CIA Launches Investigation Of Work With NYPD

Last month, we learned that the Central Intelligence Agency has spent the last ten years aiding the New York City Police Department in anti-terror efforts, with no small degree of controversy. Now, The New York Times reports that the CIA has launched an internal investigation of its involvement with the NYPD:

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has opened an internal inquiry into whether its close cooperation with the New York Police Department in the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks has broken any laws prohibiting the agency from collecting intelligence in the United States.

During his first Congressional testimony as the C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus said Tuesday that the agency’s inspector general had begun to investigate its work with the Police Department “to make sure we are doing the right thing.” Mr. Petraeus said the inquiry began last month, but gave few details about its scope.

The C.I.A. is prohibited from gathering intelligence on American soil, but some have criticized its counterterrorism cooperation with law enforcement services as a de facto domestic spying campaign. The head of the Police Department’s intelligence unit, David Cohen, is a former C.I.A. official, and the agency has a senior clandestine officer embedded in the New York police force.

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said during the same Congressional hearing on Tuesday that while there were no C.I.A. officers out on the streets of New York collecting intelligence, he thought it was “not a good optic to have C.I.A. involved in any city-level police department.”

I think the only response needed to Clapper’s comment is Gee, do ya think? The involvement of the CIA with domestic law enforcement seems bad enough, but the fact that it lead the NYPD to launch a program that comes pretty close to being the same type of domestic spying that it was roundly condemned for during the Vietnam War era.It would be nice to see a Congressional investigation of this as well, but don’t hold your breath on that one.

FILED UNDER: Intelligence, National Security, Policing, Terrorism, , , , , , , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Jane Doe says:

    Yes, there is a lot of spying by the CIA into the United States. There is an ongoing internal investigation going on that is being done with a SOUND SURVEILLANCE technique. Guaranteed what I am telling you is FACT.