Beyond Cold Blood by Larry Welch

Author:Larry Welch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700620579
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2014-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Some are displeased that federal authorities have been given names of young foreigners to interview as part of the Justice Department’s efforts to blunt future terrorist acts and get new data about the September 11 tragedies in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. Officials and leaders would be remiss if they were not taking this action, considering how the guilty parties and their supporters used our free-flowing system to their advantage. Such questioning lists will contain the names of foreign students here on visas, as were at least three of those in the deadly airliner hijackings.5

Simons was right, it seemed to me. If we had learned nothing else in the early aftermath of September 11, surely we learned that, to better protect our own citizens, we should pay more attention to our visitors. Better tracking of those here on visas would likely translate to increased protection of our own citizens. No other nation permitted the free and easy, unchecked, unregulated, unmonitored travel of foreign visitors that we did prior to September 11, 2001. We quickly learned that many, perhaps hundreds, of Middle Eastern males were in the United States on student visas yet had never set foot on any school campus. As some of our KBI agents learned, in assisting INS and U.S. Customs even before the interview project, there were student-visitors who could not even correctly name the community in Kansas where the college he was ostensibly attending was actually located. Surely it would not be too much to ask school and immigration officials to keep better track of such visitors, in the name of national security.

I was not surprised by the considerable criticism of the interview effort outside Kansas in the media and by Arab-American groups and the ACLU. What did surprise and disappoint me was the opposition to the project from a few law enforcement agencies in other states. A quote attributed to Sheriff Don Horsley of San Mateo County, California, puzzled me: “We don’t have any legal authority to question people. Unless they could articulate some suspicious activity, no, we wouldn’t participate.”6 Surely the good sheriff was misquoted. No authority to question people? That’s what we do, and can do, in law enforcement. The sheriff seemed to be confusing arrest or detention with interview. We most certainly are entitled to ask. No one is required to answer. These were not suspects of any crimes. These were intelligence-seeking “chats,” to quote our own Jim Flory, not custodial interrogations, or involuntary detentions. They were voluntary interviews.

The overwhelming majority of law enforcement administrators, however, like Chief Michael Chitwood of Portland, Maine, dismissed any criticism of the project that described it as racial profiling and expressed puzzlement at the reluctance of any sheriff or police chief to permit officers to participate. “That’s not racial profiling; that’s good investigative work,” said Chief Chitwood.7 In Kansas we certainly agreed.

The criticism of the project outside Kansas prompted me to send out a report to all 165 Kansas legislators fully describing KBI participation on December 5, 2001.

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