From Volume 3, Issue Number 52 of EIR Online, Published Dec. 28, 2004

Secrets Buried in Bush Intelligence Reform Bill
by Carl Osgood

Dec. 21 (EIRNS)—There are secrets buried in the intelligence reform bill that President Bush signed into law on Dec. 17—the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, S. 2845. While the new layer of bureaucracy that is created by the bill is the talk of Washington—especially whom Bush will name to become the Director of National Intelligence—very few are talking about some of the most egregious police-state provisions in the bill.

One thing the bill does, for example, is to break down the wall that has historically existed between domestic intelligence and foreign intelligence, by redefining "national intelligence" to refer to all intelligence related to national security, regardless of the source, inside or outside the United States.

Within that context, the bill's provisions do two other things: 1) They continue to shift the FBI away from being a law enforcement agency towards becoming a domestic intelligence agency, reminiscent of the old Division 5 under J. Edgar Hoover. 2) They add a provision to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the so-called "lone wolf" provision, which makes any non-American person suspected of engaging in terrorist activity, regardless of whether or not anything connects that person to a foreign government or terrorist organization, subject to an FISA surveillance warrant. The FISA provision expires at the end of 2005. - Okay To Kidnap? -

The bill also includes what looks to be a "kidnapping" provision—a fact which, as far as this reporter can tell, has not been raised by anybody else. Under the section dealing with "providing material support to terrorism," the bill includes an expansive extraterritorial jurisdiction provision, making subject to the law any offense in which "the offender is brought into or found in the United States, even if the conduct required for the offense occurs outside the United States." There is no caveat that the offender has to be a U.S. national or be subject to arrest if he returns to the U.S. of his own free will.

What has been reported about this section of the bill, is that it criminalizes the provision of "expert advice" to a designated foreign terrorist organization. As has been pointed out, such "expert advice" could include the professional advice of a lawyer; an earlier version of this language that had been included in the USA Patriot Act, was struck down as a violation of the First Amendment.

Finally, the provision in the bill on designation of foreign terrorist organizations amends current law by providing that such a designated organization may apply to have the designation revoked, although the provision places the burden of proof on the applicant organization to prove that it is no longer engaged in terrorist activity. Some speculate that this was written for the Mujaheddin e Khalq (MKO), the anti-Iranian group some neo-cons around Washington would like to use against the Iranian regime, even though the MKO is currently on the State Department terrorist list.

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