The action seeks to push back restrictions put in place 25 years ago in the wake of widespread exposure and condemnation of the government’s counterintelligence operations (Cointelpro) against the civil rights and antiwar movements and other political organizations opposed to government policies. These operations, which were designed to discredit, disrupt, and break up organizations fighting the government and the employers, also involved frame ups, use of agent provocateurs, and victimization of individuals through firings and blacklisting.

As with other assaults on workers’ rights and military adventures abroad, the move was made under the guise of "fighting terrorism." "Our philosophy today is not to wait and sift through the rubble following a terrorist attack," said Ashcroft. "Rather, the FBI must intervene early and investigate aggressively...to scour public sources for information on future terrorist threats."

The new Justice Department guidelines authorize the FBI to conduct wide-ranging monitoring of political organizations, religious groups, and libraries. The rules expand the spy agency’s powers to snoop on web sites and online chat rooms. The bureau will also be permitted to obtain information from commercial "data mining services" of companies that collect, organize, and analyze marketing and demographic facts from the Internet.

U.S. president George Bush underscored this "philosophy" several days later in a speech to nearly 1,000 graduates of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. "If we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long," he said, adding that the U.S. "military must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world."

Similar moves are being carried out by governments in the 15 countries of the European Union. The European Parliament drafted a proposed law that would allow police more access to records of phone and Internet companies. The measure also requires these companies to keep information on their customers’ phone calls, e-mail messages, and Internet connections long after it would be discarded, at the end of each billing cycle of one or two months.  
 
Makes use of attack by Democrats
The Bush administration announced the latest expansion of FBI powers after coming under attack from the right by liberal Democrats who sought to scandalize the president for supposedly having advanced information that could have thwarted the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

CBS news reported May 15 that Bush was informed last August about followers of Osama bin Laden who were allegedly planning to hijack planes. The media also disclosed a memorandum written by an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, last July urging the bureau to investigate Middle Eastern men attending flight schools in the United States.

The day after the CBS newscast, New York senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, referring to the headline "Bush Knew," which appeared in the New York Post, stated, "The president knew what? My constituents would like to know the answers to that and many other questions."

House Democratic leader Richard Gephardt of Missouri said, "What people knew, and when they knew it and what they did about it" would be part of a wide-ranging Congressional investigation into the "failure" of the CIA and FBI in relation to the September 11 attacks.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman said the inquiry should be a nonpartisan commission, "just like the ones they had after Pearl Harbor." The Congressional hearings began June 4.

At the same time, a letter from a senior FBI agent in Minneapolis to FBI director Robert Mueller complained that agents in her office were "held back" from investigating Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, who is accused of training to join the 19 men who hijacked the planes on September 11.  
 
‘Some racial profiling works’
The Bush administration’s beefing up of FBI powers won open backing of Democrats and liberals of many stripes. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote May 31 that the reason the Minneapolis FBI agents were "restrained" is that "liberals like myself" have "regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling." He said liberals need to "acknowledge the tradeoff between public security and individual freedom." The steps by the FBI to expand its powers in order to spy on mosques, libraries, and the Internet "make sense."

We liberals, Kristof added, "must also relax a taboo, racial profiling, for one of the lessons of the Moussaoui case is that it sometimes works." Young Arab men, he opined, "are more likely to ram planes into nuclear power plants...and as such they should be more vigorously searched." He pointed to the effectiveness of El Al, the Israeli airline, where security is "all about racial profiling."

A federal grand jury charged Moussaoui with conspiring to plan the September 11 attacks without presenting any evidence that he ever communicated with those involved. The Justice Department announced in March that it would seek the death penalty against him, despite the fact that he was in prison at the time.  
 
New FBI powers
The Justice Department’s expansion of the powers of the FBI builds on the bipartisan USA Patriot Act passed last October. The act contains a host of assaults on workers’ rights and wider powers for secret police agencies to spy on, frame up, and win convictions of working people.

Among the measures the legislation allows is for police to sneak into someone’s home or office without telling them; expanded authority for cops to wiretap phones and electronic communications; dropping of the prohibition on domestic CIA spying; and detention without charges of immigrants detained as "terrorist suspects" for successive six-month periods.

The definition of a terrorist act is so broad that even throwing a rock through a window could fall into the category, according to Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The new Justice Department memorandum gives FBI field offices the go-ahead to send agents to public events and pursue other previously unauthorized activity if they involve "activities under the USA Patriot Act," Ashcroft said.

The day before the attorney general announced the lifting of restrictions on the FBI, Mueller said the spy agency had to "fundamentally change." The restructuring included reassigning agents from the "war on drugs" to the "war on terrorism." He stated that around 480 of the agency’s 11,500 field agents would be transferred from narcotics and other investigations to the counterterrorism unit, increasing it to 2,600 spies. Mueller also called for establishing "flying squads to coordinate national and international investigations."

Last November the White House openly began moves to revise guidelines imposed on the FBI in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate crisis. At the time the U.S. rulers were pushed back in their justification of the widespread domestic spying program called Cointelpro, which was used to disrupt the movement against the Vietnam War, the Black Panther Party and other civil rights organizations, the Socialist Workers Party, and other political groups.

Under the old guidelines, the FBI, an agency under the Justice Department, could not send undercover agents to spy on groups that gather at mosques or churches unless they have probable cause or evidence that indicates someone in the group has already committed a crime.

"There is a real cost to the openness of a free political society if every discussion group needs to be concerned that the FBI is listening in on its public discussions or attending its public meetings," said David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights.  
 
New witch-hunt targets Arabs
Washington’s antiterror campaign has laid the groundwork for a new witch-hunt aimed initially at Arab men. This was highlighted in remarks by the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Democratic senator Robert Graham. "We had an instance in which 25 extremists, as they were described, jumped on ships outside of the United States, hid in the container cargoes until they got to the United States, and then disembarked," Graham claimed in a May 20 interview on CNN. Now "they’ve been lost in the American population."

Graham’s assertion, based on alleged information from the U.S. Coast Guard that the men were from the Middle East, was not confirmed, one Congressional aide emphasized.

In case the senator needed clues on possible places to search for "extremists," a spokesman from the FBI’s New York office said the bureau had been preparing to warn landlords of threats against apartment buildings. According to the Times, about 250 landlords and representatives of building owners scheduled a meeting with cops to discuss ways "to keep their property safe from terrorists." The group will meet at the Police Plaza to review topics such as residential identification cards, surveillance cameras, and "how to spot and report suspicious activity." The erosion of civil liberties spearheaded by Ashcroft and Mueller was denounced by conservative columnist William Safire as a "fraud." He complained that the FBI’s "rules of intrusion" were done by "executive fiat" with no "public discussion, no Congressional action, no judicial guidance."
 
 
Related article:
U.S. gov’t seeks to reverse limits on FBI’s powers
‘Washington’s 50-year domestic contra operation’  
 
 
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