Monday, November 22, 2004
The case of the Terrorist who wasn't and the Administration who painted him out to be one
This guy wasn't a terrorist, it still didn't stop Ashcroft from trying everthing in the book to make him into one.
5000 arrests 0 convictions!
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This guy wasn't a terrorist, it still didn't stop Ashcroft from trying everthing in the book to make him into one.
"This case really stood the normal order of business on its head," said al-Hussayen's lawyer, David Nevin. "The typical situation would be a crime gets committed and you go and find the people you think committed it. In this situation they instead focused on people they were suspicious of and set about trying to prove they had indeed committed a crime."
Authorities were suspicious enough to want to tap al-Hussayen's phones, but Nevin said they didn't have the required "probable cause" to believe a crime had been committed and therefore couldn't get a typical search warrant.
To get around that Fourth Amendment requirement, they turned instead to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created in the 1970s so government could spy on spies. That court, which is conducted in secret, doesn't have the strict "probable cause" requirement. And under the Patriot Act, its jurisdiction was expanded, and it has increasingly been used in cases that don't involve spies.
In spring 2002, the court granted a government request to record all of al-Hussayen's phone calls and e-mail. All told, some 20,000 e-mails and 9,000 phone calls were captured over the course of about a year.
In addition to the wiretaps, as many as 20 local, state and federal law-enforcement officers began tailing al-Hussayen, according to his lawyer, recording his daily activities around campus and elsewhere.
Essentially, the government vacuumed every corner of al-Hussayen's life looking for crumbs of terrorist activity. After nearly a year of investigating, the FBI was ready to pounce.
5000 arrests 0 convictions!
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