think tanks, even from the CIA—giving the force a capability, he says, “that exists no place else.” The division’s “field intelligence officers,” one assigned to each of the NYPD’s 76 precincts, keep tabs on people, crimes, and arrests that might have terrorism links. “Core Collection” officers develop confidential informants, who could give early warning about people being radicalized by militant associates or websites.

Cohen’s division also supervises undercover agents who infiltrate potentially violent groups. The identities of these covert warriors, and other details of the program, remain fiercely guarded secrets. But information occasionally turns up in federal prosecutions, such as the NYPD’s use of an undercover agent in helping to foil the June JFK airport conspiracy, and of both a Bangladeshi undercover officer and an Egyptian-born confidential informant in disrupting a 2004 plot by Islamic terrorists to bomb the Herald Square subway station. “I want at least 1,000 to 2,000 to die in one day,” one of the accused told the informant in the subway case, a stunned New York jury heard last year. Though the men had not acquired explosives, police arrested them shortly before the Republican national convention in August 2004, after nearly two years of surveillance. The key plotter, Shahawar Matin Siraj, a 22-year-old Pakistani, recently received a 30-year sentence. “This is the kind of homegrown, lone-wolf case that starts way below federal radar,” Cohen says. “But had these two guys acted on their intentions”—to “fuck this country very bad,” as Siraj threatened on tape—“a lot of New Yorkers would have died and been injured.”

Undercover work capitalizes on the NYPD’s 870-plus civilian and uniformed speakers of Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Farsi, Pashto, Turkish, and Urdu—more linguists than the FBI’s New York field office employs. Of the 470 or so in uniform, more than 200 are “master linguists” in high-priority languages. The latest police academy class boasted graduates hailing from 65 countries, Cohen notes. Some will doubtless work for the division’s Cyber Intelligence Unit, a 25-person group situated in unmarked headquarters in a Chelsea industrial building; others may wind up in the Prison Intelligence program at Rikers Island, where they will work with officials from probations, the New York State Police, and other agencies to monitor the spread of militancy.

Richard Falkenrath, a counterterrorism expert who worked in the Bush White House and succeeded Deputy Commissioner Sheehan last year, says that New York’s intelligence efforts are “awe-inspiring,” beyond anything he’s seen at the local, state, and even federal levels. “New York is far more action-oriented than the feds,” he says, “partly because it’s a lot easier and faster to take action.”

Aren’t there some scary downsides to allowing a local police force to go so far beyond its local purview? The threat of bad people infiltrating the system, for example? The overly aggressive sting operations — some of which seem awfully close to entrapment (check out the Herald Square case cited above where the idea for bombing the subway station actually came from the informant!)? The TV show 24 isn’t so much an outlet for torture fantasy scenarios as it is a fantasy about a military-strength federal unit that has the power to act on U.S. soil — something that, if I’m not mistaken, is against the Constitution. Ray Kelly’s NYPD is moving towards that capability big time — and somewhere sometime they’re going to make a bad, nasty mistake that will make people question why a local police force has personnel stationed in London and Israel. Do we want to get to a point where the NYPD is practicing the black arts? Where’s the Congressional oversight?