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From LA Times

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His name: Jihad. His message: peace

An American-born Muslim earnestly works to dispel stereotypes about his faith.

by Duke Helfand

November 29, 2009

Jihad Turk -- clean-shaven and youthful -- is telling an interfaith audience that the prophet Muhammad traces his lineage to Abraham, the biblical patriarch.

Turk explains to the crowd of mostly Christians and Jews that Muslims also revere Jesus and Moses as prophets, and that Islam cherishes life.

But some in the Pepperdine University audience are skeptical. One man wants to know why so many Muslims are "willing with perfect ease to kill," as he puts it, drawing brief applause.

A woman later needles Turk about what she views as Islam's suppression of women. "You guys really need a good PR firm," she tells him.

Without missing a beat, Turk responds: "If you know of one, let me know."

U.S. Muslims are struggling mightily these days to win over a wary public. In Los Angeles, part of that task falls to the 38-year-old Turk, director of religious affairs at the Islamic Center of Southern California, one of the region's most influential mosques.

Earnest and doggedly optimistic, Turk is an unflappable ambassador for an often embattled faith -- a man whose American upbringing gives him a foothold in two sometimes colliding worlds.

The son of an American Methodist mother and a Palestinian Muslim father, Turk was elected homecoming king at his Phoenix high school and took some time off from college to explore his Islamic roots in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Now, as an emerging leader in local Muslim circles, he spends much of his time patiently trying to spread his message about Islam's peaceful intentions, the importance of tolerance and the ancient thread shared by three monotheistic religions.

Some who encounter Turk commend him for breaking down walls of suspicion. Others doubt that he represents mainstream Muslim belief. Turk acknowledges that it can be difficult to convince skeptics. The recent deadly rampage at Texas' Ft. Hood, allegedly by a Muslim Army major, has made the job even tougher.

"I've come to realize that there is a certain segment of the population that is impervious to what I have to say," Turk said. "But there is . . . usually a good number of people I will get through to."

Turk's childhood helped blend his dual identities.

He attended public schools and played on youth soccer teams (his teammates called him Jay), even as he learned Arabic in Sunday school and attended summer camps for young Muslims. In high school, he made the varsity football and track teams and spent his senior year reading books on Islam in his free time.

Although his parents came from different backgrounds, they reared their five children as Muslims. "It was my personal opinion to raise them in one faith rather than throw mixed signals at them," said his mother, Carol. "I had no objections to the Islamic religion."

Hafez Turk chose what he believed would be a noble name for his son -- Jihad -- long before the word entered the U.S. lexicon as an expression for "holy war," a meaning that Islamic scholars say has been distorted by extremists and the media.

"We do jihad every day in our life -- the struggle to do good," said the father, a refrain frequently repeated by his son.

Turk's parents divorced when he was 17, driven apart to some degree by cultural differences, including disagreements about his mother's work and activities outside the home, she and Turk recalled. The split had a lasting effect on Turk.

"I would listen and feel the pain and hear the point of view of each of my parents," he said. "That experience highlighted to me the importance for cultures to communicate."

The divorce also prompted Turk to explore his faith more deeply. An imam at a Phoenix mosque encouraged the young man to study Arabic and Islam at the Islamic University of Medina in Saudi Arabia.

Soon, Turk left Arizona State University for the ancestral land of Muhammad -- a place that he said felt wholly foreign to him, with its ideological fervor, literal interpretation of the Koran and segregation of men and women.

"It was a complete culture shock," Turk said of his two years in the country, recalling how a professor at one point offered him a free plane ticket to Afghanistan to train with mujahedin fighters (he declined).

Turk also spent six months in Iran studying Farsi and Shiite Islam before returning to the U.S. to finish his bachelor's degree in Arabic at UC Berkeley, followed by a master's degree in Islamic law and Arabic at the University of Texas. He started on a doctorate in Islamic studies at UCLA and four years ago began working at the Islamic center on Vermont Avenue. At the mosque, he runs youth programs, leads prayers, delivers sermons and officiates at weddings and funerals.

Leaders at the center said they hired Turk because he embodied their commitments to openness and integrating disparate identities.

"He fit our model," said Maher Hathout, the center's spokesman and one of its elders. "We coined the term, 'Home is not where my grandparents are buried. Home is where my grandchildren are brought up.' "

Other prominent community members see Turk as representative of a new generation of American-born Muslims who can break down stereotypes and more easily explain the Muslim experience to those beyond the walls of their mosques.

"The presence of young Muslims who project a homegrown experience and understanding helps undo the psychological barrier of 'us versus them,' " said Hussam Ayloush, the Southern California executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Turk is good-natured and quick-witted, often sprinkling humor through his crash-course presentations on Islam. During a recent visit to a world religions class at Hollywood's Immaculate Heart High School, he read passages from the Koran about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to demonstrate that Muslims and Christians share the same creation narrative.

Then he tried to teach the roomful of seniors how to deliver the traditional Arabic greeting: " as-salaamu alay-kum " -- peace be upon you. The students stumbled over the words.

"A-salami-and-bacon?" he joked, drawing giggles. "Muslims don't eat bacon."

Turk is a relative newcomer to Muslim leadership circles in Los Angeles. Those interviewed said they welcome his interfaith work, but some objected to his use of the title "imam," a designation they said should be reserved for the most learned Islamic scholars.

Turk is "not qualified to issue legal opinions or give legal advice," said Khaled Abou El Fadl, a UCLA law school professor and Islamic law scholar who was once Turk's graduate school advisor.

Turk said he gives advice on Islamic law or personal matters when asked to do so by members of the Islamic center. As for the title, he said he goes by "imam" only when outside audiences introduce him that way and never uses it in the mosque.

Turk is continually in motion. When he's not at the center, teaching Arabic at UCLA or coaching soccer (he has three young children), he can be found engaged in one of his many interfaith endeavors.

In March, he will help lead a mission to Israel and the West Bank with Jewish, Muslim and Christian representatives, his fourth such trip. The group will visit sites holy to all three faiths. And early next year, another group he co-founded, the Christian-Muslim Consultative Group of Southern California, will begin pairing local churches and mosques in a relationship-building exercise.

Turk's co-leader, the Rev. Gwynne Guibord, an Episcopal priest, said Turk's dual background is a useful tool in his efforts to establish trust.

"Because he was born and reared in this country, I think it's easier for people who are not Muslim to understand him," Guibord said. "He is deeply American and yet he is Muslim."

Yet bridging the two worlds remains a challenge.

The day after the Ft. Hood shootings, Turk hosted at the Islamic center a group of seventh-graders from New West Charter Middle School in West Los Angeles. The students observed midday prayers inside the mosque. Then Turk gave them his abbreviated course on Islam, explaining that Muslims observe five pillars of faith that include daily prayer, fasting during the Ramadan holiday and making the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, which he has done twice.

"Muslims believe in the Torah, the New Testament, the Old Testament and the Koran," Turk told the students.

Then he asked: "My name is Jihad. What does jihad mean?"

One boy answered: "It means to fight."

Turk, responding with the firm but friendly tone of a teacher, offered an alternative. "It means the inner struggle to do the right thing," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-jihad29-2009nov29,0,92112,print.story

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INNOCENTS BETRAYED

Abuse begets abuse in a family's brutal legacy

A long history of dysfunctional parenting put a 6-year-old boy in the murderous path of a man his siblings called The Maniac.

by Hector Becerra

November 29, 2009

"Sit down, Johnetta," Frances Hill told her 14-year-old cousin.

Hours earlier, police and a social worker had come knocking in the darkness, with news that stunned the South Los Angeles woman.

Now Hill had to tell the girl: Her little brother, the 6-year-old she had fed, bathed and babied as if he were her child, was dead. The killer was her mother's ex-boyfriend, a convicted rapist with a long rap sheet.

Johnetta Harrison burst into tears.

"What's wrong with my momma?" Hill, 65, remembers the child asking that morning in July. "She knew how he was and she sent my sister and my brother with him. What's wrong with my momma?"

It was a question with no simple answer.

Tylette Davis had given birth to six children by age 23 and parceled them out to friends and relatives, including the ex-boyfriend. His name is Marcas Fisher, but Davis' children said he went by a nickname: The Maniac.

Over the span of a decade, social workers repeatedly looked into allegations that Tylette's children were mistreated or neglected, including that Johnetta suffered for years with open sores from an untreated skin disorder, internal records show. Most of the complaints were not substantiated.

Twice, 6-year-old Dae'von Bailey told school officials that Fisher had struck him. Both times, social workers investigated but left the boy with Fisher. When he beat Dae'von to death, Johnetta's youngest sister, then 5, watched from a corner, unable to move or muster a scream. Fisher pleaded guilty to the boy's murder.

For all of the flaws and missed opportunities that Dae'von's case exposes on the government's part, it also highlights the formidable problems of families steeped in generations of dysfunctional parenting. For them, abuse and neglect are a brutal legacy, not easily broken by the occasional intervention of social workers or well-meaning relatives.

"Abuse can certainly happen in any family, but it can become ingrained as a dynamic when each generation 'teaches' it to the next," said Trish Ploehn, director of Los Angeles County's Department of Children and Family Services, who declined to comment specifically on Dae'von's case.

"Unless there's a willingness to examine these dysfunctional behaviors, they are likely to repeat themselves and cause further harm."

In Tylette Davis' case, her own mistreatment as a girl seemed to have foretold her children's.

A harsh world

Twenty-four years ago, when Tylette was about 5, her family lived in a rough Long Beach neighborhood. Her mother, Linda Dotson-Davis, had just given birth to her seventh child, her fifth with husband Freddie Davis.

As Linda recalls it, the baby had been rejecting milk and was malnourished. "I heard a faint cry in the night and I touched my baby and he felt like rubber," Linda, 55, said. "I knew something was seriously wrong."

The infant, Keyonte, was hospitalized, and before long, social workers, and then police, were knocking at the family's door. Another son, Freddie Jr., was so tiny at about age 2 that he appeared to be 10 months old, the authorities found. They also reported a foul odor, a lack of electricity and refrigerators and cabinets infested with roaches and spiders, said a person familiar with the case file who requested anonymity because its contents are confidential.

Linda and Freddie Davis Sr. were charged with "willful cruelty to children," a misdemeanor that was later dismissed.

Child welfare authorities placed all seven children in protective custody for about a month before releasing them to other relatives, the couple said.

Linda said the family was harassed. One social worker "came out and talked to me like I had a tail behind me, she said. "I went off on that woman. I took it offensive. I cursed her out. I called her an old dilapidated bitch."

The Davises were ordered to undergo drug tests and counseling and to take parenting classes, Linda said. About a year later, the children returned home to new beds in their rooms and fresh clothes in the closet, she said: "It was a joyous time."

Over the years, the family moved around, staying with relatives, bouncing from motel to motel. Freddie Sr. said a sister, Dorothy Davis, helped him find an apartment in Long Beach where he could do repairs in lieu of paying rent.

In the early 1990s, when Tylette was about 12, she and a sister moved in with Dorothy, also living in Long Beach.

"I just didn't want to live with my parents," Tylette said recently, declining to elaborate.

"Tylette was very quiet," recalled Dorothy, now 61. "I think all the lights and the gas constantly being cut off in the house, the poverty, life with her momma and daddy -- she went through a lot."

Her niece could be "a very compassionate person, very sweet," Dorothy said, but she was easily manipulated. Soon Tylette began to run off with boys, and Dorothy decided it was too much. She returned Tylette and her sister to their parents.

By age 13, Tylette was pregnant. In April 1995, she gave birth to her first child, Johnetta.

'Out there with boys'

Over the next eight years, Tylette had five more children.

"She was just out there with boys, thinking she was in love," said her mother, Linda, who had her first child at 17.

In the 11th grade, Tylette dropped out of school. Living on welfare payments for her children, she'd sometimes spend weekends partying, family members said.

"We allow that," her mother said. "She needed her leisure time."

In 1998 and 1999, the child welfare agency looked into whether Linda and Freddie were mistreating Tylette, then about 17, according to an internal report prepared in August after Dae'von's death. Someone had alleged that her parents abused crack cocaine and alcohol and provided an "unkempt home."

"They never proved we did drugs," said Freddie Sr., now 59. "They didn't prove nothing."

Soon Tylette's own parenting came under scrutiny, according to the report last August. Year after year, calls to the child welfare agency alleged that their house was infested with drugs and lacked running water; that the children were "filthy and hungry," begged neighbors for food, did not go to school and played outside, unsupervised, into the night.

Seven times, beginning in 1999, social workers investigated whether Johnetta had uncontrolled eczema. "It burns!" one caller said she heard the girl crying at night.

But of 12 complaints in 10 years, just two were substantiated: one in 2001 that Tylette had left her 1-year-old alone on a hospital gurney after he accidentally drank lighter fluid, and another in 2006 that Johnetta had "open sores and blisters" all over -- seven years after the first eczema complaint.

Johnetta told a social worker in 2001 that her grandparents sometimes hit her with a belt. She repeated that complaint after Dae'von's death, when her youngest sister also said her grandfather would "whoop everybody." But the August report suggests that for the most part, everyone in the family denied to social workers that anyone was mistreated.

"My mom would tell us to lie," Johnetta said, because Tylette was afraid the children would be taken away.

With immunization records current and no bruises apparent, the August report suggests, social workers were willing to give Tylette second and third chances. In 1999, one gave the mother "an opportunity" to clean the home so that, upon the worker's return, it "appeared appropriate." In 2005, another gave Tylette another "opportunity" to enroll her children in school and make medical appointments.

In Johnetta's case, one worker wrote, Tylette was "doing what she could" for her.

"However, restraints brought on by simple economics pose substantial limitations on the family's ability to control both the longevity and severity of Johnetta's medical condition."

Johnetta's fear

Quiet but well-spoken at 14, Johnetta describes an itinerant life filled with chores and suffering.

It was often her job to clean the bathroom and help bathe Linda, who has diabetes and later used a wheelchair. She gave Linda daily insulin shots, worrying constantly that she'd hurt the older woman.

She often washed, dressed and fed her youngest siblings, Johnetta said, including Dae'von.

"I thought he was a good boy," she said. "I didn't like that people were always hitting on him. I thought he should feel like he had a home and somebody to love him."

Johnetta said she also loved her mother -- but feared her. Late one night, she said, Tylette lost her temper when she refused to get up from bed to clean up after a little sister who vomited.

"I didn't want to do it, so she hit me up in my head." Johnetta later told a social worker that her mother "would be constantly drunk" and that her boyfriend, Fisher, frequently struck her brothers, according to the August report. "He would hit Dae Dae all over the body."

After her family moved briefly to Las Vegas with Fisher, Johnetta said, he "whooped" one of her brothers because he'd wet his bed.

"When I went in there to wash my hands, he was peeing blood," she said in an interview. "I went upstairs and told my momma and she went in there and seen it, and that was when she told Maniac, 'Don't ever put your hands on my kids.' But he was still doing it."

There were good times too, Johnetta said, beaming as she recalled them. Her Uncle Katari, 30, a security guard and the only one in the family with a regular job, would get the boys haircuts or take the kids to Knott's Berry Farm.

Hill, Linda's first cousin, bought church clothes for the children, lent money to Linda and Freddie and sometimes paid Freddie to work around her Watts home.

Touched particularly by Johnetta and Dae'von, she'd take the boy shoe shopping and buy the girl oatmeal baths for her skin.

In late 2005, Johnetta's family moved to a home on Loness Avenue near Compton. The next February their lives took a dramatic turn: Tylette's younger brothers were shot by a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy who confronted them as they walked home from a liquor store, after a customer reported seeing them with a gun. Freddie Jr. had been carrying a sawed-off shotgun and Keyonte a handgun -- for protection, family members said.

Freddie Jr. died the next day of gunshot wounds to the back.

The family sued the county and, in August, a jury awarded the Davises $2.6 million -- a judgment they are waiting to collect. Everyone mourned her uncle's death, Johnetta said, but Tylette could not stop crying. Freddie Sr. noticed another change in Tylette.

"Well, I have always been drinking a little bit," he testified at the trial, "but right now I got a daughter, she has turned into an alcoholic."

'I had to call'

Linda had a stroke and a mild heart attack after the shooting.

Dorothy Davis, who visited the home to help care for her, said Tylette seemed to be in bed all the time, and the children often missed school.

"Johnetta looked like an old lady. She cleaned around the house more than all of them. . . . Everyone called her names."

In May 2006, a cousin of Linda's saw Johnetta walk out of a kiddie pool, scratching and bleeding from her eczema. Mary Smith, 74, said her brother yelled for somebody to get some lotion but no one budged.

"I knew I was going to call [the county] when I saw Johnetta," she said. "I had to call."

After finding a pattern of mistreatment in the home -- only the second such conclusion in a dozen investigations -- county authorities checked for the next year to see that the children went to school and that their mother received Family Preservation services, including classes on parenting. If Tylette found a new place to live, the child welfare agency would help cover move-in costs, according to the August report -- but she never did.

In spring 2008, after an argument with Linda and Freddie Davis, Hill decided she'd had enough. "Johnetta was on the couch bleeding, and I just told her, 'Come on, Johnetta, let's go. You're staying with me.' "

Hill said Linda turned to Tylette and said, "You're going to let her take your baby like that?" Tylette said, "Yeah."

Hill had planned to take in Dae'von because she thought he was treated roughly. But then she saw Johnetta, barely over 4 feet tall, the backs of her knees so scabbed she could hardly walk.

"I thought she needed me more," she said.

Hill was already caring for a husband in a wheelchair. She had survived cancer and the murder of a son. She also knew the academic challenges facing Johnetta, who read at about a second-grade level.

But Hill had some advantages, too: a sense of humor and dogged resourcefulness. She found Johnetta a dermatologist and arranged for tutoring. She set boundaries, identifying "gang houses" to avoid. She grounded Johnetta for letting a friend pierce her lip and for not listening to teachers.

"Your problem is you're a follower," Hill said as Johnetta sat nearby. "She loves her momma. She'd go with her momma right now if her momma said, 'Let's go.' "

"I said I love my mother," Johnetta retorted. As for going back, "I never said that."

Home 'not suitable'

Last December, after another visit by social workers, Tylette sent most of her other children to live with others.

She later told social workers she had decided her parents' home was "not suitable for anyone." Most of the fathers' homes were not an option -- two of the four were in prison for murder -- but her ex-boyfriend Fisher was willing to take the two youngest, Dae'von and his little sister. He was the girl's father, not the boy's.

In March, the siblings entered pre-kindergarten at Lakewood's Riley Elementary School, teacher Majella Maas said. They clung to her like "extra appendages" -- especially Dae'von.

In 28 years of teaching, Maas said, she had never known a boy as hungry for affection.

He'd snuggle up to her in class and sit on her lap, or throw his arms around her. He knew how to tie his shoes but would undo his laces so she'd redo them. During recess, he stayed at her side.

"Being with an adult was more important for him than playing," she said. "He didn't need to talk. He just wanted to be close."

In late April, the boy arrived at school with a bloody, swollen nose. The school called the county, but without the correct address, it took social workers about two weeks to find Fisher. The boy said Fisher hit him; the man said it was an accident. The evidence was deemed inconclusive.

According to the August report, the social worker "ensured the child was seen by a doctor and a safety plan was signed, indicating that no one is to hit the children."

A month later, on June 3, Maas called the county, this time because Dae'von said that Fisher had hit him in the stomach.

After the boy and his sister provided inconsistent accounts, no bruises were found on Dae'von and Fisher denied the allegations, they were declared "unfounded."

On July 23 police found Dae'von's body inside a house on 87th Place in South Los Angeles. His little sister had seen him tied up in the hallway, crying, as Fisher beat him, according to her account in county records.

Later, she said, Fisher put Dae'von in the shower and told him to "wake up," before dragging him to the bedroom. Her father told her to "go take a nap like Dae Dae," the girl said.

Fisher fled and was captured in Las Vegas a month later. With his guilty plea on Nov. 19, he became the third father of Tylette's children to be incarcerated for murder.

"I never thought that he would do something like that to my son," Tylette said a week after the slaying. "I was going through things and I thought that leaving him with Marcas was the best thing to do. But apparently not."

After Dae'von's death, the county expressed a certainty about Tylette's parenting that hadn't been there before.

"Mother has not taken any responsibility for her role nor has she been able to display any insight into the issues that plague this family," the August report said. "It is in the best interest of these children to remain . . . with relatives permanently."

Hill became Johnetta's permanent guardian on Sept. 24. Two of the children, now 12 and 10, are staying with a paternal grandmother. And the youngest girl, now 6, and her 9-year-old brother are with their great aunt Dorothy -- some 15 years after Tylette left her care.

Hers is a spacious home with manicured lawns and flower beds on half an acre in Hesperia. Upon arrival in August, the girl marveled at its pristine furniture and glass cabinets.

One night, Dorothy let her sleep in a room with her brother, each in a twin bed. She peered in and noticed that the girl's bed was empty.

"She was in the bed with her brother, wrapped up in his arms," Dorothy said.

The girl has had flashbacks and once screamed in a department store after seeing a small boy sleeping in a shopping cart. "He's dead!" she cried.

She's doing better now, though Dorothy said she worries about the boy, who is angry and has been fighting with classmates.

"Those children are out of that nasty house," Dorothy said. Now "God be in control. It's time for the curse to be broken."

Missing Dae'von

Last month, Tylette was arrested in a Compton apartment after attacking her current boyfriend with a knife. She later pleaded guilty to injuring the man and was sentenced to five years' probation and 90 days in an alcohol treatment center.

Freddie Sr. wept in court, relieved that the penalty wasn't more severe.

Linda began making plans: Once the $2.6-million judgment comes through, she said, "we'll be able to buy a five-, six-bedroom house so all my grandkids could be under one roof, and Tylette can get custody of her children again."

In her cousin's living room in Watts, Johnetta said she had hope that her mother could fix her life, maybe get her other children back.

But she said she's staying with Hill.

She only wishes Dae'von could be with her.

"I used to say to myself, 'Well, when I get grown up, I'ma take Dae Dae and have him live with me.' Him and my little sister."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-child-death29-2009nov29,0,2835537,print.story

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Intervention and reinvention in South Park

A recreation area once claimed by gangs has been turned into a bustling community park with help from City Hall and the LAPD. But it took a former heavy-hitter in the local gang to close the deal.

by Scott Gold

November 26, 2009

Not so long ago, South Park looked like Club Med for gang members.

The neighbors had given up on the little park -- ceding it, almost entirely, to the 5-Trey Avalon Gangster Crips. Gangsters smoked pot in the gym and bounced their gambling dice against the concrete steps outside the rec center. There was no grass, and, in the mornings, junkies littered the dirt with syringes and tiny, colorful balloons that had been emptied of heroin. There were no youth sports teams. There was one child -- one -- enrolled in the preschool program.

"It was," said Brian Cox, the park's senior recreation director, "not a park."

Four years ago, a police crackdown and a decline in violent crime created an opening. Workers planted grass and hung nets from the rusted basketball rims. The park, tentatively, began to rebuild. But to accomplish any sort of rebirth, city officials were forced to admit that they needed help of a different sort.

They needed the gang.

They needed Blue.

His real name was Parie Dedeaux, but he'd always been known as Blue. No one ever had explained it to him. He'd grown up nearby, and he'd been a heavy hitter in the Avalons for two decades, since before he could drive a car. He commanded an inordinate amount of respect on the streets, officials said.

"Before we could get the kids to come back, we had to get those guys to allow the kids to come back," Cox said. "We could pretend otherwise. Or we could start to work with them. What are you going to do? They ain't leaving."

So Blue, instrumental in claiming the park for the gang, would now play a pivotal role in giving it back -- an unlikely partnership that would lead to a remarkable resurrection.

Deserted as youths

Blue recently sat in the empty bleachers at South Park and offered a passionate and articulate defense of the gang life, which can be an unsettling thing to hear.

He grew up just a few blocks away, near Avalon Boulevard, back when the area was known as South-Central -- before City Hall figured out that the name had become shorthand for urban decay and changed it to South Los Angeles.

He is 38 now, with a barrel chest and Popeye forearms that belie the gray hairs in his goatee. In the gang world, he and his contemporaries are of a specific age. They were the first to become men during the truly terrible years in South L.A. 20 years ago, when crack cocaine came through like a tempest and gangs were averaging a killing a day.

Everyone, he said, seemed to desert them at once. Many of their parents were lost to drugs; his own mother was murdered and his father was addicted and absent, like most of the fathers he knew at the time. The police, he said, became cruel and combative. The schools offered little hope. The factory jobs on Alameda and Slauson -- the jobs that had lured his grandparents from Louisiana, like thousands of other African American families -- were gone. Blue and his friends had hustled a little cash by offering to pump gas for customers at the local stations; soon, even that was taken away, as crackheads kicked the boys out and took over.

"We didn't have a man at home. I never had a single man walk through the door and say, 'I paid the light bill today.' None of us did," Blue said.

"So now your mom is getting high. The lights get turned off. The house is getting stinky. We all looked at each other and said: 'Well, I guess it's just us now. We ain't got no malls, no colleges, no jobs. But everybody wants to be a part of something. All we could do is claim . . . this."

He stretched his arms wide; he meant the park.

A steep decline

It became a headquarters of sorts for the Avalons, and some of them soon began selling the same drugs that had sullied their lives a few years before. The park began a precipitous and notorious decline.

"They owned the park," said Los Angeles Police Officer Cathy Emestica, a 14-year veteran who has devoted much of her career to South Park and its regulars. "You couldn't come in or out unless they let you."

Four years ago, shortly before Cox took over, an Avalon took a shot at a cop. The bullet missed, but for the LAPD, it was the last straw.

The department took the unusual step of erecting five surveillance cameras at the park. Emestica began monitoring the everyday crowd: addicts fresh from the methadone clinic; dealers; gangsters who stared up into her cameras, alternately waving or flipping her the bird. The pace was relentless; in the first year and a half, the LAPD made 1,140 arrests.

Cox, sensing a shifting tide, had begun cracking down. No more pot in the gym. No more dice outside his office. The park started filling up on weekends. It was time to talk to Blue. They sat in the bleachers one day, just the two of them, staring into the caramel-colored dirt in the empty infield on the other side of the fence.

"I'm going to be real with you: I don't condone what you do," Cox told him, carefully. "But we've got to come to common ground."

It was a tense conversation, but one that Blue was ready for.

He looked around. The park had been his proving ground, the place where he'd darted between the shaggy palm trees that formed a once-proud promenade leading to the swimming pool. Where he'd earned his first taste of respect behind the rec center, in a little shady spot where the boys went to resolve their disputes. Through all the pain that came with growing up in the neighborhood, the park had been one of the few constants in his life. It had, in a very real sense, sustained him. And now, he realized, he could repay the favor.

"We're tired," Blue told Cox. "We got to find a new way."

So Blue went legit.

A 'double life'

Truth be told, it wasn't that much of a stretch.

For years, until he got laid off in a downsizing, Blue had been leading what he called a "double life" -- working a respectable job in hardware sales, something he chose to shield from the Avalons as if it were a badge of shame. He cashed in his 401(k) and bought exercise equipment, including a heavy punching bag, which the park allowed him to install in a small courtyard near the office, mostly for the Avalons' use.

The park also gave him a key to a dank storage room; Blue bought a hot plate and a microwave and began preparing breakfast for the park's homeless residents.

He also launched a tradition called "Spread Friday." Each week he and his friends make a goulash of sorts, using only ingredients that are also available for purchase inside local jails: ramen topped with smoked oysters and canned beef, honey, jalapeños and crushed Doritos, tossed inside a garbage bag and doled out to all takers, who are surprisingly many -- and eager. The meal, said Blue -- who in his 20s served 22 months in prison for robbery -- is a reminder that life will always be better on the outside.

Once Blue had signed off on the notion of the Avalons cooperating with the city -- or at least allowing the community unfettered access to the park -- the floodgates opened.

Using grants and money routed from City Councilwoman Jan Perry's office, the park built a playground, replaced the gym floor and refurbished a band shell. The park launched a series of music performances. During the first concert, featuring blues and jazz, "everyone held their breath," Cox said. Nothing happened. So at the next show, Cox asked Blue and his comrades -- "the big, bad Avalon Crips," Cox said with a grin -- to provide security. It worked without a hitch.

Today, there are talent shows, tutoring programs, toy giveaways at the holidays. An aerobics class has exploded in popularity; more than 200 women are registered, making it one of the city's largest park programs for adults. The class is so large that the instructor had to develop hand signals to telegraph dance moves. There are more than 700 children enrolled in classes and sports programs. And there are 18 kids in the preschool.

"Do we still have our problems? Yeah, of course we do," Cox said. "This ain't Westwood or Brentwood, and it ain't never going to be. But we made it work."

By last year, it was time for the final chapter.

Blue learned that a football program called the Demos was losing its permit to practice at another nearby park. He wanted to bring the program to South Park. Here, that was a radical idea. Many of the players' fathers were from rival gangs: Pirus, Outlaws, Blood Stone Villains.

"You guys have shot at each other," Cox told Blue.

"I'll make it safe, homie," Blue told him. "I'll do it."

'Showtime!'

It is a Saturday morning in November, early enough that the fog hasn't yet burned off. The Demos will play six games today -- six age brackets -- against the mighty Compton Vikings. Blue has been up since 6 a.m. washing uniforms, and as he climbs out of his 1975 Buick Skylark, which is the color of asparagus, he is already champing at the bit.

"Showtime!" he screams.

The city rolled the dice on Blue, and so far he has delivered. At first, parents who brought kids in from other neighborhoods sat in their cars with the engines running during practice. Eventually, they ventured out.

There are now 300 kids in the program -- among them Blue's 11-year-old son, P.J., a running back, and his 7-year-old daughter, Paris, a cheerleader.

On this morning, the first person Blue encounters is Vernard Payne, whose white "P" on his cap says what no one needs to say out loud: that he is affiliated with the Pueblo Bishops gang. Blue and Payne are Crip and Blood; here, they embrace.

"Once you root for my son . . . " Blue explains.

" . . . It's over," Payne says.

"It's like rehab for gangsters," Blue says.

Blue walks in as though he's the mayor, beaming, teasing, high-fiving. "It's on!" he shouts.

"The mouth is in the house," someone mutters.

The league is not for the faint of heart. The players' helmets are gouged and duct-taped, their socks and sleeves full of holes and bloodstains.

"Wake the . . . up!" a coach shouts after Compton makes a big gain on a busted play -- he's talking to a 7-year-old. Another boy seems to wilt under his oversize helmet and misses a tackle. "Tear his ass up!" a coach screams at him, the veins on his neck taut beneath a tattoo of a roll of money.

The early games do not go well for the Demos; Compton seems able to move the ball at will. Blue tries bribery; he offers to buy players hot dogs if they recover a fumble. When that doesn't work, he bumps his offer up to $5.

Blue erupts when P.J. storms 30 yards on a kickoff return. But when the Demos throw an interception on the next play, Blue hurls his bag of sunflower seeds to the ground.

"We're out here to win!" he yells. "You're playing like little punks!"

Soon, though, perspective regained, Blue finds himself in the center of a scrum of players, firing them up for the next game. He has many roles in the league, chiefly that he is its head booster.

"Whose house?" he bellows.

"Our house!" the boys shout.

"Where we from?"

"East side!"

"Where?"

"East side!"

It's the last bit that always gets to him, he said later.

In the parlance of South L.A., "east side" has long referred to gangs east of Main Street. All of a sudden, the words mean more.

They mean that the east side now gathers in peace, if only once or twice a week, and if only to watch kids play football.

"I'm not just part of a gang. I'm part of a community," Blue said. "It's the first time I ever felt that. I'm part of . . . this."

He threw open his arms again, and fell silent, which doesn't happen often.

"We're in the middle of the ghetto," he whispered. "You hear that?"

Then he smiled, knowing full well that the only thing you could hear -- at least for now -- was the sound of a lawn mower on the new grass, and the birds in the trees.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-southla-southpark26-2009nov26,0,4221046,print.story

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Clerical errors and luck kept suspect in Lily Burk killing on the street, records show

In June 2006, Charles Samuel entered a Van Nuys home and beat a man. Prosecutors could have sought a life sentence under the state's three-strikes law, but there was an error on his rap sheet.

by Jack Leonard

November 29, 2009

Three years before he was charged with kidnapping and murdering 17-year-old Lily Burk, Charles Samuel slipped through an unlocked side door of a Van Nuys home.

The man living there, James Alger, was dating Samuel's ex-wife, according to court records newly obtained by The Times. As he spotted Samuel in his home, Alger confronted the intruder, asking why he had entered the house.

"I can do whatever . . . I want," Samuel responded.

Samuel punched Alger two or three times in the face, leaving the victim bruised before Samuel snatched a cordless phone and keys and fled, according to a probation report released to The Times in response to an order from a court of appeals.

The report gives the clearest picture yet of the criminal record and recent biography of the man accused in the abduction and slaying of Burk, a high school student whose killing this summer jolted a city inured to news of violence.

Samuel's criminal record stretches over three decades and includes mostly minor theft and drug crimes.

But the probation report shows that Samuel, 50, was also known to authorities as someone with a recent violent past.

This and other public law-enforcement and court records lay out how a combination of clerical errors, decisions by criminal justice officials and luck helped Samuel avoid a lengthy prison term that might otherwise have placed him behind bars on the day Burk was killed.

At the time of the June 30, 2006, Van Nuys attack, Samuel's record included convictions for robbery and residential burglary in San Bernardino, making him subject to prosecution under the state's tough three-strikes law. The law carries a 25-years-to-life prison term for third strikers.

Clerical error

But because of clerical errors that misstated Samuel's criminal record, Los Angeles County prosecutors were unaware of his previous residential burglary conviction.

Even if prosecutors had known about Samuel's two previous strikes, it is unclear whether they would have sought a life prison term. Under L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley, prosecutors generally do not seek life sentences for repeat offenders unless the third strike involves a violent or serious crime, such as robbery.

In this case, the district attorney's office charged Samuel with one felony -- petty theft with a prior -- and misdemeanor battery. Samuel pleaded no contest to the theft charge.

In her probation report, Deputy Probation Officer Paula Golden listed Samuel's lengthy rap sheet and described his alleged break-in and attack on Alger as an "extremely serious offense."

Samuel, she wrote, "is lucky that there were not more serious charges brought against him for his criminal behavior."

A district attorney's spokeswoman said in a statement that a "highly accomplished" prosecutor decided which charges to file but that it was "hard to reconstruct the rationale for a filing decision made several years ago."

In an interview before he was sentenced in the Van Nuys case, Samuel told Golden that he had been unemployed since the 1970s and homeless for a year and a half, the report said. He had been separated from his wife since 2004, he said, and his two children lived with her mother. He denied using drugs.

Samuel told Golden that he agreed to plead no contest to the theft charge as part of a plea bargain to avoid a third strike. The report does not elaborate on the comment.

Samuel was sentenced to two years and eight months in prison and was released two years later.

Lily Burk

On July 24, Samuel was on parole for the Van Nuys incident and enrolled in a residential drug treatment program south of Koreatown when he obtained permission to leave the facility to visit a Department of Motor Vehicles office, even though the office was closed.

Burk went missing the same day while visiting Southwestern Law School in the Mid-Wilshire area as she ran an errand for her mother, a lawyer who teaches at the school.

Police said footage from surveillance cameras showed Samuel driving Burk's car away from the area of the law school with the 17-year-old in the passenger seat. About 30 minutes later, another camera showed Samuel repeatedly and unsuccessfully trying to withdraw cash at a downtown ATM using a credit card, police said.

Burk made two calls to her parents that afternoon, asking how to use a credit card to withdraw money from an ATM. Her body was found the next morning in her Volvo in a downtown parking lot. Her head had been beaten and her neck slashed.

Samuel has pleaded not guilty to murder, kidnapping and other charges.

His previous strikes stem from the same crime -- one that bears a striking similarity to Burk's abduction.

In 1986, he was accused of kidnapping an elderly man in San Bernardino and driving the man's car to an ATM, where he demanded that the victim withdraw cash. Samuel allegedly beat the victim when no money appeared. Samuel pleaded guilty to robbery, residential burglary and car theft. He was sentenced to six years in prison.

Under the 1994 three-strikes law, prosecutors are allowed to charge any felony, however minor, as a third strike if a defendant has been convicted of two crimes considered violent or serious. Samuel's robbery and residential burglary convictions count as strikes under the law.

But his rap sheet did not say that the 1986 case involved a residential burglary. Only residential burglaries are counted as strikes.

In 1997, Samuel was caught shoplifting a bottle of alcohol from a Barstow grocery store.

He was charged with a single felony: second-degree burglary. But prosecutors in San Bernardino County missed an opportunity to seek a life term for Samuel because they did not realize that he had two prior strikes.

Details about the robbery and residential burglary convictions were included in a probation report made public this year by a San Bernardino County judge at the request of The Times.

The newspaper made a similar request for a probation report in the 2006 Van Nuys attack. The Times argued in court papers that state law requires that a defendant's old probation reports -- normally public for 60 days after a defendant is sentenced -- be made public again when the offender is charged with a new crime.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Patricia Schnegg denied The Times' request but did not address the newspaper's legal arguments.

The Times asked the California Court of Appeal to review the decision. An appeals court panel ordered the judge to release the report or explain her refusal to do so. Schnegg released the report Tuesday.

Allan Parachini, a spokesman for the L.A. County Superior Court, said he did not know whether the court, now dealing with a budget crunch, would change its policy to make such probation reports available to the public after the appellate court decision.

"The reality right now is that 100% of the attention of the judicial leadership is focused on the budget," Parachini said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-samuel29-2009nov29,0,1926020,print.story

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L.A. County sheriff backs database on sales of cold medicine

Baca and other California sheriffs say the records would reduce the illicit production of methamphetamine. But civil rights activists fear invasion of residents' privacy.

by Patrick McGreevy

November 28, 2009

Reporting from Sacramento

When you buy cold medicine, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca wants to know about it.

He and other California sheriffs are hoping the state will help them learn about such purchases as part of a narcotics enforcement plan that is riling civil rights activists.

Their proposal calls for a statewide database to track Californians' purchases of remedies such as Sudafed that contain pseudoephedrine, a key ingredient for illicit production of the drug methamphetamine.

Buyers would have to sign an electronic log and provide their date of birth and home address. The database would alert stores instantly if a customer had already purchased the legal limit of the remedy in other locations, and stores would be banned from selling it to such customers.

"It's really a prevention tool," said Baca, one of the law enforcement officials behind the legislation that would create a state database. "The ability of people to acquire these chemicals for illicit purposes would drop significantly."

Officials at the ACLU say there would be other implications as well.

"Law enforcement officers could follow up with individuals after their purchase of a packet of the common congestion remedy Sudafed and grill them about why they purchased it, what their medical condition is and other private information," said Valerie Small Navarro, a senior legislative advocate for the ACLU in California.

Other worries cited by civil liberties groups: the record of consumers' purchases could be used for marketing by pharmaceutical companies and others or even become a Big Brother-like database used for social surveillance.

Federal law already prevents anyone except law enforcement personnel from having access to such data. Assemblyman Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), author of the state proposal, which is still being refined, said it would similarly limit use of the information.

State law requires that pseudoephedrine products be kept behind the store counter and that buyers of certain quantities provide identification and sign a log. Retailers may not sell any customer more than three packages at a time or more than nine grams in a 30-day period.

The restrictions have helped curb methamphetamine production, according to the California State Sheriffs' Assn., but the group says the state is not making nearly enough headway.

Certain cold tablets can be easily processed to extract pseudoephedrine, said Sgt. Keith Proctor of the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Narcotics Division.

The LAPD reports that clandestine methamphetamine labs in Southern California have accounted for 40% to 45% of the narcotic produced in the United States. Of the 19 "superlabs" -- which produce the drug on a factory-like scale -- discovered and dismantled nationwide last year, 17 were in California, state officials said.

Nick Warner, a spokesman for the California State Sheriffs Assn., cites cases of drug dealers evading current limits on cold remedy purchases by filling cars with people and driving them from store to store loading up on the medicine, a practice known in the drug trade as "smurfing."

"An electronic registry will help curb and prevent the number of smurfing incidences while still allowing consumers an appropriate degree of access" to ephedrine products, San Bernardino County Sheriff Rod Hoops wrote to state lawmakers.

The database legislation, AB 1455, has been endorsed by the Consumer Healthcare Products Assn. and member drug makers, including Johnson & Johnson, and some drugstore chains, such as Rite Aid.

Oklahoma, Arkansas and Kentucky have state databases. In Kentucky, clerks have blocked hundreds of improper purchases, nearly 2% of the total, and led law enforcement officials to several meth labs, said Andrew Fish, general counsel of the Consumer Healthcare Products Assn., a national trade group.

The organization's members manufacture and distribute over-the-counter medicines and would pay for the system, but the data would be administered by the National Assn. of Drug Diversion Investigators. That private, nonprofit group works with the pharmaceutical industry to improve prevention and investigation of the illegal use of medicine.

ACLU officials say such systems will not catch most people who want to get around it, and will encourage meth makers to engage in identity theft to get the cold medicine.

"The question is: Are you achieving a goal that warrants infringing on people's medical privacy?" Navarro said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-meth28-2009nov28,0,7265415,print.story

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Russia says homemade bomb caused deadly train derailment

Authorities say terrorists planted a device on the tracks that detonated under the high-speed Nevsky Express carrying more than 650 passengers from Moscow to St. Petersburg.

by Sergei L. Loiko and Megan K. Stack

November 29, 2009

Reporting from Atlanta and Moscow

Russian officials are blaming terrorists for the derailment of a Moscow-to-St. Petersburg passenger train that killed at least 26 people and injured dozens more.

Authorities said Saturday that a homemade bomb equivalent to about 15 pounds of TNT detonated when the Nevsky Express, carrying more than 650 passengers, passed over it about 9:30 p.m. Friday. Traces of the device were found at the scene, officials said.

"Indeed, this was a terrorist attack," said Vladimir Markin, a spokesman for the investigative committee of the Russian prosecutor-general's office, Interfax news agency reported.

President Dmitry Medvedev called an urgent meeting of top officials at the Kremlin to deal with the situation.

"Based on preliminary data, criminal experts say that it was an explosion of a self-made 7-kilo TNT equivalent explosive device," Federal Security Service chief Alexander Bortnikov said in televised remarks. An investigation has been launched, he said.

As of late Saturday, officials were preparing sketches of possible suspects, but did not know who was responsible for the attack.

Many of the victims were in serious condition, Russian Health Minister Tatyana Golikova said in televised remarks. The dead were taken to a morgue in the city of Tver, where the identification process will begin today, according to media reports.

Emergency relief workers moved seriously injured victims to the nearest towns of Bologoye and Tver and from there to Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The derailment occurred not far from the village of Uglovka in the Novgorod region, about 250 miles northwest of Moscow. At the time of the explosion the train, which was full, was traveling about 125 mph, railway officials said.

The Nevsky Express between Moscow and St. Petersburg is the fastest railway line in Russia, covering about 440 miles in 4 1/2 hours. The explosion caused at least two cars to go off the tracks and damaged several others, said passengers who described feeling something like a loud metallic bump, as if the train had hit something or lost a wheel just before the derailment.

"The train shook and pieces of luggage started falling down from the upper shelves on our heads," Boris Gruzd, a 44-year-old lawyer who was on the train, said in a telephone interview. "I realized the train was skidding to brake and I immediately smelled something burning."

The wreckage was devastating, according to several people who said they were on the train.

"It was as if you were in a battlefield," said Ilya Gureyev, 42, a financier who lives in St. Petersburg and works in Moscow, also in a phone interview. "As if you were in war."

Gureyev and Gruzd were among passengers and crew members whose cars did not derail, and who took part in the rescue effort. The first car they reached was lying on its side not far from the rails. They said they carefully stepped over the debris in search of survivors.

"That was a really horrible sight," Gruzd said. "This eerie silence was hanging in the air. It was dark, damp and still."

Late Saturday afternoon, as the cleanup and restoration work was in progress, a smaller explosion occurred nearby, said Russian Railways head Vladimir Yakunin. No injuries were reported, he said.

Dozens of trains were delayed across northwestern Russia and thousands of passengers were stranded at railway stations.

Medvedev called for people to stay calm. "We need there to be no chaos, because the situation is tense as it is," he said, according to news reports.

The Russian government spent much of the 1990s and early 2000s locked in a bloody struggle with Islamist separatists in the southern republic of Chechnya. Those years were punctuated by dramatic attacks by militants deep in the Russian heartland, including blood-drenched attacks on a Moscow theater, and infamously, a 2004 assault on a grammar school in Beslan, in the North Caucasus.

For several years after the Beslan attack, Moscow appeared to have quashed most of the bloodshed in its restive Caucasus regions. But recent months have seen a dramatic upsurge in fighting in the republics of Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia, raising fears that violence will once again reach deeper into Russia.

As violence in Ingushetia and Chechnya escalates, the government has stepped up a crackdown that rights groups charge includes abuses such as disappearances, extrajudicial killings and torture. The escalation is reminiscent of the cycle of violence that has, in the past, seen Islamist militants attack civilian targets in the Russian capital.

"One thing is quite clear: The situation in the country is getting more and more destabilized," said Lev Ponomaryov, head of the For Human Rights group in Moscow. "And that is a fact the regime cannot hide."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-russia-train29-2009nov29,0,2511237,print.story

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OPINION

The case against military tribunals

It's a violation of the Constitution to use the panels without a declaration of war -- and just calling it a 'war' on terror doesn't count.

by Andrew P. Napolitano

November 29, 2009

In the uproar caused by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr.'s announcement that the alleged planners of the 9/11 attacks are to be tried in U.S. District Court in New York City, and the suspects in the attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole will go on trial before military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the public discourse has lost sight of the fundamental principles that guide the government when it makes such decisions. Unfortunately, the government has lost sight of the principles as well.

When President George W. Bush spoke to Congress shortly after 9/11, he did not ask for a declaration of war. Instead, Republican leaders offered and Congress enacted an Authorization for the Use of Military Force. The authorization was open-ended as to its targets and its conclusion, and basically told the president and his successors that they could pursue whomever they wanted, wherever their pursuits took them, so long as they believed that the people they pursued had engaged in acts of terrorism against the United States. Thus was born the "war" on terror.

Tellingly, and perhaps because we did not know at the time precisely who had planned the 9/11 attacks, Congress did not declare war. But the use of the word "war" persisted nonetheless. Even after he learned what countries had sponsored terrorism against us and our allies with governmental assistance, Bush did not seek a declaration of war against them. Since 9/11, American agents have captured and seized nearly 800 people from all over the globe in connection with the attacks, and now five have been charged with planning them.

Virtually all of those seized who survived interrogation have been held at Guantanamo Bay. Bush initially ordered that no law or treaty applied to these detainees and that no judge could hear their cases, and thus he could detain whoever he decided was too risky to release and whoever he was satisfied had participated in terrorist attacks against the U.S. He made these extra-constitutional claims based, he said, on the inherent powers of the commander in chief in wartime. But in the Supreme Court, he lost all five substantive challenges to his authority brought by detainees. As a result, some detainees had to be freed, and he and Congress eventually settled for trying some before military tribunals under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and subsequent legislation.

The casual use of the word "war" has lead to a mentality among the public and even in the government that the rules of war could apply to those held at Guantanamo. But the rules of war apply only to those involved in a lawfully declared war, and not to something that the government merely calls a war. Only Congress can declare war -- and thus trigger the panoply of the government's military powers that come with that declaration. Among those powers is the ability to use military tribunals to try those who have caused us harm by violating the rules of war.

The last time the government used a military tribunal in this country to try foreigners who violated the rules of war involved Nazi saboteurs during World War II. They came ashore in Amagansett, N.Y., and Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., and donned civilian clothes, with plans to blow up strategic U.S. targets. They were tried before a military tribunal, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt based his order to do so on the existence of a formal congressional declaration of war against Germany.

In Ex Parte Quirin, the Supreme Court case that eventually upheld the military trial of these Germans -- after they had been tried and after six of the eight defendants had been executed -- the court declared that a formal declaration of war is the legal prerequisite to the government's use of the tools of war. The federal government adhered to this principle of law from World War II until Bush's understanding of the Constitution animated government policy.

The recent decision to try some of the Guantanamo detainees in federal District Court and some in military courts in Cuba is without a legal or constitutional bright line. All those still detained since 9/11 should be tried in federal courts because without a declaration of war, the Constitution demands no less.

That the target of the Cole attackers was military property manned by the Navy offers no constitutional reason for a military trial. In the 1960s, when Army draft offices and college ROTC facilities were attacked and bombed, those charged were quite properly tried in federal courts. And when Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal courthouse in Oklahoma City; and Omar Abdel Rahman attempted in 1993 to blow up the World Trade Center, which housed many federal offices; and when Zacarias Moussaoui was accused in the 9/11 attacks, all were tried in federal courts. The "American Taliban," John Walker Lindh, and the notorious would-be shoe bomber, Richard Reid, were tried in federal courts. Even the "Ft. Dix Six," five of whom were convicted in a plot to invade a U.S. Army post in New Jersey, were tried in federal court. And the sun still rose on the mornings after their convictions.

The framers of the Constitution feared letting the president alone decide with whom we are at war, and thus permitting him to trigger for his own purposes the military tools reserved for wartime. They also feared allowing the government to take life, liberty or property from any person without the intercession of a civilian jury to check the government's appetite and to compel transparency and fairness by forcing the government to prove its case to 12 ordinary citizens. Thus, the 5th Amendment to the Constitution, which requires due process, includes the essential component of a jury trial. And the 6th Amendment requires that when the government pursues any person in court, it must do so in the venue where the person is alleged to have caused harm.

Numerous Supreme Court cases have ruled that any person in conflict with the government can invoke due process -- be that person a citizen or an immigrant, someone born here, legally here, illegally here or whose suspect behavior did not even occur here.

Think about it: If the president could declare war on any person or entity or group simply by calling his pursuit of them a "war," there would be no limit to the government's ability to use the tools of war to achieve its ends. We have a "war" on drugs; can drug dealers be tried before military tribunals? We have a "war" on the Mafia; can mobsters be sent to Gitmo and tried there? The Obama administration has arguably declared "war" on Fox News. Are Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and I and my other colleagues in danger of losing our constitutional rights to a government hostile to our opinions?

I trust not. And my trust is based on the oath that everyone who works in the government takes to uphold the Constitution. But I am not naive. Only unflinching public fidelity to the Constitution will preserve the freedoms of us all.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at the Fox News Channel. His next book is "Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-napolitano29-2009nov29,0,3388576,print.story

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OPINION

Terrorism trial in New York carries few risks for government

The federal court system is stacked against terrorism defendants, making the trial a safe bet for the Obama administration. But justice would be better served by being honest about tainted evidence.

by Petra Bartosiewicz

November 29, 2009

The news that accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four alleged co-conspirators are to stand trial in a federal court in Manhattan has provoked no small amount of controversy and even hysterical reaction. "9/11 fiends coming here for trial -- next stop is hell!" read a New York Post headline.

Critics denounced the decision as a victory for terrorists that would give Mohammed a platform for maligning America and move New York City "to the top of Al Qaeda's target list," in the words of Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.).

Supporters, meanwhile, declared a victory for due process. The American Civil Liberties Union, which has co-represented the five defendants, reported that it was pulling out of the case now that the detainees were assured "real and reliable justice."

But what promises to be the biggest terrorism trial in U.S. history likely will be neither the civil liberties victory its proponents claim nor the terrorist propaganda opportunity its critics fear. It is actually a safe choice for the Obama administration. This is because in recent years, the federal court system has been effectively retrofitted to all but ensure guilty verdicts in terrorism-related cases.

In scores of post-9/11 federal trials, detainee-defendants are subject to the extreme confinement measures, degraded due process and lack of procedural transparency that have characterized the detentions of enemy combatants. "Special administrative measures," previously reserved for the most violent class of felons, keep defendants in lengthy pretrial solitary confinement, sometimes for years. The Classified Information Procedures Act, once used sparingly in foreign intelligence cases, is now invoked routinely to keep key evidence secret from defendants and their attorneys, thus hampering their ability to confront the most sensitive evidence against them.

In the ultimate legal absurdity, even the prosecutors trying the case occasionally are barred from seeing the evidence that provides the gravamen of their arguments. And sweeping "protective orders" shroud trials in secrecy and shield from dissemination even materials as benign as newspaper clippings and college transcripts.

The result is an impressive record of wins for the Justice Department. According to the Center on Law and Security, of 593 individuals prosecuted on terrorism-related charges since 9/11, 523 have been convicted.

Even in defeat the government has proved tenacious. After the three-month terrorism-financing trial of the Holy Land Foundation in Texas ended in a mistrial, prosecutors successfully retried the case last year. In a Florida case involving an FBI-informant- driven plot to attack Chicago's Sears Tower and FBI offices, the government won on the third attempt, after two mistrials.

The District Court in Manhattan, where Mohammed and his alleged cohorts are to stand trial, has a particularly rich history in dealing with terrorism cases. This was the venue for the first World Trade Center bombing trial and a host of other prominent cases.

Two trials on the docket are a fair example of what we can expect in the KSM spectacle: Syed Hashmi, a U.S. citizen, has spent nearly two years in solitary confinement on charges that he aided an Al Qaeda associate who was transporting "military gear" to Pakistan, which turned out to be waterproof socks and ponchos. The Al Qaeda associate is expected to be the government's star witness.

Another case, that of Aafia Siddiqui, a U.S.-trained neuroscientist accused of firing at U.S. soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan, has been marked by such extreme secrecy that her attorneys, who have top-secret security clearances, complained that the discovery material they've received from the government is so marred by redactions that it is rendered nonsensical. "I can't figure out who says what," said attorney Charles Swift in a recent hearing. "Is the concern that I'm going to give this to the Taliban?"

What concerns critics is not so much that the government will lose the case -- Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr., sounding more like a politician than the nation's top lawmaker, has said, "Failure is not an option." The concern is about the shadow defendant in this trial: the U.S. intelligence system. The fear is that the trial will be a referendum on rendition, interrogation and torture of suspects, and a potential bonanza of law enforcement trade craft for would-be terrorists.

But if other post-9/11 cases are any guide, there is little chance that unknown details of waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" will be forthcoming. Prosecutors have no motive to introduce such evidence and will surely seek to classify potentially embarrassing or incriminating information.

Likewise, assuming their clients don't plead guilty, defense attorneys will seek to exclude any statements made under duress. And because Mohammed and his codefendants have repeatedly confessed to their crimes -- though reportedly the defendants have said they will plead not guilty in order to explain why they did it -- there's plenty of unclassified material to work with.

The Obama administration has been handed a terrible legal legacy by its predecessor, in which traditional evidence-gathering methods have been hopelessly intertwined with intelligence-gathering practices that historically were never in much danger of scrutiny in open court. But this administration can't simply restart the clock by shifting detainees to a new venue.

If the injustices of the previous administration are to be expunged, the government should openly present the facts of its wrongdoing in gathering evidence. Otherwise, the trial of the alleged conspirators will serve only to stamp the seal of justice on an unjust process. The shadow defendant -- the U.S. intelligence system -- will remain in the shadows. By avoiding that confrontation in the name of national security, the Obama administration would achieve a victory that creates only the appearance of due process, while damaging the very system of open justice that the trial is supposed to present as a model to the world.

Petra Bartosiewicz is a freelance journalist whose article in the November issue of Harper's magazine, "The Intelligence Factory: How America Makes Its Enemies Disappear," examines the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-petra29-2009nov29,0,6885021,print.story

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From the Washington Times

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Multiculturalism on trial

by Jeffrey T. Kuhner

The United States Navy has betrayed its own. The names of the victims are Petty Officer Matthew McCabe, Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe and Petty Officer Julio Huertas.

They are Navy Seals, part of an elite commando unit, who recently captured one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq - the accused mastermind of the 2004 infamous war crime in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, Ahmed Hashim Abed. Mr. Abed is said to have ordered the assassination of four Blackwater USA security guards.

These security guards - all of them Americans - were slaughtered in an ambush, their bodies then burned and mutilated as they were dragged through the streets of Fallujah. Two were later hanged from a bridge over the Euphrates River, dangling from a noose so the world press could photograph them.

Mr. Abed also has spearheaded insurgent attacks against U.S. soldiers. His jihadists are responsible for murdering innocent Iraqi civilians - many of them women and children.

The three Seals should have been given a medal for their brave actions. Instead, they face court-martial. They will be separately arraigned in a military court on Dec. 7. Their trials will take place in January.

Their crime: They purportedly punched Abed, giving him a bloody lip. They face prison time because their actions constituted "assault," thereby rising to the level of possible "detainee abuse." The U.S. military is determined not to have another Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Navy authorities fear Mr. Abed's allegations of "abuse" and "torture" could embarrass America, undermining our public outreach to the Islamic world.

The three Seals are being sacrificed on the altar of liberal multiculturalism. They are being smeared and treated as criminals for - at worst - doing the equivalent of what hockey players regularly do: smack somebody in the mouth.

Moreover, they may not have even laid a hand on Mr. Abed. Al Qaeda terrorists have been ordered by Osama bin Laden to claim torture once in U.S. custody - even if it means inflicting self-abuse. The goal is to continue jihad within the prison system, presenting America as a nation that violates human rights and oppresses Muslims. It is part of radical Islam's propaganda playbook. Hence, Mr. Abed just as likely hit himself, claiming his captors did it.

Yet even if one of the Seals did punch him, big deal. They are not police officers arresting a U.S. citizen; they are warriors who apprehended a mass-murdering foreign terrorist - someone with American blood on his hands. Mr. Abed does not deserve to be treated with kid gloves. He is not entitled to have his Miranda rights read. If Mr. Abed is tough enough to massacre Americans, behead Iraqi civilians and wage a brutal insurgency, he certainly can take a punch. Had the three Seals been captured by Mr. Abed's forces, a bloody lip would be the least of their problems.

The fact that these brave men now face court-marital is emblematic of our military's inability to successfully prosecute the war on terror. We are no longer able to distinguish real and fake abuse. The rights of terrorists take precedence over the rights of U.S. soldiers. Any bogus claim of "abuse" can be used to legally harass American troops.

Moreover, our service members are expected to confront fanatical, ruthless jihadists in a hostile environment under strict rules of engagement. They are subject to regular roadside bombings, sniper attacks, ambushes and a cowardly enemy that blends into the civilian population. Yet the military brass is more interested in a public-relations campaign aimed at winning Arab sympathy rather than providing our soldiers with the support they need to win.

America has become so overly sensitive about massaging world Muslim opinion it is no longer able to defeat the rampaging Islamists in Afghanistan and Iraq. The wars have evolved into protracted military quagmires.

During World War II, the United States razed German cities to the ground. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was total war for total victory - regardless of the cost to German and Japanese civilians. Today, it is the opposite: a partial, inhibited war with no vision for victory. Our troops are being betrayed by their military and political leaders.

Our perverse military culture now targets its heroes, while promoting and turning a blind eye to a homegrown terrorist such as Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. For years, Maj. Hasan publicly acknowledged his sympathy for jihadism before the massacre for which he is accused was committed at Fort Hood. The result was 14 dead (including an unborn child) and 29 wounded in the worst terrorist atrocity on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Army's knee-jerk reaction, however, was to defend "diversity."

"Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength," said Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff. "And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

No, it isn't. What is worse is how the virus of political correctness has infected our military - to the point, where our Islamic outreach efforts have descended into the theater of the absurd.

Diversity is not our strength; unity is - unity of purpose, will and commitment. We used to know that.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute in Washington.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/29/multiculturalism-on-trial//print/

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Holiday honors

by Oliver North

America is at war. According to the latest opinion polls, that is not what many Americans want to hear this weekend after Thanksgiving, as the Christmas holiday approaches.

Our political "leaders" don't want to acknowledge this war. Our media does its best to ignore it. Most of our businesses, society and industry are removed from it. What little manufacturing remains in this country turns out products other than those used by our soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines. Our allies long ago largely abandoned this fight, and our entertainment industry openly mocks and condemns it.

The fact remains, however, that America is at war. Even those who turn a blind eye to reality cannot ignore the fact that radical Islamists want to be at war with us. Thus, it is so.

On Oct. 3, 1863, in the midst of the bloodiest war America ever fought, Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation "to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens." After visiting several wounded Marines in the National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda this week, it struck me that too few of our countrymen would offer thanks for the remarkable young Americans in harm's way on Thanksgiving.

Here are some others for whom we should always be grateful - and who serve with little or no credit:

• Doctors and nurses, corpsmen and medics: Thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, guardsmen and Marines are alive today because of the courage, skill and advanced medical treatment employed by these specialists. From the battlefield to stateside hospitals, there have never been lifesavers better than these.

• Chaplains: While the medical professionals heal the body, they minister to the soul. War is hell on Earth - and it can lead someone to the Lord as easily as it can test the strength of his or her faith. In covering our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, I've seen countless times when chaplains helped battle-weary young Americans make sense of that which doesn't.

• Military recruiters: Most would rather be with a unit in combat - and nearly all assigned to this often thankless duty have already served in this war. But for the recruiters in our communities, most young Americans would never have the opportunity to make a decision to become part of a cause bigger than themselves. Despite all the negative spin from our press and politicians, they have filled the ranks of our armed forces with the bravest and brightest of this generation.

• Drill instructors and drill sergeants: America's all-volunteer military is the best-educated, -trained, -led and -equipped armed force in history - thanks to the qualities of these proven leaders. They hone individuals into a team and model the kind of skills necessary for a unit in combat to perform honorably - even heroically - in the chaos of the modern battlefield.

• Officers, specialists, analysts, interrogators and special agents of our intelligence services and federal law enforcement agencies: They have the most thankless task of all - spending countless hours poring over millions of images, transcribed conversations and e-mails from, and to, those who are dying to kill the rest of us. They go undercover for clandestine, high-risk "meets" with informants who may provide a clue to prevent a disaster. The only official recognition most will ever receive won't be declassified until they are long since retired or dead.

• Volunteers: They take a day off work to meet our troops to welcome them home. They staff the airport USOs and attend the funerals of our fallen - though they never knew them - just because it is the right thing to do. These are the Americans who organize "care package" drives and knit quilts for burn victims, who make flights available to bring family members to the bedside of a loved one. These are the people who quietly, without fanfare, pick up the restaurant tab for a service member sitting at a nearby table. These also are the Americans who dare to approach a uniformed man or woman in an airport, extend a hand and say, "Thank you for your service."

• Military families: These are the most special people of all. They gave their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, to the service of our nation. Only those who have experienced an airport or pier-side goodbye hug for a loved one leaving in uniform truly know what they endure. They have made that lonely, tearful walk back to the car after waving what they hope and pray is not a last "good-bye" for a service member leaving on deployment. They have persevered through missed anniversaries, birthdays and holidays - always anxious about the knock on the door or a telephone call that will bring terrible news. Alone on the holiday, they bravely shouldered their family's burdens because words like duty and service mean something - especially when America is at war.

Thank you. God bless all of you during this holiday season.

Oliver North is the host of "War Stories" on the Fox News Channel, the author of "American Heroes" (B&H Publishing Group, 2008) and the founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/29/holiday-honors//print/

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A vaccination against biologicals

by Deroy Murdock

COLORADO SPRINGS

"I sleep like a baby," says retired Air Force Col. Randall J. Larsen. "Every three hours, I wake up screaming."

It's little surprise that Col. Larsen has such trouble getting shut-eye. As executive director of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, Col. Larsen spends his days and many nights visualizing mushroom clouds over U.S. cities and emergency rooms clogged with victims of biological attacks. Among his many solutions to America's WMD challenges, this may be the easiest: Let Americans get immunized against smallpox and anthrax.

"Smallpox and anthrax are our two biggest biological threats," Col. Larsen tells journalists gathered here on Nov. 16 by the Heritage Foundation. "Smallpox and anthrax are the only biological threats for which we have [Food and Drug Administration]-approved vaccines. We have enough smallpox vaccines for every American, but not enough anthrax vaccines even for 10 percent of our population. Once we increase that supply, we can take these two risks off the table."

Voluntarily immunizing Americans against these two diseases would deter terrorists from plotting attacks with them. Even vaccinating some Americans would create "herd immunity," whereby those who stay healthy would impede an epidemic's progress, much as firebreaks retard advancing infernos.

Col. Larsen's commission offered this sobering conclusion in December: "Unless the world community acts decisively and with great urgency, it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013."

In an Oct. 21 progress report, this bipartisan board cautioned that "a one- to two-kilogram release of anthrax spores from a crop duster plane could kill more Americans than died in World War II," specifically, 380,000. "Clean-up and other economic costs could exceed $1.8 trillion." "Dark Winter," a June 2001 high-level simulation exercise, assumed that a covert smallpox attack would infect 3.3 million Americans, one-third fatally.

A biological attack's psychological impact would be incalculable, especially if healthy Americans saw their smallpox-infected neighbors as contagious "enemies" to be shunned.

America's Islamofascist enemies have stayed busy in this sphere.

"I was directly in charge ... [of] the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax," Khalid Shaikh Mohammed told a Guantanamo military tribunal on March 10, 2007. Mohammed was Sept. 11's chief architect and al Qaeda's self-described "military operational commander."

The commission's crop-duster scenario was conceived after Americans discovered two Afghan anthrax laboratories. The 9/11 Commission report says Jemaah Islamiah agent Yazid Sufaat "would spend several months attempting to cultivate anthrax for al Qaeda in a laboratory he helped set up near the Kandahar airport."

Interestingly enough, Sufaat was captured thanks to information American interrogators gleaned after waterboarding Mohammed. Had America not dampened Mohammed's nose, U.S. soldiers or civilians already might have had Sufaat's anthrax up their nostrils.

"Four pounds of anthrax ... carried by a fighter through tunnels from Mexico into the US, are guaranteed to kill 330,000 Americans within a single hour," said Kuwaiti professor and terrorist sympathizer Abdallah Al-Nafisi, laughing, in a speech broadcast Feb. 2 on Al-Jazeera and translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute. "One person, with the courage to carry four pounds of anthrax, will go to the White House lawn, and will spread this 'confetti' all over them, and then will do these cries of joy. It will turn into a real 'celebration.' "

Today's dilatory federal rollout of swine-flu shots offers little confidence that government can deliver smallpox and anthrax inoculations with speed and tranquility, especially after a shocking attack turbocharged public anxiety.

Instead, these vaccines should reach thousands of hospitals, clinics and doctors' offices now. Americans could request them calmly during routine medical visits rather than overwhelm government agencies amid widespread panic after thousands of people have fallen ill - or worse.

Al Qaeda and other vicious killers surely have a "to do" list of horrors they would love to hurl at us infidels. Let's deny them at least these two potential murder weapons.

Deroy Murdock is a columnist with Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with Stanford University's Hoover Institution. The Heritage Foundation sponsored his visit to Colorado Springs.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/29/a-vaccination-against-biologicals//print/

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From the Wall Street Journal

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Senate Report: Bin Laden Was "Within Our Grasp"

Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

The report asserts that the failure to kill or capture Mr. bin Laden at his most vulnerable in December 2001 has had lasting consequences beyond the fate of one man. Mr. bin Laden's escape laid the foundation for today's reinvigorated Afghan insurgency and inflamed the internal strife now endangering Pakistan, it says.

Staff members for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Democratic majority prepared the report at the request of the chairman, Sen. John Kerry, as President Barack Obama prepares to boost U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Mr. Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, has long argued the Bush administration missed a chance to get the al Qaeda leader and top deputies when they were holed up in the forbidding mountainous area of eastern Afghanistan only three months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Although limited to a review of military operations eight years old, the report could also be read as a cautionary note for those resisting an increased troop presence there now. More pointedly, it seeks to affix a measure of blame for the state of the war today on military leaders under former president George W. Bush, specifically Donald H. Rumsfeld as defense secretary and his top military commander, Tommy Franks.

"Removing the al-Qaida leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat," the report says. "But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide. The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism."

The report states categorically that Mr. bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora when the U.S. had the means to mount a rapid assault with several thousand troops at least. It says that a review of existing literature, unclassified government records and interviews with central participants "removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora."

On or about Dec. 16, 2001, Mr. bin Laden and bodyguards "walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area," where he is still believed to be based, the report says. Instead of a massive attack, fewer than 100 U.S. commandos, working with Afghan militias, tried to capitalize on air strikes and track down their prey.

"The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines," the report said. At the time, Mr. Rumsfeld expressed concern that a large U.S. troop presence might fuel a backlash and he and some others said the evidence wasn't conclusive about Mr. bin Laden's location.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125947253857168225.html#printMode
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