After: How America Confronted The Sept. 12 Era

Ashcroft then went over the case, now planned to be made public with arrests and indictments on Friday or Monday, against five Buffalo-area men who were suspected of being part of a sleeper cell. Ashcroft's frustration was that the only crime they could be charged with was giving "material support" to a designated "terrorist group." The only evidence they had even of that was that one of the suspects had, under repeated questioning, conceded that during what he said was a religious trip to Pakistan in June of 2001 (three months before the September 11 attacks) he and his friends had accepted an invitation to go to an Al Qaeda training camp. The law had never been tested in court to see if going to a training camp constituted providing "material support." Besides, the defend-ants--who had no criminal records and were American citizens--seemed certain to claim that they might have been lured to the camp, but did not know its purpose until they got there (this was, after all, before the September 11 attacks), then left and never did anything to further anyone's terrorist designs. Again, the problem with charging members of sleeper cells with actual terrorism was that they were sleepers--or were innocent people wrongly accused.

As more details would surface as a trial approached, it would become clear that the provisions of the USA Patriot Act giving federal agents wide latitude to investigate suspected terrorists had been pivotal in making the case. Almost from the day the law was signed in October, these defendants' phone conversations, financial and travel records, and e-mails had been relentlessly and secretly examined by FBI agents, after they had obtained a warrant from the special national security court. It was probably only because the Patriot Act now allowed the evidence they had obtained to be used in a criminal case that they had been able to be prosecuted.

JANUARY 2003

In each of what are now three pending terror cell cases (involving groups in Detroit, Buffalo, and Oregon), Ashcroft faces a difficult challenge of establishing guilt beyond a reasonable doubt against people who, by definition, were sleepers, if they were anything at all, not overt criminals. But by mid-January he had achieved at least partial vindication of his prosecution of the Buffalo case, when one of the defendants agreed to plead guilty and testify against the others. Regardless of whether he wins convictions, if the defendants in these cases were sleepers, he certainly has achieved his primary mission of preventing them from carrying out attacks.

CONTRIBUTING EDITOR STEVEN BRILL'S BOOK EXAMINES AMERICA'S RESPONSE TO SEPTEMBER 11 THROUGH THE LIVES OF A RANGE OF PEOPLE ON THE FRONT LINES--FROM HOMELAND SECURITY DIRECTOR TOM RIDGE TO A BORDER PATROL AGENT IN DETROIT AND AN ENTREPRENEUR WHO MAKES baggage explosive detectors. This excerpt is drawn from interviews with John Ashcroft, his staff, members of Congress and ACLU officials, as well as relevant memos of meetings and other documents.

© 2003