I can't believe this

This is similar to what Egyptian security forces do at rallies here in Egypt. Infiltrate them to cause trouble and clashes with the police. This is happening a pro-bicycle riding rallies in New York. Is this really in the name of anti-terrorism?

New York Police Covertly Join In at Protest Rallies
By JIM DWYER
Undercover New York City police officers have conducted covert surveillance in the last 16 months of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a cyclist killed in an accident, a series of videotapes show.

In glimpses and in glaring detail, the videotape images reveal the robust presence of disguised officers or others working with them at seven public gatherings since August 2004.

The officers hoist protest signs. They hold flowers with mourners. They ride in bicycle events. At the vigil for the cyclist, an officer in biking gear wore a button that said, "I am a shameless agitator." She also carried a camera and videotaped the roughly 15 people present.

Beyond collecting information, some of the undercover officers or their associates are seen on the tape having influence on events. At a demonstration last year during the Republican National Convention, the sham arrest of a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation between officers in riot gear and bystanders.

Until Sept. 11, the secret monitoring of events where people expressed their opinions was among the most tightly limited of police powers.

Finding God

Abdullah: A professor at the American University in Cairo who found Islam after a particularly heavy night of drugs in Tangiers in about 1960. He was cast into a vision of hell that lasted six weeks, and people came to minister to him at his home during that time. Finally he got up the strength to make the long trek back to America, flying through Cuba with dark glasses on (his onward ticket had been from there; he had been fighting the Revolution on the side of the revolutionaries until becoming disenchanted with the movement’s Stalinist tendencies.) When he arrived back in New York, the vision came. In Tangiers, he said, strangers--men-- acknowledged each other when they met for the first time on a bus and inquired about each others lives, whether that meant a conversation ending in hugs or blows. But on the New York City subway, Abdullah saw that everyone sat alone, afraid of intruding into anyone else’s space, alienated. And Abdullah (at that time, Mark) felt, “We are not meant to live this way.”
He was a Forest Hills native, but he had just come from a theocentric community, one in which people lived by and acknowledged and were colleagues in the worship of god. What impressed Mark the most about Islam were the little, basic things; how men washed themselves after the bathroom, making themselves really, not just in name, clean; their penchant for greeting and acknowledgement. Mark had tried the capitalist life, the bohemian life, and the life of the Marxist revolutionary. None of them had been satisfying.
So Mark in New York opened the Koran at random, hoping for a sign. What came up was the phrase “Allah knows us, but we cannot know Allah, for he is unknowable.” It was both an acknowledgment and a release, a release from the need to know, and a promise that knowing was not necessary to believe. So he thought, if this is not a sign, I don’t know what is. And he threw up his hands and said, I submit, I submit to the will of god.
In Morocco, it had been the Sufis that Mark was attracted to. They were mystics of the highest order, they could approach Allah by reciting his 100 names, over and over. A beat generation poet, Mark sympathized with the idea that there was something in the word, in the name itself that contained deity and power.
After an unsatisfying visit to an Islamic Center in Manhattan, Mark found his way to a small mosque in Brooklyn. The imam, who was wearing Sufi beads, asked him if he was a Muslim. “No,” said Mark, “but I want to be.” So Mark recited his pledge right there--according to the Quran, he was instantly cleansed of all his past sins.
Mark gave up cocaine after becoming Muslim, but not alcohol at first. He had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, become a young hot shot at Young and Rubicam, took a cross country journey while Jack Kerouac was still penning On the Road, dropped out and found Alan Ginsberg and the beat generation, wrote poetry, joined up with the Cubans, and gone to Tangiers to space out and find another form of life.
“Had I gone to a Buddhist country, I would have likely become a Buddhist. Had I gone to a Catholic country, I would have likely become a Catholic,” he said, but he came to a Muslim country, was impressed by the community of faith therein, and found Allah.

Rejecting God
Mahmoud: At age five, Mahmoud asked his mother why it was that his family ate meat when the other families around him subsisted on beans and bread. His mother said, this is because of what God wills. So Mahmoud said, if this is what God does, I do not think I like God. And his mother was horrified, and cast him out to live with his grandparents.

At age eleven Mahmoud had a shock. He went to wake his grandfather up from his bed, but he was dead. So Mahmoud had no choice to return to his home, where he was not made to feel particularly welcome.

When he reached 15, Mahmoud moved out and found a small room in the home of an older man. He worked at a textile factory all night and went to school during the day. Despite this he graduated second in his class and had his choice of university subjects.

Mahmoud tried business studies. But he didn’t like the attitude of the rich young men he met on the campus, whom he found false. He ended up switching to law with the idea of standing up for the disenfranchised. Not sure when he became a Marxist but it was probably around this time.

To this day Mahmoud is suspicious of rich people and shuns their friendship. He believes that the truth is with the poor, the genius is with the masses. Reflecting on the failures of dictatorship, he now believes that freedom has to come before social justice, a noteworthy intellectual development among former Marxists here. Of the slim portfolio of ideologies available to idealists in post-Revolutionary Egypt, Mahmoud’s is among the kindest.