FBI monitoring mosques in U.S.

WASHINGTON – Federal law enforcement officials said Friday that FBI agents have secretly monitored radiation levels at Islamic mosques, businesses and homes for several years in large cities to determine whether nuclear or chemical bombs were being assembled.

The officials said no suspicious radiation levels have been found.

The disclosure, following the revelation a week ago that the government has secretly spied on U.S. citizens without court permission, angered a number of U.S. Muslim leaders.

“All Americans should be concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens and another diminished set for Muslims,” said Nihad Awad, an official of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil liberties group.

But Justice Department officials said the monitoring was lawful. They said investigators used special equipment to gauge radiation levels at homes, warehouses and religious centers of some Muslim groups, and that the testing was sometimes carried out in or near parking lots and driveways – areas the government believes to be public property.

They said the testing was still taking place. It was first reported Friday by U.S. News & World Report.

“This is being done in a manner that protects U.S. constitutional rights,” said Brain Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman. “FBI agents do not intrude across any constitutionally protected areas without proper legal authority.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, federal officials began monitoring Muslim groups’ activities to determine whether they were planning attacks.

Roehrkasse and other federal law enforcement officials said the agents had targeted mosques, warehouses, businesses and some homes in and near several of the nation’s largest cities, including Los Angeles, Washington, New York and Chicago.

The monitoring program was also used near other potential targets, including the 2004 political conventions and the Group of Eight summit of the leading industrial democracies that year, in Georgia.

Another federal source, who asked not to be identified, said government lawyers reviewed the process and found it legal for the tests to proceed without agents first seeking court authorization.

The tests are frequent and could pose grave logistical problems if court permission had to be routinely sought, he said.

“The FBI believes it has the legal authority,” the official said. “A parking lot or a driveway is not necessarily private property, and our equipment is not intrusive.”

But Awad and other Muslim leaders at the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations said the monitoring fit a pattern of spying on U.S. citizens without first obtaining a court warrant.

Awad and other Muslim officials pointed to a June 11, 2001, Supreme Court decision that found a similar testing program to be unlawful.

In that case, government agents used thermal imaging to determine whether marijuana was being grown inside a home in Florence, Ore.

In a 5-4 Supreme Court decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the court ruled that the test was an illegal search that violated the Fourth Amendment right to privacy.