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By Rocco Parascandola
Newsday
NEW YORK — New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s attempt at quicker approval for eavesdropping warrants is based in part on recent cases in which authorities didn’t apply for such warrants and paid a steep price, a law enforcement official briefed on the controversy said yesterday.
Kelly and federal authorities are feuding over surveillance of suspected terrorists and how quickly it can be approved legally.
Kelly says the Justice Department is too cautious about submitting warrant requests to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, and he has appealed to Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who has said that New York is asking for too much investigative leeway and if the requests were approved, they might violate federal laws.
Kelly, according to the law enforcement official who spoke on the condition he not be named, wants to avoid repeating mistakes made in the past, most notably the controversy surrounding the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui almost four weeks before the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001.
Agents in Minnesota asked superiors in Washington to get a special warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop, but the request was denied.
The FBI had by then reportedly grown overly cautious because a counterterrorism supervisor had been disciplined for submitting warrant applications with faulty information during an investigation of Hamas.
Moussaoui was later deemed the 20th hijacker after the attacks took place.
A similar reticence characterized other investigations, the official said, and a Senate Judiciary Committee report in 2003 said Justice applied too high a standard of probable cause when considering Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants.
Kelly, in a letter to Mukasey, said that senior Justice officials “have candidly acknowledged that of the last 50 applications not submitted to the court some fraction surely would have been approved.” “In a proactive, intelligence-driven domestic counterterrorism enterprise, such omissions should be unacceptable,” he wrote.
Mukasey, however, said in a letter back to Kelly that the NYPD is guilty, in at least one case, of withholding information “about investigative steps it had taken in connection with a terrorism suspect.”
Yesterday, the New York Civil Liberties Union called for a federal investigation on the issue.
Copyright 2008 Newsday