Their [police] motive “was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims.”
Source/Credit: SF Gate |
By Bob Egelko | February 21, 2014
Now we know who’s to blame for any harm the police cause by secretly spying on Muslims.
It’s not the officers who infiltrate religious groups and monitor their activities in hopes of finding a terrorist. No, any injury suffered by the innocent targets of surveillance is the fault of the reporters who expose it. Take it from a federal judge.
A group of New Jersey Muslims’ “alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press’ unauthorized disclosure of the documents,” U.S. District Judge William Martini said Thursday in a ruling dismissing their lawsuit against the New York Police Department.
The NYPD started surveillance of Muslims in New York and parts of New Jersey a few months after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. But the public knew nothing about it until 2011, when the AP obtained and published confidential police documents about the infiltration of mosques and Muslim student groups.
The New Jersey lawsuit, one of two filed against the police, accused them of unconstitutionally targeting Muslims based on their religion. The plaintiffs said undercover officers monitored sermons, religious observances and conversations, conducted round-the-clock video surveillance of mosques, photographed and named innocent individuals in their reports and collected their license plate numbers. After learning of the surveillance, they said, they became afraid to discuss religious topics or pray in public, avoided controversial topics at religious events, and saw a drop in mosque attendance.
Martini, a former Republican congressman appointed to the bench by President George W. Bush in 2002, said none of those complaints showed any “injury in fact” that could be redressed in a lawsuit. He cited a 1972 Supreme Court ruling that rejected a challenge to Army surveillance of civilian political activity based on an allegedly chilling effect on free expression.
What’s more, he said, “the Associated Press and not the city is the manifest cause of plaintiffs’ alleged injuries,” which occurred only after the news organization “released unredacted, confidential NYPD documents and articles expressing its own interpretation of those documents.”
In any event, Martini said, the surveillance program wasn’t discriminatory, because the police were looking for terrorists, and reasonably concluded they might find them in the Muslim community after 9/11. Their motive “was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims,” he said.
The plaintiffs plan to appeal. The AP, and its co-conspirators in the Fourth Estate, plan to keep writing about it.
-- begelko@sfchronicle.com
Read original post here: USA: Judge tosses out Muslim surveillance case, says any harm is the media’s fault
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