>From SLATE: White House Helped Fund NYPD Muslim Surveillance The AP reveals both Bush and Obama gave millions to the controversial program by way of a little known narcotics program.
By Rachael Levy | Posted Monday, Feb. 27, 2012, at 10:47 AM ET The White House helped fund the New York Police Department’s controversial surveillance of Muslim Americans under a little-known grant program intended to help local law enforcement fight drug crimes, the Associated Press reports Monday in its latest investigative report about the controversial monitoring program. The AP was unable to determine the exact amount of federal funding that was funneled to the surveillance program by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, but pegs the figure at somewhere in the "millions" of dollars range. The money was handed out under the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) program, which has sent roughly $135 million in total to the New York and New Jersey region, at least some of which was used to pay for the cars and computers that NYPD officers used as part of their monitoring of Muslim neighborhoods in the city and the storing of, in the words of the AP, "innocuous information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events." So far, the Obama administration has stayed quiet on the subject, declining last week to comment on the grant payments. The regional director of the HIDTA program, however, maintains that the lion's share of the federal cash was used to fight drug crime and not fund the monitoring program in question. He said that less than $1.3 million was used on cars for the NYPD's intelligence unit. The revelation of the NYPD’s surveillance drew harsh criticism last week from administrators at Columbia, Yale, and elsewhere, whose Muslim student groups were among those monitored. Meanwhile, the New Jersey attorney general is investigating the NYPD for conducting surveillance outside of their jurisdiction of New Jersey residents. -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
