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Using The Patriot Act To Target Patriots
By Cliff Kincaid
(08/11/2004)
John Kerry voted
for the anti-terrorist law, the USA Patriot Act, but now wants to change
it and replace Attorney General John Ashcroft with someone “who actually
upholds the Constitution of the United States.” However, the liberal
critics never cite alleged “abuses” under the law involving the anthrax
investigation, which has been driven by Kerry’s Democratic colleagues,
Senators Patrick Leahy and Thomas Daschle.
The Patriot Act has
been used to obtain search warrants against doctors and scientists who had
been warning about the threat of bioterrorism in the U.S. The most
prominent such cases are Dr. Steven Hatfill and now Dr. Kenneth Berry. No
evidence has been produced against either man, but the highly publicized
raids on their homes—and the media feeding frenzy—give the fleeting
impression that the Bureau is making progress.
Yet it appears that
Hatfill and Berry have become FBI targets primarily because they warned
America about terrorism that the FBI and the CIA didn’t prevent.
The same FBI that falsely implicated security guard Richard Jewell
in the Olympic Park bombing has made several mistakes in the anthrax case.
The first mistake was assuming that Leahy and Daschle received anthrax
letters because they were liberals. Leahy’s influential chief of staff,
who pushed this theory, was quoted in Marilyn Thompson’s book on the case
as saying the anthrax killer was a “right-wing zealot.” Daschle offered
his opinion that the perpetrator probably had a U.S. military background.
This fit an FBI profile of the alleged perpetrator. Barbara Hatch
Rosenberg, a leading advocate of this view, met with the FBI and Leahy’s
staff and pointed them toward Hatfill, a former U.S. government scientist.
Her views were echoed by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and
other media.
Under media assault, Hatfill was labeled a “person of
interest” by Ashcroft. After losing several jobs because of government and
media scrutiny, he has filed suit against the Justice Department and
Kristof and the Times.
The second key FBI mistake was thinking
that the Ames strain of anthrax, used in U.S. labs and found in the
letters, was not available to foreign terrorists.
These mistakes
explain why the Justice Department, in a 29-page report on the Patriot
Act, cited dozens of cases in which the law has been beneficial but had
only one anthrax-related “success” story. It said that investigators
“saved valuable time” by using the Patriot Act to apply for a search
warrant for American Media, Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida, the employer of
the first anthrax victim.
The reference to “saving valuable time”
ignores the fact that it took the FBI nearly a year after the attacks to
start a crime-scene investigation of the American Media building. The
decontamination of the building only started this July.
Former CIA
Director James Woolsey says it is time to change the FBI assumption that
the anthrax attacks were perpetrated by “a crazed solitary American
microbiologist operating out of a cave” in the U.S.
Such a theory,
he pointed out at a June symposium at the American Enterprise Institute,
means that the perpetrator was either “a very quick crazed solitary
microbiologist” or “a very lucky crazed solitary microbiologist,” because
he was ready to mail his anthrax letters shortly after al Qaeda hit the
U.S. on 9/11.
According to the FBI theory, this crazed scientist
even wrote like an Islamic radical, putting references to “Death to
Israel” and praise for Allah on the letters, only as a diversion.
Woolsey noted the evidence that in the summer before 9/11,
hijacker Muhammad Atta took an associate, who turned out to be one of the
other hijackers, in for medical treatment in Florida, near the first
anthrax attacks and near where they lived. He had a black lesion on his
leg that a doctor and experts say was anthrax-related. Woolsey said, “That
raises some interesting questions which again I would suggest we should
pursue rather than bury.”
Ignoring the al-Qaeda connection to the
anthrax attacks, the FBI’s targeting of Berry continues the questionable
behavior evident in the Hatfill case. As some of their agents wore
protective suits to dramatically enter one of Berry’s homes, the FBI was
telling local officials there was no danger to public health. It looked
like another big show and photo opportunity, similar to what occurred when
the FBI raided Hatfill’s home.
Journalists should be investigating
how the Bureau obtained search warrants in the Berry case and what, if
any, “evidence” is contained in them. There may be a story here about real
abuses of the USA Patriot Act and why the FBI has been unable to solve
this nearly three-year-old case.
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Cliff Kincaid is President of
America’s Survival and contributing editor of the AIM Report. A longtime
investigative reporter and media critic, he currently specializes in
coverage of the U.N. and other global institutions. Kincaid helps write
and broadcast Accuracy In Media’s "Media Monitor" radio
commentaries.
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