The New York Police Department put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate, prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Associated Press. The documents describe in extraordinary detail a secret program intended to catalog life inside Muslim neighborhoods…
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s counterterrorism adviser and the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee are offering support for the New York Police Department after an Associated Press investigation revealed a secret police unit that monitored daily life inside Muslim communities. Muslim civil liberties groups and a Brooklyn congresswoman have called on the…
By Michelle Nichols Islamist extremists similar to the Times Square bomber are living among New Yorkers and the threat of attack by “homegrown terrorists” is not diminishing, city Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said. A failed attempt by a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen to blow up a car bomb in midtown Manhattan last month confirmed “the threat…
(NEW YORK, NY 9/9/09) A coalition of Muslim advocates, lawyers and community leaders today called the NYPD decision to add a “Statement of Clarification” (Clarification) to its 2007 report, “Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat” a “welcome first step.” They urged the NYPD to publicize the Clarification and engage in deeper dialogue with the…
At the headquarters of the New York Police Department, in a high-ceilinged, wood-floored room, Erhan Yildirim is speaking to a group of officers. As he lists facts about Islam, they crack their gum and tap their feet. Yildirim is slighter, shorter and snazzier — in a sleek Turkish-made suit — than most of his audience,…
