Coming Up Empty
It must have seemed like a brilliant idea. The kind of thing that would be certain to result in invaluable data. Secret surveillance would most certainly catch those with sinister intentions revealing themselves unaware that they are being watched, their every words recorded, a dossier being compiled about them, their associates, their meeting places, their everyday lives meant in their quotidian habits, to throw off any possible suspicion that they are in reality sleeper agents.Except that this is yet another instance of that famous old saying; the plans of mice and men do oft go awry. In this instance, the six years of spying on the part of the New York Police Department's secret Demographics Unit generated not one scintilla of suspicious evidence against any of the unsuspecting residents of that great city that they might conceivably be planning violent skulduggery.
The NYPD special unit had really excellent advice and assistance from the self-acknowledged experts in the craft, none other than the CIA. From the CIA assembled databases were procured. Those databases gave information on where New York's Muslims lived, shopped, worked and prayed. Moreover, police were able to infiltrate Muslim student groups, place informants in mosques, monitor sermons and catalogue any Muslin the city who took new, Americanized surnames.
And out of all this elaborate, painstaking information collection techniques came nothing, nothing at all. Other than the realization that there are an awful lot of law-abiding, conscientious, Americanized and loyal Muslims living in New Yawk, New Yawk. The intention was that the Demographics Unit would act as that canary in the mine; an early warning system for a possible terror attack.
If a tip of the presence of a suspect was ever received, the police already in possession of detailed knowledge of each resident Muslim, would be enabled to leap right in and isolate the suspect and take him/her into custody. Sounds good in theory, a good practical bit of investigative and information-collecting planning. But, it would seem, if there are Muslim terrorists, they will be of an imported variety.
Which is just what the jihadists that participated in the 9/11 attacks happened to be. Not resident New York Muslim community members. In fact, isn't it so that New York Muslims were also lost in among the three thousand that died that day? "I never made a lead from rhetoric that came from a Demographics report, and I'm here since 2006", testified Assistant Chief Thomas Galati in a deposition.
Attorney-at-law Jethro Eisenstein, involved in the issue because of a similar surveillance case 40 years earlier revolving around communist sympathizers, is planning to work toward seeing that the Demographics Unit, operating under a new name, the Zone Assessment Unit, be shut down as unnecessary and an offence as far as civil rights groups are concerned.
Labels: Social-Cultural Deviations, Terrorism, That's Life, United States
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, August 23, 2012
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