Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/nest/051222nest.htm

> Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants
>
> By David E. Kaplan
>
> 12/22/05 "US News" -- -- 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.
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> 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.
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> The nuclear surveillance program began in early 2002 and has been run by the FBI and the Department of Energy's 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. 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. 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.
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> 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. 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.......

and stepping into flame underwear.

But in the general scheme of things this bothers me less than the other recent revelations (American spying.)

Since what they are looking for is physical evidence of a massively life threatening activity...

Well, maybe it's just me.

I could probably be persuaded that I'm full of baloney. Any takers?

Do they think that nuclear weapons are like groceries at Walmart? Not every idiot is as science and reality phobic as the Busheviks. Most people with the ability to comprehend the first thing about fissile material treats it with great respect. Besides, there are lots cheaper, more easy to acquire and handle materials if one wants to go out with a boom. Consider all that unguarded explosives left in warehouses in Iraq after the "mission" was accomplished. Consider Timothy McVeigh. They don't need atomic bombs!