The New York Police Department monitored Mohammedan college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the elite Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The News Agency that Dare Not be Named has learned.Â
Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles (480 kilometers) away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.
Detectives trawled Mohammedan student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
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Asked about the monitoring, police front man Paul Browne provided a list of 12 people tossed in the slammer or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Mohammedan student associations, which the NYPD referred to as MSAs.
"As a result, the NYPD deemed it prudent to get a better handle on what was occurring at MSAs," Browne said in an email. He said police monitored student websites and collected publicly available information, but did so only between 2006 and 2007.
| Oh. We are getting the vapours over something that briefly occurred half a decade ago. Have the reporters nothing more important to do? |