RIGHTS-U.S.: Domestic Spying Curbs Eased

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, May 31 2002 (IPS) - Three days after Amnesty International deplored repressive actions taken by the world’s leading democracies in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush has eased long-standing curbs on spying by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

The new rules, which were strongly denounced by major civil-liberties and Muslim organizations, will permit the FBI the freedom to monitor Internet sites, churches, synagogues, and mosques, as well as political gatherings, without any evidence that criminal or terrorist activity may be underway there.

‘’Men and women of the FBI in the field are frustrated because many of our own internal restrictions have hampered our ability to fight terrorism,” said Attorney General John Ashcroft, who announced the changes Thursday.

‘’Under the current guidelines, FBI investigators cannot, for example, surf the West in the same way that you and I can to look for information, nor can FBI investigators simply walk into a public event or a public place to observe ongoing activities,” he added, noting that the new rules will permit the FBI to take a much more ‘’pro-active” stance in investigating possible terrorists.

The new measures were depicted as part of a major re-organisation of the FBI announced earlier this week in the wake of revelations that field agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis had collected evidence months before September 11 that Al Qaeda suspects had enrolled in flight schools in their areas, but that the evidence went largely ignored by FBI headquarters.

The re-organisation, which includes the importation of more than two dozen Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) anti-terrorist personnel, is designed to make anti-terrorism the Bureau’s primary mission.

The re-organisation co-incides with similar moves by the European Parliament which Thursday approved legislation that gives law-enforcement agencies great surveillance powers over phone logs and Internet usage.

Some 40 European civil liberties groups protested the legislation, warning that it could have ‘’disastrous consequences for the most sensitive and confidential types of personal data.” They also warned that police will use their new powers to go on fishing expeditions against individuals or groups without prior evidence of wrong-doing.

This echoes the concern of civil liberties groups here which strongly denounced the new FBI rules, warning that they could easily lead to the kinds of abuses against civil-rights and left-wing activists in the 1960s and 1970s which, when revealed, badly embarrassed the FBI.

‘’The new guidelines will trash a central protection against government fishing expeditions by ending the requirement that law enforcement agencies have at least a scintilla of evidence û or even a hunch û of a crime before engaging in certain investigative activities,” according to a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The group also charged that the new powers granted the FBI will not address its failures û conceded this week by FBI director Robert Mueller û to heed clues and compile evidence that its field agents had accumulated before September 11 about the plot to skyjack planes and fly them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

‘’The government is rewarding failure,” said Laura Murphy, director of the ACLU’s national office here. ‘’When the government fails û as it increasingly appears to have done before September 11 û the Bush administration’s response is to give itself new powers, rather than seriously investigate why the failures occurred.”

Muslim groups also expressed alarm at the new rules, particularly those which will permit FBI agents to monitor mosques without any prior evidence that activities there may lead to criminal or terrorist activity.

‘’Mosques, along with other religious institutions, are open to all Americans and have nothing to hide, but that openness should not be abused by using tactics of deception to spy on a religious minority engaged in lawful activities,” said Jason Erb, a senior official of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) here.

‘’We cannot win a war on terrorism by turning the clock back to the days when the FBI infiltrated groups and harassed individuals engaged in Constitutionally-protected political dissent,” he added, nothing that CAIR had co-operated closely with the FBI since September 11 in organising meetings with Muslims around the country.

The senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee of the House of Representatives, John Conyers, echoed those views. ‘’I hope it is clear to all that by taking it upon himself to institute new rules to wiretap religious organizations, including places of worship, the Attorney General will do little to help us battle terrorism,” said Conyers, whose Michigan district has a large Muslim population.

‘’Instead, it will simply further alienate the American Muslim community, a crucial ally in our efforts,” he added.

Ashcroft stressed that the new rules would be used strictly ‘’for the purpose of detecting and preventing terrorism,” and would not be applied to other purposes. ‘’The abuses that have been alleged about the FBI decades ago àwould not be allowed,” he said in a reference to the FBI’s practice of maintaining detailed files on prominent dissidents, such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and organizations that were never found to have been engaged in criminal activities.

But civil libertarians were not reassured. ‘’History suggests the FBI won’t stop at passive information-gathering,” said Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR).

He cited an infamous domestic spying operation, Cointelpro û whose best-known target was King û that was designed, in its own words, ‘’to misdirect, discredit, disrupt and otherwise neutralize” political and activist groups.

Even under the stricter guidelines adopted after Cointelpro and its abuses were revealed in the 1970s û those which Aschcroft is now phasing out û Ratner said that the FBI had abused its authority. A lawsuit filed by CCR filed against the Justice Department in the late 1980s on behalf of a group opposed to the Reagan administration’s Central America policies disclosed that the FBI had ‘’kept files on lawful dissenters across the country and placed informers in peace groups in an effort to dampen opposition to U.S. policy,” Ratner said.

Particularly worrisome, according to the ACLU’s Murphy, was that information collected by the FBI is likely to be shared with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Department, particularly under laws steamrolled through Congress last Fall. ‘’We cannot let the CIA step outside its own charter and begin surveillance inside American borders, as it has in the past,” she said. ‘’And we cannot let the military again engage in domestic espionage.”