Posted on 12/23/2005 7:07:18 PM PST by FairOpinion
WASHINGTON - A classified radiation monitoring program, conducted without warrants, has targeted private U.S. property in an effort to prevent an al-Qaida attack, federal law enforcement officials confirmed Friday.
While declining to provide details including the number of cities and sites monitored, the officials said the air monitoring took place since the Sept. 11 attacks and from publicly accessible areas — which they said made warrants and court orders unnecessary.
U.S. News and World Report first reported the program on Friday. The magazine said the monitoring was conducted at more than 100 Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area — including Maryland and Virginia suburbs — and at least five other cities when threat levels had risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York and Seattle.
The magazine said that at its peak, three vehicles in Washington monitored 120 sites a day, nearly all of them Muslim targets identified by the FBI. Targets included mosques, homes and businesses, the magazine said.
The revelation of the surveillance program came just days after The New York Times disclosed that the Bush administration spied on suspected terrorist targets in the United States without court orders. President Bush has said he approved the program to protect Americans from attack.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based civil rights group, said Friday the program "comes as a complete shock to us and everyone in the Muslim community."
"This creates the appearance that Muslims are targeted simply for being Muslims. I don't think this is the message the government wants to send at this time," he said.
Hooper said his organization has serious concerns about the constitutionality of monitoring on private property without a court order.
Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said Friday that the administration "is very concerned with a growing body of sensitive reporting that continues to show al-Qaida has a clear intention to obtain and ultimately use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear" weapons or high energy explosives.
To meet that threat, the government "monitors the air for imminent threats to health and safety," but acts only on specific information about a potential attack without targeting any individual or group, he said.
"FBI agents do not intrude across any constitutionally protected areas without the proper legal authority," the spokesman said.
In a 2001 decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that police must get warrants before using devices that search through walls for criminal activity. That decision struck down the use without a warrant of a heat-sensing device that led to marijuana charges against an Oregon man.
Roehrkasse said the Justice Department believes that case does not apply to air monitoring in publicly accessible areas.
Two federal law enforcement officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because the program is classified, said the monitoring did not occur only at Muslim-related sites.
Douglas Kmiec, a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University, said the location of the surveillance matters when determining if a court order is needed.
"The greatest expectation of privacy is in the home," said Kmiec, a Justice Department official under former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. "As you move away from the home to a parking lot or a place of public accommodation or an office, there are a set of factors that are a balancing test for the court," he said.
Despite federal promises to inform state and local officials of security concerns, that never formally happened with the radiation monitoring program, said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information.
The official said that after discussions with attorneys, some state and local authorities decided the surveillance was legal, equating it to air quality monitors set up around Washington that regularly sniff for suspicious materials.
"They weren't targeting specific people, they were just doing it by random, driving around (commercial) storage sheds and parking lots," the official said.
Asked about the program's status, the official said, "I'd understood it had been stopped or significantly rolled back" as early as eight months ago.
Such information-sharing with state and local officials is the responsibility of the Homeland Security Department, which spokesman Brian Doyle said was not involved in the program.
___
Associated Press Writer Lara Jakes Jordan contributed to this story.
Has the entire country gone mad?
1. People object to simple, useful measures to try to prevent such an attack.
2. Top secret information is disclosed by our domestic enemies, which seriously harms national security, endangering OUR lives.
3. Now they are disclosing that the program was stopped, so the terrorists in the US don;t have to worry that we may discover where they are hiding the nukes they plan to detonate.
""Asked about the program's status, the official said, "I'd understood it had been stopped or significantly rolled back" as early as eight months ago."
These useless effin Liberals are dead set on getting us all killed. It's damn time we start demanding special prosecutors for the leaker's, if we can have a special prosecutor assigned to the hose bag Valerie Plame's outing, we damn sure need a special prosecutor for these last two top secret leaks
I would say if they weren't doing such a thing, federal authorities would be irresponsible and incompetent. People that think this is all a game are too dense to bother engaging in argument.
So when, under a Democrat-led administration, authorities decide that niceties such as search warrants are not required, you'll be happy to have BATF agents search your place for tobacco remains, as part of the war-on-cancer?
H A RD TO TYP HE AD BOUT TO XPL ODE
They were NOT going into people's homes, they were driving around on public streets with radiation monitors.
It's sad, that you can't tell the difference.
There was no outrage, when Reno sent armed Federal Agents to illegally arrest a 6-year old child, Elian, but there is an outrage, when radiation monitors are used by the government OUTSIDE, to identify if anyone is hiding a nuke, planning a catastrophic attack on the country.
THIS is the insanity.
Because the media deliberately misrepresents or sensationalizes their stories in order to create a mood of suspicion in America. They want to bring the Bush Administration down and will do anything to succeed. Dishonesty, deception and publishing national security secrets are mere minor details as far as the msm are concerned.
"Has the entire country gone mad?"
You could write a whole book to answer this question. Suffice to say half the country is going either pagan, socialist, communist, homosexual, or in general falling into a mood of rebellion against what is good and right. The media are the liars and rabble rousers behind this movement.
Shouldn't someone be in jail for blabbing about this? In the cell next to the person who blabbed about the NSA last week?
Classified information has been leaked and published.
To hell with those niceties when you are fighting a War-on-the-War-on-Terror. Right?
""Has the entire country gone mad?""
I believe it's on the verge of a complete nervous breakdown.
This is why liberals are such sleazy liars. Nobody (but you) has said that "search warrants are not required". Search warrants are typically used in criminal cases, this is warfare we're engaged in....HUGE difference.
But then again, it seems like the a$$hole liberals don't want to defend against a possible chemical or biological attack; (though they don't fool a soul, all they really want to do is try to sully Bush's image). Clinton spied on Americans without a warrant per his own Executive Order and none of the liberals even whimpered about it.
If you want to get attacked by the muslims again then I'd suggest you take your a$$ to Iraq and wear a "I Love Saddam" T-shirt. Meanwhile, the rest of we Americans want to defend our nation, so have a happy trip.
How does radiation monitoring constitute a 'search?' All they are doing is capturing RELEASED particles.
The MSM is either stupid or deliberately pretending to be.
You're absolutely right. Leakers in the intelligence community is frightening thing. It raises the question: Who's side are they on?
BTW, my neighborhood was one of the "sites" regularly patrolled. Most of the Moslems around here were "on our side" since they were from Afghanistan, or had defected from Iraq. However, Saudi AlQaida operatives had earlier encamped in a number of units in a townhouse development nearby and they'd done the "ground support" work for the hijackers who attacked the Pentagon.
I'm very happy to hear someone bothered to look for nukes. You never know what a bunch of terrorists might leave behind.
What's with Matt Drudge??
He's got this story on a HUGE banner headline. He led the charge on the NSA story too, in big red letters (literally). Michelle Malkin sort of took him behind the woodshed for it.
I like Drudge's site, but does he play both sides sometimes, or what?
That monitoring program sounds like a good idea.
But come to think of it, what about the muslim food? Some of that spiced meat smothered in raw onions, a little hummus on the side.
The resulting gas emissions could set off a flurry of false alarms on those radiation detectors.
This could set precedents for meth lab prosecutions, where the clanlab guys track down a lab by the smells of cooking meth, from public land.
And some city PDs issue pocket radiation detectors, that look like beepers or cell phones.
The right of the people to be secure in their radioactive particle releases shall not be violated.
*Glow*
Aren't there criminal sanctions for revealing classified information? Let me know when the b*stards are in jail and their facility shuttered.
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