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Defense One
August 18, 2013
Most Americans think that the CIA works overseas while the FBI and local police protect them at home. But the agency has long worked domestically, and in the last decade it has become involved in counterterrorism operations with local police as well.
A recent report by the CIA’s inspector general shows that such cooperation can easily go wrong. Between 2002 and 2012 the CIA sent four agents to help the NYPD’s counterterrorism unit (which is led by a former agency official) without making sure that they knew the limits of what they could and couldn’t do. According to the inspector general, this type of “close and direct collaboration with any local domestic police department” could lead to the perception that the agency had “exceeded its authorities.”
But the problem goes far beyond one of perception. We should be concerned that CIA involvement with local police will influence them to adopt a counterinsurgency mentality that is simply not warranted on home turf. When deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, the agency has to assume that it is working in a hostile environment. It’s operations are necessarily covert. It is not restrained by the full panoply of constitutional rules that apply at home.
One cannot help but wonder whether a CIA mentality helped shape the NYPD’s Muslim surveillance program. A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation by the Associated Press has shown that police officers monitored every aspect of the lives of Muslim New Yorkers [since 9/11]. They secretly mapped out Muslim communities, noting the details of bookstores, barbershops and cafes. Informants in mosques reported on religious beliefs and political views that had nothing to do with terrorism. Muslim student groups across the Northeast were watched. All of this information, however innocuous or irrelevant to its purported counterterrorism purpose, landed in police files. It sure sounds like a program directed at a hostile population rather than a community with an exemplary record for cooperating with law enforcement.
