Lisa English of Ruminate This is on top of Ashcroft's testimony today before the House Judiciary Committee on the Patriot Act and renewal of anti-terrorism powers. We will be on the road until this evening, so be sure to check in with her. C-SPAN will air the testimony, starting at 9 A.M. EST, on video and audio feed. Click here for more information.

Attorney General John Ashcroft will be testifying this morning before the House Judiciary Committee on his implementation of the Patriot Act, and whether or not these anti-terrorism powers should be renewed. You can bank on legislators renewing his powers, but be prepared for some rhetorical fireworks especially coming on the heels of a scathing report issued earlier this week about immigrant detentions. Lawmakers are also justifiably peeved over the Justice Department's high level of secrecy.

Here is more on the findings of the Inspector General's report released today concerning the Justice Department's treatment of immigrants following 9/11:

In general, the report found, every aspect of the system conspired to detain for long periods people who might have, at other times, been released on bond while they awaited hearings or quickly deported.

The war on terror," said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, "quickly turned into a war on immigrants."
The government used every procedural device at its disposal, the report said, including some of questionable legality, to ensure that people charged with immigration violations in connection with the attacks were not released until the Federal Bureau of Investigation "determined they posed no danger to the United States." They included delays in informing detainees of the charges against them, opposing bond and continuing detention long after judges ordered the detainees deported.

The general policy, which the Justice Department called "hold until cleared," might as well have been called "guilty until proven innocent," civil libertarians said. "It confirms our worst fears about what was going on," Professor Cole said. "At the highest levels of the Justice Department, the government made a conscious effort to exploit the immigration laws to lock up hundreds of people who ultimately proved to have no connection to terrorism whatsoever."

We'll end here with this finding:

The conditions under which some detainees were held, the report found, were quite harsh, particularly at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where 84 people were detained. Detainees and one corrections officer said it was common for officers to slam inmates against walls before videotaping their statements. Some were housed in brightly lighted cells around the clock. (emphasis supplied)

Once again, you can read the entire report here . A six page summary of the report bythe Justice Department is here. Our post earlier today on the report is here. Excerpts from the report are here.

Former Senator Gary Hart has an excellent op-ed in today's Boston Globe: Where is Bush Leading Us? We'll quote a little, but go read the whole thing.

....when the Bush administration decided to go after terrorism everywhere it fundamentally defined a new role for America in the world.

Iraq represented no immediate or unavoidable threat to the United States. We overthrew its government because key Bush administration officials convinced the president it was the next step in the war on terrorism. But they had decided Saddam Hussein must go a full decade before 9/11. The destruction of the World Trade towers, which Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with, simply gave them the excuse to resurrect an old agenda.

But the war on terrorism is now the excuse for America to assume imperial powers and to employ those powers even when our traditional allies oppose our actions....All this has transpired in the space of a few months without congressional hearings or review, any comprehensive statement by the administration, serious editorial discussion, or public debate over this new foreign policy. Throughout American history major departures in foreign policy have been the occasion for lively, even contentious debate. This has not been the case as the war on terrorism morphed into the centerpiece of a new imperial foreign policy.

[Thanks to Eric at Hamster for the link.]

How high-tech is the equipment and how interested are our officials in this kind of technology?

A secretive law enforcement convention scheduled in Seattle next week has drawn the ire of civil liberites and minority groups--to the point where demonstrations are planned for 11 area Starbucks. Starbucks is one of the suppliers for the convention.

Top FBI and White House anti-terrorism experts will join law enforcement colleagues in Seattle next week for a police intelligence convention that is drawing fire from a coalition of local social justice and minority organizations.

The Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit -- a private group of local and state police intelligence officials -- is for the first time allowing federal intelligence personnel to participate in the conference. On the table will be initiatives instituted since the Sept. 11 attacks to improve the sharing of federal intelligence with local agencies.

The conference is closed to the public and the media.

And that concerns members of the People of Color Coalition Against the War at Home and Abroad. The ad hoc collection of groups considers the response by police to Sept. 11 to be an attack on civil liberties that especially hurts minority and immigrant communities.

Michael Woo of the Northwest Labor and Employment Law Office slammed the law enforcement group and the Department of Homeland Security as "the KGBs in our modern era" bent on stripping away our rights and civil liberties.

Starbucks response? "I don't think it is appropriate to have an expectation that Starbucks can resolve issues of civil liberties."

[link via Balasubramania]

Amnesty International has released its annual report on global human rights abuses in 2002. The report finds:

Washington's ``war on terror'' has made the world more dangerous by curbing human rights, undermining international law and shielding governments from scrutiny.

The news article about the report goes on to say:

....In one of its most critical sideswipes yet at Washington, Amnesty said the bid to stamp out terror in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, had largely backfired.

``It has deepened divisions among people of different faiths and origins, sowing the seeds for more conflict,'' it said in a statement. ``The overwhelming impact of all this is genuine fear across all sectors of society.''

More information about the report is available from Amnesty here.

The New York Post reports that an Ohio truckdriver has been arrested as an Al Qaeda operative planning an attack in the U.S.

Federal agents have nabbed an Ohio truck driver after unmasking him as an al Qaeda operative in plots to collapse a suspension bridge and blow up an airliner in the United States, according to a new report.

The information reportedly was obtained from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who has been cooperating from his overseas detention facility for some time. Mohammed is allegedly Al Qaeda's former chief operations officer.

Newsweek is the source of the report on the Ohio trucker and other suspected planned al Qaeda attacks in the U.S. this summer. The Ohio trucker story does not sound like recent news, particularly since he also has been cooperating with authorities for some time.

Intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK that during his interrogation, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed fingered an Ohio truckdriver. In a major breakthrough, the Feds picked up the truckdriver, who began to cooperate. According to law-enforcement sources, the truck- driver was involved in plots to bring down a bridge and blow up an airliner. The truckdriver was asked by his Qaeda masters to obtain the proper tools for loosening the bolts on a suspension bridge. As for the airliner, the truckdriver said that cargo trucks could easily drive underneath passenger jets without arousing suspicion.

Also, keep in mind that interrogations of suspected al Qaeda members are likely to result in deliberate misinformation as well as credible information.

Oops, never mind, says the FBI.

A year ago, Crazy Tomato was a popular restaurant in Evansville, Indiana, near the Kentucky border. Then its owner, Tarek Albasti, and seven other Egyptian-born men were arrested by the FBI and accused of plotting terrorist attacks against the U.S. They became known as the "Evansville Eight."

Pictured in prison stripes, the men were splashed across the front pages, ridiculed and shunned even after their release by people who assumed their guilt. Whispers about flying lessons and money trails from Evansville to Egypt spread rapidly.

But the FBI said it had all been a mistake. And at a meeting last month with more than 100 people in the Muslim community here, the FBI offered a rare apology because suspicion about the arrests -- which resulted from a bogus tip -- hung over the men's heads for so long and disrupted their lives.

Read the whole article to see how little justification there was for arresting the men on material witness warrants and holding them in isolation for over a week.

As part of a national roundup in the weeks after the terrorist attacks, the "Evansville 8" were among 50 people held as material witnesses in maximum security jails without being charged with a crime. Thousands of more men from Middle Eastern countries were questioned, some arrested and detained, allegedly for links to terrorism, only to be let go or deported on immigration violations. Civil liberties groups protested that the arrests amounted to racial stereotyping.

Yes, the FBI apologized. But that still doesn't undo the damage to these men.

"The situation that happened to you was horrible," Thomas V. Fuentes, the FBI's agent in charge in Indiana, said during a meeting at the Islamic Center of Evansville. "On behalf of the FBI, I will apologize. . . ."

They were wrongly accused," FBI Agent Fuentes said in a later interview. "They have almost lost their business. This is something that has affected them in every possible way. Anybody being accused falsely of something that serious is like a teacher being accused of molesting a child. It's hard to come back from that. You can see . . . months later, the tears are still ready to flow."

From the House Judiciary Committee website:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr. (R-Wis.) and Ranking Member John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.) Tuesday released the answers received last week from the Justice Department regarding the USA PATRIOT Act and the war on terrorism. Chairman Sensenbrenner and Rep. Conyers wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft on April 1, 2003 (accessible here) requesting information on these issues.

Among the findings:

~ The Department has used the new powers of the PATRIOT Act for non-terrorism cases (drug violations, credit card fraud, theft from a bank account, a lawyer who defrauded his clients).

~The Department has sought and the courts have authorized delayed notification of search warrants 47 times. Some courts have authorized delayed notification lasting until the indictment was unsealed. The Department has sought extensions of such delayed notifications 248 times.

~The Attorney General made emergency authorizations 113 times for FISA electronic surveillance and/or physical searches in a one-year period.

~Prior to moving to DHS, the INS did not charge any aliens with the expanded terrorism grounds of inadmissibility or deportability provided under section 411 of the PATRIOT Act.

On monitoring of attorney-client communications, Justice says:

~The Attorney General has ordered the monitoring of attorney communications for a single inmate: Sheik Omar Ahmad Rahman, who was convicted for his part in the 1993 plot to bomb the World Trade Center. Rahman and his attorney were notified that their communications were subject to monitoring. No monitoring has occurred, however, because the inmate and his attorneys thus far have chose not to communicate further with each other.

You can read the full 62 page report here. The New York Times' has this on the report.

Forbes.Com reports:

Government regulators issued a set of rules that require banks, securities brokers and dealers, mutual funds and other financial institutions to help the feds catch terrorists using their own dollars. There's little proof that the rules will help capture any terrorists, but software makers claim their anti-money-laundering programs could catch fraud.

bq. In an April 30 ruling, the Department of Treasury, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and seven other federal regulatory bodies ordered that financial businesses have to implement systems that "determine whether the person [opening an account] appears on any list of known or suspected terrorist organizations," and maintain records of the information used to verify the person's identity.

The feds expect financial institutions to be in full compliance by Oct. 1. Failure to comply could result in criminal prosecution and multimillion-dollar fines. Prosecutors in New York, using the Patriot Act's provision to report suspicious activity, already slapped a $4 million fine on Broadway Bank for "failing to maintain a legally required anti-money-laundering program."

But the punchline is at the end:

Given the system's wealth of intelligence, banks are already looking to use their anti-money-laundering software to mine customer data for marketing purposes and enhance fraud-protection services.

[via In_Defense_of_Freedom mailing list]

From the Associated Press:

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (May 21) - An explosion was reported in a mail room at the Yale University law school, a city spokesman said.

James Foye, a spokesman for Mayor John DeStefano, said he had no immediate information about any injuries.

The FBI in New Haven said members of the agency's terrorism task force were sent to the scene. Smoke could be seen rising from downtown.

The incident came as the nation was on elevated alert for possible terrorist attacks and several hours after President Bush - a Yale alumnus - visited the state to speak at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduation ceremony in New London.

The FBI ran over Dr. Steven Hatfill's foot Saturday during their around the clock surveillance of him in connection with the Anthrax investigation. Here's the stunner: Hatfill got a ticket for "walking to create hazard."

According to Hatfill's spokesperson,

Hatfill and his girlfriend were driving to the Georgetown section of Washington while being followed by several vehicles. A green sport utility vehicle was following especially closely, Clawson said.

Shortly before 4:30 p.m., Hatfill's car pulled into a parking spot on the street and Hatfill got out with a camera to take photos of those trailing him. Hatfill told officers the driver of the green SUV "had been recording his movements all day when he decided to take a picture back," according to the police report.

The driver of the green SUV then drove off, striking Hatfill, the reports said. Hatfill did not seek hospital treatment and refused attention from paramedics at the scene. Washington police issued the ticket to Hatfill for walking in the street while attempting to take the photo.

[link via Instapundit.]