[A-List] ÚS state: FBI vs. civil liberties

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Ashcroft's FBI war flounders in hype

Washington diary Julian Borger

Julian Borger

After the arrest of four alleged followers of al-Qaida and the Taliban last
week, John Ashcroft declared it "a defining day" in the fight against
terrorism. It may well turn out that the US attorney-general was right, but
not in the sense he intended.

The arrests in Portland, Oregon, and in Detroit defined Ashcroft's
performance so far at the justice department - they were low-level,
seemingly timed to create the impression of progress in the struggle against
terrorism, and extravagantly hyped to emphasise the threat of the "enemy
within".

In that sense they had a lot of common with the arrest in May of Jose
Padilla, portrayed by Ashcroft as the linchpin in a plot to detonate a
radioactive "dirty bomb" on US soil, but who now appears to be just a
disoriented thug with grandiose ideas. Certainly there is much less talk
about dirty bombs emanating from the justice department these days.

The four suspects arrested last week, plus two more still at large abroad,
were described as a "sleeper cell", but the label is apt more because they
were dozy than surreptitious. They made so much noise practising with their
guns in a Washington state quarry that they drew the attention of a local
policeman who - startled to see men in flowing robes and turbans shooting
assault rifles a few days after the September 11 attacks - took down their
names.

Undeterred, the suspects left the country a few weeks later, allegedly with
the intention of fighting alongside the Taliban - unorthodox behaviour for a
supposed sleeper cell already ensconced in suburban America. Moreover they
took the hardest possible route. Instead of wandering over the ultra-porous
Pakistan border, they tried entering through China, whose short frontier
with Afghanistan is heavily patrolled by the People's Liberation Army. The
mojahedin wannabes were unsurprisingly turned back, although this Chinese
assistance in Washington's war on terror went unacknowledged by the
attorney-general.

Five of the six alleged cell members were American citizens. Two were of
Arab origin, and the other three were African American converts to Islam, in
an apparent echo of the black West Coast radicalism of another era. One of
the suspects, Patrice Lumumba Ford, is the son of a former Black Panther
member.

There was no sign the would-be cell was planning an attack on US soil, nor
is it clear why the authorities waited so long after their abortive trip to
Afghanistan before arresting them. But the justice department has had few
victories to boast about lately.

Ashcroft downplayed the threat of terrorism before September 11, rejecting
an FBI request to recruit extra agents and analysts on the day before the
attacks, though the bureau then had only one analyst working full-time on
the al-Qaida threat. In retrospect he was lucky to keep his job.

Since then, the justice department has failed to track down any serious
al-Qaida cells, nor has it caught the person who sent anthrax-laced letters
to politicians and journalists last year. It is in danger of bungling its
case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman accused of being "20th
hijacker" in the September 11 plot, mistakenly handing him 48 classified FBI
reports among the court documents he required for his defence.

The FBI is also under fire for refusing to hand over documents to Congress
about a government informer in San Diego who turns out to have been the
landlord of two September 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq al-Hazmi,
a year before the attacks. The refusal is in line with Ashcroft's regime of
secrecy that has often appeared more geared to obscuring mistakes than to
national security. The link to al-Midhar and al-Hazmi would raise more
questions on whether the FBI could have prevented September 11 by looking
more carefully at the evidence in its hands.

Nor has intelligence-sharing between the FBI and CIA improved much over the
past year. For all the plans for reorganisation at the top in the shape of
the homeland security department, there is resistance to change in the lower
ranks, who have seen reformers come and go.

The department's other much publicised arrests, of four Arabs in Detroit in
August and six Yemeni-Americans in Lackawanna, New York, last month, have
been controversial. In both cases the evidence so far revealed against the
suspects has fallen well short of the dramatic claims at the time of the
arrests.

The incidents have also revealed the extent of the close electronic
surveillance routinely carried out in Arab-American communities, bringing
with it accusations of racial profiling and abuse of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires a lower standard of evidence
to set up a wire-tap than normal criminal cases.

If this is indeed a war against terror, Ashcroft is not having a good one.
He has chopped away at some basic civil liberties, but has had little to
show for it apart from a handful of American fellow travellers with no
serious plans for attacks on US soil.

He is, however, almost certain to keep his job. His presence at the justice
department always had more to do with the deal George Bush made with the
religious right than the former Missouri senator's own aptitude for the job.
With congressional elections looming and the presidential campaign due to
kick off after that, all that is required of him is to produce a few arrests
from time to time, and proclaim more "defining days" in America's perpetual
struggle.

The Guardian Weekly 10-10-2002, page 6