Slop goes the weasel in attack on NYPD

IF I told you a really good story, then admitted it was based in large part on the word of a convicted liar, would you believe the story? If I never told you the source was a convicted liar but you found out later, would you ever believe me again?

Readers of The New York Times now face that dilemma because the paper is dancing around the perjury past of a prime source.

A frontpage news article on May 11 and a Monday editorial both relied heavily on former Police Officer Bobby Hadid to criticize the NYPD for trying to recruit Muslims as informers. The program, started under the Bloomberg administration and continued by Mayor de Blasio, tries to persuade Muslims arrested for small crimes to provide tips on potential terrorists.

Hadid was the only police official, current or former, the Times cited as being critical of the antiterror unit or its methods. No wonder his criminal case and firing got short shrift. He is too important to the Times’ agenda.

In the online version of the news article, between the third and fourth paragraphs, a welldressed Hadid stands in front of a wall of what looks framed award plaques. The caption features his charge that the police program improperly involved questions about Islam and mosque attendance, quoting him as saying, “What does that have to do with terrorism?” His words were deemed the quote of the day.

But not until the 33rd paragraph, after repeating Hadid’s criticism, calling him a former sergeant in the antiterror unit and a Muslim immigrant from Algeria who was a “wellregarded investigator,” does the article admit he was “eventually removed from the force after being convicted of perjury in a case unrelated to his counterterrorism work.”

“Eventually removed” is a nice way to say he was fired for lying under oath in a murder case. Even during his trial, he denied a romantic pursuit of one of the suspects, but emails and trips to France proved otherwise.

In other words, he lied then but can be trusted now because his crime was “unrelated” to the topic at hand. If that’s the new standard, Bernie Madoff can be trusted on anything “unrelated” to his Ponzi scheme. And prisons are jammed with good sources who can be trusted on anything “unrelated” to their crimes.

There is nothing illegal about the NYPD effort, which uses the routine police tactics used to gain informers on all kinds of issues.

But the Times article insisted the program creates a “potentially uncomfortable” nexus between crime fighting and antiterrorism.

The flimsy complaint takes political correctness to an extreme, and is a strange claim for a paper that wants law enforcement to have a bigger role against terrorism, including using civilian courts to try jihadists captured on foreign battlefields.

Still, the article was a paragon of journalistic virtue compared with the editorial, which uses Hadid’s inflammatory quote to incriminate the NYPD without even mentioning his name or perjury conviction and dismissal. It uses him as the linchpin for a broadbased attack, saying the department “has a long history of trampling on people’s rights” and making “inflated claims about the value of its intelligence operations.”

Any firstyear journalism student who put so much credibility on an employee who was fired by the organization he’s now criticizing would be sent back to find better sources.

Hadid is a convicted liar with an ax to grind against the NYPD. He wouldn’t be taken seriously if he defended the program, so why should he be trusted to trash it?

He shouldn’t be trusted, period. But without him, the story falls flat, and that’s the paper’s problem.

The Times doesn’t like the department and its antiterror efforts, and will take any ally it can find, taint and all.

Hadid fits the editors’ anticop agenda, so he’s good enough to print.