OKLAHOMA CITY: AFTER THE BOMB : Administration Drops Disputed Anti-Terror Proposal

The Administration beat a tactical retreat on one component of its anti-terrorism package Wednesday, even as it disclosed a new interpretation of internal guidelines that will give the FBI somewhat greater latitude to investigate domestic organizations suspected of encouraging terrorism.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh said Wednesday that he had reached agreement with the Justice Department on a new, less restrictive interpretation of rules that limit FBI surveillance and infiltration of domestic organizations.

“We are at the point now where we agree on an interpretation of the existing guidelines, which give us a lot more confidence to conduct . . . investigations, where in the past we were clearly not encouraged and, indeed, in some ways persuaded not to conduct some of these investigations,” Freeh said at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Administration’s anti-terrorism proposals.

Freeh’s statement surprised many in the room and left more questions than answers about how far the new standards would expand the FBI’s investigative authority.

At the hearing, Deputy U.S. Atty. Gen. Jamie S. Gorelick also disclosed that the Administration has backed off one of the most controversial provisions in its anti-terrorism legislative package. In a bow to civil liberties concerns, Gorelick said the Administration now agrees that courts should be allowed to review decisions by the President to designate foreign groups as “terrorist organizations” under the new legislation.

In the Administration’s original proposal, neither the courts nor Congress would have been given authority to review such designations--which would prohibit U.S. citizens to contribute or raise funds for the affected groups. “We will recommend deletion of the assertions in the bill that the President’s designations are unreviewable,” she said.

The investigative guidelines to which Freeh referred establish the limits on FBI surveillance of domestic organizations. They were imposed by then-U.S. Atty. Gen. Edward Levi in 1976 in response to revelations of FBI counterintelligence programs aimed at anti-war, civil rights and other domestic groups. The guidelines were loosened somewhat in the Ronald Reagan Administration.

Some former FBI and Justice Department officials have complained that the existing guidelines have been interpreted too narrowly to allow the FBI to keep track of potentially dangerous domestic organizations, such as the militia movement, which has been linked to Timothy J. McVeigh, the principal suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing.

But civil libertarians, joined in an unusual alliance by some Republican lawmakers, have warned that broadly increasing the FBI’s authority to monitor domestic organizations could open the door to the abuses of the 1960s.

A senior Justice Department official said in an interview after the hearing that the new interpretation will not loosen the requirement that the FBI find reasonable evidence of criminal activity before launching a full investigation of a domestic organization.

Instead the new language is intended to “clarify the circumstances” under which the FBI can open more limited “preliminary inquiries” into suspected terrorist organizations.

In his testimony, Freeh cited three standards in the new language for launching preliminary investigations. Freeh said that the standards “would allow us to begin an investigation with respect to a domestic terrorism group if that group advocates violence or force with respect to achieving any political or social objectives,” if the group has “the apparent ability to carry that out, whether that be paramilitary training, AK-47s, whatever,” and if the group’s resulting action “might violate federal law.”