USE OF ANTI-TERROR LAWS ON COMMON CRIME IS UP

Critics Say Practice Threatens Civil Rights

In the two years since law-enforcement agencies gained new powers to help
them track down and punish terrorists, police and prosecutors have
increasingly turned the force of the new laws not on al-Qaida cells but on
people charged with common crimes.

The Justice Department said that it has used authority given to it by the
USA Patriot Act to crack down on currency smugglers and seize money hidden
overseas by alleged bookies, con artists and drug dealers.

Federal prosecutors used the act in June to file a charge of 'terrorism
using a weapon of mass destruction' against a California man after a pipe
bomb exploded in his lap, wounding him as he sat in his car.

A North Carolina county prosecutor charged a man accused of running a
methamphetamine lab with breaking a new state law barring the manufacture
of chemical weapons. If convicted, Martin Dwayne Miller could get 12 years
to life in prison for a crime that usually brings about six months.

Prosecutor Jerry Wilson says he isn't abusing the law, which defines
chemical weapons of mass destruction as 'any substance that is designed or
has the capability to cause death or serious injury' and contains toxic
chemicals.

Civil-liberties and legal-defense groups are bothered by the string of
cases and say that the government will soon be routinely using harsh
anti-terrorism laws against run-of-the-mill lawbreakers.

'Within six months of passing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was
conducting seminars on how to stretch the new wiretapping provisions to
extend them beyond terror cases,' said Dan Dodson, a spokesman for the
National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys. 'They say they want the
Patriot Act to fight terrorism, then, within six months, they are teaching
their people how to use it on ordinary citizens.'

Prosecutors aren't apologizing.

Attorney General John Ashcroft completed a 16-city tour this week defending
the Patriot Act as a key to preventing a second catastrophic terrorist
attack. Federal prosecutors have brought more than 250 criminal charges
under the law, with more than 130 convictions or guilty pleas.

The law, passed two months after the Sept. 11 attacks, erased many
restrictions that had barred the government from spying on its citizens,
granting agents new powers to use wiretaps, conduct electronic and computer
eavesdropping and access private financial data.

Stefan Cassella, the deputy chief for legal policy for the Justice
Department's asset forfeiture and money-laundering section, said that
although the Patriot Act's primary focus was on terrorism, congressmen were
aware that it contains provisions that had been on prosecutors' wish lists
for years and would be used in a wide variety of cases.

In one case prosecuted this year, investigators used a provision of the
Patriot Act to recover $4.5 million from a group of telemarketers accused
of tricking elderly U.S. citizens into thinking they had won the Canadian
lottery. Prosecutors said the defendants told victims that they would
receive their prize as soon as they paid thousands of dollars in income tax
on their winnings.

Before the anti-terrorism act, U.S. officials would have had to use
international treaties and appeal for help from foreign governments to
retrieve the money, deposited in banks in Jordan and Israel. Now, they
simply seized it from assets held by those banks in the United States.

'These are appropriate uses of the statute,' Cassella said. 'If we can use
the statute to get money back for victims, we are going to do it.'

The complaint that anti-terrorism legislation is being used to go after
people who aren't terrorists is just the latest in a string of criticisms.

More than 150 local governments have passed resolutions opposing the law as
an overly broad threat to constitutional rights.

Critics also say that the government has gone too far in charging three
U.S. citizens as enemy combatants, a power presidents wield during wartime
that is not part of the Patriot Act. The government can detain such
individuals indefinitely without allowing them access to a lawyer.

And Muslim and civil liberties groups have criticized the government's
decision to force thousands of mostly Middle Eastern men to risk
deportation by registering with immigration authorities.

'The record is clear,' said Ralph Neas, the president of the liberal People
for the American Way Foundation. 'Ashcroft and the Justice Department have
gone too far.'

Some of the restrictions on government surveillance that were erased by the
Patriot Act had been enacted after past abuses - including efforts by the
FBI to spy on civil-rights leaders and anti-war demonstrators during the
Cold War.