On Sept. 11, an immigration judge ruled Posada be released unless the administration charges him with terrorism. In a Justice Department brief, the Bush administration admitted that Posada is "an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks on tourist sites," but refuses to charge him for such crimes.

Recognizing the problem of setting a known terrorist free, and unable to deport him to a third country, the Justice Department argued that according to law an illegal immigrant cannot be freed if the release has "serious, adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States."

The Bush administration's handling of this case has resulted in a firestorm of criticism and charges of hypocrisy.

"The fight against terrorism cannot be fought à la carte," said José Pertierra, a Washington lawyer who is representing the government of Venezuela in its effort to extradite Posada. "A terrorist is a terrorist," he told The New York Times.

On the Oct. 6 bombing anniversary, four Nobel Prize winners and other scholars released a petition calling upon the U.S. government to judge Posada for the "73 murders committed on Oct. 6, 1976, or extradite him to Venezuela."

Wayne Smith, the former head of the U.S. interests section in Cuba, told reporters that the U.S. has "massive evidence" against Posada, and that if the administration doesn't bring him to trial or extradite him to Venezuela, they will be violating several treaties as well as their own admonitions. Smith pointedly recalled that Bush once remarked that "one who shelters a terrorist is a terrorist."

The hypocritical stand is only part of the problem the Bush administration faces. Posada worked for the CIA as a demolitions expert, saboteur and plotter of violent crimes. He helped organize well over 100 murderous attacks throughout Latin America and the United States. He was involved in Contra operations in Nicaragua, hotel bombings in Havana in 1997, and an assassination attempt against Cuban President Fidel Castro in 2000.

And according to newly released documents from National Security Archives, Posada told the CIA that he and other exile cohorts like Orlando Bosch (who freely walks the streets of Miami) were planning to bomb the plane.

Cuba's National Assembly President Ricardo Alarcon said the Bush administration has a self-interest in covering up the case and declassified information. "The Bush administration wants to avoid a trial at all costs because someone will ask about the role of the CIA, and its director in 1976 was George Bush Sr.," said Alarcon.

Also included in the documents:

- Information tying the FBI to one of the airliner bombers.

- Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was briefed on¡ previous failed attempts to bomb flights from Panama and Jamaica to Cuba.

- The bomb was placed in a Colgate toothpaste tube.

- The FBI had knowledge of a telephone call to Bosch reporting that "a bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed."

Jesus Rojo, a Cuban father of three, was one of the 73 passengers, along with the entire Cuban Olympic Fencing team, other Cubans, Guyanese and North Koreans. His youngest son Camilo is the coordinator of a committee of victims' relatives seeking justice.

"I am not seeking vengeance; what I want is to see Posada in court," Camilo Rojo said.

"Terrorism affects us all. I have received solidarity even from the most right-wing people, those who do not agree with the revolutionary process in Cuba, but they tell me they are with me, because mine is everybody's cause. That is also what I share with the relatives of the 9/11 victims. We keep in contact with them, and we know very well what they feel."

Terrie Albano contributed to this story.

Brennan said that if the trials in Hungary are a success and the technology attracts customers, it could arrive in airports within two years.

Brennan said Optag has been designed to improve airport security by virtue of its ability to track the movement of suspicious passengers, which would enable security personnel to bar them from entering restricted areas.

The ability to locate individuals could also aid airports in an evacuation situation, he said, and in finding lost children and passengers who are late to the departure gate.

Optag's big range, big challenges

Optag is different from its RFID predecessors in that standard RFID devices have a range of only a few centimeters. Optag, by contrast, has a range of 10 to 20 meters, and its wearer can be located within a radius of 1 meter, Brennan said.

The Optag project is now nearing completion but there are still some sizeable hurdles to real-world implementation, such as figuring out how to get the tags to operate properly in an airport, developing a system that ensures people will wear them, and allaying concerns over civil liberty infringements, said Brennan.

He added the device is "not intended to know who's doing what, although it might be that security needs to pinpoint certain individuals."

The design of the device that would contain the Optag is still not finalized. Brennan said RFID-tagged wristbands could be used but noted that they can be taken off and swapped between individuals.

A possible option is to use cameras to scan the tag-wearer's face and verify that it matches the correct Optag ID, but such a system could be used only in certain areas of an airport, according to Brennan.

Brennan said installation of the systems required to run Optag would also be very disruptive to existing airports. Installation could occur easily, however, at airports under construction, such Heathrow's T5.

As currently configured, the tag does not store any data but might incorporate biometric data in the future, Brennan added.

Optag is primarily aimed at improving airport security, but Brennan said "anywhere where a large number of people are, this has applications."

Human rights groups tried to track the detainees; members of Congress denounced the arrests. They all believed that all of those who had been arrested had been deported, released or processed through the criminal justice system.

Just this summer, it was reported that an Algerian man, Benemar "Ben" Benatta, was the last detainee, and that his transfer to Canada had closed the book on the post-9/11 sweeps.

But now The Associated Press has learned that at least one person - Partovi - is still being held. The Department of Homeland Security insists he really is the last one in custody.

"Certainly it's not our goal as an agency to keep anyone detained indefinitely," said DHS spokesman Dean Boyd. Boyd said the department would like to remove Partovi from the United States but that he refuses to return to his homeland of Iran.

And so he remains, a curious remnant of a desperate time.

Arrests now, questions later
Within hours of the Sept. 11 attacks - before it was even clear if they were over - the FBI was ordered to identify the terrorists who had managed to slip so smoothly into American society and to catch anyone who might have been working with them. The FBI operation was called PENTTBOM; it was swift and fierce, and the stakes couldn't have bee

Anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on Bush's list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies could be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant" and imprisoned indefinitely. That includes American citizens.

The bill also strips habeas corpus rights from detained aliens who have been declared enemy combatants. Congress has the constitutional power to suspend habeas corpus only in times of rebellion or invasion. The habeas-stripping provision in the new bill is unconstitutional and the Supreme Court will likely say so when the issue comes before it.

Although more insidious, this law follows in the footsteps of other unnecessarily repressive legislation. In times of war and national crisis, the government has targeted immigrants and dissidents.

In 1798, the Federalist-led Congress, capitalizing on the fear of war, passed the four Alien and Sedition Acts to stifle dissent against the Federalist Party's political agenda. The Naturalization Act extended the time necessary for immigrants to reside in the U.S. because most immigrants sympathized with the Republicans.

The Alien Enemies Act provided for the arrest, detention and deportation of male citizens of any foreign nation at war with the United States. Many of the 25,000 French citizens living in the U.S. could have been expelled had France and America gone to war, but this law was never used. The Alien Friends Act authorized the deportation of any non-citizen suspected of endangering the security of the U.S. government; the law lasted only two years and no one was deported under it.

The Sedition Act provided criminal penalties for any person who wrote, printed, published, or spoke anything "false, scandalous and malicious" with the intent to hold the government in "contempt or disrepute." The Federalists argued it was necessary to suppress criticism of the government in time of war. The Republicans objected that the Sedition Act violated the First Amendment, which had become part of the Constitution seven years earlier. Employed exclusively against Republicans, the Sedition Act was used to target congressmen and newspaper editors who criticized President John Adams.

Subsequent examples of laws passed and actions taken as a result of fear-mongering during periods of xenophobia are the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, the Red Scare following World War I, the forcible internment of people of Japanese descent during World War II, and the Alien Registration Act of 1940 (the Smith Act).

During the McCarthy period of the 1950s, in an effort to eradicate the perceived threat of communism, the government engaged in widespread illegal surveillance to threaten and silence anyone who had an unorthodox political viewpoint. Many people were jailed, blacklisted and lost their jobs. Thousands of lives were shattered as the FBI engaged in "red-baiting." One month after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, United States Attorney General John Ashcroft rushed the U.S.A. Patriot Act through a timid Congress. The Patriot Act created a crime of domestic terrorism aimed at political activists who protest government policies, and set forth an ideological test for entry into the United States.

In 1944, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-American citizens in Korematsu v. United States. Justice Robert Jackson warned in his dissent that the ruling would "lie about like a loaded weapon ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need."

That day has come with the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It provides the basis for the President to round-up both aliens and U.S. citizens he determines have given material support to terrorists. Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Cheney's Halliburton, is constructing a huge facility at an undisclosed location to hold tens of thousands of undesirables.

In his 1928 dissent in Olmstead v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis cautioned, "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." Seventy-three years later, former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, speaking for a zealous President, warned Americans "they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."

We can expect Bush to continue to exploit 9/11 to strip us of more of our liberties. Our constitutional right to dissent is in serious jeopardy. Benjamin Franklin's prescient warning should give us pause: "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."

Marjorie Cohn, a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is president-elect of the National Lawyers Guild, and the U.S. representative to the executive committee of the American Association of Jurists. Her new book, "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law," will be published in 2007 by PoliPointPress

The Defense Department acknowledged last year that its analysts had maintained records on war protests in an internal database past the 90 days its guidelines allowed, and even after it was determined there was no threat.

A department spokesman said Thursday that the "questionable data collection" had led to a tightening of military procedures to ensure that only information relevant to terrorism and other threats was collected. The spokesman, Maj. Patrick Ryder, said in response to the release of the documents that the department "views with great concern any potential violation" of the policy.

"There is nothing more important or integral to the effectiveness of the U.S. military than the trust and good will of the American people," Major Ryder said.

A document first disclosed last December by NBC News showed that the military had maintained a database, known as Talon, containing information about more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" around the country in 2004 and 2005. Dozens of alerts on antiwar meetings and peaceful protests appear to have remained in the database even after analysts had decided that they posed no threat to military bases or personnel.

Some documents obtained by the A.C.L.U. referred to the potential for disruption to military recruiting and the threat posed to military personnel as a result.

An internal report produced in May 2005, for instance, discussed antiwar protests at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was issued "to clarify why the Students for Peace and Justice represent a potential threat to D.O.D. personnel."

The memorandum noted that several hundred students had recently protested the presence of military recruiters at a career fair and demanded that they leave.

"The clear purpose of these civil disobedience actions was to disrupt the recruiting mission of the U.S. Army Recruiting Command by blocking the entrance to the recruiting station and causing the stations to shut down early," it said.

But the document also noted that "to date, no reported incidents have occurred at these protests."

The documents indicated that intelligence reports and tips about antiwar protests, including mundane details like the schedule for weekly planning meetings, were widely shared among analysts from the military, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.

"There is simply no reason why the United States military should be monitoring the peaceful activities of American citizens who oppose U.S. war policies," said Ben Wizner, a lawyer for the A.C.L.U.

Joyce Miller, an official with the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that learned that information on some of its antiwar protests was in the military database, said she found the operation to be a "chilling" and troubling trend.

The latest Sacramento resident to be questioned by federal agents in possible threats against President Bush is a 14-year-old girl with a heart on her backpack and braces on her teeth, a freckle-nosed adolescent who is passionate about liberal politics and cute movie stars.

Her name is Julia Wilson, and she learned a vivid civics lesson Wednesday when two Secret Service agents pulled her out of biology class at McClatchy High School to ask about comments and images she posted on MySpace.

Beneath the words "Kill Bush," Julia posted a cartoonish photo-collage of a knife stabbing the hand of the president. It was one of a few images Julia said she used to decorate an anti-Bush Web page she moderated on MySpace, the social networking Web site that is hugely popular among teenagers.

The Secret Service refused to answer questions about the case or even confirm an investigation. Eric Zahren, a Secret Service spokesman, said the agency does not discuss its work "due to the sensitivity of our mission."

But Julia's mother, Kirstie Wilson, and an assistant principal at McClatchy High said two agents showed them badges stating they were with the Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security.

Federal law prohibits making serious threats against the president, and Julia and her parents say what she did was wrong.

The couple are disturbed, however, that federal agents questioned a child at school -- without her parents present. And First Amendment lawyers question whether the Secret Service over-reacted to a 14-year-old's comments on a Web site made for casual socializing.

"I don't condone what she did, but it seems a little over the top to me," said Julia's father, Jim Moose. "You'd think they could look at the situation and determine that she's not a credible threat."

Earlier this month, federal officials arrested two Sacramento-area men for allegedly threatening the president. Elk Grove resident Michael Lee Braun has been charged with sending two threatening letters to the El Dorado Hills country club where Bush recently made an appearance. Rocklin resident Howard J. Kinsey is accused of threatening the president through a text message.

Here is how Julia Wilson's family tells their story:

Two Secret Service agents arrived at their Land Park home about 2:30 Wednesday afternoon, Kirstie Wilson said. They told her they wanted to speak with her daughter about threats to the president that she had posted on MySpace.

"She was in molecular biology, and I said I really didn't want to take her out of class for this," Kirstie Wilson said. "I said I'd make sure she came right home from school."

She asked the agents to come back in an hour, and they left.

Then Wilson sent her daughter a text message instructing her to come straight home from school.

"... there are two men from the secret service that want to talk with you. Apparently you made some death threats against president bush. Dont worry youre not going to jail or anything like that but they take these things very seriously these days," Kirstie Wilson wrote.

"Are you serious!?!? omg. Am I in a lot of trouble"? her daughter replied, using common teenage shorthand for "Oh, my God."

Kirstie Wilson called her husband. While they were on the phone, she received another text message from her daughter: "They took me out of class."

It was a 15- to 20-minute interview, Julia said. Agents asked her about her father's job, her e-mail address, and her Social Security number. They asked about the MySpace page she had created last year as an eighth-grader at Sutter Middle School.

"I told them I just really don't agree with Bush's politics," Julia said Thursday. "I don't have any plans of harming Bush in any way. I'm very peaceful; I just don't like Bush."

The MySpace page under question was a group page, similar to an online club.

Most of the groups Julia is a part of are fan clubs for movie stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Ewan McGregor. The group that got her in trouble was called something like "People who want to stab Bush" -- Julia said she doesn't remember the exact name because she soon changed it.

After an eighth-grade history lesson in which she learned that threatening the president is against the law, Julia said she changed the group name to "So Bush is an idiot but hey what else is new?"

The group primarily consisted of her teenage friends who share her liberal political interests, Julia said. She deleted the group page over the summer when she decided that MySpace was juvenile and taking up too much time.

Moose and Wilson say they had no idea what their daughter had posted online.

"I was more than happy to have them talk to her about the severity of what she did. But I wanted to be here with her," Kirstie Wilson said.

McClatchy Assistant Principal Paul Belluomini said he usually does not notify parents when law enforcement officials come to school to interview students.

"Parents usually interfere with an investigation, so we usually don't notify them until it's done," he said.

Sacramento City Unified School District policy calls for parents to be notified but doesn't say whether it should happen before or after a student is interviewed. State law doesn't require parental notification.

In any case, said Ann Brick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, Julia Wilson's post did not sound like a "true threat" to the president, making it political speech that is protected by the First Amendment.

"The courts have to distinguish between political rhetoric and hyperbole and a real threat," Brick said. "A reasonable person would have to interpret what was said as indication of a serious intent to commit harm."

Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, said in the current political climate, "the threshold that brings (agents) in has gotten lower."

"It's a cautionary tale for kids who are on MySpace that putting something on MySpace like 'Kill the President' is not the same as saying it on e-mail or over the phone," Scheer said. "The government is not systematically listening to all phone calls or going through e-mails, but it probably does search the Internet."