In 2009, the FBI and New Brunswick Police responded to a 911 call about suspicious, terrorist-like activity in an apartment that was undergoing code inspections. According to the 911 caller, the room had surveillance equipment, literature on Muslims, photographs of terrorists, and little else.
The culprits? New York’s finest, spying undercover in New Jersey on Muslim Americans.
A new book hitting shelves next week finds that some of the first responders to that apartment three years ago, the FBI, find the NYPD’s program to be a “waste of money” and has barred agents from dealing with the department’s intelligence division, the New York Daily News reported this morning.
This stands in stark contrast to a White House that has declined to speak out — even as federal grant money funds the NYPD projects — and FBI Director Robert Mueller’s complimentary remarks in March saying the department had done a “remarkable job in protecting New York.”
But FBI sources reportedly told book author Ronald Kessler, ” We will not be party to it.”
The NYPD’s Muslim spying program has been widely criticized as both an illegal act of racial profiling and a massive expansion of the department’s jurisdiction since it was uncovered by the Associated Press last year. The AP found that the NYPD was trailing Muslim Americans in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, following Muslim students on whitewater rafting trips, recording sermons, hanging out in hookah bars looking for dissidents, and using minor traffic infringements to force Pakistani taxi drivers into informing on their communities.
