Author: Neil A. Lewis and David
Johnston
Publication: The New York Times
Date: October 28, 2001
Within hours of the terror attacks
on Sept. 11, law enforcement officials say, F.B.I. agents intercepted telephone
calls in which suspected associates of Al Qaeda in the United States were
overheard celebrating the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
In the following days, the officials
said, agents swept in and arrested them and have been holding them since,
some as material witnesses, based on the information picked up in the phone
calls. They are among hundreds of people detained after the attacks.
Agents made the requests for the
intercepts barely minutes after the planes crashed into the World Trade
Center, knowing from past terrorist acts that Osama bin Laden's followers
often phoned to congratulate one another after successful operations.
The agents' requests quickly paid
off. While the precise contents of the intercepted phone calls have not
been disclosed, officials have said some were congratulatory, even gloating.
Yet it remains unclear whether the
people involved in the conversations were participants in the plot, or
merely exulting in the audacity and destructiveness of the attacks on the
American "enemy." The authorities have not said whether any of the people
detained on the basis of the intercepts were cooperating, but none have
been charged with crimes related to Sept. 11. Law enforcement officials
have said that, before Sept. 11, they did not believe they had sufficient
evidence to ask a court to authorize wiretaps of people suspected of being
Al Qaeda sympathizers. But after the attacks, the requests were quickly
approved.
Among the people arrested as a result
of these intercepts and other information are several material witnesses
in the case, the officials said, although they would not identify them
or discuss the contents of the intercepted communications. They did say
that the tone of the conversations was happy - good cheer at the success
of the attacks, a pattern of behavior that paralleled what occurred after
the bombing of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August
1998.
The officials would not say how
many people were detained through the telephone intercepts, nor would they
discuss evidence that any of them proved to be Al Qaeda members or other
militants planning specific terrorist actions. The intelligence officials
said, however, that the intercepts and the resulting arrests helped form
the basis of assertions by senior government officials that they thwarted
separate terrorist plots in the days after Sept. 11.
The most that law enforcement officials
said about the fruits of the detentions arising from the telephone intercepts
was that they believed they had netted Al Qaeda sympathizers who might
have been in the very early stages of terrorist plots.
Intelligence officials said they
had aimed their efforts at bin Laden associates because they believed it
was impossible to catch Mr. bin Laden through electronic intercepts. Officials
said they had learned that he had made it a firm practice since August
not to use or even go near electronic communications devices.
One official said intelligence reports
showed that Mr. bin Laden began this practice because he believed that
Israel was able to assassinate a Palestinian leader in Ramallah on Aug.
27 after tracing electronic emanations from his cellphone.
One official said Mr. bin Laden
now used associates as messengers, who make cellphone or satellite calls
after they have left him. This official said previous reports that Mr.
bin Laden had called his wife in Syria shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks
to advise her to return to Afghanistan were incomplete. In fact, the official
said, Mr. bin Laden had someone else call his wife with that message. The
call was made away from Mr. bin Laden's hideaway.
As of today, United States law enforcement
authorities say they have arrested 977 people in connection with the investigation
into the Sept. 11 attacks. The bulk of those arrested have been charged
with immigration violations or criminal violations. A far smaller group
is being held on material witness warrants.
Mindy Tucker, the Justice Department
spokeswoman, said this week that the authorities had not released most
of the names of those held because the identities of some material witnesses
were under seal. She said the department would not disclose the names of
those arrested on immigration violations because privacy issues must be
resolved.
But many civil liberties advocates
have said they are worried that the large number of arrests may be improper.
David Cole, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, said, "It's
remarkable how little information is available about these people."
Mr. Cole added: "It begins to feel
like those countries where they lock people up and don't tell anyone about
it. That's not how this country was run until Sept. 11."
One senior law enforcement official
said the new wiretaps principally produced information about Al Qaeda associates
in the United States and their activities. But investigators have not learned
more about the Sept. 11 attacks from those detained.
The wiretaps being used against
Al Qaeda are authorized by a special court in Washington that hears requests
from the government to conduct surveillance against anyone who may be connected
to a foreign intelligence operation. The new antiterrorism law signed by
President Bush on Friday is supposed to make it easier for federal investigators
to obtain eavesdropping authorization. Under the law, officials have to
assert only that foreign intelligence is a part of their need; before that,
it had to be the only purpose.
In addition to the efforts against
Al Qaeda, officials said they renewed their interest in people who might
know something about the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 off Nantucket in
October 1999, suspecting a connection. But officials said they had not
determined any link between that crash and the attacks of Sept. 11. United
States investigators say they feel strongly that the crash was the result
of an unexplained suicide effort by the plane's co-pilot, but Egyptian
officials have angrily rejected that conclusion.
Under the law that created the special
court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the subjects of eavesdropping
may be American citizens or foreigners.
The surveillance act, first passed
in 1978 after Watergate and other revelations of abuses by the Federal
Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, created a
legal framework allowing the government to spy on suspects considered dangerous
to American national security.
This year, the Justice Department
and the F.B.I. began an investigation of formal requests to the court that
administers these requests after complaints that agents had sought to eavesdrop
on people who were already subjects of criminal investigations - apparently
a violation of the rules.
Despite the recent problems, applications
to the special court have surged in the last decade, for espionage and
terrorism investigations. Last year, the government made 1,005 applications
under the act for electronic surveillance and physical search warrants,
according to an April report from Attorney General John Ashcroft to Congress.
The court approved 1,003 of the applications in 2000 and the final two
in January 2001.
