A top U.S. Justice Department official yesterday defended the feds for eavesdropping on some imprisoned terror suspects to prevent them from passing information to other conspirators.
“Just because somebody is in jail does not mean they have stopped planning and committing crimes,” warned Michael Chertoff, head of the Justice Department’s criminal division.
Speaking in Manhattan at an event sponsored by the city Bar Association, Chertoff said terrorist training manuals recovered in Afghanistan detail how to use lawyers to get them to pass on information.
“We have to have the option . . . to have communication monitored to alert us to another threat,” Chertoff said.
“It is only to be used to make sure people are not communicating on future terrorist threats.
“It is a very, very, very narrow rule. It involves a dozen or so of the hundreds of thousands of people in the entire prison system.”
But civil-rights lawyer Norman Siegel objected to some of the department’s methods, and told The Post, “The painful reality is civil liberties are being violated by some of the Bush-Ashcroft policies.”