Does Michael Chertoff “pick his feet in Poughkeepsie?”
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“We just see ourselves very much at risk here,” said New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. He said he does not want to rely solely on other agencies for the city’s protection. (By Helayne Seidman — The Washington Post)
In New York, a Turf War in the Battle Against Terrorism
By Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 22, 2008; A01
NEW YORK — Not long after Sept. 11, 2001, as New York City began to build a counterterrorism effort to rival those of most nations, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly decided to put an end to the department’s reliance on the FBI for classified data coming in from Washington.
Kelly, who was working to protect the city against another attack, wanted his own access to the stream of threat reporting concerning New York. The solution was to install a classified-information vault, like the FBI’s, at the headquarters of the New York City Police Department.
Kelly made the request in the spring of 2002 and waited six years for an answer. After questions from The Washington Post for this story, the FBI said it has decided to approve the vault, a specially designed, guarded room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.
No other police department in the United States has responded to the threats of terrorism in quite the same way as the NYPD — or clashed as sharply with the nation’s primary counterterrorism agency, the FBI.
A thousand NYPD officers are assigned full time to operations drawing on the traditional missions of the CIA and the FBI. The department’s liaison officers have been deployed from Nairobi to Singapore, while its networks of domestic informants stretch across the five boroughs of New York City.
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Images: (William Friedkin’s French Connection) #1 & #2–dvdbeaver.com; #3-oscars.org #4-movie.beaver.org