U.S. Uses Terror Law to Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling
|
ASHINGTON,
Sept. 27 — The Bush administration, which calls the USA Patriot Act
perhaps its most essential tool in fighting terrorists, has begun using
the law with increasing frequency in many criminal investigations that
have little or no connection to terrorism.
Published: September 28, 2003
(Page 2 of 2)
Customs officials say they have used their expanded authority to open at least nine investigations into Latin American officials suspected of laundering money in the United States, and to seize millions of dollars from overseas bank accounts in many cases unrelated to terrorism.
In one instance, agents citing the new law seized $1.7 million from United States bank accounts that were linked to a former Illinois investor who fled to Belize after he was accused of bilking clients out of millions, federal officials said.
Publicly, Attorney General John Ashcroft and senior Justice Department officials have portrayed their expanded power almost exclusively as a means of fighting terrorists, with little or no mention of other criminal uses.
"We have used these tools to prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil," Mr. Ashcroft said last month in a speech in Washington, one of more than two dozen he has given in defense of the law, which has come under growing attack. "We have used these tools to save innocent American lives."
Internally, however, Justice Department officials have emphasized a much broader mandate.
A guide to a Justice Department employee seminar last year on financial crimes, for instance, said: "We all know that the USA Patriot Act provided weapons for the war on terrorism. But do you know how it affects the war on crime as well?"
Elliot Mincberg, legal director for People for the American Way, a liberal group that has been critical of Mr. Ashcroft, said the Justice Department's public assertions had struck him as misleading and perhaps dishonest.
"What the Justice Department has really done," he said, "is to get things put into the law that have been on prosecutors' wish lists for years. They've used terrorism as a guise to expand law enforcement powers in areas that are totally unrelated to terrorism."
A study in January by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that while the number of terrorism investigations at the Justice Department soared after the Sept. 11 attacks, 75 percent of the convictions that the department classified as "international terrorism" were wrongly labeled. Many dealt with more common crimes like document forgery.
The terrorism law has already drawn sharp opposition from those who believe it gives the government too much power to intrude on people's privacy in pursuit of terrorists.
Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "Once the American public understands that many of the powers granted to the federal government apply to much more than just terrorism, I think the opposition will gain momentum."
Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said members of Congress expected some of the new powers granted to law enforcement to be used for nonterrorism investigations. But he said the Justice Department's secrecy and lack of cooperation in putting the legislation into effect made him question whether "the government is taking shortcuts around the criminal laws" by invoking intelligence powers — with differing standards of evidence — to conduct surveillance operations and demand access to records.
"We did not intend for the government to shed the traditional tools of criminal investigation, such as grand jury subpoenas governed by well-established precedent and wiretaps strictly monitored" by federal judges, he said.
Justice Department officials say such criticism has not deterred them. "There are many provisions in the Patriot Act that can be used in the general criminal law," Mark Corallo, a department spokesman, said. "And I think any reasonable person would agree that we have an obligation to do everything we can to protect the lives and liberties of Americans from attack, whether it's from terrorists or garden-variety criminals."
