March 30, 2005
Denver Questions JTTF Participation
Audit Cites Inability To Ensure Compliance With Restrictions
It happens every time. We try to pull back, take a breather, gather our thoughts. And something comes along within a couple of hours to draw us back to the fray. This time, it's a Rocky Mountain News report on questions being asked in Denver about their own Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Two Denver police officers assigned to a federal terrorism task force are supposed to be limited in the kind of intelligence work they are doing, a requirement imposed by the 2003 "spy files" settlement that reined in a decades-old practice of compiling dossiers on political activists.
But an auditor hired to look at whether the city is complying with the settlement concluded that there's no way to determine whether the two Denver officers assigned to the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force are following the city's new intelligence gathering directives.
The restrictions imposed in Denver by court settlement are similar those contained within ORS 181.575 here in Oregon, in that they require (says the News) "reasonable suspicion that a person or group is involved in a serious crime before watching them".
It's not clear just how similar or dissimilar the procedures in Denver are to the procedures here in Portland, but the article says that in the audit performed by a former judge, a deputy police chief in Denver indicated that he "has no way of actually knowing whether the two detectives are performing their duties in compliance with the policy." The News article does not say whether or not supervisors in Denver's police department have any security clearances at all from the FBI.
However, there's also a Denver Post article on the same concerns, which reports that the "chief of police, the independent judicial auditor and the city attorney all lack that clearance." It does not indicate whether any of them have ever been offered such clearances. In addition, the Post story frames it as concerns of the ACLU of Colorado, without mentioning the independent audit.
Nonetheless, it's important to understand the Denver example because it provides documented evidence (see the News article for more) that abuses are possible under JTTF authority, and illustrates why it is not merely a matter of "trust", as argued both by Robert Jordan here in Oregon and S. Renee Mitchell in today's Oregonian.
Trust, but verify. Ensure, don't assume.
Comments (1)
allehseya on 30 Mar 2005
The press never sleeps. It's going to get worse in the next three weeks, I suspect. No time to burn out on the issue, good man. We need you. Let us know what we can do to help. I'm just a poor struggling artist, myself, but I have bookcases if you still need them.