Federal Bureau Of Investigation

Special Agent Barry Lee Bush loved his job. He reveled in the challenges crime scenes presented and took pride in what he managed to extricate from them, fellow FBI Agent Jeff Lanza said. Nearly a decade after the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, Bush still told Lanza stories about his work scavenging the Nairobi offices of the Mercy International Relief Agency, a Saudi Arabian charity with strong ties to Al Qaeda.

The federal government is close to a decision to demolish the 17-story Federal Building at 11000 Wilshire Boulevard and replace it with two new towers that would become the Los Angeles headquarters for the FBI. After looking at 35 sites throughout the region, the General Services Administration has determined that the Westwood site, at Veteran Avenue, is "actually the best," said Gene Gibson, the San Francisco-based regional public affairs officer for the GSA.

The city of Los Angeles is preparing to join a coalition of veterans and Westside residents and business groups challenging the federal government's plan to tear down the Federal Building in Westwood and erect a new FBI headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard. City Councilmen Jack Weiss and Bill Rosendahl said Thursday they planned to introduce a measure asking that the city attorney outline what steps the city would have to take to participate in an expected lawsuit.

In a significant victory for Westside activists, the FBI revealed late Thursday that it has decided not to build a new Los Angeles headquarters at the Federal Building site on Wilshire Boulevard. "In response to community concerns, the FBI has requested that the General Services Administration ... search for alternative sites for the FBI's Los Angeles field office," the agency said in a brief statement. "The FBI has requested that the GSA not expand the Wilshire Boulevard site" for its office.

The counterespionage operation was authorized by the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court. FBI agents snapped photos of one suspected spy with cameras they had hidden in his house and mounted on light poles across the street and in his company's parking lot. In fall 2005, authorities dismantled what they said was a family spy ring that had been sending U.S. military secrets to China for two decades.

The FBI has hailed the breakup of an alleged plot to kill soldiers at Ft. Dix, N.J., as a major success story. But federal authorities acknowledge that the case has underscored a troubling vulnerability in the domestic war on terrorism. They say the FBI, despite unprecedented expansion over the last 5 1/2 years, cannot counter the growing threat posed by homegrown extremists without the help of two often unreliable allies.

UC Irvine's chief of police said Friday that his officers were investigating a complaint that an FBI agent doing surveillance assaulted a Muslim student with his unmarked car near the site of an anti-Israel demonstration. The alleged incident Monday has ratcheted up tension between the university's Muslim students and the FBI. In May 2006, an FBI agent was quoted as telling a business group in Newport Beach that the agency was monitoring Muslims at UC Irvine and USC.

The FBI is warning its agents to carefully review all personal data collected from Americans in terrorism investigations before it is uploaded into FBI databases to protect the subjects' privacy rights and to make sure only requested information is used. The warning came in draft FBI guidelines made public Wednesday to be issued to correct abuses of so-called national security letters that were revealed in a Justice Department audit three months ago.

The director of the FBI told a congressional committee Thursday that he had had reservations about the Bush administration's terrorism surveillance program -- a statement that appears to contradict sworn testimony last year by Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales that the warrantless eavesdropping had generated no serious disagreement among high-level officials. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Robert S.

dallas -- Rebuffing defense arguments, a federal judge on Monday agreed that an Israeli intelligence officer can testify anonymously and in a closed courtroom in the trial of five men accused of funneling money to the radical Islamic group Hamas through a now-shuttered Muslim charity in the United States. The decision by U.S. District Judge A.