Now That Bush Is Out Of The Way, Can We Agree That This Might Not Be The Best Idea?

Did the NYPD’s vaunted* counter-terrorism unit blow the FBI’s cover? Who knows:

Zazi had been under FBI surveillance, but the criminal complaint against him suggests NYPD officers acting without the bureau’s knowledge may have blown their cover by questioning Afzali, who is an imam in the New York City borough of Queens.

“They came to ask me about your characters,” Afzali told Zazi in a secretly recorded Sept. 11 telephone conversation. “They asked me about you guys.”

At least one of those New York Police Department detectives, referred to in the recently unsealed criminal complaint, works for a division that operates independently from an FBI-run terrorism task force.

The complaint also suggests investigators may have tipped off Zazi, a 24-year-old Denver airport shuttle driver, by towing and searching a rental car he was using on a New York City trip that heightened fears of an attack.

The maneuver, authorities say, produced evidence of bomb-making instructions retrieved from a hard drive on Zazi’s laptop.

But it also apparently didn’t get by the suspect: In the phone conversation with Afzali, Zazi said the car’s disappearance convinced him he was being watched.

NYPD and FBI officials have denied that the potential missteps forced their hand in a series of high-profile raids last week, prompted Zazi to abort his New York visit and caused friction between the two agencies, which work together through the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

And the Times notes that it’s actually misleading to consider the NYPD one monolithic entity because there is infighting within the department:

Current and former police and federal officials said the approach to the imam, and the resulting disruption, added to a long history of tensions and rivalry between the New York Police Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which in recent years have developed a new dimension: a clash of sorts within the Police Department, between its two primary antiterrorism units.

Those tensions, according to police and federal officials, have led to communication and coordination problems between the two police units and between one of them, the Intelligence Division, and the F.B.I. The other unit, the Counterterrorism Bureau, oversees the more than 100 detectives assigned to work with the F.B.I. on the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Bumbling police departments are a time-honored tradition — see Seasons 1-5 of The Wire! — but imagine the Congressional hearings that will take place if one day something like this actually costs lives . . .

*The New Yorker published one of the worst puff pieces during the Bush Administration.