I would like to direct you to Commentary Magazine, Mitchell Silber’s piece, Who Will Defend the Defenders (see cover story, June 2012). His subtitle reads:
The New York Police Department has kept the world’s prime terror target safe for a decade. Why are the media so eager to celebrate an unjust attack on the NYPD?
It may be the most damning indictment ever written of the left-wing media and its allies, exposing them for what they really are—dangerous capitulationists, collaborationists, and the unwitting enemy within.
Silber, Deputy Commissioner at the NYPD and Director of Intelligence Analysis (2007-12) has written a compelling response to the banality on parade exhibited by the Pulitzer Prize, awarded this April to the Associated Press for its fifty investigative articles about the New York Police Department’s “clandestine spying program that monitored the daily life in Muslim communities.” AP accused Silber’s Intelligence Division of placing the whole New York Muslim community under surveillance with “no evidence of wrongdoing.”
Among its many accusations, it accused the Department of “running afoul of legal restraints on intelligence gathering and of violating civil liberties rules.” And after all these crimes, AP asserted that the “results were mixed.”
AP’s widely syndicated articles attacking the NYPD, predictably engendered outrage from Muslim American groups and civil liberties activists while also creating some cursory calls for congressional investigations. But as usual, none of those who were outraged the AP stories thought to investigate the investigators.
Silber is no right-wing fanatic. While he points out that his careful skillful work uncovered and interdicted 14 major plots aimed at killing large numbers of New Yorkers, he concedes that the greatness of American society must always include a rigorous debate about the methods we employ to preserve both liberty and security, an uncommonly gracious concession given the attacks on his character by an obsequious AP and Pulitzer committee.
Like so much that passes for journalism in the left-wing media, the conclusion of AP’s reportage was pre ordained and the facts cherry-picked to support its bogus conclusion—a bigoted NYPD unfairly and illegally targeted peaceful Muslims by infiltrating their mosques and campus organizations.
Most New Yorkers have either forgotten or never knew that on February 26, 1993, the first Trade Center plot detonated a 1,336 pound device which killed six and wounded 1,042. But had it been successful in toppling one tower against the other, estimates are that we would have lost as many as 200,000 New Yorkers, twice the number killed in the Korean and Viet Nam wars combined. Clinton never even toured the site. And very little was done to understand and interdict Muslim terrorist plots aimed at New York until after 9/11.
Silber reports that in 2003, under the direction of the new Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the NYPD created the country’s first municipal counterterrorism bureau and intelligence division. This was hardly a rogue operation. The NYPD was ordered to develop a far-reaching operational plan to protect the City from a potentially catastrophic attack by the mayor. The Intelligence Division was tasked with creating a “demographics unit” with language capabilities and cultural knowledge necessary to infiltrate mosques and campus groups.
The majority of those recruited for these undercover operations were Muslims and proud Americans.
They were tasked with infiltrating organizations that had large representations of individuals from Egypt, Kuwait, Lebanon, Palestinian territories, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, countries “of concern.” And as Silber points out, while those on the left are so easily brought to outrage at the “targeting” of largely peaceful populations of Muslims, they have no issue with identical intelligence gathering operations aimed at arresting drug dealers, human traffickers, and gang leaders.
The bottom line is the NYPD has succeeded in interdicting 14 deadly plots against the city for the 11 years since 9/11, including the most serious, the 2009 Najibullah Zazi plot to detonate explosives in the New York subway system. Zazi was an active member of the Queens College Muslim Student Association.
As Silber so aptly puts it, “Anyone who denies the success of our demographics initiative is fortunate not to carry the burden of responsibility should there actually be a counterterrorism failure…I, for one, would have borne that responsibility. The AP team would not have.”
More and more evidence continues to mount in favor of the supposition that the progressives, such as those at AP and the Pulitzer Committee have evolved to the point where they have lost their basic instinct for survival.
