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Since September 11, 2001, AP reported, the “Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135 million to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, known as HIDTA.” Neither the White House nor Congress are given details of how the money is spent. But the AP reports the drug war-era funds have been used at least in some part to pay for “cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods and … for computers that stored” information of the targets of the NYPD’s Muslim mapping program.
The ACLU and other groups have demanded a federal probe into the legality the spending.
“We’re concerned that federal resources may be used to map Muslims with no evidence of wrongdoing,” said Nusrat Choudhury, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project. “There are federal protections against this and what disturbs is that there’s a revelation that the White House may have supported it.”
But the White House money came in addition to a much larger pool of funds from the federal government. According to New York City documents, nearly $1 billion came to the NYPD directly from the Department of Homeland Security in just the last seven years to pay, in part, for the sprawling anti-terrorism program.
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