Enemies Within (19 page)

It was all part of the new strategy, outlined by Sanchez in his testimony before Congress, to investigate what police believed were the precursors to terrorism, even when they were legal.

“All you had was rhetoric,” explained a former NYPD official who regularly attended meetings with Cohen and Sanchez. “If you had actual criminal activity, you’d have a case.”

But NYPD Intel rarely made cases, much to the frustration of officers who didn’t care for their new mission of just watching, following, and listening. There was a running joke: “This is Intel. We don’t make cases. We make overtime.”

•  •  •

If parsing political speech posed challenges for the NYPD, interpreting religious rhetoric was even more difficult.
Radicalization in the West
mentioned frequently the role of Muslim extremists and their speech in the process of creating terrorists. The NYPD’s intelligence files often included, without elaboration, the fact that someone had engaged in extremist or radical rhetoric.

Exactly what qualified as radical rhetoric at the NYPD was a matter of debate. Galati, the commanding officer, said it was any “conversation which would be inciting somebody or encouraging somebody to commit an unlawful act.”
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He acknowledged that definition wasn’t written down anywhere, leaving detectives, informants, and analysts to decide when religious speech should become part of a police file.

Such a decision is seldom clear-cut. Spiritual oratory, regardless of faith, can be fiery and passionate. If an imam says that the 9/11 hijackers were sent by Allah to get America’s attention, is that radical Islamic rhetoric? When Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association
religious group declared, “The jihadists on 9/11 were the agents of God’s wrath in order to get our attention,” was that radical Christian rhetoric?

In one document, the NYPD recorded the words of a Brooklyn imam: “Satan is with all people who do not accept Allah. Islam is the one and true religion.”
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Seen through the lens of the NYPD’s new preventive strategy, the words seemed to embody the indoctrination phase discussed in
Radicalization in the West
.

A theologian, on the other hand, might point out that the comment is a variation on the Catholic doctrine of
extra ecclesiam nulla salus
(“Outside the church there is no salvation”) or the Protestant tenet of
solus Christus
(“Christ alone”). But Intel analysts and investigators, the ones deciding what went in police files, weren’t sitting around discussing the universal theme of one true faith in monotheistic religions. They erred on the side of reporting the rhetoric.

From time to time, Stuart Parker, a city attorney assigned to the Intelligence Division, would tell people not to rely so heavily on adjectives such as
anti-American
and
extremist
in their files.
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But that was a record-keeping issue. Once the Handschu rules allowed police to decide what religious views were suspicious, there was little discussion about whether they were qualified to judge. Or whether they should.

Rhetoric collection was driven in part by intense pressure on detectives to produce.

“If anything goes on in New York,” Cohen told his officers, “it’s your fault.”
²²

If terrorists launched an attack, and it turned out they’d been radicalized inside a mosque and held meetings in a coffee shop, no cop wanted to be the last one to have visited there and reported nothing extraordinary. So they reported everything they saw.

“The living room contained a love seat and two futons,” one official wrote in a report on how Moroccans assimilated into New York. “There was a small table as well as an entertainment center. There were
two Korans. One on top of each speaker. On the wall, there was a 2006 calendar from the Beit El Masjid,” a Brooklyn mosque.

Among Cohen’s inner circle, nobody believed that all Muslims were terrorists. Even most Muslim extremists weren’t terrorists. Neither were most people who opposed Israel’s policies, criticized America, or railed against its use of drones. But recently it seemed most terrorists were Muslim. And all of them had been extremists. Among those, some had opposed Israel, disparaged America, or criticized drones. Zone defense meant watching the city’s roughly seven hundred thousand Muslims to find the tiny few who might become terrorists.

Any trait shared among terrorists was seen as a possible indicator, even if that trait also applied to many innocent people. For instance, in 2009 Cohen started a program to monitor everybody in New York City who wanted a new name.
²³
The initiative began after a Memphis man named Carlos Bledsoe killed one US Army private and wounded another in a drive-by shooting at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. Bledsoe was a recent convert to Islam and had taken the name Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. A few months later, intelligence officials learned about David Headley, a Chicago man who’d helped the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba plan a terrorist attack in India in 2008. Headley was born Daood Sayed Gilani and had changed his name to something more traditionally American so that he could travel without attracting suspicion.

The NYPD began reviewing court filings to see who was changing his or her name. Someone taking an Arabic name might be a recent convert and, like Bledsoe, might be angry and preparing to strike. Someone Americanizing his Arabic name might be the next Headley. Of course, most people who change their names are not terrorists. Taking a new Arabic name as part of a religious conversion is protected by the First Amendment. And in New York, immigrants have been taking new Americanized names since they first began stepping off the ferry from Ellis Island to Manhattan.

Once the NYPD had the names, analysts picked some—most often those that looked like they might be from Muslim countries—and ran what they called a “round robin” on them. Analysts performed background checks, looking at criminal records, travel history, business licenses, and immigration documents. The results were stored on a spreadsheet. Then, detectives from the Leads Unit would hit the streets to interview people about why they changed their names.

The Leads detectives had drilled their share of dry holes before. The unit was responsible for checking out every terrorist tip that came in, no matter how vague or preposterous. A sign in the unit read, “Deposit All Intel Division Bags of Shit Here.” But the name-change program seemed like a new level of time wasting. They didn’t find any radical converts. And those who abandoned their Arabic names for something more American all seemed to say the same thing: They were trying to blend in, but not for the reason that Cohen feared. They were simply tired of the discrimination that came with being Muslim in America.

“Let me guess,” a detective would say when a colleague came back from a fruitless interview. “He was getting harassed.”

Programs like this put the detectives and analysts in a tough spot. Everyone agreed that identifying a terrorist before he attacked was a good idea. And it
was
Muslims, not Catholics or Protestants, who’d hijacked the airplanes on 9/11. There were, without question, radical Islamic leaders espousing violence in the name of religion. Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who’d been seen as a moderate when he preached in Virginia, went on to become al-Qaeda’s chief propagandist. He inspired Western terrorists with his internet sermons:

To the Muslims in America, I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters?

And:

Don’t consult with anybody in killing the Americans. Fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation or prayers seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils.

So ignoring Islamic rhetoric—or anything that might be a warning sign—seemed foolhardy. But in the race to identify future terrorists, innocent religious and political speech was treated the same as legitimately threatening comments.

In late 2003 the NYPD received a tip that people were training for jihad in the basement of the Masjid al-Ikhwa, a Brooklyn storefront mosque with a congregation primarily of African Americans.
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Over the next eight months, a pair of NYPD informants visited repeatedly, helping police compile dossiers on the imam, the teachers, and the man who collected donations during Friday prayers.

One teacher was especially worrisome. He had a history of violent crime and asked a police informant, “How many Jews do you think we could take out on a Saturday at Marcy and Bedford with an AK-47 in three minutes?”

As the informants informed, the catalogue of rhetoric grew. And the line about the AK-47 was given no more attention than general pronouncements about politics such as, “President Bush is behind it all and that Secretary of State Colin Powell has a deceiving tongue. Muslims throughout the world are being oppressed.” The police files even noted that the imam declared—with total accuracy—“people are sent into the Mosque to spy on it and see what’s going on.”

By June 2004, the police hadn’t found any jihadists in the basement. They hadn’t made any case at all. But they had compiled two pages of rhetoric.

•  •  •

By using religious views and rhetoric as potential terrorist indicators, the NYPD was wading into a theological debate that began in the mid-seventh century: the schism between Sunnis and Shia.

When the Prophet Muhammad died in AD 632, he did not have a male heir, leaving open the question of who would follow him as Islam’s leader. Most Muslims declared their support for the Prophet’s father-in-law, Abu Bakr, who was chosen by a council of the Prophet’s disciples. A small group believed that only God could choose the Prophet’s successor and that Muhammad, acting on God’s will, had appointed his son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib.

Sunnis followed Abu Bakr. The Shia followed Ali.

At the NYPD, analysts were especially concerned with two strains of Sunni Islam that they saw as linked to terrorism: Wahhabism and Salafism. The mere existence of this analysis—trying to understand the complex theological and geopolitical underpinnings of terrorism—shows how rapidly Cohen and Sanchez had changed the NYPD to respond to the terrorist threat. Normally, such an inquiry would be left to scholars, think tanks, and, to some degree, analysts at the CIA and State Department.

Wahhabism and Salafism are puritanical movements, meaning their followers strictly follow Muhammad’s word. True Islam, they believe, requires rigid adherence to the Koran, which is not subject to human interpretation. In post-9/11 America, the terms
Wahhabism
and
Salafism
are often used interchangeably, with
Wahhabism
used to describe Saudi Arabia’s brand of Salafism.

Both Salafi and Wahhabi followers have launched terrorist attacks, including the 9/11 hijackings. And many scholars and politicians say the severe, unaccommodating, and intolerant strain of Islam actively inspires and encourages terrorists. But puritanical Islam is complicated. Scholars disagree, for instance, on whether Osama bin Laden really qualified as a Wahhabist, because he called for the overthrow of the Saudi government, which was backed by Wahhabist religious leaders.

Further complicating the analysis, there are three factions of Salafism that, while essentially identical in religious beliefs, disagree fundamentally on how to live them. Some believe in using politics to advance Salafist goals. Others believe that politics encourages deviancy, and that the only way to purify Islam is through peaceful study and prayer. When these purists speak of jihad, it is in the historic sense of a peaceful struggle to promote Islam. A third group, the minority, embraces violence and revolution, a tactic that has given rise to the modern interpretation of the word
jihad
.
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Mitchell Silber understood those distinctions, and in
Radicalization in the West
, he referred most often to the threat from the “jihadi-Salafi” ideology. In practice, however, the subtleties were often lost as police trawled for terrorists. Conversations overheard by undercover officers and paid informants, it turned out, were clumsy tools for determining the nuances of people’s religious beliefs.

In public, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared, “We don’t stop to think about the religion. We stop to think about the threats and focus our efforts there.” Whether he was in the dark about what was going on or whether he was lying, one thing is certain: He was wrong.

In secret, the term
Salafist
had become synonymous with “suspicious” at the NYPD. In a police presentation in 2006, for instance, Captain Steven D’Ulisse listed factors that could get someone labeled a “person of interest.” Being involved in terrorism was one. A capacity for violence was another. And so was “ideological orientation (Salafi/Wahhabi).”
²⁶
By mid-2006, the NYPD had identified twenty-four mosques in New York as having “a Salafi influence.”
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The NYPD was particularly afraid of what it saw as the increasing popularity of Salafism on college campuses. Analysts worried because student groups were discussing the book
Kitab At-Tawheed
by Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, the father of Wahhabist thought.
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The presence of Wahhab’s books on college campuses was hardly unusual. Any serious study of modern Islamic history or Saudi politics includes his
works, which are available in most libraries. But zone defense meant that the police needed to pay attention to places from which terrorists might emerge.

As they had done with political rhetoric, the NYPD investigated the many to find the few. The NYPD was looking for that tiny minority, and that meant looking at everyone in Muslim student groups. The police weren’t going to wait for one angry young man to decide to become a terrorist, and then cross their fingers and hope they could spot him before he attacked. As Cohen told his officers, “Take a big net, throw it out, catch as many fish as you can, and see what we get.”
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