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Settlement Reached in NYPD Muslim Surveillance Lawsuit

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New York, NY – Today, a group of Muslim owned businesses, mosques, individuals, and student groups have finalized a settlement agreement with the New York Police Department (NYPD) in Hassan v. City of New York, a federal lawsuit challenging the suspicionless, discriminatory surveillance of American Muslims in New Jersey. Filed in 2012 in federal court in New Jersey, Hassan was the first lawsuit brought on behalf of American Muslims unlawfully surveilled under the NYPD’s program. The plaintiffs are represented by Muslim Advocates, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Gibbons P.C.

As a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning reports by the AP revealed, under the surveillance program, the NYPD spied on at least 20 mosques, 14 restaurants, 11 retail stores, two grade schools, and two Muslim Student Associations in New Jersey. The monitoring included video surveillance, photographing license plates, community mapping, and infiltration by undercover officers and informants at places of worship, student associations, and businesses. Internal NYPD documents, including a list of 28 “ancestries of interest,” revealed that the NYPD used racial and ethnic backgrounds as proxies to identify and target adherents to Islam. By its own admission, the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims failed to produce a single lead.

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Under the terms of the settlement, the NYPD has confirmed it will reform its discriminatory and unlawful practices by agreeing to:

– Not engage in suspicionless surveillance on the basis of religion or ethnicity;

– Permit
plaintiff input to a first-ever Policy Guide, which will govern the
Intelligence Bureau’s activities, and to publish the Guide to the
public;

– Attend a public meeting with plaintiffs so they can
express their concerns about the issues in the lawsuit directly to the
NYPD Commissioner or senior ranking official;

– Pay businesses and
mosques damages for income lost as a result of being unfairly targeted
by the NYPD and pay individuals damages for the stigma and humiliation
harms they suffered for being targeted on the basis of their religion.

Settlement Reached in NYPD Muslim Surveillance Lawsuit

Opinion | John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment

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…a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.

That simple but dramatic action would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform.

Opinion | John Paul Stevens: Repeal the Second Amendment

Army document: US strategy to ‘dethrone’ Putin for oil pipelines might provoke WW3

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…the document admits that far from the US being some innocently hapless victim of Russian interference, the US has at various times run covert “information, economic and diplomatic” campaigns to either “dethrone Putin”, or at least undermine his rule.

The document goes on to compare NATO policy to co-opt former Soviet
states to an imagined Russian effort to incorporate Mexico or Canada
into the Warsaw Pact, or deploy ballistic missile defences to the
Americas — such actions have never been contemplated by Russia, and
would of course never be acceptable to the United States. But, the
document says, their equivalence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is
already being carried out by NATO to weaken Russia. This is why the
incorporation of Georgia into NATO “triggered the 2008 Russian invasion
of South Ossetia and the Kremlin’s first use of nuclear coercion.”

…the document also sets out more conciliatory gestures to appease Russia, for instance, in “negotiations on any of the frozen conflicts the US, the West and Russia are involved in… One notion might be a bigger role with Iran, Syria or even Turkey.”

This does, indeed, now appear to be the self-serving policy adopted in Syria, where the US is actively planning for an accommodation with Bashir al-Assad. In the words of the DIA’s Otto, “there must be an understanding that some countries may suffer as a result of our actions. A strategy of partial withdrawal from Syria or the Ukraine may actually allow for better future negotiations. The springtime drawdown of Russia from Syria allowed negotiation space for Putin, and even Assad.”

Army document: US strategy to ‘dethrone’ Putin for oil pipelines might provoke WW3