What can 2,976 counts of murder and dozens of other charges of conspiracy, terrorism and hijacking get you? At Guantanamo Bay, Khalid Shaikh Mohammad and the other masterminds behind the September 11th attacks are about to find out the hard way.More >>

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Nearly 11 years after terrorists took down the World Trade Center towers, the structures' replacement is now the tallest building in New York City.

As of 2:09 p.m., the Freedom Tower became the tallest building in the Big Apple -- and the third tallest building in the world.

Two constructions workers at One World Trade Center today attached a vertical beam to the top of the structure, making it a symbolic 1,776 feet tall (for anyone who's not a history buff, 1776 was the year the Declaration of Independence was signed).

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A 27-year-old Brooklyn man pleaded guilty this morning to charges that he's a terrorist -- well, a failed terrorist, anyway.

According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Agron Hasbajrami -- an Albanian native -- made arrangements to travel to Pakistan to join a "radical" jihadist fighting group last year. In doing so, Hasbajrami exchanged emails with a contact in Pakistan who told him the group he was trying to join was currently engaged in violent military operations and had killed American soldiers.

Hasbajrami told his Pakistani contact that he wanted to travel abroad and "marry with the girls in paradise" and that he wanted to die a martyr.

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The controversy over the NYPD's surveillance of muslim groups gets the courthouse steps protest treatment in Manhattan this morning, as a man arrested for an alleged terror plot has his next hearing.

Ahmed Ferhani, 26, of Queens is accused of plotting to blow up synagogues and the Empire State Building. He was arrested in May, 2011 with another alleged plotter. Police seized handguns and bullets in a raid. Critics claim Ferhani was "entrapped and framed" by the police.

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When news broke that the NYPD had been spying on whole Islamic neighborhoods, it didn't just prompt Muslims to mistrust cops.

The issue has stirred up strong reactions from American Muslims -- some are vehemently pro-surveillance, while others have decried police tactics as attacks on civil liberties.

And then there are the Muslims who take a very middle-of-the-road approach to this issue.

Enter Fatima Thompson, who is on the board at Muslims for Progressive Values. Fatima, who herself was monitored by cops directly after 9-11, says her group supports a moderate approach, but that blanket monitoring threatens to discourage Muslims from policing themselves. Runnin' Scared chatted with Thompson a bit about this.

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No surprise here: Spying on Islamic communities might make Muslims mistrust police, creating difficulties in gathering intel, the FBI's top cop in New Jersey says.

Religion News Service (via Washington Post) reports that Muslims are now wary of law enforcement after reports revealed that the NYPD carried out extensive surveillance, going so far as to stakeout entire neighborhoods.

"They're not sure they trust law enforcement in general, they're fearing being watched, they're starting to withdraw their activities," Michael Ward, director of the FBI's Newark division, told reporters.

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Wikipedia

​As you may know, the New York Police Department has received millions of dollars from the federal government over the past decade to basically spy on Muslims living in New York. The goal, of course, is to prevent terrorist attacks on the Big Apple.

If you're unaware of the NYPD's under-the-radar (until recently) surveillance of our Islamic neighbors, click here, or here...or here.

The cops' tactics are controversial for several reasons. For starters, it's a bit prejudicial -- and potentially unconstitutional -- to assume people are terrorists because of their faith. In other words, Praising Allah on a Tuesday Night isn't a crime recognized by any reputable law enforcement agency in the United States.

Despite the potential civil rights violations, several prominent members of the Islamic community have come out in support of the cops -- for example, Asra Q. Nomani, the Islamic author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam and co-director of the Pearl Project, praised the NYPD's tactics in an op-ed for the Daily Beast, saying that she's "relieved that our country's largest police agency was monitoring our Muslim community as closely as the reports indicate."

Additionally, several Muslim activists joined Republican Congressman Peter King yesterday at a rally in front of One Police Plaza to show their support for the boys in blue. For more on that click here.

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As the fallout over NYPD's Muslim spying scheme continues -- even prompting Chicago's top cop to pledge against blanket monitoring of Islamic communities -- some have taken a drastically different approach to the issue.

While Mayor Mike Bloomberg has defended the NYPD's controversial practices, Asra Q. Nomani, author of Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam and co-director of the Pearl Project, has outright promoted the department's techniques in a new Daily Beast op-ed.

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Columbia University plans on investigating reports that the New York Police Department, which spied on Muslims at Northeastern universities, targeted students at the Ivy League institution, according to The Associated Press (via Wall Street Journal.)

At a university meeting Tuesday, Provost John H. Coatsworth said that Columbia and the college's own police department were working to figure out the extent of the NYPD's spy scheme. They weren't sure how much the NYPD investigated Columbia, the AP says.

Previous AP reports indicate that a 2006 police brief named Columbia as one of the universities included in the NYPD's investigation of American Muslims.

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As issues that arose following revelations of the NYPD's zealous surveillance of Muslims throughout the Northeast are still far from being resolved, the New York Post published a cartoon by Sean Delonas depicting those Muslims that see these actions as an invasion of privacy as bomb-making terrorists. Aside from dealing in offensive stereotypes of Muslim-Americans, The cartoon simultaneously belittles an argument about First Amendment rights and slanders those who speak out against the NYPD's tactics, leaving the argument at a severely detrimental you're either with us or against us stage.

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