Journalist Christopher Dickey is offering an alternative to Washington's discredited strategy of invading foreign Muslim lands and applying torture to fight terrorism.
In his recent book, Securing the City - Inside America's Best Counterterror Force - the NYPD (Simon & Schuster, 2009) offers the common sense notion that old fashioned police work coupled with good street intelligence is a more effective method to deal with such crimes.
In a somewhat gee whiz style, the Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor credits New York City's police commissioner Ray Kelly -- assisted by former CIA official David Cohen -- with managing to avoid some of the shortcomings of the FBI and CIA after 9/11 by establishing a home-grown intelligence service to protect the city's population and infrastructure and nip potential bomb makers in the bud.
Dickey notes how the NYPD managed to recruit from its own ranks native speakers of languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Urdu, Pashtun and Bengali to perform the kind of undercover work that their counterparts at the US federal government agencies found difficult to accomplish.
The book credits the NYPD's use of computer technology and the CompStat system to facilitate the auditing and sharing of crime data and intelligence down from the senior officers to the level of the cops on the street with their BlackBerries.
Rather than build legal cases for convictions, he shows how the NYPD's counter terror division of several hundred officers focused on applying "standard police procedures," - that is arrests on unrelated or "dubious" crimes to intimidate would-be terrorists or even recruit informers. "[This] would be largely out of bounds to the FBI or the CIA," Dickey told one interviewer about the book.
We may never know how many terrorist acts were ultimately prevented but Dickey recognizes some fundamental missteps in the NYPD' strategy.
He has no time for the unfair targeting of the entire Muslim community by the NYPD counter terror bureau in its 2007 "Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat" report, which had been penned by a CIA veteran.
And Dickey also reports that the NYPD has not shied away from taking advantage of the unreliable confessions induced by torture at Guantanamo or even that New York's finest were present in some interrogations in the US Cuban base that were related to their city - no tantalizing details are offered on the latter.
The lessons learned at the NYPD are not for other US urban police forces which lack the resources, the contacts with the FBI/CIA or the rationale to mount a similar intelligence operation but for the respective federal policing and intelligence agencies in Washington, he says.
Maybe that's just as well. Dickey also admits in a subsequent interview that the majority of terrorist incidents which occurred in the US or are known to have been thwarted have been in fact "the work of very different groups, whether racists, anti-abortion activists or even radical animal rights activists."
In other words, Muslims were targeted in what appears to be a massive overreaction on the part of American security and intelligence authorities after 9/11.
Missing in the Dickey account is that as journalist and Mother Jones magazine contributor James Ridgeway has charged in a co-written piece, the NYPD used its "counterterrorist efforts" to embark upon "one of the most blatant crackdowns on legitimate dissent in recent memory."
He and a co-author cited the mass arrests of peaceful protesters (almost three times the number as in Chicago in 1968) and pre-surveillance of activists with anti-George Bush sentiment (including church groups, anti-war organizations and street theatre) before and during the 2004 Republican National Convention, even though no credible threat of violence existed.
It is this lack of context that ultimately gets in the way of the message of Securing the City.
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