An upcoming book claiming the New York Police Department has been spying on mosques will be "a fair amount of fiction" if it's based on past Associated Press articles, New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Wednesday.
"If it's a reflection of the articles, then the book will be a fair amount of fiction. It will be half-truths and lots of quotes from unnamed sources," Kelly said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."
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"They're hyping a book that's coming out next week. Actually, the book is based on a compilation of about 50 articles two AP reporters did on the department," he said.
"What we're investigating, and how we're investigating, is done pursuant to a federal judge's direction," Kelly said.
"We follow that ... stipulation that authorizes us to do a whole series of things. Certainly investigations are part of it," he added later in the "Morning Joe" interview.
"We follow leads wherever they take us. We're not intimidated as to where that lead takes us. And we're doing that to protect the people of New York City."
Citing documents it had obtained, AP reported Wednesday that the NYPD has been conducting a massive spying operation on mosques. The upcoming book, "Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America," was written by AP reporters Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman.
"We've had 16 plots against New York since 9/11. None of them have succeeded," Kelly said in response to the charges. He attributed the success to "a combination of good work on the part of the federal government, good work on the part of the NYPD, and sheer luck."
Kelly said the investigations that uncovered the plots began 3½ months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
"Our sin is to have the temerity, the chutzpah, to go into the federal government's territory of counterterrorism, and trying to protect this city by supplementing what the federal government has done."
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