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Pentagon Expanding Its Domestic Surveillance Activity

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world. The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage. The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction. The proposals, and other Pentagon steps aimed at improving its ability to analyze counterterrorism intelligence collected inside the United States, have drawn complaints from civil liberties advocates and a few members of Congress, who say the Defense Department's push into domestic collection is proceeding with little scrutiny by the Congress or the public....

Administration heads off legal showdown over executive powers

The Justice Department's decision to indict Jose Padilla is the latest example of how the Bush administration short-circuits any legal review of the expansive powers it has claimed in the war on terror, legal experts said Tuesday. In the Padilla case, the administration wanted to prevent a showdown in the Supreme Court over whether the president legally can hold a U.S. citizen indefinitely without criminal charges by declaring him an enemy combatant. The Justice Department faced a Monday deadline for filing an argument urging the Supreme Court not to review the Padilla case. Many legal experts expected the court to take the case and resolve the issue of presidential authority. One staunch defender of the administration said the dramatic shift suggested that the Justice Department may have lost confidence in its legal arguments in the enemy combatant case. "I think this is a sign of fear that they would lose," said David Rivkin, who has worked in the Justice Department for Republican administrations. "But there is no way the Supreme Court was going to order the release of someone like Padilla." The Bush administration has taken similar actions in cases that seemed likely to resolve issues of the president's authority. Last year, in a related case, the Supreme Court ruled that while the president has the authority to hold citizens as enemy combatants, it said that there needed to be more due process in the system and indicated that some restrictions on the president's authority were possible. It ordered a lower court to consider the case anew. But when lower courts were about to examine the case of Yaser Hamdi - who had grown up in Saudi Arabia but had been born in the United States and was being held in a Navy brig - the military released him and allowed him to return to Saudi Arabia rather than face a challenge in court....

In Terror Cases, Administration Sets Own Rules

When Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales announced last week that Jose Padilla would be transferred to the federal justice system from military detention, he said almost nothing about the standards the administration used in deciding whether to charge terrorism suspects like Mr. Padilla with crimes or to hold them in military facilities as enemy combatants. "We take each individual, each case, case by case," Mr. Gonzales said. The upshot of that approach, underscored by the decision in Mr. Padilla's case, is that no one outside the administration knows just how the determination is made whether to handle a terror suspect as an enemy combatant or as a common criminal, to hold him indefinitely without charges in a military facility or to charge him in court. Indeed, citing the need to combat terrorism, the administration has argued, with varying degrees of success, that judges should have essentially no role in reviewing its decisions. The change in Mr. Padilla's status, just days before the government's legal papers were due in his appeal to the Supreme Court, suggested to many legal observers that the administration wanted to keep the court out of the case. "The position of the executive branch," said Eric M. Freedman, a law professor at Hofstra University who has consulted with lawyers for several detainees, "is that it can be judge, jury and executioner." The government says a secret and unilateral decision-making process is necessary because of the nature of the evidence it deals with. Officials described the approach as a practical one that weighs a mix of often-sensitive factors....

Privacy laws disarming gun dealer database

An Alabama man with a history of mental illness killed two police officers with a rifle he bought on Christmas Eve. In suburban New York, a schizophrenic walked into a church during Mass and fatally shot a priest and a parishioner. Neither of their names was in a database that licensed gun dealers must check before making sales -- even though federal law prohibits the mentally ill from buying guns. Most states have privacy laws barring such information from being shared with law enforcement. Legislation pending in Congress that has bipartisan support seeks to get more of the disqualifying records in the database. Similar measures, opposed by some advocates for the mentally ill and gun-rights groups, did not pass Congress in 2002 and 2004. The FBI, which maintains the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), has not taken a position on the bill, but the bureau is blunt about what adding names to its database would do. "The availability of this information will save lives," the FBI said in a recent report. Legislation sponsored by Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, New York Democrat, says millions of records are either missing or incomplete. "The computer is only as good as the information you put in it," she said....

Another's habit up your nose

At my local drugstore, shelves of cold and allergy medicine have been replaced by merchandise cards hanging from metal rods. If I want to buy one of these remedies, I have to take the corresponding card to the pharmacist's counter, wait in line, show my ID and add my name to a register. This procedure, required by an "emergency order" from Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, is supposed to prevent me from using the pseudoephedrine in products such as Sudafed and Dayquil to cook up a batch of methamphetamine in my garage. If you're not lucky enough to live in a state with similar restrictions, fear not: Under the Combat Meth Act, which Congress is expected to pass soon, you too can be treated like a criminal the next time you have nasal congestion, thereby doing your part to help achieve a drug-free society. "This legislation is a dagger at the heart of meth manufacturing in America," says Missouri Republican Sen. Jim Talent, the bill's co-sponsor with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat. "If you can't get pseudoephedrine, you can't make meth." According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, some 80 percent of the illicit meth consumed in the United States comes from large-scale Mexican traffickers, who buy their pseudoephedrine in bulk rather than a couple of boxes at a time from CVS. Restricting retail access to pseudoephedrine may shift production from small local labs and toward the big-time meth makers who already account for most of the supply, but it's unlikely to affect consumption noticeably....