ip: Collision with Civil Rights: A Wide, Aggressive Probe

R. A. Hettinga rah at shipwright.com
Sat Sep 15 14:21:59 EDT 2001


--- begin forwarded text


Status:  U
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 12:17:27 -0500
To: believer at telepath.com
From: believer at telepath.com (by way of believer at telepath.com)
Subject: ip: Collision with Civil Rights: A Wide, Aggressive Probe

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/A34046-2001Sep14.html

A Wide, Aggressive Probe Collides With Civil Rights
Innocent People May Face Questioning, Experts Say

By Serge F. Kovaleski
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 15, 2001; Page A14

NEW YORK, Sept. 14 -- As the FBI pursues thousands of leads around the
country and widens its dragnet, agents have detained for questioning dozens
of people who, investigators eventually determined, had no role in
Tuesday's terrorist attacks.

Terrorism experts said that such measures are a necessary part of following
tips about possible accomplices and sympathizers and trying to develop
intelligence that might lead to those behind the deadliest act of terrorism
in American history. But the experts also cautioned that FBI agents risk
running roughshod over people's civil liberties as they face immense
pressure and an extremely difficult investigation.

"They have to follow leads, and some people will get sucked up into the
investigation who had nothing to do with the attacks. And a lot of them
will fit a certain profile of Arabs and Muslims," said Juliette Kayyem,
executive director of the program on domestic preparedness at the John F.
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

She added: "The challenge is how do you do all this without intimidating an
entire ethnic or religious population. First of all, there is incredible
pressure on the FBI, and when law enforcement agencies are under pressure
they tend to cut corners and . . . there may be ethnic or racial profiling
going on to narrow the pool of suspects."

Most recently, the FBI said today that all 13 people taken into custody on
Thursday at Kennedy and La Guardia airports had been released and that none
of them had any ties to the hijacking attacks. But Justice Department
spokeswoman Mindy Tucker said at least one remained in custody.

Authorities said they suspected that one of the detainees was carrying a
fake pilot's license. Today, however, officials said the man was a pilot
and that there were suspicions about him because of documents he was
carrying, including a visa issued under another name. The man was taking
the papers to his brother in Boston, who coincidentally lived in the same
building as three of the hijackers, officials said.

Meanwhile, about 60 miles north of Pittsburgh, the home of radiologist
Basem M. Hussein was searched and his car was later impounded after his
landlord called local authorities Tuesday saying she had not seen him after
the attacks. Hussein's apartment was searched and his car was impounded at
the Pittsburgh airport, while agents investigated the lead by, among other
things, reviewing hospital employment records at two Pennsylvania hospitals
where he had worked.

Hussein, whose home is in Neshannock Township, Pa., just outside New
Castle, was located Wednesday afternoon at the Indian Health Service in
Shiprock, N.M., where he has been working as a contracted medical doctor
since early September, the FBI said. Hussein was detained, cooperated with
the questioning and was not arrested, the FBI said in a statement.

In Boston, federal authorities detained three people on Sept. 12 for
several hours after law enforcement officials received a tip that led them
to a hotel in downtown. In the city's Copley Square area, local police and
agents from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms descended
on the Westin Copley Hotel with battering rams and shields, detaining a
Saudi businessman, his wife and his sister who were guests, officials said.

Two bomb squads and two SWAT teams were among the first into the building
after reports that at least one suspect was hiding in the hotel. About an
hour later, police evacuated not only the hotel but the adjacent shopping
mall. An FBI source subsequently confirmed that the tip was wrong, and
there was no connection between the family and the suspected  terrorists.

About 4,000 special FBI agents are involved in the attack investigation, as
are the bureau's 56 field offices around the country. The agency has
received an estimated 36,000 leads and has served more than 30 search
warrants and issued hundreds of subpoenas, but has made at least one
arrest. Officials said that teams of agents have also been deployed to
airports to assist in case suspicious questions are raised about particular
passengers.

"There is a fine line between a thorough investigation and violations of
civil liberties. The line gets crossed when agents intimidate, use
excessive questioning and rely on racial profiling," said Salam
Al-Marayati, director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles.
"The fact that the American Muslim community is under increased scrutiny is
unfortunate but something we have to accept."

James K. Kallstrom, the former head of the FBI in New York, said that it is
important for agents to pursue leads, as tiresome as it may be, because it
can help provide the probe with the critical mass needed to determine the
mastermind behind the attacks.

"The small things can lead you to the meat of the investigation, but the
meat of the investigation is not dragging a guy off an Amtrak train," said
Kallstrom, who oversaw the criminal probe into the crash of TWA Flight 800
off the coast of New York.

"The meat would be finding out the full extent of the conspiracy and who
inside and outside the country helped these cowards commit these acts, who
harbored them, who encouraged and helped them, who gave them money and who
gave them transportation," he said. "It could be that the guy you pull off
the train can provide leads."

Ian Lesser, senior analyst specializing in security affairs at the
Washington area office of the think tank RAND Corp., said that given the
magnitude and intensity of the investigation, individuals will invariably
be targeted by agents in error as the FBI tries to unravel the possible
conspiracy behind the attacks.

"Mistakes will be made in terms of misidentifications. The heavy level of
scrutiny and attention will clearly cause a lot of false alarms," Lesser
said. "But that is understandable under the circumstances and it is the
natural outcome of heightened security and heightened awareness, as well as
the scope and intensity of the investigation."


--- end forwarded text


-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'



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