March 21
GUEST: Diala Shamas, staff attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, and coauthor of the newly published, New York After 9/11, talks about the surveillance and infiltration of Muslim youth groups in New York City after the World Trade Center attack.
New York After 9-11 Book Launch
I had been unaware of all the damage that spying on a community can cause. We did see the damage inflicted on individuals and groups during the 1960's by the FBI. The FBI's Cointelpro wasn't limited to collecting information. It also encouraged activist groups to fight one another, used blackmail against Martin Luther King, and assisted in the assassination of Fred Hampton. Cointelpro was created to damage social movements. FBI agents even supplied the Black Panthers with guns. No, the FBI had gone way beyond any Constitutional line to suppress dissent during these years.
Diala Shamas shows that the NYPD inflicted pain on the Muslim community in New York in a remarkably similar way. There was the mindlessness of counting how many times each young member of a canoe trip prayed each day, all noted and reported by an NYPD informant. But beyond this mind numbing banality, there was an underlying attack on individuals and groups based on their religion. Infiltrating these groups and pressuring individuals to be informers in fact poisoned the Muslim community, and the results were similar to what Cointelpro accomplished for the oppressive state of the 1960's.
