New York police spied on Muslim students

The New York Police Department monitored Muslim students at universities far beyond the city limits, including the elite Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, it has emerged.

Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.

Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for NYPD commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Asked about the monitoring, police spokesman Paul Browne provided a list of 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations, which the NYPD referred to as MSAs.

Jesse Morton, who this month pleaded guilty to posting online threats against the creators of the animated TV show 'South Park', had once tried to recruit followers at Stony Brook University on Long Island, Mr Browne said.

“As a result, the NYPD deemed it prudent to get a better handle on what was occurring at MSAs,” he said. He said police monitored student websites and collected publicly-available information, but did so only between 2006 and 2007.

“I see a violation of civil rights here,” said Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse. “Nobody wants to be on the list of the FBI or the NYPD or whatever. Muslim students want to have their own lives, their own privacy and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has.”

In recent months, the Associated Press revealed secret programmes the NYPD built with help from the CIA to monitor Muslims at the places where they ate, shopped and worshipped. The AP also published details about how police placed undercover officers at Muslim student associations in colleges within the city limits, a revelation that has outraged staff and student groups.

Although the NYPD says it follows the same rules as the FBI, some of its activities go beyond what the agency is allowed to do.

Mr Kelly and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg have repeatedly said that the police follow only legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity. Yesterday, the mayor’s office referred any further comment to the NYPD.

The latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students.

In one report, an undercover officer describes accompanying 18 Muslim students from the City College of New York on a whitewater rafting trip in upstate New York on April 21 2008. The officer noted the names of those there, who were officers of the Muslim Student Association.

“In addition to the regularly scheduled events (rafting), the group prayed at least four times a day, and much of the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature,” the report says.

Praying five times a day is one of the core traditions of Islam.

Jawad Rasul, one of the students on the trip, said he was stunned that his name was included in the police report.

“It forces me to look around wherever I am now,” he said.

But another student, Ali Ahmed, whom the NYPD said appeared to be in charge of the trip, said: “I can’t blame them for doing their job. There’s lots of Muslims doing some bad things and it gives a bad name to all of us, so they have to take their due diligence.”

City College criticised the surveillance and said it was unaware the NYPD was watching students.

“The City College of New York does not accept or condone any investigation of any student organisation based on the political or religious content of its ideas,” the college said.

Student groups were of particular interest to the NYPD because they attract young Muslim men, a demographic that terrorist groups frequently draw from.

Police worried about which Muslim scholars were influencing these students and feared that extracurricular activities such as paintball outings could be used as terrorist training.

AP first reported in October that the NYPD had placed informants or undercover officers in the Muslim Student Associations at City College, Brooklyn College, Baruch College, Hunter College, City College of New York, Queens College, La Guardia Community College and St John’s University. All of those colleges are within the New York City limits.

A person familiar with the programme said the NYPD also had a student informant at Syracuse.

Police were also interested in the Muslim student group at Rutgers, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. In 2009, undercover NYPD officers had a safe house in an apartment not far from campus. But the operation was blown when the building superintendent stumbled upon the safe house and, thinking it was some sort of a terrorist cell, called the police.

Another NYPD intelligence report from January 2, 2009, described a trip by three NYPD officers to Buffalo, where they met a high-ranking member of the Erie County Sheriff’s Department and agreed “to develop assets jointly in the Buffalo area, to act as listening posts within the ethnic Somalian community”.

The sheriff’s department official noted “that there are some Somali professors and students at SUNY-Buffalo and it would be worthwhile to further analyse that population”, the report says. Mr Browne said the NYPD did not follow that recommendation.