New York, August 25: A report has unveiled that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is giving assistance to the New York Police Department (NYPD) to spy on American citizens, especially 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.
——Agencies