Securing The City... And A Takeaway For Dublin 4

Most books are worth reading. Even if you disagree with the basic premise, there is always a new dimension to consider. "Securing the City" by Christopher Dickey, a laudatory treatise on the Herculean NYPD counterterrorist effort, is such a book.

Rising like the Phoenix out of the ashes of September 11th, the department, with radical innovation and dedicated personnel, has successfully defended the city from any second wave of terrorist attacks. In doing so, it has written the book on how a "local" police department should go to war against terrorism.

The NYPD has divorced itself from the pre 9/11 mentality that local police departments should regard international terrorism as the prerogative of the "three letter guys," the FBI and the CIA. September 11th emphasized that the "city state" of New York could no longer rely solely on the federal government.

The NYPD would have to develop its own counterterrorist capability. Notwithstanding any profound lessons gleaned, there is an obvious rationale for this conclusion.

With the exception of the U.S. military, the NYPD, with its 40,000 personnel, is much bigger than anything the federal government can muster.

In comparison, the FBI, the primary law enforcement agency invested with the responsibility for domestic security, has approximately 12,000 agents.

Elements of NYPD's counterterrorist initiative are intentionally performed on the public stage. The "circus" of critical response vehicle (CRV) surges and Operation Hercules deployments provide daily street theater. A convoy of marked vehicles, sirens blaring, turret lights flashing, suddenly musters at any one of the city's critical locations. With similar effect, Hercules teams of heavily armed Emergency Service Unit officers spontaneously appear.

This projection of power and deterrence disrupts any reconnoitering terrorists while simultaneously reminding the citizenry that the radical Islamic threat still exists.

Less public has been the department's networking with the business world through Operation Nexus, a concept designed to educate commercial entities that might be exploited by terrorists in the planning of an attack.

To enhance its "all powerful and all knowing" omnipresence, NYPD has been enlisting, educating, and training neighboring police agencies, governmental security officials and corporate security directors through "eyes and ears" force multiplier initiatives like NYPD Shield and Operation Sentry.

Of course, there has been the massive expansion of the NYPD Intelligence Division and the much greater NYPD footprint on the Joint Terrorist Task Force.

In a universe demarcated by interagency and inter jurisdictional rivalries "the three letter guys" opine that the NYPD has trespassed into others' domains. Indeed, Mr. Dickey's book was hardly greeted with elation by the local federal partners. Nowhere has this turf war been so intense than in the NYPD's decision to deploy detectives overseas.

Heretofore, the international domain has been the prerogative of the CIA and the FBI. The NYPD currently has detectives in London, Paris, Tel Aviv, and other strategic foreign cities.

Securing the city is a very ideological and politically partisan manuscript. Mr. Dickey's left wing, anti-GOP and, in particular, anti-Bush bias oozes from each page.

He is decidedly from the "Blame America" school. Mr. Dickey, who is Newsweek's Paris bureau chief, regards the Bush administration with contempt. Opprobrium is also reserved for President Reagan.

Mr. Dickey exists in a parallel universe where Republicans are deviant, incompetent, and negligent and Democrats diligent, vigilant, and virtuous.

His manuscript details a clash of surrogates. Mr. Dickey twists the successes of the NYPD - the locals apparently being the surrogates of the Left - to bash the federal partners, in particular, the FBI, who apparently are the preserve of the Right.

According to Mr. Dickey, in the years subsequent to September 11th, while the NYPD counterterrorist effort has been excelling, in stark contrast, Dubya and the feds have been disappointing in Afghanistan, Iraq, and in Guantanamo.

Like all Monday morning quarterbacks, Mr. Dickey is highly dismissive of the Iraq campaign. For him, the NYPD's success has occurred in a vacuum. He never considers that the departments' effort might have been much more challenging.

Radical Islam has been exhausting its energy and resources in Afghanistan and Iraq, thus squandering its potential to execute in New York. There was a de facto choice: Do we fight radical Islam on the streets of New York using the NYPD and the FDNY, or on the streets of Baghdad with the U.S. military, the CIA, and the FBI? And Mr. Dickey fails to consider that while the NYPD has excelled in defending its priority, New York City, the federal partners must concern themselves with the complete domain of U.S. territory and interests.

Mr. Dickey's analysis of the decades prior to Sept 11th is laughably deficient. Apparently, the U.S. jihad confrontation began to balloon under Ronald Reagan and exacerbated under Dubya. Incredibly, absent is any treatment of the Clintonian failures, negligence, and incompetence, which enabled the September 11th attacks.

Not a word on the neutering of our law enforcement and intelligence gathering capability. Not a peep on the emasculation of our defenses as Islamic terrorism, with one attack after the other, telegraphed its increasing proficiency.

From Colgans, Gallaghers, Higgins, Kellys, Murphys, O'Neills, Sheerins ... to Chief James Waters of the Counterterrorism Bureau, son of Cork and Leitrim, the contribution of the Irish to the ranks of the NYPD counterterror warriors has been indispensable.

In the ranks of the "Big Dog" or "Major Partner," the FBI, the Irish presence is just as pronounced. The next time some self-serving Dublin 4 politico or some anti-American journalistic hack from the Pale seeks to ascribe to America's counterterror warriors the characteristics of mindless, human rights-trampling Gestapo agents, consider that many are likely the children and grandchildren of an ogra who left for America.

As the Irish Foreign Affairs minister, Dermot Ahern, in his pushing of the massive security neutering amnesty bill, was reckless as to the adverse impact on the United States. Hopefully as Justice minister, he is less nonchalant about the security of the Irish State.

It may or may not be a light bulb moment for Mr. Ahern to learn that Islamic Jihad is probably operating within his bailiwick.

Terrorist Mohammed Mergueba claims to have been recruited while working as a waiter in Ireland. Under interrogation, Mergueba furnished information about a potential mass murder plot in the U.K. During the arrest of the alleged conspirators, a police officer was killed. So, if this is, indeed, a revelation to Mr. Ahern, he should get swotting. He may find his pretentious concern for the Guantanamo inmates rather misplaced as Al Qaeda gears up to do jihad at a nearby crossroads.

"Securing the City" reads like a book that should be written at the successful end of a conflict. Most never got the capitulation memo from radical Islam. The fight goes on. The book discloses details, methodologies, and tradecraft of the counterterror effort, gratuitous intelligence, which can only facilitate the enemy.

An gaelgoir, one of "the three letter guys" and no fan of the Dickey manuscript, clarified: "It doesn't really matter. It all comes out in court." All the more reason to prosecute war as war, not as a police action, and to keep the enemy out of reach of our legal system.

It is disappointing that such a valuable historical reference and a rightfully congratulatory narrative on the NYPD's success should sink into naked ideological politics.

By using the locals to bash the feds in his petty surrogate ideological war, Mr. Dickey does a great disservice to the NYPD. The reader is left with the nagging feeling that it may yet dawn on Ray Kelly that the NYPD was used in a cheap partisan shot.

"Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force - The NYPD" by Christopher Dickey. Simon & Schuster. New York, 2009.

Patrick Hurley blogs at: www.irish-american-news-opinion.blogspot.com