Ashcroft OKs Over 170 'Emergency' Searches

The Justice Department has stepped up use of a secretive process that enables the attorney general to personally authorize electronic surveillance and physical searches of suspected terrorists, spies and other national-security threats without immediate court oversight.

Attorney General John Ashcroft told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday that he had authorized more than 170 such "emergency" searches since the Sept. 11 attacks-- more than triple the 47 emergency searches that have been authorized by other attorneys general in the last 20 years.

A 1978 law enables the FBI and other investigators to conduct intelligence operations under the supervision of a super-secret federal tribunal known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Over the years, the number of such "FISA" applications has grown-- and civil liberties' groups and defense lawyers have complained that the law has become a tool to dilute suspects' constitutional rights.

Now, Justice Department officials are pushing the law's limits even further. Since Sept. 11, officials have seized on a provision that allows them to launch emergency searches signed only by the attorney general. The department must still convince the FISA court that the search is justified-- but officials have 72 hours from the time the search is launched, and such requests are almost always granted.

Ashcroft's tally was more fuel for critics of the law who contend that it already operates in the shadows.

"That is a startling increase," said Timothy Edgar, a legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Edgar and others are concerned that law-enforcement officials are pursuing run-of-the-mill criminal cases under the guise of national security. The trouble, they say, is that defendants' customary Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches don't apply in the FISA courts. Others point to the fact that the number of search warrants obtained by federal investigators in intelligence cases in recent years has started to outstrip the number in criminal cases.

The process "is getting attenuated from any kind of effective judicial oversight," said Joshua Dratel, a New York lawyer who helped represent the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in a challenge to the FISA law last year. "The question now becomes, 'How much can a court tolerate before it reigns this in?' "

Currently, the Justice Department is only required to report publicly how many FISA search applications it pursues annually, and how many are approved. Several members of Congress have introduced legislation that would expand the reporting requirements-- to detail the number of searches of U.S. citizens, for instance.

"The bare numbers cry out for further scrutiny," said James X. Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington civil-liberties' group.

Separately, Ashcroft announced the unsealing of charges in a New York City federal court against two Yemeni citizens, Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad and Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed. Ashcroft said the men stand accused of conspiring to provide material support to the al-Qaida and Hamas terrorist groups through a worldwide fund-raising operation that netted Osama bin Laden $20 million.

According to Ashcroft, a portion of the funds came from the Al Farouq mosque in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, a one-time gathering place for Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman

and other men later convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The men were arrested Jan. 10 in a sting operation in Frankfurt, Germany; the United States is seeking their extradition. A Justice Department spokesman said the announcement of the arrests was delayed for "operational reasons."