Posted on 12/01/2001 8:12:17 PM PST by OKCSubmariner
The US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was yesterday reported to be ready to relax restrictions on the FBI's powers to spy on religious and church-based political organisations.
His proposal, leaked to the New York Times, would loosen limits on the FBI's surveillance powers, imposed in the 1970s after the death of its founder J. Edgar Hoover.
The plan has caused outrage within the FBI itself with agents expected to act upon new surveillance powers describing themselves as 'very, very angry'.
The spying, wiretapping and surveillance campaign unleashed by Hoover against church and political groups was called 'Cointelpro', and was aimed mainly at the movement behind civil rights activist Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, the anti-Vietnam war movement and, on the other wing, the Ku Klux Klan.
When the system was revealed, upon Hoover's death, restrictions were put on the security bureau, in the form of two sets of regulations pertaining to foreign-based and domestic groups. The rules forbade FBI agents from sending undercover agents into churches, synagogues or mosques unless they found 'probable cause or evidence' that someone in them had broken the law.
A Justice Department spokeswoman, Susan Dryden, said no final decision had been made on their reintroduction.
According to sources, the plan has caused a sharp rift within the department and the FBI. Ashcroft and the new FBI director, Robert Mueller, are pushing the plan eagerly, but there is strong opposition among officials inside both the bureau and the Justice Department.
Internal opposition to the plan will exacerbate an already fractious atmosphere in the FBI since President Bush took office.
Some agents told the New York Times that they considered any weakening of the guidelines 'a serious mistake', and that the Justice Department had 'not clearly described' the proposed changes. 'People are furious right now,' said one agent.
The changes would become part of what civil liberties groups regard as a dangerously changing legal landscape in the US: 1,200 people with connections to Islamic groups have been taken into custody, and Draconian security measures, such as wiretapping of lawyers, pushed through Congress.
Further plans are now afoot to seek out and interview some 5,000 immigrants, mostly Muslims, who have entered the US since January.
I have trouble believing that, and I'll tell you why. At that rate we would see 100,000 x 52 weeks = 5.2 million illegals per year.
That's a pretty big number. I went over to census.gov and found a report that tells me that there are about 35 million Hispanics in the country, about 20 million of whom are Mexicans. Let's agree that they haven't counted them all, but that we can use these numbers to get a sense of the scale of the numbers we're working with.
Ten years ago, there were 22 million Hispanics, of whom about 13 million were Mexican. So the number of Mexicans we know about went from 13 million to 20 million in ten years, or about 700,000 per year.
Your number would suggest that the illegals alone are coming in at the rate of 5 million a year. That just doesn't make any sense. If we really had added 50 million Mexicans to our population in the last ten years, we would have noticed. They'd be over 25% of the population. Add in the Puerto Ricans, the Cubans, and other Hispanics, and our population would be one-third Hispanic. Well, it's not.
I know people like to throw around big numbers and stuff, but at some point we have to run a sanity check. The claim of 100,000 per week does not pass the sanity check.
I live about 30 miles from the Mexican border, so you don't have to tell me that there are people coming across. At any given time, there are about 7,000 of them living in shanty towns in the canyons around here. I just don't see the utility in exaggerating things to the point of not being believeable.
As for the Arabs and the trucks, I think we all know that the drug cartels are bringing in tons of heroin, cocaine, and other goodies every month. If they can get all that in, then the Atta Boys can certainly sneak in a suitcase nuke or two. It just seems to me that the words "close the borders" must be a lot easier to say than to do.
Scientology has serious juice.
I'd like to find out the details, if you have a link or something. I have never been able to find any evidence that Mohammad Atta had ever been arrested for anything.
Apparently there was some guy with a similar name (Mahmoud Atta, a naturalized citizen from Pakistan) who was arrested in New York in 1987, but they've determined that it wasn't the same guy.
Atta and one of his henchmen left a small plane on the runway at a small Florida airport, a violation of FAA regulations. The FAA investigated, and obtained Atta's name and Florida address. They did nothing, even though abandoning a craft on a working runway is a serious violation.
There were at least two other incidents where Atta ran up against federal authorities, but no one touched him.
Louis Freeh told the US Senate that the FBI was already monitoring the Muslim terrorist cells in the US in 1999, but claimed they were not a threat to the United States. The FBI already has enough powers to have dealt with terrorist cells in the US years ago. They do not need further powers, and many of the street agents do not want those powers.
Thanks for a reality heads-up -- disturbing and surprising that the infestation is so extensive on both sides of the equation. The notion of the "last minute gratuity" does strike a chord...
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