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We are reporting from the heart of the campus that sparked a global student movement for Palestine. We’re seeing right now, Chris, we’re trapped in a dorm room. There are 10 white PDs barricading the doors, and we’re not allowed to leave. What started off as a protest against genocide at an elite Ivy League university was met with a military-style operation to suppress it. We need to find a way to get some spare medication. So when Columbia University sent the NYPD on the campus, they were willing to deploy violent militarized police to maintain their active investment in genocide.
This is not about students expressing ideas. It is about a change in tactics that presents a concern and a normalization and mainstreaming of rhetoric. And I’m not just talking about language. I’m now talking about tactics, and that’s what shifted our response yesterday. But a normalization and mainstreaming of rhetoric associated with terrorism has now become pretty common on college campuses. Right? You see people wearing headbands associated with foreign terrorist organizations. This happened in October when you had a viral TikTok reissuing Osama bin Laden’s 2002 letter to America. So that’s a larger concern. It’s separate from what happened yesterday, but they’re related.
Speaker 3 asks what was found: basically, NYPD changed the way it did business after the attacks of September Eleventh. It not only changed the way it did business, it created a very deep connection with the CIA. They started to build these intelligence programs that infiltrated Muslim communities in ways that, if the federal government did it, would totally go against rules designed to protect civil liberties. And they did it with an unusual partnership with the CIA. A very senior CIA officer was dispatched by CIA Director George Tenet to be his personal representative to the NYPD and help create these intelligence gathering programs, directing and supervising the intelligence gathering, and that relationship continues today.
Speaker 3 notes: Recently, the CIA sent one of its most senior undercover officers to work out of 1 Police Plaza in New York as a covert officer. So we’re talking about former CIA agents now working within the New York Police Department. Well, they’re current CIA; they’re on CIA payroll. They’re on the CIA payroll, working with the NYPD, traveling abroad, and using intelligence in conjunction with the NYPD.
Speaker 2 describes one element: there is a program called the demographics program. Officers described it as mapping the human terrain of the city. They placed undercover officers, ethnic officers inside Middle Eastern neighborhoods to blend in and look for things that are suspicious. That could be something as simple as who’s looking at radical books in a bookstore or who’s watching Al Jazeera and perhaps applauds at a report about an IED in Iraq, and that could be enough to get you into a report at the NYPD. They also have informants called mosque crawlers who go to the mosque as the eyes and ears for the NYPD. The FBI places informants in mosques with a criterion of specific information related to criminal activity, while the NYPD reportedly does not have that bar and says they follow leads; but those involved with the mosque crawler program say they’re there as eyes and ears.