BREAKING: Discover How A Slacker Makes $100,000 A Year!

WEBMASTERS! Get Your Website To The Top Of Google

How FBI sought to block Deep Throat the movie

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Have Your Say: How FBI sought to block Deep Throat the movie
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

FBI Declines 2 Of 3 Information Requests

Friday, March 13th, 2009

A private study said the FBI tells two out of every three Freedom of Information Act requesters that it can’t find the records they requested.

 

The study by the National Security Archive, a private group that publishes declassified government documents, said that failure rate is five times higher than other major federal agencies.

 

The Archive awarded the FBI its Rosemary Award for the worst Freedom of Information Act performance by a federal agency.

 

The award is named for former President Richard M. Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods who’s known for claiming to have accidentally erased 18 1/2 minutes of a White House tape recording during the Watergate era.

 

The award is given annually around Sunshine Week, when journalism organizations promote open government and freedom of information.

 

An FBI spokesman said the reason for the huge number of no-records responses is that “it’s become a cult phenomenon to ask the FBI for records.”

Have Your Say: FBI Declines 2 Of 3 Information Requests
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Holder OK with FBI Searches of Bookstore, Library Records

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

By Phil Leggiere  At confirmation hearing attorney general nominee voices support for Patriot Act provision authorizing secret FBI searches of reading records.

President-elect Barack Obama’s nominee for attorney general has endorsed an extension of the law that allows federal agents to demand Americans’ library and bookstore records as part of terrorism probes, dismaying a national group of independent booksellers.

 

Eric Holder said at his confirmation hearing Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that he supports renewing a section of the USA Patriot Act that allows FBI agents investigating international terrorism or espionage to seek records from businesses, libraries and bookstores. If not renewed by Congress, the provision will expire at the end of 2009.

The searches must be authorized by a court that meets secretly and has approved the government’s requests in nearly all cases, according to congressional reports. The target of the search does not have to be suspected of terrorism or any other crime. A permanent gag order that accompanies each search prohibits the business or library from telling anyone about it.

Holder said he realizes the provision has been controversial and he will seek more information from department staff before making a final decision, if confirmed as attorney general. He didn’t elaborate on his support for the law, but said at another point in the hearing that his top priority would be to protect Americans from terrorism, using “every available tactic … within the letter and spirit of the Constitution.”

“I was disappointed” that Holder supports the bookstore and library searches, “although maybe not entirely surprised,” Chris Finan, spokesman for the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, said Friday.

The provision Holder wants Congress to renew, known as Section 215, “gives the government far too much power to conduct fishing expeditions in the records of bookstore customers and library patrons,” Finan said. “We never expected that the change of administration would mean we had any less of a fight on our hands.”

Finan said the Justice Department has told Congress that it conducted only 42 searches nationwide from 2004 through 2007, the last year covered by congressional reports. The law does not require the department to describe the targets of the searches, and Finan said no breakdowns on bookstore or library searches are available because of the gag orders.

Organizations of librarians and booksellers have denounced the law as an assault on reader privacy. Some libraries have posted signs warning patrons that their records are subject to government inspection, and many librarians now destroy files on borrowers who have returned their books.

Opponents of the Patriot Act provision have lobbied Congress to require that agents seeking such records obtain grand jury subpoenas, based on evidence of wrongdoing, and defend them before a judge if the record-keeper objected. So far, their efforts have failed.

Finan said the American Booksellers Association, which represents 2,000 independent bookstores, and allied groups of librarians, publishers and writers will instead try to soften the law along the lines of legislation that Obama supported in the Senate last year.

Carried by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., the bill would have allowed agents to obtain records of customers and library patrons only if they were actually suspected of terrorism, and would have authorized court challenges by keepers of the records.

Have Your Say: Holder OK with FBI Searches of Bookstore, Library Records
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

FBI won’t release documents on anthrax suspect

Wednesday, October 1st, 2008

By MARISA TAYLOR | WASHINGTON - The FBI is declining to release at least 15,000 pages of documents related to the now deceased prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks despite lingering suspicions that the bureau has accused the wrong man.

In August, the FBI and Justice Department identified Bruce Ivins, a former microbiologist at the U.S. Army’s biological weapons research center at Fort Detrick, Md., as the “only person involved” in the attacks that killed five people and terrorized the nation.

But David M. Hardy, the section chief of the FBI’s records management division, notified McClatchy Newspapers that his office could not immediately release the records because there were “investigative leads still open” and the FBI needed to withhold the documents in order to protect confidential sources, privacy, law enforcement techniques and a suspect’s right to a fair trial.

McClatchy had filed a request for the documents under the federal Freedom of Information Act, which generally permits the release of records of a dead person.

Ivins committed suicide in July.

In a letter received by McClatchy on Tuesday, Hardy said the FBI has identified a “significant number” of documents related to Ivins that have not yet been released and is still searching for other relevant records.

The investigation, known as Amerithrax, is not officially closed. But when it is, Hardy said, the FBI will release documents on a “rolling basis as soon as practicable.” So far, the FBI has received eight requests for records related to Ivins.

“Although the FBI cannot predict with absolute certainty when the Amerithrax investigation will be formally closed, we can assure you that the FBI has already begun to make initial preparations,” he said.

Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said she was not surprised by the decision because open records exemptions give the FBI broad latitude to cite the need to protect law enforcement efforts.

“There’s virtually no chance of getting FBI records in this case until they decide to close it,” she said. “This is a situation where it’s probably going to be years before we figure out what they’ve got.”

David A. Schulz, an attorney who’s represented media in open records lawsuits, agreed the bureau had that prerogative under the law, but said it seemed “a bit of a stretch” for them to be invoking that exemption because they have publicly stated they have solved the crime.

The Justice Department has released hundreds of pages of court records and detailed a trail of circumstantial evidence against Ivins, including his access to anthrax with genetic mutations that matched the DNA of the spores that were mailed in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The government identified Ivins as the sole culprit a week after his suicide and a month after the government paid another former Fort Detrick scientist almost $6 million for wrongly implicating him for years.

However, some experts have continued to question the bureau’s evidence, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., whose office received some of the anthrax-laced letters, recently said he did not believe Ivins acted alone.

In an attempt to bolster confidence in the bureau’s handling of the case, FBI Director Robert Mueller announced recently that a panel of independent scientists would review the FBI’s DNA analysis of the anthrax spores.

Given widespread skepticism, open records advocates said the FBI should move more quickly to release additional records.

“The FBI is asking us to trust them that they got the person responsible, but they’re not releasing all the evidence that would reassure us that this is the case,” said Jane Kirtley, an open records expert at the University of Minnesota. “I would argue that as a matter of policy they should be releasing much more to make their case.”

Have Your Say: FBI won’t release documents on anthrax suspect
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

FBI’s civil rights initiative: no trials yet

Saturday, September 6th, 2008

WASHINGTON - Flanked by officials from the NAACP and the Southern Poverty Law Center, FBI Director Robert Mueller last year announced with considerable fanfare a new partnership between his agency and civil rights organizations.

The goal: To bring justice in long-ignored murders from the civil rights era.

The outcome: Not one case has been prosecuted under the FBI’s Cold Case Initiative, which actually began two years ago with no fanfare at all.

The civil rights leaders present at Mueller’s February 2007 news conference — John Jackson of the NAACP, who now works for a private firm, and Richard Cohen, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center — have come to question the government’s motives.

“I’ve been disappointed that more cases have not been brought,” Cohen said. “I worried that too many people would get their hopes up. I don’t want to be part of a show.”

Some of the killings occurred up to 60 years ago. Evidence was sometimes destroyed to prevent further investigating. Some crime-scene samples — clothing, hair strands, blood stains — were lost. Memories have faded, and witnesses have died. Of those still alive, some are afraid to come forward even now. Others are ashamed, unwilling to bear witness against relatives who did the Ku Klux Klan’s bidding.

Yet some killers have been convicted — before the FBI’s new initiative was announced. Those successes were due in large part to the relentless efforts of survivors, journalists and prosecutors, and to the declassification of secret documents from the segregationist Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an agency that spied on blacks and civil rights workers and was connected to racial killings. Commission records were finally released in 1998 after a 21-year legal battle.

Since 1989, state and federal authorities have made about 29 arrests, leading to 23 convictions, according to civil rights organizations and others. Those cases include:

• Byron De La Beckwith’s conviction in 1994 of murdering Medgar Evers, the first NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, shot to death on his doorstep some three decades earlier.

• Edgar Ray Killen’s 2005 conviction on three counts of manslaughter for orchestrating the killings of civil-rights workers. The deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner — kidnapped and shot to death by Klan members — were the basis of the 1989 film “Mississippi Burning.”

But for each conviction there are many killings that have never been prosecuted or even fully investigated.

Nineteen years ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group based in Montgomery, Ala., began compiling a list of those unsolved killings. It is called “The Forgotten,” and contains more than 70 names dating to the 1940s. Center researchers created case files for each. Some contain a wealth of public records and statements. Some hold a single story clipped from a Northern newspaper.

It was from those files, as well as materials submitted by the NAACP and others, that the FBI’s Cold Case Initiative found 95 cases to review.

“We cannot turn back the clock. We cannot right these wrongs. But we can try to bring a measure of justice to those who remain,” Mueller said last year, joined by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

Gonzales, seven months away from resigning under fire, also pledged to chase justice. “We hope we can bring closure to some of these cases,” he said.

Mueller promised the cases would be sent to FBI field offices for review. Months later, he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that 26 cases had been forwarded to the Justice Department for prosecutorial analyses.

They’ve been there for more than a year.

A bill in Congress that would have allocated $10 million annually to pursue cold civil rights cases — the so-called Till Bill, named for Emmett Till, a murdered black teenager — passed the House overwhelmingly but failed in the Senate. For two years it was blocked by a maneuver called a “hold,” initiated by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. He argued the government should not give money to new programs until it figures out what to do about chaotic fuel prices. Supporters hope Congress will revive the funding measure.

Meanwhile, the cold case initiative remains under FBI’s civil rights division, with no independent budget.

The FBI will reveal little about the initiative. Some civil rights leaders wonder whether it was more than an effort to cast the embattled Gonzales in a more favorable light.

“I’ve always wondered about the timing,” said Jackson, who was then chief policy officer for the NAACP. “There was a lot going on with the attorney general at the time,” he said, referring to Congress members’ demands that Gonzales resign amid criticism of government surveillance programs and alleged political motivations in the firing of several federal prosecutors.

“We wanted to know, after we turned over the cases, what was the next step?” Jackson said. “A lot of (FBI) staffers didn’t know how it worked.”

Southern Poverty Law Center director Cohen says he has heard little since the news conference, where he was surprised to hear the word “partnership.”

“We’d never discussed that,” he said. “I certainly don’t see myself as their ‘partner.’”

Has the initiative done nothing? In an interview at FBI headquarters, civil rights division chief Carlton Peeples replied: “I would say that’s probably untrue. We’re not going to get anywhere with these cases if people don’t come forward.”

Still, he would not say which cases are being reviewed and said he does not know how many agents are working on them. He also would not discuss details concerning some cases recently reopened and closed, including the notorious killing of Till in 1955.

Visiting his great uncle in Money, Miss., the 14-year-old Chicago boy made remarks deemed suggestive to a white woman behind the counter of a local market. When she went outside to get a gun from her car, he wolf-whistled.

The next day, he was dragged from his bed at 2:30 a.m. by at least two white men. Till’s bloated body was found snagged in the undergrowth of the Tallahatchie River. He had been beaten and shot. Barbed wire circled his neck, tied to a 70-pound fan from a cotton gin.

Two half brothers, one of them the woman’s husband, were tried for murder. An all-white jury took 68 minutes to find them not guilty. Years later, the men, now dead, confessed to Look magazine, saying they had killed the boy after he refused to apologize.

The case was reopened in 2004 — after the release of “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till,” a documentary film by Keith Beauchamp that included interviews with people who’d never publicly spoken about the killing.

A new FBI investigation produced a 464-page investigative report, but the FBI concluded it had no federal jurisdiction and forwarded the case to Mississippi prosecutors. Last year, a Leflore County grand jury declined to issue indictments, citing insufficient evidence.

At trial, Till’s great uncle testified he heard what could have been a woman’s voice saying, “That’s him,” after the boy was dragged from his house. Carolyn Bryant, the woman Till whistled at, has long denied being in the car that night.

Beauchamp, who’s based in Brooklyn, N.Y., is proud to call himself a partner of the FBI. He said the agency gave him a list of the top five cases reviewed under the cold case initiative.

“I’m helping them shake the trees,” he said, by producing documentaries on those killings.

Beauchamp’s re-enactments of the five cases will be the focus of a television series called “Murder in Black and White,” scheduled to run in October on cable channel TV One.

An 800 number will be shown — creating a kind of “America’s Most Wanted” tip line for racial killings.

The unsolved cases Beauchamp has dramatized:

• Lamar Smith, a 63-year-old World War II veteran, was shot to death in 1955 on a crowded Mississippi courthouse lawn in broad daylight. He had argued with a white man over registering blacks to vote. No witnesses ever came forward.

• The Rev. George Lee, a Baptist minister who urged his Belzoni, Miss. parishioners to register to vote, was killed in 1955 by a shotgun blast fired at his car. The death was never prosecuted. After Lee was sprayed with buckshot, his car crashed into the porch of a woman’s house. Initially, she told police she’d seen the shooter but later said she’d seen nothing.

• Willie Edwards Jr., 25, a truck driver, was abducted by Klansmen in Montgomery County, Ala., and ordered to jump off a bridge or face being shot. He jumped, and drowned. In 1976, one man confessed and three others were charged with murder. The charges were dismissed after a judge ruled that forcing someone to jump doesn’t necessarily result in death. The confessor, Raymond Britt, the only surviving participant, received immunity in exchange for his testimony.

• Sharecroppers George and Mae Murray Dorsey and Roger and Dorothy Malcom, were lynched at the Moore’s Ford Bridge outside Atlanta in 1946. The couples were returning from jail, where Roger Malcom had been held for allegedly stabbing a white man in a fight. A local white landowner had given them a ride to post Malcom’s bail. Afterward, he drove all four to the bridge, where a white mob opened fire with shotguns, rifles and a machine gun. FBI agents dispatched by President Truman could find no witnesses. Dorothy Malcom was allegedly seven months’ pregnant. The case was reopened eight years ago. A Georgia civil rights leader has said at least five suspects are still alive.

• Johnnie Mae Chappell, a black mother of 10, was shot to death in 1964 by the side of a Florida highway, where she was looking for her lost wallet. Four young white men were charged with her murder. They confessed to prowling Chappell’s community, looking to “get” a black person as race riots raged in nearby Jacksonville. Charges were dropped against three after they recanted. The fourth, J.W. Rich, served three years for manslaughter after telling an all-white jury that he hadn’t meant to shoot the woman. All four are still alive.

The Jacksonville detective who solved the killing, a white man named Lee Cody, has for years said the case was buried by a racist chief of detectives, now dead, who was part of the Klan.

Shelton Chappell, who was 4 months old when his mother died, has for years begged the FBI, with Cody’s help. After rejecting his pleas for years, the FBI met with Chappell in 2006 as part of the new cold case initiative, he said.

He told them everything he knew, a long and complicated story he has repeated over and over to state, local and federal authorities.

His mother knew nothing about civil rights demonstrations. She rode a bus 30 miles each way to clean the houses of white women. She had gone to get ice cream from the corner store, then realized, as she walked along darkened U.S. 1, that she’d somehow dropped her wallet.

There were headlight beams, then gunfire from a passing car, and then she was kneeling in the grass, shot in the stomach. She bled to death. Her 10 children were scattered in separate foster homes because her widower, who worked two jobs to support his family, wasn’t deemed fit by local welfare authorities to raise the children on his own.

Many didn’t see each other for years.

Chappell’s children think the FBI should use the old confessions, and the testimony of Cody, to reopen the case. Shelton Chappell says the government could have federal jurisdiction because his mother was walking along a national highway when she was shot.

But he has not heard a word since that 2006 meeting in Atlanta, and doesn’t have much hope that he will.

“It’s a dog and pony show,” he says. “Nothing has happened. I don’t see any movement. I don’t know what they’re waiting on. Are they waiting on everybody to die? What else do you need?”

FBI unit chief Nancy Nelson, who is Peeples’ boss and oversees the public corruption and civil rights operations, insists her office is “passionate about these cases” and will continue looking at them.

AP

Have Your Say: FBI’s civil rights initiative: no trials yet
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

New Guidelines Would Give F.B.I. Broader Powers

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

By ERIC LICHTBLAU | A Justice Department plan would loosen restrictions on the Federal Bureau of Investigation to allow agents to open a national security or criminal investigation against someone without any clear basis for suspicion, Democratic lawmakers briefed on the details said Wednesday.

The plan, which could be made public next month, has already generated intense interest and speculation. Little is known about its precise language, but civil liberties advocates say they fear it could give the government even broader license to open terrorism investigations.

Congressional staff members got a glimpse of some of the details in closed briefings this month, and four Democratic senators told Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a letter on Wednesday that they were troubled by what they heard.

The senators said the new guidelines would allow the F.B.I. to open an investigation of an American, conduct surveillance, pry into private records and take other investigative steps “without any basis for suspicion.” The plan “might permit an innocent American to be subjected to such intrusive surveillance based in part on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, or on protected First Amendment activities,” the letter said. It was signed by Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.

As the end of the Bush administration nears, the White House has been seeking to formalize in law and regulation some of the aggressive counterterrorism steps it has already taken in practice since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Congress overhauled the federal wiretapping law in July, for instance, and President Bush issued an executive order this month ratifying new roles for intelligence agencies. Other pending changes would also authorize greater sharing of intelligence information with the local police, a major push in the last seven years.

The Justice Department is already expecting criticism over the F.B.I. guidelines. In an effort to pre-empt critics, Mr. Mukasey gave a speech last week in Portland, Ore., describing the unfinished plan as an effort to “integrate more completely and harmonize the standards that apply to the F.B.I.’s activities.” Differing standards, he said, have caused confusion for field agents.

Mr. Mukasey emphasized that the F.B.I. would still need a “valid purpose” for an investigation, and that it could not be “simply based on somebody’s race, religion, or exercise of First Amendment rights.”

Rather than expanding government power, he said, “this document clarifies the rules by which the F.B.I. conducts its intelligence mission.”

In 2002, John Ashcroft, then the attorney general, allowed F.B.I. agents to visit public sites like mosques or monitor Web sites in the course of national security investigations. The next year, Mr. Bush issued guidelines allowing officials to use ethnicity or race in “narrow” circumstances to detect a terrorist threat.

The Democratic senators said the draft plan appeared to allow the F.B.I. to go even further in collecting information on Americans connected to “foreign intelligence” without any factual predicate. They also said there appeared to be few constraints on how the information would be shared with other agencies.

Michael German, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union and a former F.B.I. agent, said the plan appeared to open the door still further to the use of data-mining profiles in tracking terrorism.

“This seems to be based on the idea that the government can take a bunch of data and create a profile that can be used to identify future bad guys,” he said. “But that has not been demonstrated to be true anywhere else.”

The Justice Department said Wednesday that in light of requests from members of Congress for more information, Mr. Mukasey would agree not to sign the new guidelines before a Sept. 17 Congressional hearing.

Have Your Say: New Guidelines Would Give F.B.I. Broader Powers
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

F.B.I. Says It Obtained Reporters’ Phone Records

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the newspapers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., disclosed the episode in a phone call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, and apologized for it. He also spoke with Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, to apologize.

F.B.I. officials said the incident came to light as part of the continuing review by the Justice Department inspector general’s office into the bureau’s improper collection of telephone records through “emergency” records demands issued to phone providers.

The records were apparently sought as part of a terrorism investigation, but the F.B.I. did not explain what was being investigated or why the reporters’ phone records were considered relevant.

The Justice Department places a high bar on the collection of reporters’ records in investigations because of First Amendment concerns, and obtaining such records requires the approval of the deputy attorney general. That requirement was not followed when the F.B.I. obtained the records of two reporters for The Times in Indonesia, Raymond Bonner and Jane Perlez, as well as two reporters there for The Post, Ellen Nakashima and Natasha Tampubolon, officials said.

“The F.B.I. is committed to protecting the news media consistent with the First Amendment and Department of Justice policies, and we very much regret that this situation occurred,” Valerie Caproni, general counsel for the bureau, wrote in a letter to Mr. Keller faxed Friday.

Ms. Caproni said the telephone records, which list the numbers that were called but do not show the calls’ content, had been purged from the F.B.I.’s databases. She also said the records were not used as part of any investigation.

But Mr. Downie said it was not clear to him why the F.B.I. was interested in his reporters’ records in the first place.

“I want to find more about what this is about,” he said. “We will be asking our general counsel to advise us on what more we should be doing about this.”

Mr. Keller said: “I told the director that it was gracious of him to apologize. Of course, we’d still like to know more about how this happened and how the bureau is securing against similar violations in the future.”

An initial report by the inspector general last year found that the F.B.I. had violated its own policies in tens of thousands of cases by obtaining phone records in terrorism investigations through what are known as national security letters, without first getting needed approval or meeting other standards. In some cases, the F.B.I. used a whole new class of demands — emergency or “exigent” letters — that are not authorized by law. The emergency records were used in the Indonesian episode.

The inspector general’s findings have prompted outrage in Congress, with leading lawmakers calling for greater checks on the F.B.I.’s ability to gather private information in terrorism investigations. But bureau officials say they have instituted internal reforms to solve the problem.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Have Your Say: F.B.I. Says It Obtained Reporters’ Phone Records
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Anthrax case against bio-weapons expert ’staggering for lack of evidence’

Friday, August 8th, 2008

The case against the lone suspect in the 2001 anthrax case, who killed himself last week, has been blasted by his lawyer as based on nothing but “innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence”. 

By Guillaume Simard-Morissette 

Justice Department officials claim that Bruce Ivins, 62, a US government bio-weapons scientist, posted envelopes containing anthrax spores to members of Congress and the media in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, spreading fear across America.

Mr Ivins took an overdose of sleeping pills after what his family and friends describe as persecution by the FBI, which told him he was about to be charged with murder. He worked at the Fort Detrick military base facility in Frederick, Maryland.

On Wednesday, Justice Department officials made their evidence against Mr Ivins public. Their case rested primarily on his possession of strands of anthrax genetically virtually identical to those used in the attacks, work in the laboratory at late hours during the months of the attacks and a history of paranoia.

Paul Kemp, Mr Ivins’s lawyer, described the case as “an orchestrated dance of carefully worded statements, heaps of innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence - all contorted to create the illusion of guilt by Dr Ivins”.

Prosecutors could not place Mr Ivins in Princeton, New Jersey, where the letters were posted and there was no match between Ivins’s handwriting and that found in the anthrax laden letters.

Congressman Rush Holt of New Jersey questioned the government’s insistence that the complex attack could have been orchestrated by one individual.

Those close to Mr Ivins have suggested he was driven to suicide by investigators in much the same way as David Kelly, the British biological warfare expert, killed himself in 2003 amid a furore over justifications for the Iraq war.

The $15 million investigation lasted five years and led to a fruitless investigation of Steven Hatfill, another Fort Detrick researcher.

Mr Hatfill’s lawsuit against the US government was resolved in June with a $5.8 million settlement.

During a memorial service for Ivins on Wednesday at the Fort Detrick base, attended by hundreds of family, friends and colleagues, the dead researcher, who was married with two children, was praised as a dedicated servant to his country and a mentor to young scientists.

Have Your Say: Anthrax case against bio-weapons expert ’staggering for lack of evidence’
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Feds say Irvins alone caused 2001 anthrax attacks

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Army scientist Bruce Ivins “was the only person responsible” for anthrax attacks in 2001 that killed five and rattled the nation, the Justice Department said Wednesday, buttressing its claim with the release of dozens of documents all pointing to his guilt.

Ivins, who committed suicide last week, had sole custody of highly purified anthrax spores with “certain genetic mutations identical” to the poison used in the attacks, according to the documents. Investigators also said they had traced back to his lab the type of envelopes used to send the deadly powder through the mails.

Ivins killed himself last week as investigators closed in, and U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said, “We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury.”

Ivins’ attorney, Paul Kemp, has repeatedly asserted his late client’s innocence.

The prosecutor’s news conference capped a fast-paced series of events in which the government partially lifted its veil of secrecy in the investigation of the poisonings that followed closely after the airliner terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The newly released records depict the scientist as deeply troubled, increasingly so as he confronted the possibility of being charged.

“He said he was not going to face the death penalty, but instead had a plan to kill co-workers and other individuals who had wronged him,” according to one affidavit. In e-mails to colleagues, Ivins described a feeling of dual personalities, the material said.

The affidavits also said Ivins submitted false anthrax samples to the FBI, was unable to give investigators “an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours around the time of” the attacks and sought to frame unnamed co-workers.

In addition, he was said to have received immunizations against anthrax and yellow fever in early September 2001, several weeks before the first anthrax-laced envelope was received in the mail.

Authorities say that language Ivins used in an e-mail days before the 2001 anthrax attacks was similar to the messages in anthrax-laced letters to Democratic Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

In the e-mail, Ivins wrote that “Bin Laden terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas” and have “just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans.” The letters to Daschle and Leahy said: “WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX . . . DEATH TO AMERICA . . . DEATH TO ISRAEL.”

Wednesday’s documents were released as the FBI held a private briefing for families of the victims of the attacks and officials said the agency was preparing to close the case.

As for motive, investigators seemed to offer two possible reasons for the attacks: that the brilliant scientist wanted to bolster support for a vaccine he helped create and that the anti-abortion Catholic targeted two pro-choice Catholic lawmakers.

“We are confident that Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks,” Taylor told a news conference at the Justice Department.

Noting that Ivins would have been entitled to a presumption of innocence, Taylor nevertheless said prosecutors were confident “we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The events in Washington unfolded as a memorial service was held for Ivins at Fort Detrick, the secret government installation in Frederick, Md., where he worked. Reporters were barred.

More than 200 pages of documents were made public by the FBI, virtually all of them describing the government’s attempts to link Ivins to the crimes.

“It is a very compelling case,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who attended a briefing for lawmakers and staff.

The government material describes at length painstaking scientific efforts to trace the source of the anthrax that was used in the attacks.

It says that in his lab, Ivins had custody of a flask of anthrax termed “the genetic parent” to the powder involved — a source that investigators say was used to grow spores for the attacks on “at least two separate occasions.”

Anthrax culled from the letters was quickly discovered to be the so-called Ames strain of bacteria, but with genetic mutations that made it distinct. Scientists developed more sophisticated tests for four of those mutations, and concluded that all the samples that matched came from a single batch, code-named RMR-1029, stored at Fort Detrick.

Ivins “has been the sole custodian of RMR-1029 since it was first grown in 1997,” said one affidavit.

Powder from anthrax-laden letters sent to the New York Post and Tom Brokaw of NBC contained a bacterial contaminant not found in the anthrax-containing envelopes mailed to Sens. Patrick Leahy or Tom Daschle, the affidavit said.

Investigators concluded that “the contaminant must have been introduced during the production of the Post and Brokaw spores,” the affidavit said.

The documents disclosed that authorities searched Ivins’ home on Nov. 2, 2007, taking 22 swabs of vacuum filters and radiators and seizing dozens of items. Among them were video cassettes, family photos, information about guns and a copy of “The Plague” by Albert Camus.

Investigators also reported seizing three cardboard boxes labeled “Paul Kemp … attorney client privilege.”

Ivins’ cars and his safe deposit box also were searched as investigators closed in on the respected government scientist who had been troubled by mental health problems for years.

According to an affidavit filed by Charles B. Wickersham, a postal inspector, the scientist told an unnamed co-worker “that he had `incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times’ and ‘feared that he might not be able to control his behavior.’”

A mental health worker who was involved in treating Ivins disclosed last week that she was so concerned about his behavior that she recently sought a court order to keep him away from her.

Allegations that Ivins sought to mislead investigators ran through the material made public.

One FBI document said Ivins “repeatedly named other researchers as possible mailers and claimed that the anthrax used in the attacks resembled that of another researcher” at the same facility.

The name of the other researcher was not disclosed.

Stephen A. Hatfill’s career as a bioscientist was ruined after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft named him a “person of interest” in the probe. The government recently paid $6 million to settle a lawsuit by Hatfill, who worked in the same lab.

The documents made public painted a picture of Ivins seeking to mislead investigators beginning in 2002, when he allegedly submitted the wrong samples to FBI investigators.

It wasn’t until more than two years later, in March 2005, that he was confronted with the alleged switch, according to U.S. Postal Inspector Thomas Dellafera, who added that Ivins insisted he had not sought to deceive.

The documents were released following an order from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. Among them were more than a dozen search warrants issued as the government closed in on Ivins in an investigation into the terrifying mail poisonings a few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Lamberth ordered the release after consultation with Amy Jeffress, a national security prosecutor at the Department of Justice.

The investigation dates to 2001, when anthrax-laced mail turned up in two Senate offices as well as news media offices and elsewhere. At the time, the events were widely viewed as the work of terrorists, and delivery of mail was crippled when anthrax spores were discovered in mailing equipment that had processed the contaminated envelopes.

The FBI’s investigation had dragged on for years, tarnishing the reputation of the agency in the process.

AP News

Have Your Say: Feds say Irvins alone caused 2001 anthrax attacks
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

FBI used aggressive tactics in anthrax probe

Wednesday, August 6th, 2008

Ap | WASHINGTON - Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

The pressure on Ivins was extreme, a high-risk strategy that has failed the FBI before. The government was determined to find the villain in the 2001 anthrax attacks; it was too many years without a solution to the case that shocked and terrified a post-9/11 nation.

The last thing the FBI needed was another embarrassment. Overreaching damaged the FBI’s reputation in the high-profile investigations: the Centennial Olympic Park bombing probe that falsely accused Richard Jewell; the theft of nuclear secrets and botched prosecution of scientist Wen Ho Lee; and, in this same anthrax probe, the smearing of an innocent man — Ivins’ colleague Steven Hatfill.

In the current case, Ivins complained privately that FBI agents had offered his son, Andy, $2.5 million, plus “the sports car of his choice” late last year if he would turn over evidence implicating his father in the anthrax attacks, according to a former U.S. scientist who described himself as a friend of Ivins.

Ivins also said the FBI confronted Ivins’ daughter, Amanda, with photographs of victims of the anthrax attacks and told her, “This is what your father did,” according to the scientist, who spoke only on condition of anonymity because their conversation was confidential.

The scientist said Ivins was angered by the FBI’s alleged actions, which he said included following Ivins’ family on shopping trips.

Washington attorney Barry Coburn, who represents Amanda Ivins, declined to comment on the investigation. An attorney for Andy Ivins also declined to comment.

The FBI declined to describe its investigative techniques of Ivins.

FBI official John Miller said that “what we have seen over the past few days has been a mix of improper disclosures of partial information mixed with inaccurate information and then drawn into unfounded conclusions. None of that serves the victims, their families or the public.”

The FBI “always moves aggressively to get to the bottom of the facts, but that does not include mistreatment of anybody and I don’t know of any case where that’s happened,” said former FBI deputy director Weldon Kennedy, who was with the bureau for 34 years. “That doesn’t mean that from time to time people don’t make mistakes,” he added.

Dr. W. Russell Byrne, a friend and former supervisor of Ivins at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., said he had heard from other Ivins associates that investigators were going after Ivins’ daughter. But Byrne said those conversations were always short because people were afraid to talk.

“The FBI had asked everybody to sign these nondisclosure things,” Byrne said. “They didn’t want to run afoul of the FBI.”

Byrne, who retired from the lab four years ago, said FBI agents interviewed him seven to 12 times since the investigation began — and he got off easy.

“I think I’m the only person at USAMRIID who didn’t get polygraphed,” he said.

Byrne said he was told by people who had recently worked with Ivins that the investigation had taken an emotional toll on the researcher. “One person said he’d sit at his desk and weep,” he said.

Questions about the FBI’s conduct come as the government takes steps that could signal an end to its investigation. On Wednesday, FBI officials plan to begin briefing family members of victims in the 2001 attacks.

The government is expected to declare the case solved but will keep it open for now, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. Several legal and investigatory matters need to be wrapped up before the case can officially be closed, they said.

Some questions may be answered when documents related to the case are released, as soon as Wednesday. For others, the answers may be incomplete, even bizarre. Some may simply never be answered.

It is unclear how the FBI eliminated as suspects others in the lab who had access to the anthrax. It’s not clear what, if any, evidence bolsters the theory that the attacks may have been a twisted effort to test a cure for the toxin. Investigators also can’t place Ivins in Princeton, N.J., when the letters were mailed from a mailbox there.

Richard Schuler, attorney for anthrax victim Robert Stevens’ widow, Maureen Stevens, said his client will attend Wednesday’s FBI briefing with a list of questions.

“No. 1 is, ‘Did Bruce Ivins mail the anthrax that killed Robert Stevens?’” Schuler said, adding, “I’ve got healthy skepticism.”

Critics of the bureau in and out of government say that in major cases, like the anthrax investigation, it can be difficult for the bureau to stop once it embarks on a single-minded pursuit of a suspect, with any internal dissenters shut out as disloyal subordinates.

Before the FBI focused on Ivins, its sights were set on Hatfill, whose career as a bioscientist was ruined after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft named him a “person of interest” in the probe.

Hatfill sued the agency, which recently agreed to pay Hatfill nearly $6 million to settle the lawsuit.

Complaints that the FBI behaved too aggressively conflict with its straight-laced, crime-fighting image of starched agents hunting terrorists.

During its focus on Hatfill, the FBI conducted what became known as “bumper lock surveillance,” in which investigators trailed Hatfill so closely that he accused agents of running over his foot with their surveillance vehicle.

FBI agents showed up once to videotape Hatfill in a hotel hallway in Tyson’s Corner, Va., when Hatfill was meeting with a prospective employer, according to FBI depositions filed in Hatfill’s lawsuit against the government. He didn’t get the job.

One of the FBI agents who helped run the anthrax investigation, Robert Roth, said FBI Director Robert Mueller had expressed frustration with the pace of the investigation. He also acknowledged that, under FBI guidelines, targets of surveillance aren’t supposed to know they’re being followed.

“Generally, it’s supposed to be covert,” Roth told lawyers in Hatfill’s lawsuit.

In the 1996 Atlanta Olympic park bombing that dragged Jewell into the limelight, the security guard became the focus of the FBI probe for three months, after initially being hailed as a hero for moving people away from the bomb before it exploded.

The bomber turned out to be anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph, who also planted three other bombs in the Atlanta area and in Birmingham, Ala. Those explosives killed a police officer, maimed a nurse and injured several other people.

In another case, the FBI used as evidence the secrets that a person tells a therapist.

In the Wen Ho Lee case, Lee became the focus of a federal probe into how China may have obtained classified nuclear warhead blueprints. Prosecutors eventually charged him only with mishandling nuclear data, and held him for nine months. In what amounted to a collapse of the government’s case, prosecutors agreed to a plea bargain in which Lee pleaded guilty to one of 59 counts.

In 2004, the FBI wrongly arrested lawyer Brandon Mayfield after the Madrid terrorist bombings, due to a misidentified fingerprint. The Justice Department’s internal watchdog faulted the bureau for sloppy work. Spanish authorities had doubted the validity of the fingerprint match, but the U.S. government initiated a lengthy investigation, eventually settling with Mayfield for $2 million.

Have Your Say: FBI used aggressive tactics in anthrax probe
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Pressure Grows for F.B.I.’s Anthrax Evidence

Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

WASHINGTON — After four years of painstaking scientific research, the F.B.I. by 2005 had traced the anthrax in the poisoned letters of 2001 to a single flask of the bacteria at the Army biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md., according to government scientists and bureau officials.

But at least 10 scientists had regular access to the laboratory and its anthrax stock — and possibly quite a few more, counting visitors from other institutions, and workers at laboratories in Ohio and New Mexico that had received anthrax samples from the flask at the Army laboratory.

To get that far, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had helped invent what was virtually a new science, microbial forensics, the use of biochemical clues to track a germ weapon to its source.

The bureau sponsored research at a score of government and university laboratories intended to estimate the age of the anthrax, tracing the water used to grow it, assessing how it was made into an inhalable powder and, perhaps most important, taking its genetic fingerprint.

But at that point, the science had largely reached its limits. To figure out who in the narrowed pool of scientist-suspects was the perpetrator, the F.B.I. would have to rely on traditional gumshoe investigative methods: interviewing colleagues and family members, searching houses and cars, doing surveillance, and assessing personalities.

About 18 months ago, investigators appeared to sharpen their focus on Bruce E. Ivins, a veteran anthrax researcher, whom they placed under intensive surveillance as they examined every aspect of his life and work.

Since Dr. Ivins’s suicide last week, F.B.I. officials have said prosecutors were preparing to indict him for sending the anthrax letters, which killed five people, although charges appear to have been a few weeks away.

Dr. Ivins had been a respected microbiologist for three decades at the United States Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. He was a popular neighbor in Frederick, Md., a Red Cross volunteer and an amateur juggler who played keyboards at his church.

But the investigators found some personal quirks, according to law enforcement officials and people who knew the scientist well. They found that Dr. Ivins, who had a history of alcohol abuse, had for years maintained a post office box under an assumed name that he used to receive pornographic pictures of blindfolded women.

Years ago, he had visited Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority houses at universities in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, an obsession growing out of a romance with a sorority sister in his own college days at the University of Cincinnati — although someone who knew him well said the last such visit was in 1981.

What is more relevant, agents focused new attention on a 2002 Army investigation of a spill of anthrax the same year outside the secure laboratory that Dr. Ivins worked in, and his puzzling behavior in trying to clean the area with bleach while failing to report the contamination. They studied his anthrax vaccine patents and considered whether the promise of royalties after a bioterrorism scare might have been a motive. They noted that he had a lyophilizer, which could be used to dry wet anthrax into powder, a form not ordinarily used at Fort Detrick.

They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, “Your father did this,” according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend.

As the investigation wore on, some colleagues thought the F.B.I.’s methods were increasingly coercive, as the agency tried to turn Army scientists against one another and reinterviewed family members.

One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Dr. Ivins’s daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

“It was not an interview,” Dr. Byrne said. “It was a frank attempt at intimidation.”

Dr. Byrne said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. “They figured he was the weakest link,” Dr. Byrne said. “If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?”

Another former co-worker, Dr. Kenneth W. Hedlund, who collaborated on anthrax research with Dr. Ivins in the 1980s, had a similar theory.

“The investigators looked around, they decided they had to find somebody. They went after all of them but he looked the most susceptible to pressure,” Dr. Hedlund said. “It is like prisoners of war: if they are harassed enough, they will be driven to do anything. But I don’t believe he would have done what they say he did.”

With such views voiced by Dr. Ivins’s acquaintances — and vocal skepticism from key members of Congress — the pressure is growing on the F.B.I. to unveil its evidence.

On Monday, officials began to contact survivors of the anthrax attacks and family members of the five who died to say they would get a briefing, in person or by telephone, before the case against Dr. Ivins was made public.

Shirley Davis, the primary caretaker for Ottilie W. Lundgren of Oxford, Conn., a 94-year-old woman who was killed in the anthrax letter attack, said that she received a call on Monday.

“They asked if we could put together a list of questions we would like to have answered, just to get an idea of just exactly what happened,” Ms. Davis, 78, said. She said she had not yet been given a day or time for the briefing.

“It is a relief to know that they have found something,” Ms. Davis said. “It has been seven years now. But it may end up still that they don’t really know why this happened or what happened.”

F.B.I. officials say they do know a great deal about what happened and will make it public, possibly as early as Wednesday. They say the core of their case will be the science, which produced the giant step from a globe of possible suspects to a single lab and a single flask.

Faced with the scientific mystery of the powder, government and outside scientists first looked at chemical isotopes in the attack strain for clues as to when and where the bacteria had been grown. Analyzing traces of the beef broth used to grow the anthrax, scientists measured carbon-14 left from nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s, whose quantity diminishes every year.

By calculating the ratio of carbon-14 to the normal kind in residue of plants eaten by the cow from which the broth was made, investigators learned by June 2002 that the anthrax had been grown within the last two years.

A second clue was developed from the new ability to sequence, or decode, the chemical letters of DNA. Scientists at the Institute for Genomic Research, a pioneer in genome sequencing, sequenced the full genome of the anthrax recovered from the blood of Robert Stevens, the first victim of the attacks.

The genome of various stocks of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks were almost identical in all the 5 million chemical letters of their DNA. But researchers found enough differences in the attack strain to provide a reasonable chance of identifying its source.

The chief difference was that a stretch of DNA was flipped head to tail in some bacteria in the attack strain, but not in any other samples.

Further, the attack strain contained bacteria with both the flipped and the unflipped DNA, showing that it was a mixture of two strains, which analysts later found reflected a mix of origins — 85 percent from the Dugway Proving Ground of the Army in Utah and 15 percent added at Fort Detrick, according to one person close to the investigation.

To make sure the case for the distinctive features of the attack anthrax could hold up in court, agents collected thousands of samples of Ames strain anthrax from labs around the world, said scientists familiar with the F.B.I.’s thinking. “This is the step that took so long,” one scientist said.

Decoding the genome of a bacterium like anthrax may have cost around $500,000 in 2002, and even the F.B.I.’s budget would have been strained to decode thousands of genomes. A new generation of sequencing machines can now sequence bacterial genomes for around $500. But those machines did not become available until about 2005, which may have been another reason for the delay.

Despite speculation that the anthrax had a special coating to make it more deadly, an F.B.I. scientist, Douglas Beecher, published an article in 2006 saying no such sophisticated additives had been found. That finding broadened the number of scientists and technicians who could have made the anthrax, another obstacle to a quick resolution.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University biochemist and an opponent of the rapid expansion of biodefense research since 2001, said the F.B.I. should long ago have released some of its scientific conclusions.

“The finding that the attack material could be traced definitively to a U.S. bioweapons research lab could, and should, have been released as soon is it was obtained,” Dr. Ebright said, noting that the finding could raise questions about the wisdom of proliferating stocks of anthrax and other pathogens.

“This is not just a finding with Agatha Christie-Perry Mason implications,” he said.

Have Your Say: Pressure Grows for F.B.I.’s Anthrax Evidence
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

FBI Told to Blame Anthrax on al-Qaeda

Monday, August 4th, 2008

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK - WASHINGTON | In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.

After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was “beaten up” during President Bush’s morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.

“They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” the retired senior FBI official told The News.

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. “Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with,” the ex-FBI official said. “They couldn’t go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next.”

Have Your Say: FBI Told to Blame Anthrax on al-Qaeda
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

FBI seizes local Md. library computers

Monday, August 4th, 2008

The FBI removed computer records from the C. Burr Artz Library this week, a library official confirmed Saturday.

Darrell Batson, director of Frederick County Public Libraries, said two FBI employees came to the downtown Frederick library either Wednesday or Thursday. The agents removed two public computers from the library’s second floor. They told him they were taking the units back to their office in Washington, D.C., Batson said.

Batson expected the computers would be returned early this week, he said.

Debbie Weierman, spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office, would not comment Saturday on whether the agency had removed records from the library.

This was the third time in his 10 years with FCPL that the FBI has come to the library seeking records, Batson said. It was the first time they came without a court order.

The library’s procedure for such requests usually requires a court order, however after the agent described the case and the situation, he was persuaded to give them access, Batson said.

“They had an awful lot of information,” he said, but he was not allowed to discuss specifics.

“It was a decision I made on my experience and the information given to me,” he said.

C. Burr Artz Library has several dozen public computers. The agents seemed to know which ones they needed access to, he said.

Anyone with a library card and a PIN number can use FCPL computers. Without a library card, a person can get a temporary pass to go online.

Batson said the agents made no mention of Bruce Ivins, anthrax or Fort Detrick.

“Obviously it coincided with the events everyone is talking about,” he said.

(Copyright 2008 The Frederick News-Post. All rights reserved.)

Have Your Say: FBI seizes local Md. library computers
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Driver told FBI agents U.S. could have killed bin Laden

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

By Carol Rosenberg | GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — In his seventh of month of U.S. captivity, Osama bin Laden’s driver told a pair of FBI agents that it was America’s fault that the al Qaida leader was alive.

The message was, ”You had these opportunities, America. You didn’t do anything,” FBI agent George Crouch Jr. testified Friday at Salim Hamdan’s war crimes trial.

The United States could have killed bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, before he moved to Afghanistan in 1996, Hamdan told his interrogators. They could have killed him after al Qaida’s 1998 twin bombings at the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Or after the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole, at the port of Aden in Yemen, which left 17 U.S. sailors dead.

Instead, ”Bin Laden was emboldened.” So he struck with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, leaving nearly 3,000 dead.

Crouch was paraphrasing a portion of a nearly two-week interrogation he conducted here at the U.S. Navy base at Guantánamo Bay, in June 2002, around the time that an Arabic-speaking FBI agent, Ali Soufan, arranged Hamdan’s first call home.

The agents let the Yemeni captive make the five-to 10-minute call with a satellite phone outside an interrogator trailer at Camp Delta. For the first time, he told his wife that he was alive. Then he cried.

Through much of Friday’s testimony, the driver watched rapt.

Thursday’s session had ended 30 minutes early because guards passed a note to the military judge that Hamdan was running a fever. He went from the court to the prison camps’ hospital where he was found ”in good health, with no acute medical conditions,” said Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, a Pentagon spokeswoman. Then he was returned for the night to his solitary steel and cement cell.

Crouch cast the June 2002 telephone call as a turning point.

Hamdan, who’s accused of providing material support for terror and conspiracy in a six-year string of terror attacks, was captured at a Northern Alliance roadblock in Takt-a-pol, Afghanistan in November 2001.

In U.S. custody, according to testimony, he was shuttled to the Pansjhir Valley, Bagram and Kandahar, all in Afghanistan, and interrogated by an alphabet soup of U.S. agencies — the FBI, NYPD, NCIS, and OGA — and other government agencies, usually the CIA.

Then he came to Guantanamo in late April 2002. But never saw lawyer, or got a telephone call.

Afterward, ”he cried quite a bit,” the FBI agent testified,and the information flowed more freely, particularly with the Lebanese-born Soufan.

”Mr. Hamdan gave us a lot of good information,” Crouch said, and was consistently ”polite” and “respectful.”

Interrogations became so congenial, Crouch said, that they brought him pizza and subs and he learned something every adolescent in America knows: McDonald’s French Fries “are not good cold.”

Through testimony in the first week of the up-to month-long military commission, defense attorneys this week sought to cast Hamdan as a cooperative captive who’d helped the United States in its war on terror at a time when hard core terrorists were resisting.

As though to accentuate their point, they got onto the court record through cross-examination that the chief bodyguard in Bin Laden’s security detail was held at Guantanamo, defiant of his interrogators and sent home to Morocco in 2004.

Prosecutors dispute the notion that Hamdan was a small fry, and have cast him as not only a driver and sometime bodyguard but also a Taliban-al Qaida weapons runner.

Moreover, Justice Department prosecutor John Murphy, on loan to the Pentagon, sought to shift the blame back on the Yemeni father of two with a fourth grade education facing the first U.S. crimes trial since World War II.

Of al Qaida, he asked Crouch: “Does its success rest upon certain members doing certain tasks?”

”Without people willing to do logistics and more menial tasks,” he replied, “al Qaida as we know it couldn’t exist. Without people like Mr. Hamdan, Bin Laden would enjoy no support. He would not enjoy protection, and he would probably not have been able to elude capture to this point.”

Have Your Say: Driver told FBI agents U.S. could have killed bin Laden
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

The FBI’s Plan to ‘Profile’ Muslims

Friday, July 11th, 2008

By Juan Cole | The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group. Agents would be permitted to ask “open-ended questions” concerning the activities of Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans. A person’s travel and occupation, as well as race or ethnicity, could be grounds for opening a national security investigation.

The rumored changes have provoked protests from Muslim American and Arab-American groups. The Council on American Islamic Relations, among the more effective lobbies for Muslim Americans’ civil liberties, immediately denounced the plan, as did James Zogby, the president of the Arab-American Institute. Said Zogby, “There are millions of Americans who, under the reported new parameters, could become subject to arbitrary and subjective ethnic and religious profiling.” Zogby, who noted that the Bush administration’s history with profiling is not reassuring, warned that all Americans would suffer from a weakening of civil liberties.

In fact, Zogby’s statement only begins to touch on the many problems with these proposed rules. The new guidelines would lead to many bogus prosecutions, but they would also prove counterproductive in the effort to disrupt real terror plots. And then there’s Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s rationale for revising the rules in the first place. “It’s necessary,” he explained in a June news conference, “to put in place regulations that will allow the FBI to transform itself as it is transforming itself into an intelligence-gathering organization.” When did Congress, or we as a nation, have a debate about whether we want to authorize the establishment of a domestic intelligence agency? Indeed, late last month Congress signaled its discomfort with the concept by denying the FBI’s $11 million funding request for its data-mining center.

Establishing a profile that would aid in identifying suspects is not in and of itself illegal, though the practice generally makes civil libertarians nervous. When looking for drug couriers, Drug Enforcement Agency agents were permitted by the Supreme Court in United States v. Sokolow (1989) to use indicators such as the use of an alias, nervous or evasive behavior, cash payments for tickets, brief trips to major drug-trafficking cities, type of clothing, and the lack of checked luggage. This technique, however, specifically excluded the use of skin color or other racial features in building the profile.

In contrast, using race and ethnicity as the — or even a — primary factor in deciding whom to stop and search, despite being widespread among police forces, is illegal. Just this spring, the Maryland State Police settled out of court with the ACLU and an African-American man after having been sued for the practice of stopping black and Latino men and searching them for drugs. New Jersey police also got into trouble over stopping people on the grounds of race.

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled last year in State v. Calvin Lee that a defendant’s plausible allegation that the arrest was initiated primarily because of race would be grounds for discovery: The defense attorney could then request relevant documents from the prosecution that might show discriminatory attitudes and actions on the part of the police. Because racial profiling is most often felt by juries to be inappropriate, its use could backfire on the FBI. Suspects charged on the basis of an investigation primarily triggered by their race could end up being acquitted as victims of government discrimination.

If the aim is to identify al-Qaida operatives or close sympathizers in the United States, racial profiling is counterproductive. Such tiny, cultlike terror organizations are multinational. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, is a Briton whose father hailed from Jamaica, and no racial profile of him would have predicted his al-Qaida ties. Adam Gadahn, an al-Qaida spokesman, is from a mixed Jewish and Christian heritage and hails from suburban Orange County, Calif. When I broached the topic of FBI profiling to some Muslim American friends on Facebook, a scientist in San Francisco replied, “Profiling Muslims or Arabs will just make al-Qaida look outside Islam for its bombers. There are many other disgruntled groups aside from those that worship Allah.”

It is a mystery why the Department of Justice has not learned the lesson that terrorists are best tracked down through good police work brought to bear on specific illegal acts, rather than by vast fishing expeditions. After Sept. 11, the DOJ called thousands of Muslim men in the United States for what it termed voluntary interviews. Not a single terrorist was identified in this manner, though a handful of the interviewees ended up being deported for minor visa offenses. Once it became clear that the interviews might eventuate in arbitrary actions against them, the willingness of American Muslims to cooperate declined rapidly, and so the whole operation badly backfired.

The fiasco of the prosecution of the Detroit Four should also have been instructive. These four Arab men apparently had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, having moved into an apartment in southwest Detroit recently vacated by a man suspected of al-Qaida ties. The prosecution alleged that innocent vacation videotapes of places such as Disneyland found in the apartment were part of a terror plot, and that vague doodles in a notebook depicted targets abroad such as a Jordanian hospital and Incirlik Air Force Base in Turkey. The prosecution relied heavily on an Arab-American informer who might reduce his own prison sentence for various acts of criminal fraud if a conviction were obtained, and whose testimony against the four suspects evolved dramatically over time. The initial conviction of two of the men, Karim Koubriti and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi on charges of giving material support to terrorism, which was hailed as an achievement by the Bush administration, was overturned when the prosecution was discovered to have withheld key exculpatory evidence.

In a startling reversal, two members of the prosecuting team were tried for criminal misconduct, and although they were acquitted, their misconduct was not in question. A Detroit judge even apologized to a third man, who was held for three and a half years on a minor fraud charge and then deported. The entire affair raised questions about whether Muslim-Americans could hope for justice if for any reason they got accidentally caught up in the Justice Department’s frantic search for Muslim terror cells on American soil (very few have been found). The flimsy case against the four men would have had no plausibility at all had they been white upper-middle-class residents of Connecticut.

Not only has the Justice Department engaged in prosecutorial misconduct with regard to Muslims, but at least one FBI operation also appears to have involved actual entrapment. Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Burson Augustine, Rothschild Augustine, Stanley Grant Phanor, Naudimar Herrera and Lyglenson Lemorin were arrested in June 2006, and accused of being an al-Qaida cell plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago. Batiste, aka Brother Naz or Prince Manna, led a small cult in a poor neighborhood of Miami called Seas of David, which was apparently an offshoot of the Moorish Temple Science, an African-American folk religion. The cult mixed themes from Judaism, Christianity and Islam but was not identifiably Muslim. The group met in a warehouse and talked big.

The FBI put an informant among them who repeatedly offered them money and equipment for their activities, some of which he appears to have suggested. Batiste maintained in the trial that he was just stringing along the informant in hopes of extracting a promised $50,000, and that he was insincere in pledging allegiance to al-Qaida. When the Justice Department announced the arrest in 2006, the indictment went on about the belief of the group in jihad, or Muslim holy war, but it is a little unlikely that these individuals knew anything about Islam at all. Both attempts to prosecute them ended in mistrials, primarily because the FBI could produce no evidence that when they were arrested they had any weapons or explosives in their possession. They were full of crazy talk, but even some of that was suggested to them by the Department of Justice.

Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans, along with members of some other ethnic groups, are therefore understandably alarmed that the Department of Justice may soon have the tools to bring them under investigation without any proof of wrongdoing. As CAIR national legislative director Corey Saylor noted in a statement, “Any new Justice Department guidelines must preserve the presumption of innocence that is the basis of our entire legal system … Initiating criminal investigations based on racial or religious profiling is both unconstitutional and un-American.” Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans have already suffered from being profiled in a de facto sense. Unsurprisingly, to have that injustice become policy concerns them. The protests would be even louder if so many in the community were not afraid to speak up and draw attention to themselves, as one of my Muslim American Facebook correspondents pointed out to me. Another remarked sadly that not only had George W. Bush not brought democracy to the Muslim Middle East, but he had also damaged its prospects in America itself.

Juan Cole teaches Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His most recent book Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) has just been published. He has appeared widely on television, radio and on op-ed pages as a commentator on Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written, edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles. His weblog on the contemporary Middle East is Informed Comment.

Have Your Say: The FBI’s Plan to ‘Profile’ Muslims
Please read our posting guidelines before posting.
Alternatively you can discuss this report in our forum .

Related News

• ZEITGEIST, The Movie DVD
• Get your FBI file — and your NSA and CIA files too, while you’re at it
• Loose Change Final Cut Press Conference
• RINF interview with ‘Taking Liberties’ director, Chris Atkins
• Wikileaks Airs Scientology Black Ops

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 1:18 am and is filed under USA-News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.