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Newsday - December 5, 2006
Lawsuit says NYPD anti-terror cyber
unit filled with Muslim hate
By LARRY NEUMEISTER
NEW YORK -- A celebrated police anti-terrorism cyber unit became a beehive of anti-Muslim rhetoric after a city consultant unleashed hundreds of hateful e-mails saying Muslims and Arabs were all potential terrorists, a unit member said in a lawsuit Tuesday.
The Department of Correction lieutenant, listed as John Doe Anti-Terrorism Officer on the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, said he was subjected to a hostile work environment, great emotional anguish, public humiliation and illegal retaliation.
The Egyptian-born man asked for unspecified damages, saying he had suffered severe emotional distress, mental anguish, depression, physical injuries, illness, loss of pay and benefits and loss of advancement opportunities as a member of the elite anti-terror unit.
The man, described in the lawsuit as "a proud Arab-American, a practicing Muslim and a patriot," blamed the city for failing to respond to his repeated complaints about the contractor, who was alleged to have sent e-mails saying "Burning the hate-filled Koran should be viewed as a public service at the least" and "Without Islam, there wouldn't be any Islamic terror."
He said the hateful rhetoric, unchecked by supervisors, infected the workplace, where other employees felt comfortable making anti-Muslim comments and jokes and where a high-ranking police official thought it was OK to say, "All Arabs are animals."
A city law office spokeswoman, Connie Pankratz, said city attorneys were aware of the case and were reviewing the papers Tuesday.
The police department said it immediately blocked an e-mail account when it became aware of a complaint about the content of e-mail "sent by an individual not employed by the department."
"We took immediate action to block his e-mails, followed by a cease and desist letter to the individual and his employer, a consulting firm," the police department's chief spokesman, Paul Browne, said in a statement.
The lawsuit said the lieutenant had not always suffered. It said he was awarded a certificate of outstanding duty in October 2001 for his "heroic efforts following the World Trade Center disaster."
It said he had a primary role in launching the cyber unit of the New York Police Department's intelligence division, where he is assigned a top-level security clearance and works undercover to protect his safety.
According to the lawsuit, the lieutenant believed he was living the American dream as he identified terrorist threats to the city two decades after arriving in the United States and more than a decade after gaining citizenship in 1990.
Recruited to join a federal law enforcement task force in 1998 because he speaks Arabic and has extensive cultural knowledge of the Arab and Muslim communities, the lieutenant helped launch the cyber unit after the Sept. 11 attacks, the lawsuit said.
Since the summer of 2002, the lieutenant has faced "almost daily, virulent anti-Muslim and anti-Arab harassment in his workplace," the lawsuit said. Much of the abuse originated with a consultant hired by the police to act as a counterterrorism adviser, it said…..
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-bc-ny--terror-biassuit1205dec05,0,1286841.story
New York Times - December 6, 2006
Police antiterrorism analyst sues NY city,
citing anti-Muslim e-mail
William K. Rashbaum
For several years, the New York Police Department has touted an elite undercover unit of mostly Middle Eastern and Asian investigators who use their foreign-language skills online to search out potential terrorist threats against the city.
But now the department is under criticism from a member of the unit, an Egyptian-born analyst who filed a suit yesterday that charges he was subjected to hundreds of blistering anti-Muslim and anti-Arab e-mail messages sent out by a city contractor over the course of three years.
The analyst, not named in the court papers, filed the discrimination lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan as "John Doe Anti-Terrorism Officer" because he still works undercover in the Cyber Unit.
In an interview yesterday, he said he complained repeatedly to supervisors but that no one took action.
A 48-year-old captain with the New York City Department of Correction, the analyst has been assigned to work with the Police Department's Intelligence Division since 1998. He said he helped form the Cyber Unit there in 2002. The members, who number about a dozen, troll message boards and Web sites to engage extremists and collect intelligence about potential threats, the suit says. He fears that his family in Egypt may face retaliation if his name and the nature of his work were revealed, said his lawyer, Ilann M. Maazel.
At the center of the lawsuit are e-mail briefing messages sent out several times a day to members of the Intelligence Division by Bruce Tefft, a former C.I.A. official who has identified himself in the past as the Police Department's counter-terrorism adviser. The e-mail messages were sent to everyone in the division, including Deputy Commissioner David Cohen, also a former C.I.A. official, the suit said….
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/nyregion/06suit.html
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