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Ashcroft: FBI may get more surveillance power

National Guard to be used on Canadian border

Ashcroft: "We're going to do what we need to do to protect the American people."

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Attorney General John Ashcroft indicated Sunday the Justice Department could loosen some restrictions on the FBI's ability to put domestic groups, including religious organizations, under surveillance to thwart terrorist activity.

The attorney general also said "several hundred" National Guard troops and possibly helicopters would be used to patrol the U.S.-Canadian border, allowing them "to observe the border better."

Ashcroft, in an interview with "Fox News Sunday," said the troops are being deployed to relieve overworked Border Patrol agents and speed up inspections at the border, but he insisted the move does not signal that the United States is "militarizing" the border. Canadian officials have been consulted, he said.

"In order to let those people go back to their ordinary course of operations, their other duties, we've asked that we get several hundred National Guard people to help us with inspections at the border," said Ashcroft, who said the deployment should speed up the movement of goods between the two countries.

The Justice Department issued a statement saying 419 National Guard troops would be deployed in 12 states bordering Canada. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, the parent agency of the Border Patrol, has already detailed an additional 120 agents to the northern U.S. border.

The statement said the troops and military aircraft would be used only until the Border Patrol can recruit and train new agents. In another interview with ABC's "This Week," Ashcroft said some of the hundreds of people detained in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks are members of the al Qaeda network, believed to be behind the attacks.

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"We believe we have al Qaeda membership in custody," Ashcroft said. He declined to say how many people in custody are suspected of being in the network.

Asked by ABC about reports that restrictions on FBI surveillance of domestic groups would be loosened, Ashcroft said, "We're going to do what we need to do to protect the American people." He did not directly confirm the change was being pursued.

He said federal law enforcement would be "interested" in any group that makes killing Americans "part of its mantra" -- even if the group were a religious organization.

"If a religion is hijacked and used as a cover for killing thousands of Americans, we're interested in that," he said. "There aren't areas of this culture that are authorized, by virtue of some cloak they draw over them, to be criminal and to assault and kill Americans. It's simply not going to happen."

Ashcroft also defended the administration's decision to use military tribunals to try non-citizens suspected of terrorist activities, to question 5,000 men in the United States holding passports from Middle Eastern and Islamic countries and to monitor the private telephone conversations of some federal prisoners, including conversations with their lawyers.

"Can you imagine apprehending a terrorist, either in the deserts of Afghanistan or on the way to the United States to commit a crime, and having to take them through the traditional justice system -- reading them the Miranda rights, hiring a flamboyant lawyer at public expense, having sort of Osama television, maybe creating a new TV network practically on cable television to supervise that trial?" Ashcroft said on "Fox News Sunday."

He said a conventional criminal trial would jeopardize "American assets in the intelligence community and in the war, putting a courthouse and a community as a target for terrorism."

Ashcroft said the plan to monitor prisoners' telephone conversations would only apply to prisoners who are certified by the head of the FBI, DEA or other federal law enforcement agencies as trying to conduct criminal or terrorist activities from behind bars.

Those prisoners, and their lawyers, would be told in advance their conversations were being monitored, and a judge would supervise use of any information obtained, he said.

He said that currently the provision would only apply to 13 out of 158,000 federal convicts. Ashcroft said the provision could in the future be extended to people awaiting trial.

"It's our commitment to say that we will not allow people to run criminal operations to impair the lives and safety of Americans from their prison cells by sending messages, either knowingly or unknowingly, through their lawyers," Ashcroft said on Fox. "This is a safe-guarded, carefully crafted program that doesn't infringe the rights of people."

Ashcroft also said the questioning of men from Islamic and Middle Eastern countries was entirely voluntary.

"If they don't respond to the questions, they don't," he said. "Every person in America has to make a decision whether they're going to help us find the terrorists and help us prevent the killing of innocent American lives."

A leading critic of the administration's moves to broaden its law enforcement powers, Rep. Bob Barr, R-Georgia, said Sunday they give the administration too much unfettered power with too little input from Congress and the courts.

In an interview on "This Week," Barr, a former federal prosecutor, said courts, not federal law enforcement directors, should certify whether prisoners are trying to conduct criminal or terrorist activities from behind bars and that a "nexus" must exist between a person and some criminal activity before he can be questioned.

"You're walking a very, very slippery slope to just bring people in to question them based on nothing more than some vague assertion that they might be connected with some group that might have had something to do with the attacks," he said.

Barr said the Bill of Rights applies to anyone in the United States, not just citizens, which precludes the use of military tribunals to try people in the country suspected of terrorist activities absent a formal declaration of war.