Adam Serwer reports:
Religious profiling is okay, as long as you have a really good reason.
That’s the logic behind a decision reached by federal judge William Martini Thursday, in dismissing a lawsuit against New York Police Department over the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim American communities in the region.
“The police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself,” Martini wrote. “The motive for the program was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, law-abiding Muslims.”
Any harm suffered by Muslims who were spied on, Martini wrote, was not the fault of the NYPD, but of the Associated Press reporters who first revealed the existence of the surveillance effort.
“Nowhere in the Complaint do Plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of the documents by the Associated Press. This confirms that Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents,” Martini wrote. “The harms are not ‘fairly traceable’ to any act of surveillance.” The Associated Press declined to comment on the ruling.
Read more on MSNBC.
How many synonyms can you come up with for “outrageous?”