More bad news continues to roll out about the NYPD's role in during the GOP Convention in 2004. Now it seems that they went around the U.S., Canada and Europe to conduct surveillance on protestors before they even got to New York. With the intention of stopping groups 'intent on creating havoc' the NYPD infiltrated anti-war organizations and all things anti-Bush and wound up taking down the views of various groups instead. As Big Tent Dem at TalkLeft said, that is how a police state operates.
From the NY Times:
The operation was mounted in 2003 after the Police Department, invoking the fresh horrors of the World Trade Center attack and the prospect of future terrorism, won greater authority from a federal judge to investigate political organizations for criminal activity.
To date, as the boundaries of the department’s expanded powers continue to be debated, police officials have provided only glimpses of its intelligence-gathering.
Now, the broad outlines of the pre-convention operations are emerging from records in federal lawsuits that were brought over mass arrests made during the convention, and in greater detail from still-secret reports reviewed by The New York Times. These include a sample of raw intelligence documents and of summary digests of observations from both the field and the department’s cyberintelligence unit.
This 'intelligence' gathered was a waste of time in looking for actual terrorism. Worse than that, it is an abuse of the American justice system that is supposed to preserve the ideals of what the United States was founded on and not to create a police state. The NYPD seems to lean towards the police state option without regard for the bill of rights and American freedoms in general.
The powers that were afforded to the NYPD are now in review and in the process of being thrown out. Of course Bloomberg's NYC is trying their best to keep their oppressive powers of surveillance despite recent rulings against them. Eventually it will be up to the Supreme Court to make the ultimate decision. I pray that they find for America and not the NYPD.
|