Posted on 10/7/2002, 1:53:56 PM by Lightnin
FBI Has Hundreds Of Young Muslims Under Surveillance
By PHILIP SHENON and DAVID JOHNSTON The New York Times
Published: Oct 7, 2002
WASHINGTON - The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to make an open book of the lives of hundreds of mostly young, mostly Muslim men in the United States in the belief that al-Qaida-trained terrorists remain in this country, awaiting instructions to attack.
Senior law enforcement officials say the surveillance campaign is being carried out by every major FBI office in the country and involves 24-hour monitoring of the suspects' telephone calls, e-mail messages and Internet use, as well as scrutiny of their credit-card charges, their travel and their visits to neighborhood gathering places, including mosques.
The campaign, which has also involved efforts to recruit the suspects' friends and family members as government informers, has raised alarm from civil liberties groups and some Arab-American and Muslim leaders. The men are suspected of ties to al-Qaida or other groups affiliated with Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.
Law enforcement officials say the surveillance program has provided vital evidence to support a string of arrests and indictments across the country since late summer - in western New York, in Detroit, in Seattle and, on Friday, in Portland, Ore. - of Americans and others accused of conspiring to assist al-Qaida.
Still, the FBI has acknowledged it has no evidence of any imminent terrorist threat posed by the so-called sleeper cells connected to al-Qaida. Federal law enforcement officials say there is no sign of a terrorist cell operating on American soil that resembles anything like the committed, trained team of suicide hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks.
They concede the domestic threat posed by al-Qaida cells may at times have been overstated, especially after the arrest in May of Jose Padilla. Justice Department officials have backed away from their initial suggestion that they had compelling evidence linking him to a plot to build an explosive radiological device known as a dirty bomb.
Dozens Could Be In Sleeper Cells
Still, law enforcement officials say they are convinced at least several dozen people now under FBI surveillance in the United States - with different degrees of terrorist training, and with varying degrees of loyalty to al-Qaida - would take part in an attack if ordered, and that they represent a clear threat.
``If you look at the number of people who went through the al-Qaida training camps, and there are literally thousands who did, it stands to reason that a certain percentage of them are in this country,'' said John E. Bell Jr., who retired last summer as the special agent in charge of the FBI's field office in Detroit. Much of the surveillance campaign is centered on Detroit, the region home to the nation's largest population of people of Arab descent.
Within the Bush administration, there has been a fractious, mostly unpublicized debate over how many sleeper agents of al-Qaida might be in the United States, and the amount of resources law enforcement agencies should devote to their effort to ferret them out.
With information gathered from abandoned al-Qaida hideouts in Afghanistan and Pakistan and from captured terrorists, the officials have tried to compile the names of everyone who attended the camps. So far, the officials say, they have been able to identify and track down several hundred people around the world.
Most Loyalists Hapless Malcontents
Officials say when they have detected al-Qaida loyalists in the United States, they tended to be hapless malcontents, not disciplined terrorists.
``They are hangers-on and wanna-be terrorists for the most part,'' said one official, adding, in reference to the leader of the Sept. 11 plot, ``Mohammed Atta wouldn't have asked most of these guys to take out his trash.''
But other senior officials emphasized they were reluctant to dismiss the threat posed by these suspects, in part because they view acts like bombings as relatively easy to carry out - even by unskilled groups operating without much money or leadership.
Some Arab-American and Muslim groups have complained the intense FBI surveillance campaign, which they insist has been evident for months, has unfairly left the perception that all young men of Arab descent or the Muslim faith have some connection to terrorism.
``Young Arab men, in particular, are being treated as suspicious, possibly dangerous,''said Hussein Ibish, communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. ``I think there have been some really egregious instances of abuse.''
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Best news I've heard in some time...
Now this is a comforting thought. The FBI had those 9/11 terrorists under surveillance while they were in flight schools, too.
Agreed. Plus leap year...... :)
It would be much cheaper to export them, or better yet...
Now there's a creative thought!
my idea of a good headline
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