How about this: The FBI has been forced to remove 876 pages from its training manuals — including one memo stating the agency “has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others” — and the Associated Press has reported scarcely a word of it.
That would be the same AP that’s been gnawing on the NYPD’s ankles for months now — implying, but never coming close to proving, that the department has been trashing the civil rights of New Yorkers ever since 9/11.
The FBI material was part of the training for counterterrorism efforts specifically involving Muslims and Arab-Americans.
All of this began coming out last year, when Wired magazine began publishing material from the documents.
You’d think that the AP would’ve hopped on that one like a duck on a bug.
After all, wasn’t the FBI doing — or at least officially advocating — precisely what the AP accuses the NYPD of undertaking?
But that’s not major-league newsworthy?
Could it be that the FBI — always at loggerheads with competent law-enforcement agencies — has been a major supplier of the calumnies the AP has been heaping on the NYPD? Never burn a source, you know.
Michael Ward, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Newark office, has been openly critical of the NYPD’s anti-terrorist operations in New Jersey, claiming they compromise his agency’s intelligence-gathering abilities. Without offering much in the way of specifics, of course.
Maybe NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly should have been training his officers to “impinge on the freedom of others.”
Would that have brought Ward around?
Even Attorney General Eric Holder acknowledged to Congress that those manuals have undermined the FBI’s “outreach efforts” and have had “a negative impact on our ability to communicate effectively.”
The FBI says it has removed the offensive material from its manuals.
But no one involved in preparing those manuals has been disciplined. And no agent who received what the FBI now admits was “inappropriate training” has been identified or ordered to undergo retraining.
Meanwhile, despite the AP’s best efforts, the NYPD hasn’t had to change a single one of its procedures or practices — because it has always been operating well within both the law and the bounds of propriety.
And it has cracked 14 terrorist plots against the city along the way.
A record of which to be proud, we’d say.