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NEW YORK, Dec 24 — In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the US government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over 100 Muslim sites in the Washington DC area, including mosques, homes, businesses and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, The US News and World Report magazine said in a report. [See: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants - US News and World Report 22dec2005]
The magazine said that in numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the programme.
Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned legality of the operation, according to these accounts.
Federal officials familiar with the programme maintain that warrants are not needed for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree.
News of the programme comes in the wake of revelations last week that after 9/11, President Bush approved electronic surveillance of US targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. [See: Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts - New York Times 16dec2005]
These and other developments suggest that the US government’s domestic spying programmes since 9/11 had been far broader than previously thought, the report said.
It said that the nuclear surveillance programme began in early 2002 and had been run by the FBI and the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Emergency Support Team (Nest).
Two individuals, who declined to be named because the programme is highly classified, spoke to US News because of their concerns about legality of the programme.
At its peak, they say, the effort involved three vehicles in Washington DC, monitoring 120 sites per day, nearly all of them Muslim targets drawn up by the FBI.
For some 10 months, officials conducted daily monitoring and resumed daily checks during periods of high threat.
The programme has also operated in at least five other cities when threat levels there have risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York and Seattle.
FBI officials expressed concern that discussion of the programme would expose sensitive methods used in counter-terrorism.
Although Nest staffers have demonstrated their techniques on national television as recently as October, US News has omitted details of how the monitoring is conducted.
Officials from four different agencies declined to respond on the record about the classified programme: the FBI, Energy Department, Justice Department and National Security Council.
“We don’t ever comment on deployments,” said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages Nest.
In Washington, the sites monitored have included prominent mosques and office buildings in suburban Maryland and Virginia.
source: http://www.dawn.com/2005/12/25/top9.htm 25dec2005
Federal agents secretly monitored Muslim homes and mosques in Detroit for radiation linked to terrorist bombs, according to published reports — a disclosure Friday that prompted disbelief and outrage in Michigan's large Islamic communities.
Under the program, agents with the FBI and U.S. Department of Energy targeted a range of private Muslim institutions without court approval or warrants. Federal officials say they set up the program in Detroit and five other cities to thwart a nuclear attack from Islamic extremists, according to a U.S. News and World Report article that was confirmed Friday by the U.S. Justice Department.
But local Muslims say it’s ludicrous to suspect that any area mosque or home populated by Muslims would be storing radioactive material for a bomb.
"It's ridiculous," said Imam Abdullah El-Amin, chairman of the board at the Muslim Center in Detroit and head of the Council of Islamic Organizations in Michigan. "It's taking our civil liberties away."
The revelation is the latest report on surveillance that has unnerved local Muslims and Arab Americans. Last week, it came to light that the National Security Agency eavesdropped on hundreds of Americans without court approval. And on Tuesday, the FBI released files revealing that counterterrorism agents sent a memo to Detroit's FBI office, noting that two members of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a civil rights groups that has a chapter in Dearborn, had attended an antiwar conference in California.
"We're wasting time and money and getting bad information based on a misunderstanding of a faith and people," said Imam Mohammad Elahi, head of the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights. "Our tax money is being wasted on something totally meaningless, and in some cases, illegal."
Local FBI officials could not be reached Friday to comment on the latest report, but local agents have said in the past that the Detroit office does not target people based on their religion or political views.
Elahi said he and other Muslims have a good working relationship with the FBI in Detroit, a relationship he hopes can continue without abuses of the law.
According to the report in U.S. News and World Report, in 2002, federal agents began tracking more than 100 Muslim institutions in six cities — Washington and its suburbs, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York and Seattle — to detect radiation that may potentially be used to make bombs.
Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said Friday that the administration "is very concerned with a growing body of sensitive reporting that continues to show Al Qaeda has a clear intention to obtain and ultimately use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear" weapons or high energy explosives.
To meet that threat, the government "monitors the air for imminent threats to health and safety" but acts only on specific information about a potential attack without targeting any individual or group, he said.
"FBI agents do not intrude across any constitutionally protected areas without the proper legal authority," the spokesman said.
In a 2001 decision, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that police must get warrants before using devices that search through walls for criminal activity. That decision struck down the use of a heat-sensing device without a warrant that led to marijuana charges against an Oregon man.
Roehrkasse said the Justice Department believes that case does not apply to air monitoring in publicly accessible areas.
On Friday, after the report was published, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights and advocacy group with a Michigan chapter, called upon the U.S. government to provide details on who it has been monitoring. What disturbed the group was the fact that the government appeared to only focus on Muslims.
The group also assailed the idea that American Muslims would be planning any sort of nuclear or terrorist attack.
"Where is the proof... of any such activity?" said Dawud Walid, director of the Michigan branch of the council. "It's preposterous."
Walid said the FBI should form working partnerships with Muslims rather than "snoop into the personal lives of Muslims indiscriminately."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
source: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051224/NEWS01/51224002&template=printart 25dec2005
The FBI and the Department of Energy have conducted thousands of searches for radioactive materials at private sites around the country in the last three years, government officials confirmed on Friday.
The existence of the search program was disclosed on Thursday by US News & World Report, on its Web site. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, government agencies have disclosed that they have installed radiation-detection equipment at ports, subway stations and other public locations, but extensive surreptitious monitoring of private property has not been publicly known.
The federal government has given thousands of radiation alarms, worn like cell phones on the belt, to police and fire departments in major cities.
A spokesman for the Justice Department, Brian Roehrkasse, confirmed that law enforcement personnel were conducting "passive operations in publicly accessible areas to detect the presence of radiological materials, in a manner that protects US constitutional rights."
US News, citing people it did not name, said many of the sites that federal agents had monitored were mosques or the homes or businesses of Muslims, and the report set off a dispute between a Muslim group here and the FBI.
The group, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said in a statement: "This disturbing revelation, coupled with recent reports of surveillance without warrant, could lead to the perception that we are no longer ruled by law, but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights. All Americans should be concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens, and another diminished set of rights for Muslims."
But John Miller, an assistant director of the FBI, said in a statement that his agency "does not target any group based on ethnicity, political or religious belief."
"When intelligence information suggests a threat to public safety, particularly involving weapons of mass destruction," the statement said, "investigators will go where the intelligence information takes them," he added.
According to a federal official, the investigators have visited hundreds of sites in Washington, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas and Seattle on multiple occasions, as well other locations for high-profile events like the Super Bowl. The surveillance was conducted outdoors, and no warrants were needed or sought, the official said, speaking anonymously.
source: http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2005/12/25/2003285920 25dec2005
WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that FBI agents have secretly monitored radiation levels at mosques, businesses and homes for several years in large cities, including Los Angeles, to determine whether radioactive, or "dirty," bombs were being assembled.
The officials said no suspicious radiation levels have been found.
The disclosure, following the revelation a week ago that the government has secretly spied on U.S. citizens without court permission, angered some U.S. Muslim leaders. They cited a Supreme Court ruling three months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in which the justices rejected such government monitoring.
"All Americans should be concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens and another, diminished set for Muslims," said Nihad Awad, an official of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Muslim civil liberties group.
But Justice Department officials said the monitoring was lawful. They said investigators used special equipment to gauge radiation levels at homes, businesses, warehouses and centers of some Muslim groups, and that the testing was sometimes carried out in or near parking lots and driveways — areas the government believes to be public property. The equipment also checked for chemical weapons.
They said the testing was still taking place. It was first reported Friday by U.S. News & World Report.
"This is being done in a manner that protects U.S. constitutional rights," said Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman. "FBI agents do not intrude across any constitutionally protected areas without proper legal authority."
After the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, federal officials began monitoring Muslim groups' activities to determine whether they were planning attacks.
They apprehended Jose Padilla, a Muslim from Chicago, as he returned to the United States, allegedly to scout out targets for a "dirty bomb."
"The U.S. government is very concerned and has been very concerned over the past three years with a growing body of sensitive reporting that continues to show Al Qaeda's clear intention to obtain and ultimately use chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear or high-energy explosives in attacks against America," Roehrkasse said.
"With this in mind, the FBI is part of an interagency team conducting passive operations in publicly accessible areas to detect the presence of radioactive materials in the air," he said.
Roehrkasse and other federal law enforcement officials said the agents had targeted sites in and near several of the nation's largest cities, including Los Angeles, Washington, New York and Chicago.
The monitoring program was also used near other potential targets, including the 2004 political conventions.
"For every single national event, we had these measures deployed," he said. "It's one of many layers we have in this country. This is basically what we do. This is what homeland security is all about."
Another federal source, who asked not to be identified because the program has been secret, said government lawyers reviewed the process and found it legal for the tests to proceed without agents first seeking court authorization.
The tests are frequent and could pose grave logistical problems if court permission had to be routinely sought, he said.
"The FBI believes it has the legal authority," the official said. "A parking lot or a driveway is not necessarily private property, and our equipment is not intrusive."
But Awad and other Muslim leaders at the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said the monitoring fit a pattern of spying on U.S. citizens without first obtaining a court warrant.
"This disturbing revelation," Awad said, "coupled with recent reports of domestic surveillance without warrant, could lead to the perception that we are no longer a nation ruled by law but instead one in which fear trumps constitutional rights."
Awad and other Muslim officials pointed to a June 11, 2001, Supreme Court decision that found a similar monitoring program to be unlawful.
In that case, government agents used thermal imaging to determine whether marijuana was being grown inside a home in Florence, Ore. The imaging device detected infrared radiation inside the house similar to that from marijuana beds, and the homeowner, Danny Kyllo, was arrested. He challenged the legality of the search.
In a 5-4 Supreme Court decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court ruled that the test was an illegal search that violated the 4th Amendment.
"The surveillance is a search, and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant," Scalia wrote.
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing a dissent, said no privacy was compromised and that the agents in Oregon gathered "information in the public domain" by operating the detection device outside the home.
source: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-monitor24dec24,1,3566855.story?coll=la-headlines-nation 25dec2005
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