Author: Giles Whittell
Publication: The Times, London
Date: June 1, 2002
FBI agents will be allowed to monitor
suspected terrorists in mosques, libraries and on the Internet without
a warrant or evidence of criminal activity, under new guidelines immediately
criticised as a move towards Orwellian policing.
The new rules, designed to add force
to FBI reforms announced on Wednesday, will roll back curbs on the FBI's
powers that were imposed 25 years ago to rein-in agents who hounded Martin
Luther King and suspected Communists under J Edgar Hoover.
The most immediate effect will be
to let agents infiltrate the congregations of the suburban American mosques
where terrorists are believed to have planned and recruited attacks on
American targets, but which the FBI has for decades regarded as off-limits
to investigators.
"We want to make sure that we do
everything possible to stop the terrorists before they can kill innocent
Americans, everything within the bounds of the Constitution and federal
law," a senior Justice Department official was quoted as saying yesterday.
Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged
Al-Qaida terrorist now facing a death penalty trial after his arrest in
Minneapolis, is believed to have used mosques for secret meetings. Sheikh
Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing, also used mosques in Brooklyn and New Jersey to build a radical
anti-American following.
In addition to allowing agents into
places of worship, the new guidelines will let them monitor book-borrowing
patterns in public libraries and trawl the Internet and public databases
for potential terrorist leads.
FBI personnel had been barred access
to hundreds of databases that are open to businesses and private individuals,
except when they can persuade a judge in advance that they have proof of
criminal activity, known as "probable cause".
Speculative surfing of the Internet
and any research not directly related to a specific crime were also ruled
out, but will now be allowed. The broad new freedoms, announced by the
US Justice Department, will give teeth to the 14 new counter-terrorist
task forces being set up by the FBI director, Mr Robert Mueller.
Civil rights lawyers were in no
doubt that they would threaten hard-won freedoms for all American citizens,
however. "The FBI is now telling the American people, 'You no longer have
to do anything unlawful in order to get that knock on the door'," Ms Laura
Murphy of the American Civil Liberties Union said.
