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From LA Times

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Beck's role in mismanagement at L.A. police relief group comes under scrutiny

November 15, 2009 | 1:07 pm

A Times review of court records found one incident over his 32-year career in which Charlie Beck, who is the mayor's choice to be L.A.'s new police chief, was accused of mishandling a crisis, stifling reform and covering up the misuse of taxpayer money.

The allegations, which Beck denies, were never proved. They involved Beck's role as a board member of the Los Angeles Police Relief Assn., a nonprofit that receives millions of dollars a month in city subsidies to manage health benefits for most of the city's police officers.

Beck was president of the board -- a volunteer position -- nearly a decade ago when two former employees filed whistleblower lawsuits alleging that they were pushed out after uncovering mismanagement and misconduct.

In an interview Friday, Beck acknowledged there were administrative problems at the association. He said he had acted properly, and he pointed out that a city audit and police internal affairs investigation cleared him and others of any wrongdoing.

Police Relief eventually settled the lawsuits out of court for more than $1.2 million, according to sources familiar with the terms, which are covered by nondisclosure agreements.

Asked why the cases were settled, Beck said it was on the advice of the board's attorneys: "Sometimes it's in the best interests of the organization."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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Obama chides China on human rights

During a stop in Shanghai on his Asia visit, the president engages in a Q & A with Chinese university students, an unusual bit of U.S.-style democracy for them.

by Peter Nicholas

10:56 PM PST, November 15, 2009

Reporting from Shanghai

President Obama told Chinese students today that the U.S. does not wish to contain China's rise, but also offered a gentle critique of their country's approach to human rights.

"We welcome China as a strong and prosperous and successful member of the community of nations," Obama said at the start of a town hall-style meeting in Shanghai as he began the China leg of his tour of Asia.

Obama acknowledged that the United States has struggled with race relations over the course of its history, but he said America would "always speak out" in favor of free expression, worship, political participation and access to information -- which he termed "universal rights."

"They should be available to all people, including ethnic and religious minorities, whether they are in the United States, China or any nation," he said.

After his opening remarks, Obama began taking questions, leaving the podium to make better eye contact with students. As is his custom at such meetings in the United States, he made a point of alternating between male and female questioners. Students sat all around him. At the back of the hall were large American and Chinese flags.

The meeting was an unusual exercise in U.S.-style participatory democracy for China. It would be unheard of for Chinese students to speak with their own president, Hu Jintao, in such an informal setting. Some of the questions posed, such as those about Obama's wife and family, would be strictly off-limits.

The White House pushed to have the event broadcast live over Chinese television, but Beijing resisted, allowing live coverage only on Shanghai television. Anyone in China with an Internet connection, however, could watch by logging onto the White House website, where it was streamed live, U.S. officials said.

Apart from questions posed by students, Obama also took questions submitted via the Internet.

More than 400 students from eight Shanghai universities attended the event, held at the Shanghai Science & Technology Museum. Students who wanted to see Obama and possibly ask him a question had to submit applications through their universities.

As they filed in, neatly dressed and carrying notepads and pens, some of the students said they were excited and had spent days preparing. They looked to be in their early 20s. One smiled at the press corps and flashed the peace sign.

One person asked Obama if he used Twitter and was aware of China's Internet firewall. Obama said his thumbs are too "clumsy" for him to send messages via Twitter. But he said that information should flow unhindered, even if that proves uncomfortable for politicians.

"I can tell you that in the United States the fact that we have unrestricted Internet access is a source of strength," Obama said, "and should be encouraged."

He added: "Now, I should tell you that, as president of the United States, there are times when I wish information didn't flow so freely because then I wouldn't have to listen to people criticizing me all the time. I actually think that makes our democracy stronger and it makes me a better leader, because it forces me to hear opinions that I don't want to hear."

After the town hall, Obama was to fly to Beijing for a meeting with Hu, the Chinese president. Obama was on the fourth day of a weeklong trip to Asia. He has already visited Singapore and Japan. When he leaves China he will head to the South Korean capital, Seoul, before returning home Nov. 19.

Among students, shopkeepers and Internet users, President Obama's visit to Shanghai has been one of the most anticipated by a foreign leader to China in recent years.

"I have a very good impression of Obama," said Shanghai resident Jiang Heting, 21. "Even though I've read that some Americans disapprove of how he's handling the economic crisis, I still like him very much."

They also recognize China's growing power and influence on the international stage.

"This is the first time that China and America will talk as equals," said Zhang Shun, a student at East China University of Political Science and Law.

"It was the first town-hall meeting in China and it was a very good dialogue," said Ding Xinhao, president of Shanghai Institute of American Studies, shortly after the event.

He said, however, that he believed that Obama was less effective in communicating with the Chinese students than President Bill Clinton was in 1998, when meeting with students at Beijing University. "President Obama didn't listen to the questions as carefully and his answers were a little long. He wanted to add additional information rather than answering the questions directly."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-obama-shanghai16-2009nov16,0,1529316,print.story

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FORGOTTEN COUNTRIES

Guinea-Bissau: Cocaine's traffic hub

The unstable nation, along with other West African countries, makes an ideal stop for cartels smuggling drugs from South America to Europe.

by Scott Kraft :: reporting from Bissau, Guinea-Bissau

November 16, 2009

Second Of Two Parts

As a senior police official, Edmundo Mendes' job is to arrest the South American cocaine traffickers who use his troubled West African country, with its starry array of remote islands, as a transit point for drug shipments bound for Europe. It hasn't been easy.

To demonstrate, Mendes walked a few steps from his office into the gritty mix of smoke and car exhaust in downtown Bissau. He fished a ring of keys from his pocket and made quick work of a rusty padlock. The metal door groaned open to a small courtyard. Across the way was a room, about 10 by 15 feet, where four men looked out drowsily from behind a barred, glass-less window.

This holding cell is the only jail in a country of nearly 2 million.

"We live in paradise and hell at the same time," said Mendes, a baby-faced 35-year-old with master's and doctoral degrees from France and Portugal. "In paradise, there are no prisons. In hell, there are no prisons. Without a prison, all the work we do is for nothing. At the moment, this is a paradise for criminals."

That's just one reason Guinea- Bissau has been an easy mark for the world's drug cartels.

The country's navy has a single aging ship to search for smugglers, and the head of the navy fled the country amid accusations that he was involved in the drug trade. When a Gulfstream jet from Venezuela landed last year at the Bissau international airport, its $250-million cargo of cocaine was whisked away in army trucks before police arrived. A judge freed the three Venezuelan pilots, including one wanted on an arrest warrant from Mexico.

Then, in one 12-hour period this year, the army chief of staff was killed by a bomb in his office and his soldiers retaliated by hacking the president to death in his kitchen. Three months later, soldiers killed a presidential candidate and two former government ministers whom they accused of plotting a coup.

Disputes over the drug trade are believed to have played a role in the mayhem. But the investigation has stalled because the soldiers refuse to be questioned.

$70-billion market

West Africa is among the world's poorest, least developed and most politically unstable regions. This patchwork of coastal nation-states has long been exploited by international profiteers, from the slave traders who fed off it for centuries to the European colonizers who later tried to sculpt tropical replicas of France, England and Portugal.

Today it is buffeted by another outside force: the $70-billion global cocaine market. As much as a third of the cocaine that moves from South America to Europe every year goes through West Africa. Since 2005, cocaine with a wholesale value of more than $7 billion has passed through this region, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

This new route reflects a shift in consumption. Cocaine exports to the United States have declined, but they have doubled and tripled to European countries, where the strength of the euro against the dollar has brought more revenue for traffickers.

Law enforcement efforts have made the direct route from South America to Europe riskier for traffickers, causing them to detour through this part of the world. Cocaine arrives here in large shipments, sometimes by air but more often by sea. It is broken into smaller parcels that come ashore -- where officials are paid off in cash or in kind -- or continue north by boat, truck or plane toward Europe.

"West Africa has everything criminals need: resources, a strategic location, weak governance, and an endless source of foot soldiers who see few viable alternatives to a life of crime," a recent U.N. report concluded.

A day after the Gulfstream arrived in Guinea-Bissau in July 2008, a twin-engine Cessna landed about 300 miles south, at the international airport near Freetown, Sierra Leone. This one was met by local and international authorities, who seized $350 million worth of cocaine and arrested seven men from Colombia, Venezuela and the United States.

In Guinea, a nation on the coast between Guinea-Bissau and Sierra Leone, the death of a president and a military coup led to bloody confrontations with protesters in September -- and revelations that the late president's family was deeply involved in cocaine trafficking. The president's son, an army officer, has admitted clearing cocaine shipments that arrived in planes marked with the symbol of the Red Cross.

That same month, authorities in Ghana seized 350 pounds of cocaine, valued at $8 million, on a ship arriving from South America, the second major seizure there since May.

"Drug trafficking here evolves at a much faster rate than in places like Afghanistan and South America," said Alexandre Schmidt, the U.N. drug office's representative for West and Central Africa. "When we become aware of trafficking routes in West Africa, the drug traffickers are already one step ahead."

The U.N. launched a $50-million effort this year to train and outfit West African police, beginning with Sierra Leone.

"You're never going to stop the drug flow through West Africa," said Rudolfo Landeros, a former assistant police chief in Austin, Texas, who is senior police advisor to the U.N. in Sierra Leone. "But we have to take a stand somewhere and it might as well be here, so Sierra Leone doesn't become like Guinea-Bissau."

Stability first

Guinea-Bissau has been called Africa's only narco-state, a nation controlled and corrupted by drug cartels. In many ways, it is an ideal host for the parasitic drug trade. Since independence in 1974, the onetime Portuguese colony has suffered coups d'etat, dictatorships and civil wars.

The elegant facade of the presidential palace, on a traffic circle honoring the independence struggle, is a ghostly monument to that past: Its gutted interior is blackened by the bombs of civil war a decade ago. An American aid organization has unearthed 3,000 anti-personnel mines in the capital and is still digging up unexploded ordnance in the countryside.

"I'm taking on a sick state in all aspects," said Guinea-Bissau's president, Malam Bacai Sanha, who took office in September.

"We have serious problems, and drugs is just one of them," Sanha said. He cited increasing deaths from malaria, a flood of counterfeit medicines, poor roads, rickety schools, and a lack of reliable electricity and clean water. "The first medicine the country needs is stability," he said.

Stability is a lofty goal. If the 62-year-old leader survives the next five years, he will be the first head of state to complete a term of office in 35 years of independence.

"I will pray to God every single day of those five years," he said with a chuckle.

Like other politicians in West Africa, Sanha doesn't put a high priority on drug interdiction.

"It's not just Guinea-Bissau's problem," he said. "These drugs don't come here to stay. Our people cannot afford drugs."

Allegations that government officials and military officers are involved in the drug trade "is just talk without proof," Sanha said. But he recognizes that foreign aid is linked to progress on the drug front. "We cannot ask the international community to help us if we allow drugs to be sent to their countries from here," he said.

One sign pointing to an influx of drug money is the flurry of activity in a seaside suburb known as the "ministers' quarter." Bissau has few wealthy businessmen, no industry and no foreign exports other than peanuts. The average income is less than $2 a day. Yet construction crews in that neighborhood are building pastel-colored two-story homes with ocean views. Workers at the sites declined to identify the owners.

Guinea-Bissau was an inviting target for traffickers primarily because of the Bijagos Archipelago, 70 beautiful islands that were once a stopping point for seafaring traders. Only about 20 of the islands are inhabited, but many have natural ports and abandoned airstrips built by Portugal during the war for independence.

"Our concern now is that the traffickers are changing their modus operandi," said Mendes, deputy director of the judicial police. "They used to bring drugs in by plane, but now it's ships at sea. This is a big problem for us. We don't have the means to control our coast."

Mendes leads a staff of three dozen officers, about a tenth of what he figures he needs to do his job. The judicial police, the only one of nine government police forces in the country responsible for drug interdiction, do make arrests, mostly of locals with small amounts of cocaine who are foot soldiers for the cartels.

Some are freed by corrupt judges, Mendes says, and the others get off with fines because there's no prison to hold them. International governments recently agreed to build a high-security prison in Bissau, but it won't be completed before the end of next year.

On the outskirts of the capital is the Municipal Cemetery, where the late president, Joao Bernardo Vieira, and the army chief of staff, Batista Tagme na Waie, are buried about 100 yards apart, beneath the shade of mango and acacia trees in a setting overgrown with stiff grass and weeds.

The motives for those assassinations remain a mystery. Tagme had reportedly told his officers that if anything happened to him, they should assume the president did it. Tagme's troops listened; they went to Vieira's home after the bombing and killed the president. But Mendes says his commission has concluded that the president was not behind the general's killing.

Some believe it was a battle over power in a country where the defense force -- 4,500 troops, with three officers to every private -- has long held sway. Others suspect that the cause was either a dispute over the missing cocaine from the Gulfstream or a battle for control of the drug trade.

What is clear is that moving cocaine through a small country like Guinea-Bissau requires help from the government or the military, or both.

"You must have the approval of someone in authority," the U.N.'s Schmidt said.

An empty plane

The private Gulfstream jet from Venezuela swooped low over a sodden landscape marbled with chocolate-colored rivers and muddy roads, and landed at the forlorn little airport in Bissau.

No customs officers or immigration agents appeared because no flights were expected. The plane's contents were unloaded into a convoy of Guinea-Bissau army vehicles as it was refueled. It took off again, but a problem with the landing gear forced the pilot to turn back. Three days later, a plane arrived with parts and a mechanic from Senegal. But the plane couldn't be fixed.

Five days passed before the judicial police learned of the plane's existence. By then, the plane was empty; even the flight recorder was gone. The army contended it had been carrying medicine for troops. International drug investigators, using dogs, concluded otherwise: The missing cargo was cocaine, 1,300 pounds, by the U.N.'s estimate.

The Gulfstream remains at the airport, parked next to the control tower. Its owner is listed as a holding company in Delaware, and a few months before it landed in Bissau it was photographed in Florida. The government may put it on the auction block.

As for the cocaine, it long ago disappeared into the countryside.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-africa-drugs16-2009nov16,0,504909,print.story

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OPINION

The flaws of lethal injection

It's a preferred method of executing inmates, but so much can -- and has -- gone wrong that states need to take a hard look at their procedures.

by Miriam Aroni Krinsky

November 16, 2009

It has been a year and a half since the Supreme Court ended the nationwide moratorium on lethal injections, finding that Kentucky's three-drug protocol had adequate safeguards to protect inmates from "cruel and unusual" punishment. But in California, executions remain on hold, as they have been for more than three years. Some have urged the governor and others to move things along. They point to executions without incident, like Tuesday's of John Allen Muhammad in Virginia. But other recent executions compel a contrary conclusion: We still haven't found a way to get it right.

The latest debacle came in September, when Ohio botched its third lethal injection execution in as many years. The saga began when corrections officials could not find a vein during the execution of Romell Broom. They tried for two hours, sticking Broom at least 18 times. The process got more macabre when the condemned man tried to help his executioners, pumping his arm and pointing out potential veins. The team of corrections officials finally gave up, and Broom returned to death row.

It was all eerily familiar to those who follow executions in California. In each of the last three executions here, prison staff struggled for more than 30 minutes to insert IV needles. One of the prisoners, Stanley Tookie Williams, asked his executioners, "You doing this right?"

For those who believe that the lethal injection debate is just another concern of defense attorneys, let me assure you that is not the case. I served for 15 years as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and with an organized crime and drug enforcement task force based in Maryland. My tenure coincided with the "tough on crime" mind-set of the late-1980s and early 1990s. I sat on a committee that made recommendations regarding when and if to seek the ultimate sanction of death in particularly heinous federal criminal cases.

Over time, however, I have observed the diminution of our standards of justice as we condone a death penalty process that is not only drawn out, costly and of questionable accuracy -- as demonstrated by a few cases in which death row inmates have been exonerated -- but also is flawed in application.

Many prosecutors and judges with varying views on the death penalty share my horror at a process gone awry. In 2006, California's execution protocol was aptly described by a federal judge as "broken." He found there was reason to doubt that the anesthetic -- the first drug in the process -- was being delivered properly, which meant that subsequent injections that paralyze and then kill a condemned inmate could cause pain that violated the "cruel and unusual" punishment prohibition. When state officials came up with a new procedure, the courts ruled that they did so in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, a "sunshine" law that ensures that government agencies act with transparency and accountability. Earlier this year, prison officials finally submitted their proposed procedures to a public comment period, but it remains to be seen whether our courts will deem these new procedures to be satisfactory.

Unfortunately, what California proposes isn't much different from the previous protocol. It's still a three-drug procedure that depends on the execution team successfully setting a functioning IV so that the anesthetic works. And prison officials also continue to insist on paralyzing inmates, though the proposed paralytic drug is considered inhumane for animal euthanasia in most states.

Even if execution teams are proficient -- which is never easy to guarantee and was clearly not the case in the bungled executions -- a lot can go wrong. The stress of the situation, the state of an inmate's veins and the difficulty of placing multiple IVs under the best of circumstances may put the condemned inmate in jeopardy of suffering extreme agony -- induced paralysis, suffocation and cardiac arrest -- all while fully conscious.

Thirty-five states use lethal injection to execute inmates. The list of those undertaking a review of their execution protocols now includes Maryland and Nebraska, in addition to California and Ohio. A number of states have tweaked their procedures in the last two years. But in too many cases, the "new" protocols that emerge are, like the proposals in California, virtually identical to the old ones. Such cursory reviews are not enough.

In contrast, Ohio says it is going back to the drawing board. "Everything is on the table," a corrections spokesperson recently stated. Ohio is right to take it slowly and give this issue serious reconsideration and open public vetting. Our state leaders should do the same.

The defects in lethal injection affect more than just the person being executed. Corrections officers who perform executions without proper training suffer a terrible strain. Families of crime victims who watch a botched process are further traumatized. And all of us are diminished when we allow an inhumane and unsound process to be the norm.

No state should go forward with another execution until we can be assured that it knows what it is doing in the death house. And if we don't have the ability to get it right, then maybe it's time to revisit the death penalty altogether.

Miriam Aroni Krinsky serves as a lecturer at the UCLA School of Public Affairs and an adjunct professor at Loyola Law School.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-krinsky16-2009nov16,0,912036,print.story

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BLOWBACK

Misrepresenting the ideology of Islamic terrorists

A recent Times Op-Ed article wrongly says violent extremism is rooted mostly in a 'perverted political ideology.'

by Jennifer Rubin

November 16, 2009

In their Nov. 12 Times Op-Ed article, “Our enemy is not Islam — it’s extremists,” Judith Miller and David Samuels wrote regarding the Ft. Hood shootings that "in taking aim at the evasive psycho-babble that dominated early news accounts, the right has engaged in an equally dangerous bias that conflates [Nidal Malik] Hasan's radicalism with the religious beliefs of mainstream Muslims. In their narrative, any Muslim might suddenly 'snap,' as Hasan apparently did, and reveal himself to be the enemy within." They identify me as a proponent of this view. While acknowledging that I added "sensibly that not all Muslims might be so inclined," they assert that I "left it to more primitive commentators to draw the inevitable conclusion that all Muslims in the U.S. military should be viewed as potential traitors."

Miller and Samuels distort, quite egregiously, my views. In a different post from the one they referenced, I wrote:

"To be clear: it is the ultimate red herring, a straw man of gargantuan proportions, to suggest that those pointing to Hasan's ... announced intentions (‘I am going to do good work for God’) are suggesting that Muslim soldiers as a group are untrustworthy or suspect. No, there is no 'backlash' in the works. What there is, and what elite opinion makers should recognize before the public's fury builds, is that ignoring signs of Islamic-fundamentalist-inspired animus toward America will get people killed. It has. And it will again unless and until we stop tip-toeing around the obvious link between a murderous ideology and murder."

In another blog post, I made a similar argument:

"But let's be clear: the Army didn't fail the 'Muslim community'; it failed 43 wounded or slain people and their families. And to prevent it from happening again, we need to get over the diversity fetish (which imagines that Americans are too dumb to distinguish between nonviolent Muslims and those who've adopted a murderous ideology) and get on with the business of fighting a war against those who want many, many more Fort Hoods."

One would be hard-pressed, after a fair reading of these, to conclude that I conflated fanatical jihadists with nonviolent Muslims or left "it to more primitive commentators to draw the inevitable conclusion that all Muslims in the U.S. military should be viewed as potential traitors." The opposite is obviously the case.

But there is something more fundamental and of greater consequence than the sloppy distillation of one commentator's work. The suggestion by Miller and Samuels that what is really at play is the "perverted political ideology" of heretics who merely use the language of religion to achieve their goals deserves scrutiny.

Their argument might be strengthened by evidence that the brand of jihadist ideology we confront is alien to Islam or that its followers have been declared heretics by prominent Muslims. But the evidence for this is thin, if nonexistent. Cliff May, writing for National Review Online, reminds us: "Hateful, medievalist, supremacist, and genocidal ideologies, movements, and regimes have risen up from within the world's Muslim communities. They are waging a war against the West -- and against Muslims who don't go along with them." To say that the majority of Muslims don't subscribe to the strain of radical fundamentalism is a truism. To say that it is not rooted at all in Islam is sophistry.

Moreover, it really matters not so much what Miller, Samuels and I think; what is critical is what those committed to the slaughter of Americans think. And in this regard the evidence is mounting. Hasan printed business cards identifying himself as "SoA (SWT)." That would be "soldier of Allah," with the parenthetical referencing the Arabic phrase, "Glory to him, the exalted." Hasan reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" ("God is great") as he allegedly slaughtered his fellow soldiers. According to other reports, Hasan informed his neighbor before the shooting that he was "going to do good work for God."

And then there is Hasan's 50-slide PowerPoint presentation, which as Thomas Joscelyn described on the Weekly Standard's blog, makes it "fairly obvious that Hasan endorsed the jihadist view of the world in which believers are rewarded, while the infidels are punished. And only those believers who truly follow Allah's commandments will be rewarded in the afterlife. Allah's demands, according to Hasan, included participation in an offensive jihad against Islam's enemies."

It is reasonable to conclude, given all of this, that Hasan certainly thought of himself as a Muslim believer on a mission from God. It was that which seems to have inspired him, as it did the 9/11 hijackers and those who attacked the U.S. warship Cole. If we want to understand America's enemies, disrupt their plots and protect innocents, it would behoove us not to obscure or misrepresent the ideology that motivates them.

Jennifer Rubin is a contributing editor at Commentary magazine, where she writes for its "Contentions" blog.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-rubin16-2009nov16,0,6491802,print.story

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From the Daily News

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A look at how we braced for the worst

RELICS: New insight into post-WWII era on 50th anniversary of county's Civil Defense program.

by Troy Anderson, Staff Writer

Updated: 11/15/2009 10:20:07 PM PST

As Los Angeles County celebrates the 50th anniversary of its Civil Defense program this month, officials have rediscovered remarkable treasure troves of relics from the 1950s, a time when nuclear scares haunted average Americans in much the same way terrorism fears do today.

Among the finds are a massive underground bomb shelter in El Monte now used to store new cars, and storage rooms full of old rations and guidebooks that sound almost quaint today in their tips for nuclear-war survivors.

The supplies included gallons and gallons of Vaseline, with advice for post-apocalyptic survivors to smear it all over their bodies as protection from radiation.

Another find was instructions from the military on what to do in case of a coastal invasion of Southern California.

"I found letters in the storeroom from World War II generals to the area coordinators, saying the last stand would take place in the San Gabriel Valley and they would move all the civilians back to the shelter of the San Gabriel Mountains," said Brenda Hunemiller, an area coordinator for the county's current disaster management program. "It's pretty amazing stuff."

Rummaging through an old Azusa storeroom, Hunemiller recently discovered old Civil Defense materials that included a book listing hundreds of fallout and bomb shelters and 55-gallon drums filled with K- and C-rations, medicines and other survival supplies.

But Hunemiller, coordinator for Disaster Management AreaD, was most intrigued by the four, five-gallon containers of Vaseline in each barrel. In the event of a nuclear attack, the instructions called for those taking radiation readings above ground to cover their bodies with Vaseline to prevent radiation poisoning.

"I have no idea if that would work or not," Hunemiller said. "There was 20 pounds per barrel, so they must have been taking it real seriously."

In November 1959, 12 cities signed a joint powers agreement with the Board of Supervisors to create the Civil Defense program in case of nuclear attack.

Today, the program has evolved to focus on a variety of potential disasters, such as earthquakes and wildfires. Coordinators in eight Disaster Management Areas work closely with the county's Office of Emergency Management.

But despite the move away from preparations for nuclear war, OEM spokesman Ken Kondo said the recent discovery of the Civil Defense supplies and a large fallout shelter in El Monte has renewed interest in the Civil Defense program and the shelters.

Among the hundreds of bomb shelters in the county, officials recently discovered a still-intact one below what is now one of the world's largest car dealerships. At Penske Longo Lexus in El Monte, customers can actually pick out their car from inside the former bomb shelter built by a previous business, Kondo said.

"It's a big and cavernous place," Kondo said. "It's gigantic. You could sit several football or soccer fields in there."

The federal Civil Defense program was created after World War II. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the military was concerned about a potential invasion of the Southern California coastline, Kondo said. At the time, the county was divided up into eight areas for civil defense.

After WWII, many in the government and the public feared a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union. In an effort to protect the public, the Federal Civil Defense Administration was created in 1951.

One of the first campaigns emphasized building and designating fallout and bomb shelters.

"We still have those rusting, old air-raid sirens around," said Joel Bellman, an aide to county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. "Anyone who was a child in California in the 1950s and '60s certainly remembers the Civil Defense symbols, the duck-and-cover drills and the educational films they would show at school."

A fallout shelter sign is still on the wall in the lobby at the county Hall of Records downtown. Underneath the hall and surrounding areas is a labyrinth of underground facilities and tunnels connecting one of the largest government complexes in the nation.

The Glendale Courthouse also still has a fallout shelter in its basement, stocked with medical supplies and processed food that is at least several decades old, said acting court manager Roobina Badalian.

However, most of the fallout shelter signs throughout the county have been taken down over the years.

"Once the reality of what a nuclear engagement would really be like set in, I think there was a realization that there wasn't going to be any survivors if you are in the designated target area," said Bob Garrott, who was assistant manager of the OEM from 1989 to 2004.

"The warheads today cause unbelievable destruction. So the focus was placed on the reality of what is facing us, and that's natural disasters and occasionally man-made disasters."

Although the government no longer stores food or other supplies in shelters and no one is trained as shelter managers or radiological monitors, the shelters today would still provide better fallout protection than private homes in the event of a nuclear attack, said Sharon Packer, executive director of the American Civil Defense Association.

"There would, however, be no security in place, no supplies and no communications to a central command station," Packer said.

The government does, however, continue to maintain well-stocked shelters for critical personnel, including Congress, under a program called "Continuity of Government," she said.

Since the creation of the Civil Defense program, the OEM has responded to numerous natural disasters, including the 1992 riots, 1994 Northridge Earthquake and numerous wildfires, floods and mudslides.

But even though the "Big One" - an earthquake of 7.8 magnitude or greater - can't compare to the 10.5 earthquake that destroys Los Angeles in the movie "2012," Kondo said the film highlights that not only government agencies, but residents too need to prepare for the next catastrophe in the "disaster capital of the world."

"It showed me we have a lot of work ahead of us," Kondo said.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_13797079

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From the Washington Times

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Environmental laws put gaps in Mexico border security

by Stephen Dinan

In the battle on the U.S.-Mexico border, the fight against illegal immigration often loses out to environmental laws that have blocked construction of parts of the "virtual fence" and that threaten to create places where agents can't easily track illegal immigrants.

Documents obtained by Rep. Rob Bishop and shared with The Washington Times show National Park Service staffers have tried to stop the U.S. Border Patrol from placing some towers associated with the virtual fence, known as the Secure Border Initiative or SBInet, on wilderness lands in parks along the border.

In a remarkably candid letter to members of Congress, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said her department could have to delay pursuits of illegal immigrants while waiting for horses to be brought in so agents don't trample protected lands, and warns that illegal immigrants will increasingly make use of remote, protected areas to avoid being caught.

The documents also show the Interior Department has charged the Homeland Security Department $10 million over the past two years as a "mitigation" penalty to pay for damage to public lands that agencies say has been caused by Border Patrol agents chasing illegal immigrants.

"I want this resolved so border security has the precedence down there. If wilderness designation gets in the way of a secure southern border, I want the designation changed," said Mr. Bishop, Utah Republican, who requested the documents. "If it means you lose a couple of acres of wilderness, I don't think God will blame us at the judgment bar for doing that."

The conflict between the environment and border security has raged for the past decade as better enforcement in urban areas has pushed the flow of illegal immigrants into Arizona and straight into some of the nation's most remote and fragile desert.

A major problem is wilderness - lands deemed so pristine that they should be maintained in that condition, free of man-made structures.

Wilderness is governed under a 1964 law that imposed strict rules that tie Border Patrol agents' hands, and there is a lot of that land along the border. According to the Congressional Research Service, California has 1.8 million acres of wilderness within 100 miles of the border, and Arizona has 2.5 million acres. New Mexico and Texas have smaller plots.

According to e-mails obtained by Mr. Bishop, Park Service officials at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and at the Denver office that oversees the park said they will not allow the Border Patrol to place electronic surveillance towers on parts of the park that are designated wilderness.

In one 2008 e-mail, officials tell the Homeland Security Department to "pursue alternative tower locations." In another 2008 memo, the superintendent of Organ Pipe says Park Service officials could reject towers even beyond wilderness areas if they deem the effects would spill over into wilderness.

Organ Pipe has 32 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border on its land, and 95 percent of the park is designated wilderness. Officials have shut down much of the western side of the giant park, saying the threat of encounters with illegal immigrants and drug smugglers makes that land not safe enough for visitors.

Homeland Security considers SBInet critical to gaining control of the border. The concept is to mix manpower, technology and infrastructure to form the "virtual fence" that government planners say can curtail illegal immigration and drug smuggling.

The project is way behind its original schedule, having slipped from a 2009 deadline all the way back to 2016. The Government Accountability Office, in a report released in September, blamed both testing flaws and environmental rules for holding up the system.

A spokesman for the National Park Service Denver office, which oversees Arizona, didn't return calls for comment.

But Jane Lyder, deputy assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks at the Interior Department, said her agency tries to cooperate, though its mission does conflict with that of the Homeland Security Department.

"A proposal to build permanent structures within a wilderness area violates the Wilderness Act. The Park Service and DOI worked with Border Patrol to find places with Organ Pipe National Monument that were not part of the designated wilderness, where the towers could be placed," she said.

She said acceptable alternate locations have been found.

A draft environmental assessment of the new sites released in September lists conditions ranging from common sense - such as designing roads that limit the impact on lesser long-nosed bats and Sonoran pronghorn, both endangered species - to the more unusual.

Towers cannot be constructed if Sonoran pronghorn are within two miles of the site, and the pronghorn's departure cannot be hastened by human interaction. Also, feed for patrol horses must be weed-free to prevent the horses from spreading nonnative seeds in their excrement.

Ms. Lyder also said she has found the Border Patrol willing to work with Interior on protecting endangered species, and said land managers recognize that the Border Patrol's mission also benefits public lands.

She said a 2006 memorandum of understanding specifically allows Border Patrol to go off-road, even in wilderness, in emergency cases that involve a threat to national security or to someone's safety.

After some initial friction, the Homeland Security and Interior departments did find agreement on the physical border fence, much of which stretches across public lands in Arizona. A letter from U.S. Customs and Border Protection's acting commissioner earlier this year praises Interior for working with border security officials to get the fencing done.

Still, Ms. Napolitano's letter to Congress, which was sent last month in answer to a series of questions, indicates that problems persist.

She said Border Patrol makes every effort to live up to the 2006 memorandum but that "it may be inadvisable for officer safety to wait for the arrival of horses for pursuit purposes, or to attempt to apprehend smuggling vehicles within wilderness with a less capable form of transportation."

She also said some public-lands managers are using a section of the Endangered Species Act to demand information about Border Patrol activities, which Ms. Napolitano said "risks jeopardizing sensitive operational information."

Ms. Napolitano also said that cracking down on illegal immigration actually helps the environment since the flow of millions of illegal crossers over the past decade has ruined some once-pristine lands with piles of trash, vehicle tracks and contaminated water.

Asked about the letter, Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler said the department wants to work with the Interior Department and the U.S. Forest Service, which is part of the Agriculture Department.

"We acknowledge that balancing the requirements of border enforcement and land preservation can at times present challenges, but we are committed to collaboration with Interior and the USFS to find workable solutions on special status," he said. "[Homeland Security's] close working relationship with Interior and USFS allows DHS to fulfill its enforcement responsibilities while respecting and enhancing the environment."

Mr. Bishop and Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, tried to free up the Border Patrol earlier this year, with each managing to pass amendments on different bills that gave the Border Patrol more leeway to circumvent environmental rules if border security required it.

The Senate passed its amendment by unanimous consent as part of a spending bill, while the House voted 259-167 to add it to a lands bill. But House and Senate Democratic negotiators watered down Mr. Coburn's amendment when they met to hammer out a final version of the spending bill.

According to a Congressional Research Service report, the new wording means that environmental laws can't block construction of the pedestrian fence on the border but still can block other activities, including regular Border Patrol operations and building the virtual fence of electronic surveillance.

"What we have done in this bill is prioritize the environment over the violation of our borders," Mr. Coburn said in opposing the bill when it came through the Senate.

But Democrats defended the move on the House floor, saying the environmental laws must be obeyed.

"We were concerned that if it weren't focused on the fence area, it could overturn the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, the Native American Graves Repatriation Act, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, the Endangered Species Act, NEPA and many other laws," said Rep. Norm Dicks, Washington Democrat. "We tried to focus this like a rifle shot."

Mr. Bishop says he has had trouble getting accurate responses to his requests. For example, he asked Interior for the total amount of money the department had received from Homeland Security for mitigation of the effects of border enforcement, such as raking out roads or replanting plants.

Interior provided him with one figure - $811,000 since 2006, which it said had gone specifically to rehabilitate territory for the endangered Sonoran pronghorn. But Homeland Security says it has paid out $9,823,813 since September 2007 alone, including $200,000 over the course of 16 months to have a single Interior Department employee on site to provide "subject matter expertise."

"The taxpayer is getting ripped off, that's pretty clear," Mr. Bishop said.

Ms. Lyder said the majority of the money went to a system being built to help the Border Patrol evaluate what threatened and endangered species might be affected by proposed actions.

As for specific mitigation money, such as the $811,000 paid to the Fish and Wildlife Service for the pronghorn, she said that was normal.

"It would not be unusual for Border Patrol to provide FWS with funding to mitigate its effects on an endangered species, such as the pronghorn, particularly if their activities would be such that the habitat disturbed is no longer suitable, and replacement habitat had to be acquired," she said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/16/national-park-service-putting-holes-in-border-secu//print/

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Black Panthers denounce 'new' Panthers

by Jerry Seper

The New Black Panther Party catapulted itself to national attention during the November 2008 presidential election when two of its members, one brandishing a nightstick, were captured on videotape intimidating voters at a Philadelphia polling place.

But the original Black Panther Party, which famously advocated black power and preached self-defense through confrontation in the 1960s and 1970s, is not happy with the new upstart. It has condemned the New Black Panther Party and its tactics, saying the NBPP "stole" the party's name for its "own misguided purposes."

The Huey P. Newton Foundation Inc., created in 1993 and co-founded by Fredrika Newton, Black Panther leader Huey P. Newton's widow, said in a statement that the original party was "never a group of angry young militants full of fury toward the white establishment ... but operated on love for black people, not hatred of white people.

"As guardian of the true history of the Black Panther Party, the foundation, which includes former leading members of the party, denounces this group's exploitation of the party's name and history," the statement said. "Failing to find its own legitimacy in the black community, this band would graft the party's name upon itself, which we condemn.

"There is no New Black Panther Party," the statement said, describing the NBPP as "a small band of African Americans calling themselves the New Black Panthers." It said the NBPP has "no legitimate claim on the party's name" and that it "only pretends to walk in the footsteps of the party's true heroes."

The denouncement by the foundation, which now operates community-based literacy, voter outreach and health-related programs, is not the only challenge facing the NBPP.

Some lawmakers are asking why a civil complaint brought by the Justice Department against the organization for its actions at the Philadelphia polling place was later dismissed against the party and two of its members, despite what they have described as compelling evidence that would-be voters were intimidated.

They have demanded access to the career lawyers who brought the complaint and to the political appointees who eventually ordered its dismissal. They also have called on the department to refile the civil charges.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which investigates allegations of misconduct involving department lawyers, said in August that it had begun an official inquiry into the complaint's dismissal, but Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Frank R. Wolf, Virginia Republican and a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, have questioned the sincerity of that probe.

In a letter last week to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., they asked whether the Justice Department was using the OPR investigation as a "means to continue stonewalling Congress in this matter."

"After three months of investigating, the Office of Professional Responsibility has yet to provide Congress with a clear explanation for why the Civil Rights Division dismissed the complaint," they said. "Congress and the American people must have confidence that the department's Voting Rights Act enforcement is free of improper political motives.

"It is important for Congress, in furtherance of its oversight obligations, to receive answers before the end of this year -- before we enter a political season so that voters can be assured that voter intimidation will not be tolerated," they said.

Both lawmakers challenged the department's explanations for the dismissal; Mr. Wolf described them as "incomplete and faulty" and Mr. Smith said they were "vague justifications."

Also, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is conducting a separate investigation into the complaint's dismissal and has reminded the Justice Department that as an independent agency answerable to Congress and the president, it has the power to issue subpoenas to top department officials, including Mr. Holder.

The commission, in a letter to Mr. Holder, said its obligation under the law is to ensure that civil rights laws are enforced and, to that end, it has the authority to subpoena witnesses and documents.

Commission Chairman Gerald A. Reynolds said the department has offered only "weak justifications" for the dismissal, adding that he feared the legal precedent set by the case might encourage "other hate groups" to act similarly. He was given the authority in October to issue subpoenas to a broad range of witnesses, including those at Justice.

"If you swap out the New Black Panther Party in this case for neo-Nazi groups or the Ku Klux Klan, you likely would have had a different outcome," said Mr. Reynolds. "A single law, a single rule should be applied across the board."

Commissioner Todd Gaziano has outlined a witness list in a request for a "major study project" by the commission that would include an extensive investigation by its staff -- with subpoenas and public hearings in both Washington and Philadelphia.

Mr. Gaziano said the commission wants to know whether the decision to drop the complaint constituted a departure from prior enforcement policy and whether it ultimately would lead to more voter intimidation.

"The dismissal of the lawsuit has the potential to significantly change the understanding some officials have regarding the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act, for good or for bad," he said.

The NBPP did not return numerous e-mails from The Washington Times seeking answers to questions concerning the case. The voice message machine at its group's D.C. headquarters has been full for several weeks.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said that "as a general policy" the department does not comment on ongoing OPR matters. But she has steadfastly maintained that the department has an "ongoing obligation" to be sure the claims it makes are supported by the facts and the law.

Ms. Schmaler noted that after a "thorough review" of the civil complaint, top career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division determined that the "facts and the law did not support pursuing the claims against three of the defendants" in the NBPP case.

She also said the department is "committed to vigorous enforcement of the laws protecting anyone exercising his or her right to vote."

With 35 chapters in 15 states and the District of Columbia, the NBPP has been described by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as radical black nationalists and the largest organized anti-Semitic black militant group in America, and by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks racist, neo-Nazi and anti-government organizations, as a "black racist" hate group.

A civil complaint brought Jan. 7 against the party and three of its members accused the NBPP and its members of violating the 1965 Voting Rights Act by scaring would-be voters with a nightstick, racial taunts, insults and military-style uniforms.

Four months later, the career prosecutors who had pursued the case for months beginning during the Bush administration were told by Justice Department political appointees named by President Obama to drop the complaint against the party and two of its members.

The original complaint, signed by Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, said the NBPP endorsed and supported racially motived violence and described the party as "a black-supremacist organization ... explicitly hostile toward non-black and Jewish individuals in both rhetoric and practice."

Grace Chung Becker, a Bush administration political appointee who was the acting assistant attorney general for civil rights when the complaint was filed, said at the time that intimidation outside a polling place was "contrary to the democratic process."

Mr. Mukasey, now in private law practice in New York, declined to comment.

A Justice Department memo shows that the career lawyers decided as early as Dec. 22 to seek a complaint against the NBPP; its chairman, Malik Zulu Shabazz, a lawyer and D.C. resident; Minister King Samir Shabazz, head of the Philadelphia NBPP chapter who was accused of wielding the nightstick; and Jerry Jackson, a resident of Philadelphia and a NBPP member.

"The deployment of uniformed members of a well-known group with an extremely hostile racial agenda, combined with the brandishing of a weapon at the entrance to a polling place, constitutes a violation of Section 11(b) of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits types of intimidation, threats and coercion," the memo said.

The memo was signed by Christopher Coates, who heads the Voting Section in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.

The civil complaint said the deployment of armed and uniformed people at the entrance of a polling place was an "attempt to have an intimidating and threatening effect on certain voters." It said that unless stopped by a court order, those doing so would continue to violate the law by deploying "armed members at the entrance to polling locations in future elections, both in Philadelphia and throughout the United States."

But the career prosecutors were ordered by their superiors in April to reverse course, according to interviews and documents, although the court had already entered a default judgment against the NBPP and its members.

Court records show that as late as May 5, the Justice Department was still considering an order by U.S. District Court Judge Stewart Dalzell in Philadelphia to seek sanctions against the party and three of its members because of their failure to appear. But 10 days later, the department reversed itself and filed a notice of voluntary dismissal for the party, Mr. Zulu Shabazz and Mr. Jackson.

That same day, the department sought a default judgment against Mr. Samir Shabazz, ordering him not to display a "weapon within 100 feet of any open polling location on any election day in the city of Philadelphia" until Nov. 15, 2012.

Records show that Loretta King served as the acting assistant attorney general in the Civil Rights Division at the time the dismissals were sought. She ordered a delay in the case after discussing it with Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, an Obama political appointee, according to the interviews.

Mrs. King, a career senior executive service official, had been named by Mr. Obama in January to temporarily fill the vacant political position of assistant attorney general while a permanent choice could be made. She and other career supervisors ultimately recommended dropping the case against two of the men and the party.

Mr. Perrelli, the department's No. 3 official, approved that plan, officials said. None of the supervisors involved in the dismissal has been available for comment.

In the complaint, the Justice Department described Mr. Zulu Shabazz as the "self-styled 'Attorney at War' " for the party, saying he exercised "organizational control" and "managed, directed and endorsed the behavior, actions and statements" of the two NBPP members at the Philadelphia polling site.

Taking over the organization in February 2001 after the death of Khalid Abdul Muhammad, Mr. Shabazz has led demonstrations across the country in what the ADL described as an effort to "blend inflammatory bigotry with calls for black empowerment and civil rights."

His militant approach, according to the ADL, has led to several confrontations with law enforcement officials, including an NBPP protest against police brutality in New York in December 2006 where he led chants of "Off the pigs who kill our kids" and "Fifty shots for 50 cops."

Closely affiliated with the Nation of Islam and its leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, Mr. Zulu Shabazz has described himself as a "freedom fighter" and the "revolutionary and visionary leader" of the NBPP. He has taken credit for making the NBPP "a great witness to the validity of the works of the original Black Panther Party."

Mr. Zulu Shabazz did not return e-mails to his Web site, and his office telephone has been disconnected. Mr. Samir Shabazz and Mr. Jackson also have been unavailable for comment.

Mr. Zulu Shabazz has been the central figure at numerous NBPP rallies across the nation, including in Jasper, Texas, when he led 50 armed NBPP members clad in military-style fatigues and black berets who sought to confront members of the Ku Klux Klan in the aftermath of the June 1998 truck-dragging death of James Byrd Jr.

In its most recent intelligence report on hate groups, the SPLC said the NBPP is active in California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and the District of Columbia.

Mr. Zulu Shabazz has embraced a 10-point platform similar to one written by original Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton that called for equality in employment, housing and education, along with military exemptions, an end to police brutality, the release of blacks from federal, state and local jails, and freedom for blacks to decide their national destiny.

But the NBPP's manifesto makes several additions, including claims that whites have kept blacks "deaf, dumb and blind and used every dirty trick in the book to stand in the way of our freedom and independence," and had targeted blacks with "biological and chemical warfare." It also wants the establishment of a separate nation for blacks, known as New Africa, and calls for blacks to protect themselves from "racist police and the racist military by any means necessary."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/16/black-panthers-denounce-new-panthers//print/

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The line that isn't drawn

by Mark Steyn

Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, there was a lot of talk about how no one would hijack an American airliner ever again - not because of new security arrangements but because an alert citizenry was on the case: We were hip to their jive. The point appeared to be proved three months later on a U.S.-bound Air France flight. The "shoe bomber" attempted to light his footwear, and the flight attendants and passengers pounced. As the more boorish commentators could not resist pointing out, even the French guys walloped him.

But the years go by, and the mood shifts. You didn't have to be "alert" to spot Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. He spent most of the past half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying, "Jihadist. Stand well back." But we (that's to say, almost all of us and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign. Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through, we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Maj. Hasan was in regular e-mail contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the Sept. 11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Maj. Hasan's "research interests," so there was no need to worry. That's America: technologically superior, money no object (not one but two "joint terrorism task forces" stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken.

On the other hand, who needs surveillance operations and intelligence budgets? Maj. Hasan was entirely upfront about who he was. He put it on his business card: "SOA." As in "Soldier of Allah" - which seems a tad ungrateful to the American taxpayers who ponied up half a million bucks or thereabouts in elite medical school education to train him to be a soldier of Uncle Sam. In a series of meetings during 2008, officials from both Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences considered the question of whether then-Capt. Hasan was psychotic. But, according to at least one bigwig at Walter Reed, members of the policy committee wondered "how would it look if we kick out one of the few Muslim residents." So he got promoted to major and shipped to Fort Hood, Texas.

And 13 men and women and an unborn baby are dead.

Well, like they say, it's easy to be wise after the event. I'm not so sure. These days, it's easier to be even more stupid after the event. "Apparently he tried to contact al Qaeda," mused MSNBC's Chris Matthews. "That's not a crime to call up al Qaeda, is it? Is it? I mean, where do you stop the guy?" Interesting question: Where do you draw the line?

The truth is, we're not prepared to draw a line even after he has gone ahead and committed mass murder. "What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy," said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the U.S. Army's chief of staff, "but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here." A "greater tragedy" than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army chief of staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the "tragedy" must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish "troubles," "an acceptable level of violence." Fourteen dead evidently is acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we'll find out.

"Diversity" is one of those words designed to absolve you of the need to think. Likewise, a belief in "multiculturalism" doesn't require you to know anything about other cultures, just to feel generally warm and fluffy about them. Heading out from my hotel room the other day, I caught a glimpse of that 7-Eleven video showing Maj. Hasan wearing "Muslim" garb to buy a coffee on the morning of his murderous rampage. It wasn't until I was in the taxi cab that something odd struck me: He was an American of Arab descent. But he was wearing Pakistani dress - that's to say, a "Punjabi suit," as they call it in Britain, or the "shalwar kameez," to give it its South Asian name.

For all the hundreds of talking heads droning on about "diversity" across the TV networks, it was only Tarek Fatah, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, who pointed out that no Arab males wear this get-up - with one exception: those Arab men who got the jihad fever and went to Afghanistan to sign on with the Taliban and al Qaeda. In other words, Maj. Hasan's outfit symbolized the embrace of an explicit political identity entirely unconnected with his ethnic heritage.

Mr. Fatah would seem to be a genuine "multiculturalist": That's to say, he's attuned to often very subtle "diversities" between cultures. Whereas the professional multiculturalist sees the 7-Eleven video and coos, "Aw, look. He's wearing ... well, something exotic and colorful, let's not get hung up on details. Celebrate diversity, right? Can we get him in the front row for the group shot? We may be eligible for a grant."

The brain-addled "diversity" of Gen. Casey will get some of us killed and keep all of us cowed. In the days since the killings, the news reports have seemed increasingly like a satirical novel the author's not quite deft enough to pull off, with bizarre new Catch-22s multiplying like the windmills of your mind: If you're openly in favor of pouring boiling oil down the throats of infidels, then the Pentagon will put down your e-mails to foreign jihadists as mere confirmation of your long-established "research interests." If you're psychotic, the Army will make you a psychiatrist for fear of provoking you. If you gun down a bunch of people, within an hour, the FBI will state clearly that we can all relax, there's no terrorism angle, because, in our overcredentialized society, it doesn't count unless you're found to be carrying Permit No. 57982BQ3a from the relevant State Board of Jihadist Licensing.

Ezra Levant, my comrade in a long battle to restore freedom of speech to Canada, likes to say that the Danish-cartoons crisis may be seen one day as a more critical event than Sept. 11 - not, obviously, in the comparative death tolls, but in what each revealed about the state of Western civilization. After Sept. 11, we fought back, hit hard, rolled up the Afghan camps; after the cartoons, we weaseled and equivocated and appeased and signaled that we were willing to trade core Western values for a quiet life. Watching the decadence and denial on display this last week, I think in years to come, Fort Hood will be seen in a similar light. What happened is not a "tragedy," but a national scandal, already fading from view.

Mark Steyn is the author of the New York Times best-seller "America Alone" (Regnery, 2006).

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/16/the-line-that-isnt-drawn//print/

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How military missed signs

by Joel Mowbray

As Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, officially begins his inquiry this week into the disturbing failures that enabled Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan to stay in uniform, it must go beyond the normal excuses related to bureaucratic bungling.

With the discussion this week devolving into interagency finger-pointing, lost has been the simple fact that the failures were systemic. Although the military has done valiant work fighting in Muslim lands, it doesn't seem to grasp how to assess when Muslim personnel could pose an internal threat.

It's easy to rely on hindsight to second-guess after the fact, but based on what we already know, Maj. Hasan had openly embraced Islamic jihadist ideology. Apparently no one who learned of his online screeds or his verbal rants to colleagues understood this, however.

What officials knew about Maj. Hasan was neither trivial nor inconsequential.

In spring, Maj. Hasan wrote an Internet posting that compared suicide bombers to soldiers who sacrifice their lives by falling on a grenade. His reasoning was that suicide bombers "help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers."

No more explicit justification could be made for the terrorists who have been targeting U.S. service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet reports indicate there was no formal investigation into a soldier who praised suicide bombers who "save Muslims" by killing the very people among whom he lived and worked.

More ominous is that only mild concern was sparked by Maj. Hasan's repeated contacts with a cleric openly affiliated with al Qaeda. Although the content of the 10 to 20 e-mails has been described officially as related to "religious guidance" and Maj. Hasan's "research," no rationale could possibly exist for any soldier independently contacting a high-level enemy figure.

Around the time from late 2008 into early this year that the two were in contact, imam Anwar Al-Awlaki issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill U.S. soldiers in Iraq. In January, Mr. Al-Awlaki published a manifesto aptly titled "44 Ways to Support Jihad," a how-to manual on all the paths available - from violence to finance - for his followers.

Had investigators merely Googled Imam Al-Awlaki, they would have found his jihad manual and an in-depth profile on him at the Web site of the NEFA Foundation, a U.S.-based counterterrorism organization that maintains the largest public database of open-source terrorism intelligence. They also would have been reminded at the NEFA Web site that Imam Al-Awlaki's recorded sermons helped inspire the terrorists who unsuccessfully targeted Fort Dix, N.J., three years ago. In fact, the Fort Dix plotters specifically praised the imam's lecture encouraging self-motivated jihad.

None of that mattered to investigators, because Maj. Hasan didn't explicitly discuss violence or terrorism with his mentor. Traditional metrics for assessing criminal danger, though, do not neatly apply to jihadists.

Most jihadist attacks are not driven by appeals to violence or wanton bloodlust. The stated motive for most jihadists is some form of defending Islam or innocent Muslims from an evil aggressor.

Someone falling into the lure of jihadist ideology becomes a threat long before he even discusses violence. Danger begins with the embrace of a paranoid worldview in which the United States has waged war on pious, peace-loving Muslims. That the United States is fighting self-identified Muslims in two Islamic nations, of course, only makes it easier for jihadists to win over Muslims.

Maj. Hasan didn't just parrot jihadist lines about evil America, though. He openly argued for Islamic violence against the United States. And that was just what he said in front of his colleagues.

Yet despite a pattern of truly incendiary comments - such as telling colleagues during a PowerPoint presentation on Islam in 2007, "We love death more then [sic] you love life!" - he remained in uniform. Much of the evidence points to a critical question: Was Maj. Hasan treated differently because he was a Muslim?

Perhaps the simplest analysis is by way of comparison. In one reported instance, Maj. Hasan told his colleagues that he supported the Muslim who shot two soldiers, killing one, at a military recruitment center in Little Rock, Ark.

Imagine if Maj. Hasan had instead been a secular, garden-variety anti-American radical who told his colleagues that he supported the murder of his fellow soldiers. Is there any doubt such remarks would have generated at least more than the indifference Maj. Hasan's various comments did?

Just as Muslim soldiers should not be presumed unpatriotic, less cannot be expected of them than from their non-Muslim peers.

Defending terrorists and openly identifying with the enemy should be an obvious infraction for any soldier. The same goes for demonizing America or contacting known terrorists.

If the military doesn't change the mind-set that allowed those actions to be ignored or shrugged off, the consequences could be even more devastating the next time.

Joel Mowbray is an investigative journalist living in New York City.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/16/how-military-missed-signs//print/

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A humanitarian disaster

by Rep. Christopher H. Smith

Even as President Obama was preparing for his trip to meet with Chinese leaders this week, brave witnesses came before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in Washington.

They shared sad tales about how the Chinese government is destroying the lives of women and devastating the traditional Chinese family.

The one-child policy has brought with it the highest female suicide rates in the world, widespread forced-abortion campaigns and rampant sex-selective abortion that is creating a gender imbalance. Since its inception in 1979, the coercive one-child policy has been the worst human rights abuse in the world today.

Few people outside China learn of the cruel social control of the one-child policy. The U.S. China Commission summarized it as a system "marked by pervasive propaganda, mandatory monitoring of women's reproductive cycles, mandatory contraception, mandatory birth permits, coercive fines for failure to comply, and, in some cases, forced sterilization and abortion."

A Chinese woman who becomes pregnant without a government permit faces relentless pressure to abort. Illegal children are denied education, health care and marriage. Fines for bearing a child without a birth permit can be 10 times the average annual income of two parents. Those families that can't or won't pay are jailed or their homes are smashed in or their young child is killed. A woman may be held in a cell. If she flees, her relatives may be detained and beaten. She can be socially ostracized, as her colleagues, and neighbors will be denied birth permits. If the woman is by some miracle still able to resist this pressure, she may be physically dragged to the operating table and forced to undergo an abortion.

The World Health Organization reports more than 500 female suicides per day in China. It is the only country in the world where the female suicide rate is higher than the male - three times higher than for males, in fact.

The result of this policy is unprecedented in human history, where women are psychologically wounded, girl babies fall victim to sex-selective abortion because males are valued more, and most children grow up without brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles or cousins.

Our Nobel Prize-winning president, it seems to me, has a moral duty and sacred responsibility not to demote, trivialize or dismiss these outrageous crimes against women and children. The secretary of state set a dangerous precedent when she said, en route to Beijing for her first visit, that human rights won't "interfere" with peddling U.S. debt or issues related to climate change.

I believe the Chinese government would respond if the president were to speak out in defense of human rights in China. Beijing is sensitive to how it is viewed by the rest of the world. Its heightened global influence in the world and its new model for authoritarian regimes throughout Asia and Africa provide all the more reason for us to stand up for the rights of the Chinese people.

It is both complicit and unnecessary that the Obama administration lavishly funds - to the tune of $50 million - organizations, including the U.N. Population Fund - that partner with China's National Population Planning Commission.

This should not be a partisan issue. On June 10, 1998, at a hearing I chaired, the late Rep. Tom Lantos, California Democrat, said: "There are few crimes against human beings which are more horrendous, more despicable, more outrageous than the practice of forced abortion and forced sterilization. Such brutal violations of human rights must be condemned across the political spectrum, and you and I have stood together through the years in condemning them."

I ask the president to consider the appeal of Wujian, a Chinese woman victimized by forced abortion who at great risk told her story to the world - the same story as millions of Chinese women. She testified behind a screen at a hearing of the Lantos Commission in Washington on Nov. 10:

"The room was full of moms who had just gone through a forced abortion. Some moms were crying, some moms were mourning, some moms were screaming, and one mom was rolling on the floor with unbearable pain. ...

"Then I kept saying to [the abortionist] ... 'how could you become a killer by killing people every day?'...

"She also told me that there was nothing serious about this whole thing for her. She did these all year. She also told me that there were over 10,000 forced abortions in our small county just for that year, and I was having just one of them. . . .

"Finally, she put the big, long needle into the head of my baby in my womb. At the moment, it was the end of the world for me and I felt even time had stopped. . . ."

Wujian told us that when the first procedure failed, they moved to a surgical abortion with scissors and a special vacuum machine:

"I did not have any time to think as this most horrifying surgery began by force. I could hear the sound of the scissors cutting the body of my baby in my womb. . . .

"Eventually the journey in hell, the surgery, was finished, and one nurse showed me part of a bloody foot with her tweezers. Through my tears, the picture of the bloody foot was engraved into my eyes and into my heart, and so clearly I could see the five small bloody toes. Immediately the baby was thrown into a trash can. . . ."

Silence in the face of this barbaric Chinese government behavior, Mr. President, is not an option.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith is a New Jersey Republican.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/16/a-humanitarian-disaster//print/

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From the Wall Street Journal

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Suspect Is Key to Pace in 9/11 Case

by JESS BRAVIN

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has said he was ready to confess to orchestrating the Sept. 11 attacks, a move that would make his case relatively easy for prosecutors. But if Mr. Mohammed decides to work with his American lawyers to stall the case, he has plenty of tools at his disposal, criminal lawyers say.

When Mr. Mohammed appeared before a U.S. military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in December, he said he and his four co-defendants wanted the proceedings over quickly. "We don't want to waste time," he told the judge. "We want to enter a plea."

Now the U.S. is scrapping military tribunals for the five men and bringing them before a civilian court in New York. If Mr. Mohammed acts to speed his own execution and await what he asserts is glorious martyrdom with a guilty plea in federal court, that would bypass a trial, eliminate the need to select a jury and lead to sentencing probably before the end of 2010.

"I think the most likely scenario is these guys don't make any bones about it and they confess their involvement," said Harry Schneider, a Seattle lawyer who helped defend Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's former driver, in a military commission. "They are proud of what they did."

"Typically, it takes a year from indictment to trial" in the Manhattan federal courts, said David Kelley, the Manhattan U.S. attorney during the George W. Bush administration. "This case is a lot more complex. There's going to be a lot of pretrial litigation, and that timeline may double."

Mr. Kelley, who was a leader of the Justice Department's 9/11 investigation and now is a partner with Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLP, said "first and foremost" among the issues Mr. Mohammed could raise is the conduct of the government.

According to government documents, Mr. Mohammed faced waterboarding, or simulated drowning, 183 times while in government detention.

Defense lawyers could seek to have the case dismissed because of the harsh treatment. Mr. Kelley said it was hard to conceive of a federal judge dismissing the charges, but the judge might take more seriously defense challenges claiming that detainee statements were coerced.

"The government has lots of information about these folks. The challenge is converting that information into admissible information under the rules of evidence," Mr. Kelley said.

Republican critics say it would have been better to keep Mr. Mohammed and his co-defendants at the military tribunal in Guantanamo.

"They wanted center stage, and they're going to want to keep it for as long as they can," Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R., Mich.) said on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday. "They will bring every motion forward that they can that will drag this trial out."

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday that he is confident of convictions and wanted to bring Mr. Mohammed before a civilian court to demonstrate America's commitment to the rule of law.

A spokesman for the U.S. Marshals Service, which will provide security for the trial, said security measures and spending "will be unprecedented in Marshals Service history."

Mr. Schneider said security issues might make it tougher on the New York judge if, for example, Mr. Mohammed sought to call witnesses who are currently in Guantanamo.

However, Mr. Kelley said many of the issues that Mr. Mohammed's lawyers could bring before a civilian court would also arise before the military commission.

As originally conceived by Mr. Bush in 2001, military commissions could consider statements taken through torture or abuse, withhold evidence from defendants, conduct proceedings in secret and execute defendants with no review by an appellate court.

Such deviations from traditional due process led the Supreme Court to invalidate Mr. Bush's plan in 2006, and subsequent congressional action, court decisions and executive orders have added safeguards. Statements taken through torture are now inadmissible before military commissions, and defendants can appeal convictions to the federal courts including, potentially, the Supreme Court.

Moreover, in the handful of proceedings that have taken place at Guantanamo, military judges and juries have demonstrated independence from the government, returning acquittals on some charges and imposing at least one sentence far below the lengthy term sought by military prosecutors.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125832748008249513.html#printMode

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OPINION

The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda

The government will have to choose between vigorous prosecution and revealing classified sources and methods.

by JOHN YOO

'This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision," President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.

No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.

Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.

Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war.

KSM is the self-proclaimed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon—and a "terrorist entrepreneur," according to the 9/11 Commission report. He was the brains behind a succession of operations against the U.S., including the 1996 "Bojinka plot" to crash jetliners into American cities. Together with Osama bin Laden, he selected the 9/11 terrorists, arranged their financing and training, and ran the whole operation from abroad.

After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan KSM eventually became bin Laden's operations chief. American and Pakistani intelligence forces captured him on March 1, 2003, in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Now, however, KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.

Prosecutors will be forced to reveal U.S. intelligence on KSM, the methods and sources for acquiring its information, and his relationships to fellow al Qaeda operatives. The information will enable al Qaeda to drop plans and personnel whose cover is blown. It will enable it to detect our means of intelligence-gathering, and to push forward into areas we know nothing about.

This is not hypothetical, as former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has explained. During the 1993 World Trade Center bombing trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (aka the "blind Sheikh"), standard criminal trial rules required the government to turn over to the defendants a list of 200 possible co-conspirators.

In essence, this list was a sketch of American intelligence on al Qaeda. According to Mr. McCarthy, who tried the case, it was delivered to bin Laden in Sudan on a silver platter within days of its production as a court exhibit.

Bin Laden, who was on the list, could immediately see who was compromised. He also could start figuring out how American intelligence had learned its information and anticipate what our future moves were likely to be.

Even more harmful to our national security will be the effect a civilian trial of KSM will have on the future conduct of intelligence officers and military personnel. Will they have to read al Qaeda terrorists their Miranda rights? Will they have to secure the "crime scene" under battlefield conditions? Will they have to take statements from nearby "witnesses"? Will they have to gather evidence and secure its chain of custody for transport all the way back to New York? All of this while intelligence officers and soldiers operate in a war zone, trying to stay alive, and working to complete their mission and get out without casualties.

The Obama administration has rejected the tool designed to solve this tension between civilian trials and the demands of intelligence and military operations. In 2001, President George W. Bush established military commissions, which have a long history that includes World War II, the Civil War and the Revolutionary War. The lawyers in the Bush administration—I was one—understood that military commissions could guarantee a fair trial while protecting national security secrets from excessive exposure.

The Supreme Court has upheld the use of commissions for war crimes. The procedures for these commissions received the approval of Congress in 2006 and 2009.

Stranger yet, the Obama administration declared last week that it would use these military commissions to try five other al Qaeda operatives held at Guantanamo Bay, including Abu Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged planner of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. It should make no difference that this second group attacked a military target overseas. If anything, the deliberate attack on purely civilian targets in New York City represents the greater war crime.

For a preview of the KSM trial, look at what happened in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker who was arrested in the U.S. just before 9/11. His trial never made it to a jury. Moussaoui's lawyers tied the court up in knots.

All they had to do was demand that the government hand over all its intelligence on him. The case became a four-year circus, giving Moussaoui a platform to air his anti-American tirades. The only reason the trial ended was because, at the last minute, Moussaoui decided to plead guilty. That plea relieved the government of the choice between allowing a fishing expedition into its intelligence files or dismissing the charges.

KSM's lawyers will not save the government from itself. Instead they will press hard to reveal intelligence secrets in open court. Our intelligence agents and soldiers will be the ones to suffer.

Mr. Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an official in the Justice Department from 2001-03 and is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704431804574537370665832850.html#printMode

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From the Department of Homeland Security

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Friday, November 13, 2009

The Three-Legged Stool

Secretary Napolitano delivered a speech this morning at the Center for American Progress, outlining the Obama Administration’s strong support for reform of the nation’s immigration laws, and delivering a clear message on her commitment to the effort required to change the status quo. “We are determined to deal with long lingering problems that cloud our future,” the Secretary remarked. We’ve discussed this issue on the blog before, but as the Secretary said today, these are “critical challenges that have been ignored in Washington for too long.” We’re going to start talking about them more on the blog in the coming months.

Reform isn’t just a legislative benchmark for this administration; for the department, first and foremost, it is about keeping our country secure. By almost any account, millions of people are living – and many working – in this country illegally. They are families and individuals; migrant workers and seamstresses; neighbors and fellow church-goers – individuals that deserve a clear, fair and firm process. This is just one part of what the Secretary referred to today as the “three-legged stool” reform that we need.

“Let me be clear: when I talk about 'immigration reform,' I’m referring to what I call the 'three-legged stool' that includes a commitment to serious and effective enforcement, improved legal flows for families and workers, and a firm but fair way to deal with those who are already here. That’s the way that this problem has to be solved, because we need all three aspects to build a successful system. This approach has at its heart the conviction that we must demand responsibility and accountability from everyone involved in the system: immigrants, employers and government. And that begins with fair, reliable enforcement.”

The Secretary noted that while DHS has already made many reforms over the last nine months within the current legal framework, real reform is necessary to address the larger challenges we face on this issue.

"Our system must be strong enough to prevent illegal entry and to get criminal aliens off our streets and out of the country. But it must also be smart enough to reward the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit that immigrants have always brought to America—traits that have built our nation."

We’ll continue to update you, and encourage you to leave comments and let us know your thoughts. You can check out video of the Secretary’s speech here and her remarks are posted on our site.

http://www.dhs.gov/journal/theblog/2009/11/three-legged-stool.html


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