Ashcroft promises aggressive use of new terrorism law

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered federal prosecutors Friday to use new anti-terrorism powers to track down terrorists by intercepting their Internet and telephone communications and financial transactions.\nAshcroft issued orders to 94 U.S. Attorney's offices and 56 FBI field offices after President George W. Bush signed a sweeping anti-terrorism bill into law.\n"Law enforcement is now empowered with new tools and resources necessary to disrupt, weaken and eliminate the infrastructure of terrorism organizations," Ashcroft said in a statement.\nUnder the new law, prosecutors have more powers to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists, wherever they are and whether they are communicating on the Internet or by phone.\nFor years, authorities have used surveillance to go after drug traffickers and organized crime, but some provisions of the eavesdropping laws did not apply to terrorism, the Justice Department said.\nAshcroft warned would-be terrorists that the government will be closely watching how they act, carefully listening to what they say and secretly reading the words they write.\n"If you overstay your visas even by one day, we will arrest you; if you violate a local law, we will hope that you will and work to make sure that you are put in jail and be kept in custody as long as possible," he said in a speech to the nation's mayors.\nEchoing a threat then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy made four decades ago to pursue mobsters for spitting on the sidewalk, Ashcroft said: "Let the terrorists among us be warned."\nHe pledged to use the new powers granted by Congress to pursue terrorist suspects relentlessly, intercept their phone calls, read their unopened e-mail and phone messages and throw them in jail for the smallest of crimes.\nJustice officials said they intend to use the new surveillance and wiretap powers granted by Congress on Thursday to build cases against many suspected terrorists already in custody on immigration violations or technicalities.\nCivil libertarians have complained that the new law gives government too much power to investigate Americans.\nAuthorities have arrested or detained 952 people in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, including 168 detained on immigration charges. Many have been arrested for relatively small crimes -- bank fraud, false identification or overstaying their visas. Most remain in custody, officials said.\nA small number of these people who are not cooperating are believed to have terrorist connections or links to the 19 hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center's Twin Towers, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. One, detained in Minnesota, had sought flight instruction. Two others, detained in Texas, were found with a large amount of cash and box-cutters similar to those used by the hijackers.\nMohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan are jailed in New York as material witnesses. The two, detained on an Amtrak train in Fort Worth, Texas, seemed nervous when approached and told conflicting stories about their travel plans, police said.\nWhen officers said the travel plans sounded suspicious, according to a police report, Azmath said: "I did not have anything to do with New York."\nOfficials plan to run anthrax tests on items from the men's Jersey City, N.J., apartment, which contained magazine articles about bioterrorism.\nThe legislation allows intelligence officials to share information with prosecutors for the first time. The immediate effect will be that a bundle of intelligence files from the CIA and other agencies on terrorism suspects will be shipped to a Justice Department terrorism task force headed by Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff.\nFiles on prior attacks and radical groups gathered before the Sept. 11 attacks are of particular interest for what they may reveal about possible new attacks, Justice Department officials said.