NYPD monitored Muslim college students

The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including Stony Brook University, The Associated Press has learned.

Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a white-water rafting trip, where he recorded students' names and noted in intelligence files how many times they prayed.

Detectives trawled Muslim 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 Ray Kelly.

Asked about the monitoring, police spokesman Paul Browne provided a list of 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations, which the NYPD referred to as MSAs.

Jesse Morton, who Feb. 9 pleaded guilty to posting online threats against the creators of the animated TV show "South Park," had once tried to recruit followers at Stony Brook, he said.

"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.

"I see a violation of civil rights here," said Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse University, one of the schools where students were monitored.

Kelly and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg repeatedly have said that the police only follow legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity. But the latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students.

In one report, an undercover officer describes accompanying 18 Muslim students from the City College of New York on a rafting trip upstate on April 21, 2008. The officer noted the names of attendees who were officers of the Muslim Student Association. "In addition to the regularly scheduled events [Rafting], the group prayed at least four times a day, and much of the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature," the report says.

Jawad Rasul, one of the students on the trip, said he was stunned that his name was included in the police report. "It forces me to look around wherever I am now," Rasul said.

But another student, Ali Ahmed, who the NYPD said appeared to be in charge of the trip, said he understood the police department's concern.

"There's lots of Muslims doing some bad things and it gives a bad name to all of us, so they have to take their due diligence," Ahmed said.

An NYPD intelligence report from Jan. 2, 2009, described a trip by three NYPD officers to Buffalo, where they met with a high-ranking member of the Erie County Sheriff's Department and agreed "to develop assets jointly in the Buffalo area, to act as listening posts within the ethnic Somalian community."

The sheriff's department official noted "that there are some Somali professors and students at SUNY-Buffalo and it would be worthwhile to further analyze that population," the report says. Browne said the NYPD did not follow that recommendation.

Another report, entitled "Weekly MSA Report" and dated Nov. 22, 2006, explained that officers from the NYPD's Cyber Intelligence unit visited the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations as a "daily routine."

The universities included the State University of New York campuses in Stony Brook, Buffalo, Albany and Potsdam; Yale; Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; New York University; Clarkson; Rutgers; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College and La Guardia Community College."Students who advertised events or sent emails about regular events should not be worried about a 'terrorism file' being kept on them. NYPD only investigated persons who we had reasonable suspicion to believe might be involved in unlawful activities," Browne said.