WASHINGTON, June 17 ? President Bush issued guidelines today barring federal agents from using race or ethnicity in their routine investigations, but the policy carves out clear exemptions for investigations involving terrorism and national security matters.

The new policy, representing the first time that the federal government has imposed across the board guidelines on racial profiling, governs the conduct of 70 federal law enforcement agencies. A narcotics agent, for instance, cannot focus on a specific neighborhood simply because of its racial makeup, the policy states.

In national security operations, however, the policy allows agents to use race and ethnicity in "narrow" circumstances to help "identify terrorist threats and stop potential catastrophic attacks," officials said.

Immigration officials, for instance, will continue to be able to require visitors from largely Middle Eastern countries to register with the government.

And if intelligence officials had information indicating that terrorists of a certain ethnic group planned to hijack a plane next week in California, the authorities could impose "heightened scrutiny" on men of that ethnicity who boarded planes in that area, officials said.

Arab-American and civil rights groups said the exemptions in the White House policy would give the authorities legal justification to single out Middle Easterners and others who may fall under suspicion, and they questioned whether the new policy ? issued as "guidance" ? would be aggressively enforced.

"This policy acknowledges racial profiling as a national concern, but it does nothing to stop it," Laura Murphy, director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in an interview. "It's largely a rhetorical statement. The administration is trying to soften its image, but it's smoke and mirrors."

The authorities receive an "all points bulletin" giving the race, hair color, age range and color of the car being driven by a fleeing bank robber. Officers may use the race to decide which drivers to pull over. [p6: Should read may use race in conjunction with all other information to decide.]

Officials receive information indicating that terrorists of a particular ethnicity plan to hijack a plane in California in the next week. Transportation officials may subject men of that ethnicity boarding planes in California to "heightened scrutiny." [p6: If even the NY Times uses scare quotes, I shouldn't have to explain that the term leaves WAY to much space for interpretation.]

Authorities seeking to increase drug arrests use software to plot out patterns of arrests and discover that the clear majority occur in neighborhoods occupied primarily by people of a single race. "So long as they are not motivated by racial animus," the authorities can use that information to increase law enforcement operations in the area. [p6: Software is mentioned because this is how the NYC Police Dept. decided to (or justified its decision to) target minority communities under Giuliani's somewhat despotic reign. It's why the cops that shot up Amadou Diallo were in the area they were in. More, such software WILL be used by those with racial animus as cover for their biases.]