NYPD Terror Investigator Gets Canned

The NYPD inspector who showed photos of "persons of interest" to a Flushing imam has been transferred to another department, the Times reports today. The imam allegedly later informed the suspects that they were being watched.

The inspector, Paul Ciorra, was "intelligence collection coordinator." He will now work in the Trial Division, "which oversees administrative hearings for police officers accused of misconduct."

And the second-guessing has now begun in earnest. Len Levitt, in a piece for the Huffington Post, called Deputy Commissioner of the NYPD Intelligence Division David Cohen "clueless," asking "Will anyone be held to account?"

Both the FBI and NYPD attempt to work together on counterterrorism concerns, but bureaucracies are bureaucracies. In this instance, the NYPD had apparently operated without communicating with the FBI. To make it worse, the NYPD has both a Counterterrorism Division and an Intelligence Division.

If you attempt to "work with the community," asking community leaders such as imams for help in rooting out extremists — at least one of the suspects in question has already told FBI officials that he intended to engage in terrorist activity — you will always run some risk of blowing an investigation. If you don't, you create an antagonistic relationship with the community. If you uncover a plot too early, you can't get any convictions. If you uncover it too late of course, that's quite a bit worse.