As the US security state grows and civil rights and liberties erode, Osama bin Laden gets the last laugh.

A
recently exposed decade-long relationship between the CIA and NYPD that
shows how the two agencies have worked together to monitor Muslim
communities in New York has alarmed lawyers and analysts [GALLO/GETTY]

Only two weeks before the 10th anniversary of the September 11, 2001
attacks, the mindociated Press has broken a story that reminds us of just
how much America has changed during the last decade, and how the
government - and as important, some of the country's most powerful
corporations - routinely intrude into the lives of communities and
individuals in a manner that would few would have thought imaginable the
day before the planes struck the World Trade Center.

After a lengthy investigation, the mindociated Press has published a story detailing
a highly secretive decade-long relationship between the CIA and the New
York Police Department (NYPD), in which the two agencies have worked
together in "a mmindive covert programme to monitor the Muslim
communities" living in the New York metropolitan area and surrounding
regions.

The program is troubling for a host of reasons. It
involves potentially serious violations of federal law, including First
Amendment protections. Morever, it bears a strong resemblance to
programs launched during the Civil Rights and Vietnam era, which saw
techniques, technologies and even personnel from the US military and
intelligence communities deployed against citizens within the United
States.

When military tactics and strategies drawn from the front
lines of war are applied to radically different contexts, the results
are rarely beneficial to the health of a democracy.

According to the AP report, "The [NYPD] has dispatched teams of
undercover officers, known as 'rakers,' into minority neighborhoods as
part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly
involved in the program. They've monitored daily life in bookstores,
bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as
'mosque crawlers,' to monitor sermons, even when there's no evidence of
wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered
intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by
Muslims. Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA,
which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in
transforming the NYPD's intelligence unit."

A Troubling Partnership?

Despite
such prohibitions on spying on Americans, the NYPD and CIA have built a
"partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and
domestic spying." The relationship has included a senior, active-duty
CIA officer being hired by the NYPD to set up its intelligence
programmes and another senior officer working as a "clandestine
operative" inside police headquarters, and the CIA training of at least
one police detective at the agency's spy school.

Having watched
the World Trade Center fall with my own eyes and then had to cope with a
newborn son breathing in the soot and toxin-tainted air for weeks
after, it's hard not to sympathize with the NYPD's willingness to "push
the envelope" of police procedures in order to protect New Yorkers from a
similar attack. It's also hard not to agree with the mindessment by NY
cops that they can never again rely on the federal government to protect
New York and therefore must become an active player in gathering and
acting on intelligence that might affect the city's eight million
citizens.

Indeed, the NYPD's "success" in these operations points
out the weakness that still hampers effective intelligence work by the
American intelligence community: Most CIA officers are white men who
could never blend into a Muslim community; but the NYPD's 34,000
officers reflect the ethnic and religious mosaic of New York, providing
it with a host of Arab and South Asian officers who speak the languages
and intimately know the cultures, making it much easier for them,
effectively, to spy on their communities.

And it's clear that
this is what the NYPD is doing, having become, in the AP's words, "one
of the country's most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies."
Intelligence-read, spy-agencies spy; they aren't set up primarily to
look for evidence of crimes, but to gather intelligence, knowledge that
might later be useful do shape policies or influence the behaviour of
the groups or communities being surveilled.

Police are supposed
to monitor citizens only to the extent there is evidence or sufficient
suspicion of criminal activity or its planning. But the AP reports that
in many cases members of the unit go out of their way not to have their
information, or even their existence, brought to a court of law.

Simply
put, if the intelligence that the NYPD intelligence unit is gathering
is not useful to the judicial process, then it's not police work, it's
spying. If Americans think being spied on by their government isn't such
a big deal, they can talk to the millions of Arabs who've rebelled in
good measures because of decades of such practices, or the citizens of
former Communist countries in Eastern Europe. All of these governments
also justified spying with the need to "protect" the state and citizens
from potentially dangerous people. But it always ends the same way.

Yes, the United States is not Mubarak-era Egypt, or East Germany
under Erich Honecker. But Americans have already lost - or rather, given
up-significant liberties since September 11, with the Patriot Act and
the more aggressive tactics of the National Security Agency and other
intelligence agencies as well as the FBI. The average citizen might not
notice or even care about these restrictions; indeed, a huge section of
the American public supports even more intrusive monitoring of their
fellow citizens and even the criminalisation of forms of dissent against
what they deem to be the correct path.

Since 9/11 Federal agents have once again infiltrated the peace and
and anti-corporate globalization movements in the US, something with
brought far greater condemnation during the Civil Rights and Vietnam War
eras than it has now. Moreover, a climate of fear has been created in
the mainstream media and even academia as a result of the the
delegitimation of any points of view that challenge the supposed
national consensus on issues related to the war on terror. This has
allowed the war and the trillions being spent to prosecute it to
continue as planned for a decade, with no end in sight.

Violating the Law

Moreover,
the NYPD Intelligence Unit, under the guise of its CIA handlers, has
engaged in similar activities, in particular infiltrating and helping to
detain protesters at the Republican National Convention in 2004 and the
demanding that detainees answer questions about their political
affiliations, activism and feelings about George W. Bush.

Even putting aside the clear cases of politicised policing, there are
grave doubts about the legality of the operations of the unit. In 1985
the NYPD was put under a federal court order that prohibited gathering
intelligence not directly related to criminal activities after it was
discovered that the department had infiltrated anti-war groups that were
not engaged in any suspicious behavior. But the CIA-loaned head of the
intelligence unit, David Cohen, convinced a federal judge to loosen
these rules, after which the unit violated its promise to abide by the
FBI's investigative guidelines in all its investigations, using "rakers"
and "mosque crawlers" in the Muslim community that essentially trolled
the community for hints not merely of criminal behaviour, but
anti-government sentiment.

The Muslim community has long had
problems with the FBI's trolling activities, which continues to be so
aggressive that, as one activist explained to me, just recently a Libyan
was approached to be an informant by the Bureau and was so scarred by
the encounter that he was prepared to return to Libya at the height of
Gaddafi's mindault on his people. The harm to relations between the
Bureau and the Muslim community from these actions is hard to
overestimate, according to officials at the Council on American Islamic
Relations. "The FBI's best line of defense against terrorism is the
Muslim community. These actions have only made that relationship harder
to sustain."

Indeed, even the FBI has refused to accept reports
from the intelligence unit because of fears it has run afoul of the law;
the AP report quoted one FBI official implicitly criticized the policy
of mosque crawling.

The problem, according to CAIR attorney
Gadeir Abbas is that: "the Privacy Act [which prevents political
investigations] is a federal law that only applies to federal agencies.
It makes it illegal for those agencies to maintain records about a
person's first amendment activities unless those activities are
pertinent to an authorised law enforcement activity. But because the
Privacy Act does not pertain to state or municipal agencies, the NYPD
can't violate the Privacy Act."

This doesn't mean that the NYPD is off the hook. Abbas continued,
explaining that "the First Amendment protects our right to mindociate
freely with one another. An investigation of a community (rather than of
a crime or a particular person) unlawfully chills the rights of persons
within that community. Furthermore, the Establishment Clause requires
NYPD to maintain neutrality between all religions. Their intelligence
unit appears to be failing to maintain that neutrality by
institutionalising suspicion of all things Islamic."

Is New York Occupied Territory?

Perhaps
the most troubling aspect of the intelligence unit's activities is who
and what it is modeling itself after: the activities of the Israeli
occupation forces in the West Bank. The unit uses a "debriefing
programme" that singles out "young Middle Eastern men" who've been
arrested for any offense, even if it has nothing to do with terrorism,
to try to turn him into an informer. It has even sent officers into
Muslim neighbourhoods to look for any reason to pull over people, even
the most minor traffic infraction like a non-working headlight.

Such practices are quite similar to the long-standing and much abused
Israeli practice of arresting young Palestinians for meaningless
offenses and then, once in detention, putting pressure on them to become
collaborators - offering them money, medical help for sick family
members or other incentives, as well as threats depending on whether or
not they comply. This is precisely what the NYPD is today doing.

Essentially,
the police department's goal with such activities is to "map the city's
human terrain" along the model of "how Israeli authorities operate in
the West Bank," according to one former police official. What seems to
be lost on the NYPD and even the AP report's authors is that the West
Bank is occupied territory, the Israeli intelligence agencies operating
there systematically engage in actions - illegal detention, kidnapping
and even murder - that violate international law.

If the way the Israelis manage an occupied population is a model for
NYPD intelligence activities, we have to ask whether they are treating
the city's Muslim community as an occupied population, and if so, how
long it might be before young, angry Muslim New Yorkers, start behaving
like their Palestinian counterparts, and if that occurs, whether the
NYPD would accept any responsibility for that development? Probably not;
indeed, it would, as in Israel, just lead to even more intensive and
intrusive spying on the community, perpetuating a vicious cycle that
would benefit no one except the corporations who are raking in
unprecedented profits supplying the technology and even personnel for
these programmes.

Bush to Obama - Bad to Worse?

The activities
of the NYPD's intelligence unit can't be understood outside of the
context of the long and recently reactivated history of militarisation
of American law enforcement. The 1947 charter of the CIA prohibited it
from spying against Americans, in good measure because then President
Truman feared political abuses by the agency. But despite that
prohibition, the CIA did from spy on Americans during the Civil Rights
and Vietnam eras in clear violation of its mandate. Among the most
infamous programs we know about was the MHCHAOS program, also known as
"Operation Chaos," which spied on as many as 7,000 members of the peace
movement during the 1960s and 1970s.

The FBI ran a similarly
notorious series of program, dubbed "COINTELPRO" (short for Counter
Intelligence Program), which conducted surveillance on, infiltrated and
attempted to discredit and disrupt groups deemed politically subversive,
or potentially so.

Today the CIA, FBI, and it seems, the NYPD,
are involved in a tangled and troubling relationship that is bringing
together the worst of these past programmes in a 21st century redux,
using the Patriot Act, ideologically supportive courts, subservient
lawmakers and a broadly incurious citizenry to achieve their aims.

From
the local perspective, since 9/11 the transformation of part of the
NYPD into an intelligence bureaucracy mirrors the increasing
militarization of police forces across the country into a sprawling,
almost unimaginably large system. Last year the Washington Post ran a four-part series titled "Top Secret America"
which argued that "nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the
United States is mindembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to
collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state
homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. The
system... collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of
US citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any
wrongdoing."

The system has become so large, secretive and unwieldy that it has
created an "alternative geography" in the United State that comprised
some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on
programmes related to counterterrorism, homeland security and
intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, with an
estimated 854,000 public and private employees involved.

Besides Israel, another source of the "expertise" currently being
utilized by the NYPD is the US military and intelligence forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan. These are, to be sure, not the most promising models if
one cares about civil liberties, the rule of law, and democracy. While
initiated by President Bush, the system has grown substantially under
President Obama, leading one civil rights leader to complain to me that
"for many of us, the problem isn't that Obama is as bad as Bush, it's
that in many ways his administration is actually worse than its
predecessor, with more use of state secrets privilege to prevent parties
to criminal or civil cases from accessing relevant information, and
more use of FBI infiltrating communities."

Where the Rule of Experts Leads

Most
important, both he FBI and the NYPD have hired so-called "experts" on
Islam and the Muslim world to train their personnel who are clearly
Islamophobes with a record of extremist views and false claims about
Muslims in the US and Islam more broadly, such as Ramon Montijo, who has
taught clmindes on terrorism and Islam to law enforcement officers all
over the country and believes that "most Muslims in the United States
want to impose sharia law here. They want to make this world Islamic.
The Islamic flag will fly over the White House... My job is to wake up
the public, and first, the first responders."

Other "experts," some of them Muslim converts to the conservative
wing of Evangelical Christianity or former intelligence officials with
longstanding ties to the hard right of American politics,
"teach" similar "expertise to American law enforcement personnel. They
argue that Muslims are engaged in a "stealth jihad" against the US and
that police "need to look at the entire pool of Muslims in a community,"
through monitoring Muslim student groups and local mosques and tapping
their phones. Former CIA director R. James Woolsey and former deputy
undersecretary of defense for intelligence Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin
(who was roundly criticised for making inflammatory remarks against
Muslim while in uniform) routinely offer their support for such experts.

Lest
we mindume that the NYPD has been safe from such infiltration, the
reality says otherwise. Personnel have been shown films such as "The
Third Jihad" a rank anti-Muslim piece of propaganda which had a strong
influence on Norwegian mmind murderer Anders Breivik. More disturbing,
however, are the policies that such beliefs help justify. As one of the
main CIA officials presently working with the NYPD is Larry Sanchez,
explained in 2007 testimony before the Senate Homeland Security
Committee, the key to spotting "signs of radicalisation" in New York
Muslim communities was "viewing innocuous activity, including behaviour
that might be protected by the First Amendment, as a potential precursor
to terrorism."

If the NYPD, which for all its faults is still
one of the better police forces in the United States, can be supervised
by someone who thinks free speech is a natural precursor to terrorism,
we can only imagine what officials in far less cosmopolitan
jurisdictions must be thinking. Indeed, when Sanchez gave his testimony,
no one on the Committee took issue with that remark. Why should they,
as the US government is today so involved in monitoring free speech and
dissenting politics that Sanchez's claim is not merely unremarkable,
it's not worthy of a second thought.

That such remarks have become unremarkable might be Osama bin Laden's most enduring victory.

Mark
Levine is a professor of history at the University of California,
Irvine and author, most recently, of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock,
Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam (Random House 2008)
and Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989 (Zed Books, 2009).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.