Plan to Question 5,000 Raises Issue of Profiling
by Thomas Farragher and Kevin Cullen
November 15, 2001
The Justice Department's plan to vastly widen the scope of an investigation that so far has yielded no direct link to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is being assailed by civil libertarians and other critics as wanton racial profiling that may scare away people who might be able to help.
''The kind of broad net-casting that was done right after Sept. 11 may have been excusable, but at this point there has to be a better way of conducting this investigation,'' said James Zogby, executive director of the Arab American Institute, which advocates on public policy for Americans of Arabic descent. ''I don't want to give up our freedoms.''
A fishing expedition
Edith Flynn
professor at Northeastern University who is a specialist on terrorism
The Justice Department, which has arrested or detained more than 1,000 people under unusual secrecy, says it has compiled a list of at least 5,000 men who it believes might have information about the attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
''These individuals are not targets, but part of a pool of individuals who may be able to help us in some way,'' said Russ Bergeron, a spokesman for the US Immigration and Naturalization Service. ''It's voluntary. It's done all the time in other investigations. It's probably never been done on this scale or with this level of visibility.''
The people sought for questioning are men, ages 18 to 33, who have entered the United States legally on nonimmigrant visas after Jan. 1, 2000, from a list of countries from which known operatives of Osama bin Laden have entered the United States.
A person's refusal to answer questions will be noted and may prompt a return visit from federal investigators, according to a Democratic Senate source familiar with the Justice Department guidelines.
''This notion that all people of this category are red flags for scrutiny just stigmatizes young Arab men,'' said Hussein Ibish, spokesman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Washington. ''It suggests that we're starting to rely increasingly heavily on a crude type of stereotyping in our police work. And it encourages the public to find people of this description suspicious.''
US Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the Senate's immigration subcommittee, said investigators need to strike a balance between an aggressive pursuit of terrorists and a vigilant protection of constitutional rights.
''Individuals who are Muslims or Arabs must be treated fairly,'' Kennedy said yesterday in a statement. ''Congress needs to monitor this situation closely.''
But Attorney General John Ashcroft has said the unconventional warfare triggered by the Sept. 11 attacks calls for unconventional law enforcement methods. Ashcroft invoked the methods used 40 years ago by Kennedy's brother, former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
''The Justice Department of Robert F. Kennedy, it was said, would arrest a mobster for spitting on a sidewalk, if it would help in the fight against organized crime,'' Ashcroft told a group of federal prosecutors on Tuesday. ''In the war on terror, it is our policy ... to be equally aggressive in protecting American citizens.''
Associate US Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr., coordinator of the Boston-based antiterrorism task force headed by US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan and Charles Prouty, special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, was in Washington to attend the conference at which Ashcroft outlined his intelligence-gathering plan.
Federal officials in Boston yesterday declined to comment on the Ashcroft plan, saying they were awaiting a briefing from Leone. Sullivan and Prouty are expected to devise the logistics for questioning men on the list who live in the Boston area, a number of whom are thought to be students at area universities.
The new list of 5,000 names is the successor to a so-called watch list of some 200 names distributed to all law enforcement agencies in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. That watch list of individuals wanted for questioning was constantly revised, and more than doubled in size at one point. But FBI officials in Boston, New York, and Washington said they were no longer using it. Once a fixture on the sixth-floor office of the antiterrorism task force across from Boston City Hall, the watch list is no longer posted.
''It's not going to be updated,'' one FBI agent said of the list. ''It's not used anymore.''
Edith Flynn, a professor at Northeastern University who is a specialist on terrorism, said there was no precedent for a list of 5,000 foreigners and she worries about its effectiveness as a weapon against terrorism. While the Justice Department has said the names have been drawn from a list of men who have entered the US legally since 2000, those who assisted the Sept. 11 hijackers were probably in the United States before that date, Flynn said.
''I think [Al Qaeda] cell members were inserted into this country a long time ago, maybe as far back as 1993,'' she said. ''Looking at it from the government's side, it might corral some very recent recruits, but I would think that the vast majority of people being questioned will be innocent.''
Flynn described the tactic as ''a fishing expedition'' that suggested how little hard evidence the authorities have to proceed with in their attempts to prevent another terrorist attack. She also questioned if it will work, ''unless you have well-schooled questioners who could detect untruthfulness. Because of the inherent cultural differences, I really wonder how effective it will be.''
But the Justice Department's aggressiveness will be welcomed by most Americans, who want the government to follow every lead possible to find out who is responsible for the worst act of terrorism ever, said US Representative Lamar S. Smith, a Texas Republican.
''My guess is that 99 percent of the people will not object because they, too, will want to prevent terrorist acts,'' said Smith, a former chairman of the House immigration subcommittee. ''These are unusual times and that's why you see unusual actions taken by law enforcement officials.''
Still, immigration lawyers and civil liberty groups, who emphasized that they favor a thorough investigation, worried that the Justice Department's net is so broad it will inevitably ensnare men who are afraid to refuse to speak to federal officials out of fear of legal consequences.
''It is inherently intimidating for an individual, especially one who has just arrived in this country, to be questioned by the FBI,'' said Lucas Guttentag, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's immigration rights project. ''It is not at all clear what the consequences of not talking to them would be, and whether the next knock on the door would come from the immigration service.''
But those who say the nation is not doing enough to patrol its borders and should be more aggressive in keeping track of US immigrants wondered yesterday why anyone would oppose the Justice Department plan.
''I didn't think anybody was going to object to it,'' said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington group favoring immigration control. ''It's implausible to label it racial profiling. They're looking for people who were accomplices or acquaintances of 19 Arab hijackers. Those people are disproportionately going to be from the Middle East. That's just the way it is.''