The shear depravity and total irresponsibility of this story just floors me. The reporter and his sources need to be arrested.
Posted 12/22/05
By David E. Kaplan
In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.
My God their looking for Nuclear weapons and material in areas with people known to be hostile to us. I guess we should look where there is a large Swedish population. Besides gee now do you think if they were smuggling this material into our cities with this information that we can scan for it, do ya think they might shield it better or now move it into that Swedish area or your neighborhood? I also have another question who are your sources that have KNOWLEDGE of the program? Anonymous huh.
Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree. News of the program comes in the wake of revelations last week that, after 9/11, the Bush White House approved electronic surveillance of U.S. targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. These and other developments suggest that the federal government's domestic spying programs since 9/11 have been far broader than previously thought.
Geeze I hope so, Aren't they supposed to be looking for the BAD GUYs so they don't kill us?
The nuclear surveillance program began in early 2002 and has been run by the FBI and the Department of energies Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST). Two individuals, who declined to be named because the program is highly classified, spoke to U.S. News because of their concerns about the legality of the program.
Either these two individuals don't exist or they have broken the law by releasing classified information to the press endangering human life, instead of going to complain about any misgivings they have through the proper channels.
At its peak, they say, the effort involved three vehicles in Washington, D.C., monitoring 120 sites per day, nearly all of them Muslim targets drawn up by the FBI. For some ten months, officials conducted daily monitoring, and they have resumed daily checks during periods of high threat.
Sounds like they're doing their job. The do this same thing in times square on New Years Eve. Where does this reporter want them to scan? He obviously has a problem that they are checking people that the F.B.I. suspect. Once again maybe we should look in a Swedish neighborhood. I mean they are the ones trying to kill us right?
The program has also operated in at least five other cities when threat levels there have risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle.
They should be checking Philly also. We need all the help we can get. This City has the worst government and p[olice force in the country.
FBI officials expressed concern that discussion of the program would expose sensitive methods used in counterterrorism. Although NEST staffers have demonstrated their techniques on national television as recently as October, U.S. News has omitted details of how the monitoring is conducted.
Gee how responsible of US News, why don't they describe the van and give us the license plate #. After all thats all thats missing.
Officials from four different agencies declined to respond on the record about the classified program: the FBI, Energy Department, Justice Department, and National Security Council. "We don't ever comment on deployments," said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages NEST.
Which is because this stuff is supposed to be SECRET.
In Washington, the sites monitored have included prominent mosques and office buildings in suburban Maryland and Virginia. One source close to the program said that participants "were tasked on a daily and nightly basis," and that FBI and Energy Department officials held regular meetings to update the monitoring list. "The targets were almost all U.S. citizens," says the source. "A lot of us thought it was questionable, but people who complained nearly lost their jobs. We were told it was perfectly legal."
It is legal, who cares if they are American Citizens, it was British Citizens who blew up their Subway System. The reporter even states that the targets are regularaly reviewed. Who does this ass think they are monitoring The Staff of The NY Times?
The question of search warrants is controversial, however. To ensure accurate readings, in up to 15 percent of the cases the monitoring needed to take place on private property, sources say, such as on mosque parking lots and private driveways. Government officials familiar with the program insist it is legal; warrants are unneeded for monitoring from public property, they say, as well as from publicly accessible driveways and parking lots. "If a delivery man can access it, so can we," says one.
It is LEGAL you Schmuck...How much do you want to bet that if a NUKE because thats what were talking about here, were to go off. If this asshole reporter happened to not be in the area and lived, he would be one of the first people writing a story on how the Bush administration didn't do it's job to protect us.
Georgetown University Professor David Cole, a constitutional law expert, disagrees. Surveillance of public spaces such as mosques or public businesses might well be allowable without a court order, he argues, but not private offices or homes: "They don't need a warrant to drive onto the property -- the issue isn't where they are, but whether they're using a tactic to intrude on privacy. It seems to me that they are, and that they would need a warrant or probable cause."
So he finds a leftist Professor a professor mind you not a judge or someone actually practicing this law to say it's not legal... I am sure in todays environment of understanding that no one at NEST bothered to get legal opinions from at least a dozen lawyers.
Cole points to a 2001 Supreme Court decision, U.S. vs. Kyllo, which looked at police use -- without a search warrant -- of thermal imaging technology to search for marijuana-growing lamps in a home. The court, in a ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that authorities did in fact need a warrant -- that the heat sensors violated the Fourth Amendment's clause against unreasonable search and seizure. But officials familiar with the FBI/NEST program say the radiation sensors are different and are only sampling the surrounding air. "This kind of program only detects particles in the air, it's non directional," says one knowledgeable official. "It's not a whole lot different from smelling marijuana."
Yes it is Marijuana is not a weapon, and the drug laws are not the same as those used during a war.
Officials also reject any notion that the program specifically has targeted Muslims. "We categorically do not target places of worship or entities solely based on ethnicity or religious affiliation," says one. "Our investigations are intelligence driven and based on a criminal predicate."
In other words if the people who are trying to kill us are Muslim, acording to this rocket scientest Don't you dare target them, we should go look where say Christians hang out anywhere except where Muslims are.
Among those said to be briefed on the monitoring program were Vice President Richard Cheney; Michael Brown, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration; and Richard Clarke, then a top counterterrorism official at the National Security Council.
Yeah nobody else just those three. I especialy like the last one.
After 9/11, top officials grew increasingly concerned over the prospect of nuclear terrorism. Just weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, a dubious informant named Dragonfire warned that al Qaeda had smuggled a nuclear device into New York City; NEST teams swept the city and found nothing. But as evidence seized from Afghan camps confirmed al Qaeda's interest in nuclear technology, radiation detectors were temporarily installed along Washington, D.C., highways and the Muslim monitoring program began.
Why is the informant called Dubious? If anything is Dubious it is this story.
Most staff for the monitoring came from NEST, which draws from nearly 1,000 nuclear scientists and technicians based largely at the country's national laboratories. For 30 years, NEST undercover teams have combed suspected sites looking for radioactive material, using high-tech detection gear fitted onto various aircraft, vehicles, and even backpacks and attaché cases.
These devices were designed by the greatist minds in the world who make up a military group called AFTAC, be gratefull we have them. Both the People and the devices.
No dirty bombs or nuclear devices have ever been found - and that includes the post-9/11 program. "There were a lot of false positives, and one or two were alarming," says one source. "But in the end we found nothing."
Doesn't he sound disapointed. So especially now I mean since the war is over, there are no more terrorists, we no longer need the Patriot Act or to keep on the alert for the enemy within lets just elect democrats, sing kuumbiah, and most of all impeach Bush.
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