Posted on 02/22/2003 5:17:17 PM PST by Sabertooth
ORLANDO, Fla. - (KRT) - Federal intelligence agents began eavesdropping on Sami Amin Al-Arian at least as far back as the late 1980s. Criminal investigators began their probe of the University of South Florida professor in 1995. But it wasn't until the October 2001 passage of the controversial USA Patriot Act that the two groups began comparing notes. That cooperation, officials say, finally made possible the indictment last week of Al-Arian and seven others accused of financing and supporting terror in the Middle East. "One of the very valuable benefits of lowering the barrier between the intelligence community and the law-enforcement community, as provided by the Congress in the Patriot Act, has been the ability to begin using the kinds of resources and information that became available in the intelligence sector," Attorney General John Ashcroft told reporters last week. Among its provisions, the Patriot Act restated the ability of government intelligence agents to share information with domestic law-enforcement authorities. It also greatly expands government powers to investigate and prosecute terror suspects. A federal grand jury charged Al-Arian and the others with racketeering, conspiring to murder people abroad and providing material support to terrorists. The government says the suspects are members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, accused in the deaths of more than 100 civilians in Israel and the occupied territories. The indictment appeared to vindicate the controversial legislation, which civil libertarians and human-rights advocates say threatens constitutional guarantees to privacy and due process. And it comes at a propitious moment for the Department of Justice, which is now seeking passage of a new antiterrorism bill - known as Patriot II or Super-Patriot - that would broaden government law-enforcement powers still further. But critics are skeptical about the actual usefulness of the Patriot Act in the Al-Arian case. They say federal agencies already were allowed to share information of the type described in the indictment - and they question the timing of Ashcroft's comments. "It's not clear to me what provision of the Patriot Act would have made this case more likely to begin now," said Juliet Kayyem, a former adviser to Attorney General Janet Reno who now heads the Domestic Preparedness Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "Senior Justice Department officials have testified that they have barely used the Patriot Act. The government really didn't need what it was asking for," she said. "I think they're trying to find ways to support not only the original legislation, but the new legislation." Foreign intelligence and domestic law-enforcement agents have been allowed to share information in the manner described by Ashcroft since the 1978 passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was the Justice Department itself that declined to do so, in guidelines issued in the 1980s. The Patriot Act - passed within weeks of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks - also allowed cooperation among different agencies. But in a November 2002 opinion, an appeals court said sharing information already was legal under the earlier law. A senior Justice Department official said the Patriot Act has helped federal agents and prosecutors, but acknowledged that opinions have differed on exactly how. "Whether you regard the Patriot Act as a clarification or as a major change, it had the effect of allowing something that was not allowed for all practical purposes before October 2001," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Removal of the wall, the barrier, has made it much, much more practical to make a substantial case that relies on a mixture of information gained from the intelligence side, national-security channels, and that which came from traditional law-enforcement channels." Jonathan Tepperman, senior editor of the policy journal Foreign Affairs, called the indictments "a big P.R. victory" for Ashcroft. "It's one of the first instances of intelligence gathered in foreign surveillance used in a domestic prosecution," he said. "The problems with that are fairly obvious. None of the safeguards are in place." Agents gathering foreign intelligence may use wiretaps and other methods of surveillance with less evidence of suspected wrongdoing than normally is required of officers investigating domestic crimes. The new antiterrorism bill, called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act by the Justice Department, now is in committee on Capitol Hill. It proposes greater government powers for surveillance, secret detentions and deportations while broadening the definition of terrorism. Ruth Wedgewood, a professor of international law at both Johns Hopkins and Yale universities, said last week's indictments could give the bill a boost in Congress. "What's going to be in Patriot II if anything is still very much up for grabs," she said. "I do think it's useful to show product." The proposed legislation has drawn criticism. "The new Ashcroft proposal threatens to fundamentally alter the constitutional protections that allow us to be both safe and free," said Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "If it becomes law, it will encourage police spying on political and religious activities, allow the government to wiretap without going to court and dramatically expand the death penalty under an overbroad definition of terrorism." U.S. Rep. Porter Goss, R-Sanibel, the former CIA officer who chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, acknowledged the concerns of critics. "This is a debate we're certainly going to continue to have," he said. "My view at the moment is that we have not seen any great abuses. I do know and can speak to positive gains in helping us to apprehend breakers of the law who have taken advantage of our hospitality." --- © 2003, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).
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