FLE

Homeland Security opening private mail

In the 50 years that Grant Goodman has known and corresponded with a colleague in the Philippines he never had any reason to suspect that their friendship was anything but spectacularly ordinary. But now he believes that the relationship has somehow sparked the interest of the Department of Homeland Security and led the agency to place him under surveillance. Last month Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words “by Border Protection” and carrying the official Homeland Security seal. “I had no idea (Homeland Security) would open personal letters,” Goodman told MSNBC.com in a phone interview. “That’s why I alerted the media. I thought it should be known publicly that this is going on,” he said. The letter comes from a retired Filipino history professor; Goodman declined to identify her. And although the Philippines is on the U.S. government’s radar screen as a potential spawning ground for Muslim-related terrorism, Goodman said his friend is a devout Catholic and not given to supporting such causes. A spokesman for the Customs and Border Protection division said he couldn’t speak directly to Goodman’s case but acknowledged that the agency can, will and does open mail coming to U.S. citizens that originates from a foreign country whenever it’s deemed necessary....


Inquiry Says F.B.I. Erred in Implicating Man in Attack

Overconfidence in its own fingerprint-identification technology and sloppy paperwork contributed to the F.B.I.'s wrongly implicating a Portland, Ore., lawyer in the deadly 2004 Madrid train bombing, a Justice Department investigation said Friday. But the investigation, by the department's inspector general's office, said there had been no misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and no abuse of the antiterrorism USA Patriot Act in the case of the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield. Mr. Mayfield was jailed for two weeks in May 2004 as a material witness before he was cleared. Although Mr. Mayfield's Islamic faith was not a factor in the initial stages of the bombing investigation, when F.B.I. technicians erroneously concluded that a print found on a plastic bag near the Madrid attack scene matched one of Mr. Mayfield's, it may have slowed his ultimate exoneration, the Justice Department inquiry found. The inspector general said the chain of errors that led to Mr. Mayfield's jailing was in part because of the "unusual similarity" between Mr. Mayfield's fingerprints and those found at the bomb site on March 11, 2004....

Head of Federal Air Marshal Service resigns

The head of the Federal Air Marshal Service, Thomas Quinn, is leaving office, effective Feb. 3, MSNBC.com has learned. Quinn announced his plans to retire in an internal agency e-mail late Thursday; he gave no reason for his resignation, or any indication of what he plans to do after leaving the agency. "I am proud of the men and women of the FAMS and salute you for your dedication and performance in fulfilling our mission," Quinn, 59, says in the e-mail, obtained by MSNBC.com. "I leave knowing that the Federal Air Marshal Service is an effective, competent federal law enforcement organization that will continue to be an important contributor to the security of the homeland." Quinn, a former Secret Service agent, came out of retirement to head up the moribund air marshal corps in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The air marshal program, started in the 1970s after a rash of airline hijackings, had dwindled in scope and importance. When 9/11 hit, there were only 33 air marshals on the payroll. Quinn oversaw the often rocky transition of the newly formed Federal Air Marshal Service as it rapidly hired and trained "thousands" of new air marshals to meet a congressional deadline of having a functioning stand-alone agency by July 2002. The exact number of air marshals is classified....

FISA Gotcha!

What if President Bush had actually gone to the court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act? Imagine if, instead of relying on his own constitutional authority, he had done the thing his detractors now insist he should have done. That is, what if he had actually gone to the FISA court and requested authorization to eavesdrop on Americans suspected of helping al Qaeda wage its terrorist war against the United States? Now, let's suppose the same brave, anonymous "whistleblowers" — in the same sort of flagrant violation of federal law and of the oath of confidentiality they gave to be trusted with access to the nation's most sensitive information — had instead leaked that program. Let's suppose they had gone to James Risen of the New York Times and told him not about warrantless wiretapping but about a surge in eavesdropping under judicial imprimatur. Would that FISA compliance have made it all okay? Do you really think there would have been no scandal? Or, in this climate that it has so tirelessly labored to create, do you think the Times would simply have weaved a different scandal?....


Congress is partly to blame for Bush's warrantless wiretaps

Congress is in an uproar over the Bush administration's use of warrantless wiretaps in the United States against American citizens. And well it might be. But to find the culprit, Congress has only to look in a mirror. The sad truth is that Congress does not want to exercise effective oversight of intelligence activities. President Bush, for his part, says Congress implicitly authorized eavesdropping and other searches without a warrant when it authorized the president to respond to 9/11. The president has also asserted his inherent power under the Constitution to wiretap without congressional authorization, either implied or explicit. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has admitted that the administration backed off seeking congressional authority because of advice from Capitol Hill that it would be too difficult to pass. So, if you don't think you can get it, say you don't need it. Mr. Bush is not the first president to claim an inherent power in matters of national security. The last one before Bush was his immediate predecessor, Bill Clinton, who claimed it in connection with the sale of secrets by CIA employee Aldrich Ames. The issue is not political; it is institutional. There is a further institutional issue between the executive and legislative branches: conflicting views of what is involved in consultation between them. Traditionally, the executive branch has thought it has consulted Congress when in fact it has done no more than inform Congress. Congress, on the other hand, does not think it has been consulted unless there has been discussion as to what to do about a given problem....

Terrorism and Probable Cause

In August 2001, instructors at a flight school in Minneapolis became suspicious of Zacharias Moussaoui, a French national of Moroccan descent who want to fly airplanes but didn't want to learn how to land them. They tipped off the FBI, which arrested Moussaoui on an immigration violation. Among Moussaoui's possessions was a computer. Minneapolis agents wanted to go into the hard drive to check for contacts or other information. Doing so, however, required that FBI headquarters in Washington apply for a search warrant before a federal judge. Schooled in the latest niceties of contemporary law enforcement, the Washington office responded that there was no "probable cause" for conducting a search. "All you've got is a guy with an expired visa who's taking flight lessons," they said. "Where's the crime?" The Minneapolis office responded that it would be good to find out exactly what was going on before Moussaoui "took an airplane and flew it into the World Trade Center." Their pleas had no impact. Only after September 11th did FBI officials finally look into Moussaoui's computer, where they found information linking him to both the Hamburg cell that planned the attack and to its leader, Mohammed Atta....