Reports indicate that the New York Police Department (NYPD) carries out illegal surveillance operations on Muslims in New York, with the help of the US spy agency.
“It was a blanket surveillance of an entire religious minority,” which is “wrong, un-American and possibly illegal,” said Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman of the country's largest Muslim organization, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Press TV correspondent reported.
According to a Wednesday report by the Associated Press, the NYPD has been spying on Muslim neighborhoods and monitoring mosques, using help from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and former CIA officials.
The report cites sources within the CIA and NYPD, yet NYPD spokesman Paul Browne ruled out any wrongdoing.
In a statement, Browne said, “We're doing all we reasonably can to stop terrorists from killing even more New Yorkers. We commit over a thousand officers to the fight every day…We don't apologize for it.”
However, rights groups strongly disagree and are calling for investigations into the matter by the US Department of justice.
“This isn't news to the community,” Ramzi Kassem of the Muslim American Civil Coalition said, adding that they have felt being under surveillance for nearly a decade.
A court case against the NYPD, which was sued for infringing on the rights of anti-war activists in 2004, is still open today.
Reacting to this case, the Department of Justice said it would look into the request.
Since the 9/11 attacks the NYPD has repeatedly violated Americans Minorities' rights “as part of a human mapping program,” reports say.
Yet the NYPD is not the only department treating the American Muslim community in this manner. Last week, reports from National Public Radio and Mother Jones magazine both said that the FBI was similarly spying on Muslims, especially Imams and other community leaders.
No comments:
Post a Comment