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From LA Times

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U.S. sees homegrown Muslim extremism as rising threat

This may have been the most dangerous year since 9/11, anti-terrorism experts say.

by Sebastian Rotella

December 7, 2009

Reporting from Washington

The Obama administration, grappling with a spate of recent Islamic terrorism cases on U.S. soil, has concluded that the country confronts a rising threat from homegrown extremism.

Anti-terrorism officials and experts see signs of accelerated radicalization among American Muslims, driven by a wave of English-language online propaganda and reflected in aspiring fighters' trips to hot spots such as Pakistan and Somalia.

Europe had been the front line, the target of successive attacks and major plots, while the U.S. remained relatively calm. But the number, variety and scale of recent U.S. cases suggest 2009 has been the most dangerous year domestically since 2001, anti-terrorism experts said:

* There were major arrests of Americans accused of plotting with Al Qaeda and its allies, including an Afghan American charged in a New York bomb plot described as the most serious threat in this country since the Sept. 11 attacks.

* Authorities tracked other extremism suspects joining foreign networks, including Somali Americans going to the battlegrounds of their ancestral homeland and an Albanian American from Brooklyn who was arrested in Kosovo.

* The FBI rounded up homegrown terrorism suspects in Dallas, Detroit and Raleigh, N.C., saying that it had broken up plots targeting a synagogue, government buildings and military facilities.

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued her strongest public comments yet on the homegrown threat.

"We've seen an increased number of arrests here in the U.S. of individuals suspected of plotting terrorist attacks, or supporting terror groups abroad such as Al Qaeda," Napolitano said in a speech in New York. "Home-based terrorism is here. And, like violent extremism abroad, it will be part of the threat picture that we must now confront."

Officials acknowledged that her tone had changed, though they said terrorism has been her focus since becoming Homeland Security chief.

In some of the 2009 cases, extremist leanings are suspected but motives are not known.

Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan -- accused of killing 13 people in a Ft. Hood, Texas, shooting rampage last month -- has apparently suffered emotional problems. But in interviews, officials and experts have also raised his Muslim beliefs as an alleged motive.

A previous attack on the U.S. military, a shooting in June by an American convert who killed a soldier and wounded another at an Arkansas recruiting center, was apparently a case of a lone wolf radicalized in Yemen, according to Homeland Security officials.

"You are seeing the full spectrum of the threats you face in terrorism," former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said.

"Radicalization is clearly happening in the U.S.," said Mitchell Silber, director of analysis for the Intelligence Division of the New York Police Department. "In years past, you couldn't say that about the U.S. You could say it about Europe."

Europe has suffered a militant onslaught: transport bombings in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005, an assassination in the Netherlands in 2004, and close calls such as the fiery failed attack on the Glasgow airport in 2007.

Hard borders have helped the U.S. ward off the threat. But experts also said that Islamic radicalization is more widespread in Europe. Crime, alienation and extremism roil Muslim immigrant communities in places like tiny Denmark and the vast slums of France.

In contrast, American Muslims are wealthier, better educated and better integrated because the United States does a good job of absorbing immigrants and fostering tolerance, experts said. During the last decade, Americans have been a rare presence in the Al Qaeda-connected camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan that have trained hundreds of Westerners and thousands of recruits from Muslim-majority nations.

Nonetheless, recent investigations have run across Americans suspected of being operatives of Al Qaeda and its allies who were trained overseas and, in several cases, allegedly conspired with top terrorism bosses. They include a convert from Long Island, N.Y, who was captured in Pakistan late last year; a Chicago businessman accused of scouting foreign targets for a Pakistani network; and at least 15 Somali American youths from Minneapolis who returned to fight in their ancestral homeland.

"A larger trend has emerged that is not surprising, but is disturbing," Chertoff said. "You are beginning to see the fruits of the pipeline that Al Qaeda built to train Westerners and send them back to their homelands. . . . This underscores the central significance of disrupting the pipeline at its source."

A campaign of U.S. airstrikes launched last year has pounded Al Qaeda hide-outs in Pakistan. But the flow of trainees gathered momentum in 2007 when Pakistani security forces ceded turf to militant groups, officials said. The suspect in the New York plot, Najibullah Zazi, and the Long Island convert, Bryant Neal Vinas, allegedly met in Pakistan in 2008 and discussed attacks on U.S. targets with Al Qaeda chiefs.

Vinas and Zazi are the first Americans to be accused of joining Al Qaeda in several years.

Meanwhile, Silber said in recent congressional testimony: "There have been a half-dozen cases of individuals who, instead of traveling abroad to carry out violence, have elected to attempt to do it here. This is substantially greater than what we have seen in the past, and may reflect an emerging pattern."

Some feel radicalization in the United States has been worse than authorities thought for some time.

"People focused on the idea that we're different, we're better at integrating Muslims than Europe is," said Zeyno Baran, a scholar at the Hudson Institute, a think tank in Washington. "But there's radicalization -- especially among converts [and] newcomers, such as the Somali case shows. I think young U.S. Muslims today are as prone to radicalization as Muslims in Europe."

In proportion to population, extremism still appears less intense in the United States. But the Internet functions as the global engine of extremism. Websites expose Americans to a wave of slick, English-language propaganda from ideologues such as Anwar Awlaki, the Yemeni American described as a spiritual guide for the accused Ft. Hood shooter and other Westerners.

And socioeconomic success will not necessarily prevent Americans' radicalization. Studies suggest that a quest for identity and the bonding process among small groups often drive militants more than personal hardship does.

"The profile in Europe is in general quite different [from U.S. extremists]: more working-class or even underclass," said a European intelligence official who requested anonymity for security reasons. "But it's a bit simplistic to make assumptions. We have seen everything in Europe -- educated people, doctors involved in terrorism. The underclass argument is not enough."

The Obama administration began the year with gestures to the Muslim world. President Obama promised to shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and made a historic speech in Cairo.

The Homeland Security Department leads the administration's counter-radicalization effort. The Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which works with Muslim leaders, held summit meetings with Somali communities this year in Minnesota and Ohio, said David Heyman, assistant Homeland Security secretary for policy.

But that office still lacks a director, critics point out, and the department has yet to fill other key posts as well.

"We don't do enough about fostering a counter-narrative," said Matthew Levitt, a former anti-terrorism official for the Treasury Department now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "Competing for space with the radicalizers and challenging their radical ideologies is the key."

In contrast to the heightened extremist activity in the United States, Europe has remained relatively calm this year. But the West needs to keep up its guard on both sides of the Atlantic, said Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian French scholar who interviewed jailed extremists for his book "Inside Jihadism."

"You can be middle-class and have bright prospects but become a jihadist," he said. "We have to broaden the analysis. This idea of American exceptionalism, the comparison with Europe, should not blind us to the fact that we are going toward a broader participation in jihad."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-us-radicalization7-2009dec07,0,2042129,print.story

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$10 million is smuggled out of Afghanistan daily, official says

The culprits are drug cartels and corrupt officials and businesses, Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal says. U.S. and Afghan officials believe much of the cash is going to the Taliban.

by Tony Perry

December 7, 2009

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan

An estimated $10 million a day is smuggled out of Afghanistan, most of it through Kabul's international airport, rather than through secret routes over the mountains or across the desert, the country's finance minister said Sunday.

The amount of corruption, both by public officials and officials of private companies, makes him embarrassed to acknowledge while traveling that he is an Afghan, Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal said.

"Corruption is a stronger threat than terrorism for Afghanistan," said Zakhilwal, who was appointed in February and is the top financial advisor to President Hamid Karzai. "It is a cancer, a disease. It has destroyed the reputation of Afghanistan."

The $10-million figure comes from a 19-day undercover study conducted by the U.S. that estimated $190 million left the airport undetected during that period, Zakhilwal and U.S. officials said. No similar study was done for the international airport in Kandahar.

Much of the hot cash ends up funding the Taliban insurgency, U.S. and Afghan officials said.

Zakhilwal's comments came at the beginning of a four-day conference sponsored by the American Embassy in Kabul, the capital, in which U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials are tutoring Afghan customs officials and others on detection methods. The remarks were some of the most candid to date about the size and blatant nature of corruption under Karzai's government.

Much of the cash allegedly comes from drug cartels eager to get the money to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a leading financial hub and the main destination for flights from Kabul. The rest may be from corrupt officials, or otherwise law-abiding businesses that wish to dodge taxes, Zakhilwal said.

The daily loss deprives the cash-poor government of tax money that could be used for badly needed improvements in transportation, medical care and education, officials said.

If the Afghan government has done little to stop the cash smuggling, the U.S. has also not been particularly vigilant.

"For years," said a U.S. federal investigator who was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue, "the U.S. government has failed to pay proper attention to the flow of drug money into and out of Afghanistan and the pockets of the leaders of the insurgency and the Afghan government itself."

U.S. agencies have stepped up their efforts in recent months to interdict the flow of cash "but the effort needs to be broader than just Afghanistan and it needs to encompass tougher measures in places like Dubai and the other city-states of the United Arab Emirates as well as key countries in Europe," the investigator said.

Under Afghan and international law, anyone taking more than $10,000 across an international border must report that amount to both countries. But as a practical matter, the law is barely, if at all, enforced in Afghanistan.

E. Anthony Wayne, an American ambassador serving as coordinating director for development and economic affairs in Afghanistan, said that cracking down on cash smuggling is a step toward establishing a government that protects "the wider interest of all the people, not the narrow interest of the few and powerful."

In opening comments, Anthony and other U.S. officials were careful not to point out embarrassing recent events, including the arrest of high-level Afghan officials accused of sneaking money out of the country and the investigation of two Cabinet ministers.

The issue of corruption has been a continuing source of tension between the U.S. and the Karzai government. Goaded by the White House, Karzai in his inaugural address last month vowed a campaign to end the "culture of impunity" that has allowed corruption.

In an interview broadcast Sunday with CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, Karzai said that "the issue of corruption has been politically overplayed by some of our partners in the international community" and that he has not received credit in the news media for his anti-corruption efforts.

"There are governors who have gone to prison," he said. "There are governors who are dismissed and are under investigation. A minister was dismissed from, from the middle of the Cabinet. Others are dismissed."

Karzai is expected to announce his selections for a new Cabinet this week, with U.S. officials and his political opponents expected to scrutinize the selections for possible ties to corruption.

Wayne said cash smugglers use "low-tech methods" such as innocent-looking airline passengers on their way to Dubai for vacations or business. In many cases, payoffs are made to avoid detection at the airport, where the government has customs inspectors.

"Only a few are corrupted, but the reputation of all is hurt," Zakhilwal said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-afghanistan-cash7-2009dec07,0,3502289,print.story

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Secret Service cites 91 gate-crashers since 1980

The Salahis are the latest people to get past the agency's checkpoints, an internal report shows.

Washington Post

December 7, 2009

Washington

Long before a pair of gate-crashers penetrated a White House state dinner, the Secret Service had detailed for its internal use a lengthy list of security breaches dating to the Carter administration -- including significant failures in the agency's protection of the president.

A summary of a secret 2003 report obtained by the Washington Post, along with descriptions of more recent incidents by federal Homeland Security officials, places Tareq and Michaele Salahi squarely in a rogues' gallery of autograph hounds, publicity seekers, unstable personalities and others identified by the Secret Service as defeating its checkpoints at least 91 times since 1980.

The document, the most complete accounting of recent Secret Service security breakdowns, includes officers mistakenly admitting to the White House grounds a family in a minivan, a man believed to be a delivery driver and a woman previously known to agents after she had falsely claimed a "special relationship" with President Clinton.

The only assailant to injure a president in the last three decades was John Hinckley, who shot and wounded President Reagan in 1981 from outside the security perimeter established by the Secret Service.

Nevertheless, the list of security breaches exposes significant gaps that could be exploited by would-be assassins, the document states, and erode "one of the best tools for deterring future attempts" -- the aura of invulnerability around the White House.

A Secret Service official confirmed the authenticity of the unclassified document, which was a 39-slide presentation, and said it had been used to train agents and officers in an effort to improve agency operations.

"This document reflects a proactive attempt to evaluate our security and obviously raises the awareness of uniformed division officers and agents about their jobs," spokesman Edwin Donovan said. "We have to be concerned about the threats to our protectees at all times, whether at the White House or away from the White House."

The agency is entering what it calls a sustained period of elevated "international, domestic and individual" threats, protecting President Obama, the country's first African American president, and its two most recent wartime leaders, President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney.

After the Salahis' appearance at last month's state dinner, the Secret Service launched a criminal investigation into the couple and a sweeping internal review of security procedures. Offering a rare public apology for the incident, the agency's director, Mark Sullivan, characterized it as a "pure and simple . . . case of human error," in which three uniformed officers let the well-dressed Salahis pass through gates on a rainy night without confirming their names on a guest list.

The historical list of perimeter breaches indicates that intruders, including the Salahis, have reached the president or another person under Secret Service protection eight times since 1980.

The review was commissioned in 2001 by then-Director Brian Stafford after the service was humiliated for a third time by the most notorious presidential gate-crasher, Richard Weaver, who evaded inauguration security to shake George W. Bush's hand.

Weaver, a California minister, had previously infiltrated a 1991 prayer breakfast attended by then-President George H.W. Bush, and Clinton's 1997 inaugural luncheon. He approached the younger Bush again at a prayer breakfast in 2003 before being arrested.

"I believe God makes me invisible to the security, undetectable," Weaver said.

The Secret Service concluded that Weaver succeeded by manipulating others to obtain tickets, telling guards he was lost or looking for a restroom, and generally "appearing as [if] you are supposed to be there," as the Salahis apparently did.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-white-house-security7-2009dec07,0,993522,print.story

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OPINION

When Islamist foreign policies hurt Muslims

Turkey's government and leader bash the West for transgressions while absolving anti-Western regimes of their sins. This hurts ordinary Muslims from Darfur to Chechnya to Iran.

by Soner Cagaptay

December 7, 2009

What is an Islamist foreign policy, exactly? Is it identifying with Muslims and their suffering, or is it identifying with anti-Western regimes even at the cost of Muslims' best interests? Turkey's foreign policy under the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government demonstrates that far from protecting Muslims and their interests, it is the promotion of a la carte morals -- bashing the West and supporting anti-Western regimes, even when the latter hurts Muslims.

AKP leader and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is scheduled to meet today with President Obama in Washington. This is a chance for Obama, who visited Ankara in April in a charm offensive to win Turkish hearts, to have a discussion with Erdogan about Turkey's ill-conceived foreign policy, which is bad for the West and for Muslims.

Since coming to power in 2002, the AKP has dramatically changed Turkey's foreign policy. The party has let Ankara's ties with pro-Western Azerbaijan, Georgia and Israel deteriorate and has started to ignore Europe. Meanwhile, the AKP has built ties with anti-Western states such as Sudan while making friends with Ankara's erstwhile adversaries, including Russia, Iran and Syria, and positioning itself as Hamas' patron.

It wasn't always this way. After casting its lot with the United States in 1946, Ankara collaborated with the West against the communist Soviet Union, Baathist Syria and Islamist Iran. When communism ended, Ankara worked to spread Western values, including free markets and democracy, in the former Soviet Union, becoming close with pro-Western Azerbaijan and Georgia. Turkey also developed a close relationship with Israel, based on shared values and security interests.

The AKP has now turned Turkish foreign policy on its head -- bashing the West for transgressions and absolving anti-Western regimes of their sins.

A comparison of the AKP's Israel and Sudan policies helps define Turkey's Islamist foreign policy. Since coming to power, the AKP has not only built a close political and economic relationship with Khartoum but also defended Sudanese leader Omar Hassan Bashir's atrocities in Darfur.

Last month, Erdogan said: "I know that Bashir is not committing genocide in Darfur, because Bashir is a Muslim and a Muslim can never commit genocide." What? The International Criminal Court indicted Bashir and has called for his arrest for war crimes in the Darfur conflict, in which 300,000 Sudanese -- mostly Muslims -- have died.

The AKP's Sudan policy stands in stark contrast to its Israel policy. At a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Erdogan chided Israeli President Shimon Peres, Jews and Israelis about the Gaza war, for "knowing well how to kill people." Erdogan then walked off the panel. Days later, he hosted the Sudanese vice president in Ankara.

This is an ideological view of the world, guided not by religion but by a distorted premise that Islamist and anti-Western regimes are always right even when they are criminal, such as when they are killing Muslims. And in this view, Western states and non-Muslims are always wrong, even when they act in self-defense against Islamist regimes.

Such an a la carte morality in foreign policy is also apparent in the AKP's approach to Russia. Russian violence in Chechnya continues, yet the AKP seems not to be bothered by the Chechen Muslims' suffering. Despite Russia's northern Caucasus policies, the rapport between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Erdogan and commercial ties have cemented Turkish-Russian ties. Russia has become Turkey's No. 1 trading partner, replacing Germany.

The ties between Ankara and Moscow come at a cost to the West and its allies. During Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia, the AKP did not stand with Tbilisi, sacrificing traditional Turkish support for Georgia in favor of commercial relations with Russia. The party is also working with Russia in building South Stream, a pipeline that undermines the Nabucco pipeline that would have connected Azerbaijan to the West, abandoning both Azerbaijan and Europe.

Another example of this harmful foreign policy is the government's stance on Iran's nuclearization, a crucial issue for the West. In October, Erdogan defended Iran's nuclear program, saying that the problem in the Middle East is Israel's nuclear capacity rather than Iran's program. Earlier that month, he called Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad his friend and dismissed the leaders of France and Germany.

Far from helping the West, the AKP's foreign policy is challenging its regional interests, and this is also bad for Muslims. When Iranian demonstrators took to the streets in June to contest the election outcome, the AKP rushed to the defense of Ahmadinejad's regime, congratulating him on his "electoral success" while pro-Ahmadinejad forces were beating peaceful protesters.

Instead of supporting Western values, the AKP and its Islamist foreign policy undermine such values and the West, which in turn hurts ordinary Muslims from Darfur to Chechnya to Iran.

Soner Cagaptay, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is the author of "Islam, Secularism and Nationalism in Modern Turkey: Who Is a Turk?"

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-cagaptay7-2009dec07,0,1959478,print.story

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EDITORIAL

Victims' rights works both ways

Flaws in a murder victim's character discovered after the crime should not influence the punishment for the killer.

December 7, 2009

In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court wisely ruled that it was unconstitutional for a jury deciding on the penalty in a murder case to take into account the character of a victim or the reactions to the crime of friends and family. Two years later, the court reversed itself, and victims' rights activists rejoiced. They may now be having second thoughts. It turns out that focusing on the victim of a crime can sometimes mean lighter punishment for his killer.

Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of Mark Gill, a convicted murderer, because his attorney failed to inform jurors that Gill's victim had child pornography on his computer. A capable lawyer, the court found, would have mentioned this unsavory aspect of Ralph Lape Jr.'s character to rebut tributes offered by relatives.

In other words, whether Gill lived or died may have depended not on his own conduct -- kidnapping and killing a man he and a confederate had targeted for robbery -- but on the character of the victim. This is exactly backward, as the U.S. Supreme Court initially argued in 1989. Quoting a previous ruling, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. wrote that a defendant's punishment "must be tailored to his personal responsibility and moral guilt."

That moral guilt can be greater if the killer, say, preyed on a child or assassinated the president, or less if the killer, say, murdered someone he knew to be a vicious wife-beater. Those are pieces of information about the victim that the killer knew at the time of the murder, and such factors can fairly be used to increase or decrease punishment. Far different is varying the penalty according to what is learned after the fact about the victim. That sort of information can be powerful, especially when it is presented artfully. Last year, the Supreme Court refused to hear appeals from inmates in California who were sentenced to death after jurors watched affecting videos about the victims made by their families.

But the Missouri ruling shows that "victim impact" evidence can backfire by inviting the prosecution to attack the victim's reputation. Victims' rights activists should ask themselves what they have wrought: an unseemly arrangement in which the culpability of a murderer varies according to the attractiveness of the victim. Do we really want juries deciding that some lives are worthier than others?

When the Supreme Court refused to review the cases involving victim-impact videos, Justice John Paul Stevens and two colleagues dissented. "The videos added nothing relevant to the jury's deliberations and invited a verdict based on sentiment, rather than reasoned judgment," Stevens wrote. That criticism applies equally to all victim-impact evidence, and as the Missouri decision shows, a practice designed to vindicate victims' rights also can undermine them.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-victims7-2009dec07,0,1735276,print.story

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Members of Valley veterans association living link to Pearl Harbor

They walk slower these days, much slower. A few need the help of canes, while their buddies rely on the steady shoulders of their wives to lean on.

It nearly brings tears to your eyes to see them aged and bowed like this. But not defeated. Never defeated.

As young men, they fought and lived through "a date which will live in infamy," as President Franklin D. Roosevelt called it.

Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941. Today - 68 years ago.

The San Fernando Valley chapter of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association is down to a handful of active members now, and a few more who keep in touch from home because they're too infirm to make it to monthly meetings anymore.

A few decades ago, 100 men, many with their wives, would have been briskly striding across the grass at Warner Park in Woodland Hills to meet and talk about what they were doing the morning a sneak attack by the enemy drew America into World War II.

Today, it's five men and two wives. All walking slowly. Ninety is just around the corner or has already arrived for them.

Art Herriford, 87, and his wife, Shirley. Joe Mariani, 90, and his wife, Thelma. Joe Ceo, 89, Curly Elliott, 88, and George Keene, 86.

None of the guys wanted to talk about the war. Any war. Not today. They wanted to talk about Leon Kolb, their friend who died at 91 last week and will be buried today at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Hollywood Hills - on Pearl Harbor Day.

A memorial service will be held at 10 a.m. at St.Charles Borromeo Church at 10828 Moorpark Road in North Hollywood.

Kolb was 23 and manning a forward gun turret on the USS Oklahoma the morning 429 sailors on his battleship died. It was the second-highest loss of life on a ship at Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona lost 1,177 men.

When the History Channel did a show on the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor and the men who were there, Kolb - a retired Los Angeles city firefighter - was front and center.

"When I was a policeman, I ran across a fireman one day who said he knew Leon Kolb, and knew we had been together at Pearl Harbor," Curly Elliott was telling the guys.

"I said don't ever forget that name because Leon was the finest, most caring, bravest person I'd ever met."

They all knew the story of how Leon almost died that day trying to get back to his locker below to save the engagement ring he had bought for his future wife of 68 years, Lucille.

"Leon was fighting to get below, but the guys in the ship's magazine told him to get out of there now, there wasn't any time," Herriford said.

"It saved his life. None of the men in the magazine survived that day. Leon didn't get the ring, but he did get the girl."

How are they doing, I ask the guys. They all smile, trying to be nice. How are they doing? They're all fighting bodies that are slowly giving out on them. How the hell do you think they're doing?

"We can't remember what we had for dinner yesterday, but we still remember that day," says Mariani, who's fighting cancer.

It's been a pretty good month, Elliott says. They were invited to be in the San Fernando Veterans Day Parade, and for a couple of hours it reminded them that people still remember what they did when they picked themselves up from the utter destruction at Pearl Harbor, and went on to win a war that saved the world.

"I was cutting across the parking lot after the parade when a little kid stopped me," Elliott said. "His mother was standing behind him. He asked if he could shake my hand.

"I looked at her and her hands were shaking. She had a tear in her eye."

Keene still gets a lot of waves and thumbs up when he drives down the street and people see his Pearl Harbor Survivor license plate.

"I was at Denny's paying my bill when the guy behind me in line patted me on the back," Herriford said. "He had been looking at my Pearl Harbor cap.

"He reached over to shake my hand, then grabbed my check. `This is on me,' he said."

Time is running out on the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, and the guys know it. When they go, will the day go with them?

How do they help ensure Roosevelt's words will mean something to a whole new generation of kids who will never see these men march in parades and have the chance to shake their hands?

Herriford, the national vice president of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association - down to about 3,000 men nationally - had some news for his local chapter.

When the association can no longer function, its assets would be given in a merger with the Arizona Memorial Museum Association at Pearl Harbor.

"We're thinking 2010 to wrap it up, other than to get together on a social basis," Herriford said.

The money from investments the association has made over the years would go for educational purposes - to pay for the trips of students and teachers to visit the Arizona Memorial, and get a live history lesson on "the date which will live in infamy."

Maybe a nice plaque at the entrance dedicated to the men and wives of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, so they will never be forgotten.

The men nodded and shook hands before slowly walking back to their cars Friday.

"I'll see you at Leon's funeral," Mariani said.

Yeah, see you there, his buddies replied.

http://www.dailynews.com/ci_13942206

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Stranger takes closer look, finds woman aid

The woman who settled on the bus bench on Ventura and Topanga Canyon boulevards had wrapped herself in blankets to wait for her daughter.

She waited for months.

No one came by to pick her up.

No one saw what she had been hiding under all those layers of jackets and blankets.

The sight of her there, alone and bundled in clothes, even under the heat of the San Fernando Valley summers and recent nights when temperatures dipped down into desert lows, bothered Dennis Magalios so much he couldn't sleep.

He called police, who told him they conducted a welfare check, but she wanted no help. He contacted the only social service agencies he knew, but there was no response. He turned to his Bible.

Day after day, Magalios wondered how he could help this woman who would push away the money he wanted to give her.

"No, I don't need help," the woman told him. "I'm waiting for my daughter."

She repeated that to him again and again, Magalios said, as if it were really true.

And then one day, as he again tried to slip a $20 bill to her, he saw what she was hiding under her blankets all along.

A cast on her right foot had rotted. Wounds had formed below her knee. Infection had eaten away at her skin until a sticky fluid oozed from open sores. The smell of disease sent Magalios running toward his car.

"I had to go to my car and vomit," he said.

And that's when he made up his mind. "I wasn't going to let it go."

Karen Clark had come from Tucson, Ariz., before wandering the San Fernando Valley for more than a year.

She "lived" on the bus bench on Ventura and Topanga Canyon boulevards, near Chase Bank, for the past six months. She pushed a buggy filled with her belongings to help her balance as she hobbled back and forth.

At the Los Angeles Police Department's Topanga Community Police Station, calls about Clark had been coming in for a while from those concerned. But in the past two weeks, the calls intensified.

Magalios tried every telephone number he could until he reached LAPD interim senior lead officer Amir Abolfazlian.

"We have sent officers with our mental evaluation unit to see her," Abolfazlian said. "She did have a cast on her leg, but she refused medical attention."

Police can't force someone off the street unless they are a danger to themselves or others. They need to want help. And this woman wasn't breaking any laws, Abolfazlian said.

But there were too many calls, so Abolfazlian wanted to go and interview her for himself. It was 6 in the morning Nov. 23, and she was wrapped in her blankets.

He saw her right foot, the cast dirty, the leg infected.

At first, she seemed fine and coherent. After several minutes, however, her mind wandered, Abolfazlian said.

"I could use some help," Clark said to the officer, "but the only person that could help me is my daughter. My daughter was here five minutes ago. You missed her."

She told Abolfazlian that her daughter had come from Saudi Arabia. Then she rambled, he said. Against her threats that she would file a complaint, Abolfazlian called the paramedics and asked that she undergo mental evaluation.

"She was disabled," he said. "And she couldn't take care of herself."

Patrol officers carry a list of social services with them that include names of agencies and places of worship that provide meals. On that list, there is only one shelter where the homeless can stay - L.A. Family Housing in North Hollywood. But beds there often go to families first, and there is a 30-day wait.

"There aren't many shelters," Abolfazlian said. "Most are in downtown L.A. or as far as El Monte."

And for the those who are homeless with mental illness, it seems there may be fewer options.

Other than Los Angeles, the Valley has the largest population of the chronically homeless, and Van Nuys is the hub because of all the services there.

While programs in the San Fernando Valley geared toward those with mental illnesses continue to maintain funding thanks to Proposition63, which levies a 1 percent income tax on people earning more than $1 million a year, there are few places where the homeless can live.

"The challenges are limited resources," said Anita Kaplan, program manager for Cornerstone, a daytime drop-in center for homeless, mentally ill adults run by the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center Inc., and funded in part by the county's Department of Health.

"Despite the fact that we have some clients in the system, we can't transition them because of the budget cuts to the Los Angeles Housing Authority," Kaplan said.

Clark, who likely has no health insurance, may remain in limbo.

"At this point, it's difficult," Kaplan said. "People can't access services because of funding cuts, so she's going to have fewer options. Sadly, it may just be food banks, shelters and free clinics."

Abolfazlian said he hopes Clark receives the mental assistance she needs.

"It's hard for them," Abolfazlian said of the homeless with mental health issues. "As far as getting them mental assistance, the county hospitals try their best to provide that. Is it a long-term solution? No. But everyone's budget is stretched. Everyone is trying their best.

"I live in the division and I take it personally," Abolfazlian said. "It's sad to see them in the cold weather like that."

When Clark was brought into Olive View Medical Center on Nov. 23, attending physicians and nurses learned she had been hit by a car, maybe a year ago. She had been treated, but she never followed up with physicians. The cast had been on her foot for months, when it should have come off in six weeks.

"There was a lot of infection, a fracture that never healed, and a massive wound on her leg," said Dr. Elijah Wasson, who is her attending physician.

"She's allowing us to help her out," he said. "The problem is we don't know much about her."

Wasson said he hopes a family member will appear. Clark, who is 53, is about 5 feet, 10 inches tall. She is black, and wears a newsboy style cap on her head.

Clark has said she has two children who are 10 and 11 years old.

She told Wasson that people had kicked and cursed at her while she lived on the bench, but otherwise, she has survived "on the blessings of others."

Clark likely will stay at the hospital for a while, then transfer to a facility where there is an orthopedic specialist, Wasson said.

After that, if she can care for herself, she will be referred to a network of shelters that "are difficult to navigate but do work," he said.

But she would have to follow several rules that many do not like, Wasson said. That means she could find herself on the streets again, maybe back on the bus bench.

"We have at least eight chronically homeless people living in the hospital lobby after 11 p.m.," Wasson said. "All county hospitals see that."

http://www.dailynews.com/ci_13942208

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From the New York Post

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Lawyers & jerks putting the 'ex' in Xmas

by ANDREA PEYSER

Last Updated: 5:40 AM, December 7, 2009

Posted: 3:57 AM, December 7, 2009

HOW did the Grinch steal that Christmas tree?

The iconic, 76-foot Norway spruce cur rently propped up in the middle of Rockefeller Center is no random bush. The tree represents nothing less than the holiest Christian holiday, the joyous celebration of the birth of Jesus.

So why has Christ been sucked out of the Christmas tree?

Every year at this time, I'm bombarded with warnings about the mugging of Christmas, and the rampant secularization of a country founded on one's ability to worship as one chooses.

So it came as a surprise to learn that the Rockefeller Christmas tree, which draws hundreds of thousands of slow-moving tourists and giddy local revelers annually to gawk at this busy corner of the universe, has been officially stripped of its religious identity.

About a year ago, the tree, which has delighted visitors of all religions since the Depression, was christened simply "The Tree at Rockefeller Center."

Now, I doubt the stealth removal of the official title "Christmas" will do much to soften the impact of the ginormous shrub on folks who gather to marvel at the sight. Consider it the death of Christmas by a thousand small cuts.

One source deep within Rock Center is mighty steamed at what he sees as the "multiculturalization" of a Christian symbol that doesn't bother this Jew one bit. Or anyone else -- except, perhaps, the ACLU.

"They don't want to offend anyone," my source groused.

Some cultural commentators call it "The War on Christmas." And just as many others insist the battle exists only in the heads of conservative troublemakers.

You can blame cheerless humbugs for snatching red and green napkins from classrooms in Plano, Texas. You can blame goblins for sucking "Dreidel Dreidel" and "Silent Night" from concerts at Maplewood, NJ, schools, drawing more legal action than flies to dung.

But during this season, you might want to blame the lawyers for spoiling the peace. Because the irrational fear of lawsuits has done more damage to holiday spirit than the Nazis did at Kristallnacht.

The Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanzaa season is starting to resemble Silly Season. This year, the mayor of Amelia, Ohio, canceled the town's 28-year-old Christmas parade for fear of lawsuits over the separation of church and state.

Mayor Leroy Ellington considered renaming the event a "holiday parade," after one person, the village solicitor, warned about the name.

"The legal fees that the village would spend to defend a Christmas parade would be costly," imagined Ellington. "There was the likelihood that we would be sued on a First Amendment issue."

Eventually, he scrapped the parade altogether.

This month, Byam Elementary School in Chelmsford, Mass., asked parents to contribute gifts for a holiday sale, but expressly forbade Christmas, Hanukkah or religious items. "No Santa, candy canes or stockings," insisted the school's legally vetted guidelines. Somehow, snowmen made the cut.

The school spokeswoman failed to get back to me.

But a spokeswoman for Rockefeller Center did. She insisted I look at a page buried within the "Tree at Rockefeller Center" Web site, to a press release that, in fact, casually referred to "The Tree" as a Christmas tree.

"Around the office, we like to call it the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree," said the spokeswoman, who would not let me use her name.

Tourists were not so understanding.

"It seems rather mean-spirited to name this 'The Tree,' " said Myra Hodgkins, visiting from Britain. "Who's it going to hurt?"

Justin Gould, 8, of New Jersey, was cheeky about the omission.

"Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!" the boy cried.

Merry Christmas! That is, until the lawyers get their say.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/lawyers_jerks_putting_the_ex_in_HyDcoZ9vvaop1Kpuq9DX7L

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