THE GREAT PROMISE OF AN OBAMA PRESIDENCY...:

Since the 9/11 attacks, the Bush and Obama administrations have provided $135million to the New York and New Jersey region through the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area programme (HIDTA). It's unclear exactly how much of that money was spent on surveillance of Muslims because the programme has little oversight. But the AP discovered that the White House money has paid for cars that plainclothes NYPD officers used to conduct surveillance of Muslim neighbourhoods in New York and New Jersey, and for computers that stored information about Muslim college students, mosque sermons and social events. It also helps pay rent for the NYPD's intelligence unit.

This is, effectively, a spying programme used to monitor American Muslims as they shop, work, socialise, pray and study. Police have photographed and mapped mosques and recorded license plates of worshippers. They have compiled lists of Muslims who took new, Americanised names, eavesdropped on conversations inside businesses owned or frequented by Muslims, infiltrated Muslim student groups and monitored websites of universities across north-east US. In the name of counterterrorism, Muslim American citizens have been catalogued, their private conversations and everyday activities recorded and stored in databases.

City officials like mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD chief Raymond W Kelly were unrepentant. Asked by the Daily News if he would apologise to anybody, Kelly said: 'Not happening.' Instead, he stressed that the NYPD will 'continue to do whatever we need to do, within the law, to protect the people of New York City. New York is where they've come before, and where we believe they want to come again, to hit us again and kill us.'

This kind of gung-ho talk is most closely associated with the Bush era, when the draconian suppression of liberties in the US and beyond was carried out in the name of combating terror. By contrast, when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, there was widespread expectation that he would usher in a new, more tolerant era, and that he would restore the rule of law and the liberties sacrificed by his 'cowboy' predecessor. People on the liberal-left believed Obama's promises of turning the politics of fear, polarisation and demonisation into the stuff of unflattering history books.

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