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9/11, Secret Police and Foreign Policy

Obama Nominates CFR Member David Cohen to Treasury | Charting Stocks.

There’s been talk of his divisiveness,

Cohen’s tenure as head of CIA operations, the nation’s top spy, was so contentious that in 1997, The New York Times editorial page took the unusual step of calling for his ouster.

and questions about the ethics and constitutionality of his role at the NYPD.

While the expansion of the NYPD’s intelligence unit has been well known, many details about its clandestine operations, including the depth of its CIA ties, have not previously been reported.

The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. In a city that has repeatedly been targeted by terrorists, police make no apologies for pushing the envelope. NYPD intelligence operations have disrupted terrorist plots and put several would-be killers in prison.

“The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there’s not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. “And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard.”

According to AP reporters Matt Goldman and David Apuzzo, the NYPD began going into Pakistani neighborhoods in the big apple, and, at Cohen’s and Sanchez’s (another CIA veteran brought in to build the anti-terror task force at NYPD) direction, looked for ways of pressuring residents to become informants.

An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant.

Now it turns out Cohen’s CFR, too, of course. Author Chris Dickey writes, according to Stephen J. Garber, that David Cohen “retired from the CIA in 2000.”

The Council on Foreign Relations is … a lot of things, taking on some roles that exist only in the minds of conspiracy theorists. They’re a bipartisan think tank that formulates American foreign policy.