WASHINGTON: One tactic coming to light on what was used in the "global war on terror" by the Bush administration included having the US Federal Bureau of Investigation secretly target some mosques with undercover agents.
But The New York Times reported yesterday that the scope of the Bush administration's investigations could target any American.
Regarding the mosques, about a year ago the FBI launched an operation to recruit informants to gather information on Muslims who attend religious ceremonies at mosques, Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in California said Monday.
The Islamic Center of Irvine, Ca., has became the most publicized mosque in California due to a recent discovery that the FBI sent an informant there to spy and collect evidence of jihadist rhetoric and other allegedly extremist acts by an individual who attended prayers there.
Former FBI agents, however, have said that although the law places almost no constraints on the use of informants, the agency takes sending an informant into a mosque very seriously and imposes a higher threshold for such requests.
Agents would have to have credible and specific information about criminal activity inside a mosque or being committed by a mosque member before sending a plant in, said Steven Pomerantz, former assistant director and chief of counterterrorism for the FBI.
But it is not only Muslims in the US who are feeling targeted.
In an article outlining several memos from the Bush Administration, the New York Times wrote Tuesday: "The president could use the nation's military within the United States to combat terrorism suspects and conduct raids without obtaining search warrants."
The memos were disclosed publicly for the first time on Monday by the Obama Justice Department in what the Obama administration portrayed as a step toward greater transparency. They noted that the president "could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance's from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants," said The New York Times.
The long-secret legal document from 2001 further noted that the Bush administration claimed the military could search and seize terror suspects in the United States without warrants.
The legal memo was written about a month after the Sept. 11 terror attacks. It says constitutional protections against unlawful search and seizure would not apply to terror suspects in the US, as long as the president or another high official authorized the action.
Even after the Bush administration rescinded that legal analysis, the Justice Department refused to release its contents, prompting a standoff with congressional Democrats.
The memo was one of nine released on Monday by the Obama administration.
Another memo showed that within two weeks of Sept. 11 the administration was contemplating ways to use wiretaps without getting warrants.
The author of the search and seizure memo, John Yoo, wrote that the president could treat terrorist suspects in the United States like an invading foreign army. For instance, he said, the military would not have to get a warrant to storm a building to prevent terrorists from detonating a bomb.
Yoo also suggested that the government could put new restrictions on the press and speech, without spelling out what those might be.
"First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully," Yoo wrote, adding later: "The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically."
While they were once important legal pillars of the US fight against Al-Qaida, some of the memos were withdrawn in the final days of the Bush administration.
In one of his first official acts as president, Barack Obama also signed an order negating the memos' claims until his administration could conduct a thorough review.
In a speech Monday, Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder said that too often in the past decade the fight against terrorism has been put in opposition to "our tradition of civil liberties."
That "has done us more harm than good," he declared. "I've often said that the test of a great nation is whether it will adhere to its core values not only when it is easy but when it is hard."
