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    --===U.S. Uses Terror Law to Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling===--



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-==U.S. Uses Terror Law to Pursue Crimes From Drugs to Swindling==-
 _By ERIC LICHTBLAU_






[W] 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.

The government is using its expanded authority under the far-reaching law to
investigate suspected drug traffickers, white-collar criminals, blackmailers,
child pornographers, money launderers, spies and even corrupt foreign leaders,
federal officials said.

Justice Department officials say they are simply using all the tools now
available to them to pursue criminals — terrorists or otherwise. But critics
of the administration's antiterrorism tactics assert that such use of the law
is evidence the administration is using terrorism as a guise to pursue a
broader law enforcement agenda.

Justice Department officials point out that they have employed their newfound
powers in many instances against suspected terrorists. With the new law
breaking down the wall between intelligence and criminal investigations, the
Justice Department in February was able to bring terrorism-related charges
against a Florida professor, for example, and it has used its expanded
surveillance powers to move against several suspected terrorist cells.

But a new Justice Department report, given to members of Congress this month,
also cites more than a dozen cases that are not directly related to terrorism
in which federal authorities have used their expanded power to investigate
individuals, initiate wiretaps and other surveillance, or seize millions in
tainted assets.

For instance, the ability to secure nationwide warrants to obtain e-mail and
electronic evidence "has proved invaluable in several sensitive nonterrorism
investigations," including the tracking of an unidentified fugitive and an
investigation into a computer hacker who stole a company's trade secrets, the
report said.

Justice Department officials said the cases cited in the report represent only
a small sampling of the many hundreds of nonterrorism cases pursued under the
law.

The authorities have also used toughened penalties under the law to press
charges against a lovesick 20-year-old woman from Orange County, Calif., who
planted threatening notes aboard a Hawaii-bound cruise ship she was traveling
on with her family in May. The woman, who said she made the threats to try to
return home to her boyfriend, was sentenced this week to two years in federal
prison because of a provision in the Patriot Act on the threat of terrorism
against mass transportation systems.

And officials said they had used their expanded authority to track private
Internet communications in order to investigate a major drug distributor, a
four-time killer, an identity thief and a fugitive who fled on the eve of
trial by using a fake passport.

In one case, an e-mail provider disclosed information that allowed federal
authorities to apprehend two suspects who had threatened to kill executives at
a foreign corporation unless they were paid a hefty ransom, officials said.
Previously, they said, gray areas in the law made it difficult to get such
global Internet and computer data.

The law passed by Congress just five weeks after the terror attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, has proved a particularly powerful tool in pursuing financial
crimes.

Officials with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement have seen a
sharp spike in investigations as a result of their expanded powers, officials
said in interviews.

A senior official said investigators in the last two years had seized about
$35 million at American borders in undeclared cash, checks and currency being
smuggled out of the country. That was a significant increase over the past few
years, the official said. While the authorities say they suspect that large
amounts of the smuggled cash may have been intended to finance Middle Eastern
terrorists, much of it involved drug smuggling, corporate fraud and other
crimes not directly related to terrorism.

The terrorism law allows the authorities to investigate cash smuggling cases
more aggressively and to seek stiffer penalties by elevating them from what
had been mere reporting failures.

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."

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