State proposes lethal injection revisions, a step toward resuming executions

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation today released its proposed revisions to the lethal injection procedures, a first step toward resuming executions in the state after a four-year halt.

The proposals kick off a new 15-day period for public comment, after which the revised procedures can be adopted and submitted for what is expected to be months of judicial review in state and federal courts to assess the execution method's conformance with state law and the Constitution.

Executions have been on hold since early 2006, when concerns about the state's three-drug method prompted U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose to deem the process a potentially unconstitutional infliction of cruel and unusual punishment.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tasked a special panel with rewriting the lethal injection procedures in 2007, but the revisions were decided behind closed doors and later ruled illegal by a Marin County judge for the state's failure to submit the changes to public scrutiny and comment.

Corrections officials last year sought the public's input in May and June, receiving more than 8,000 comments by letter, e-mail and at a public hearing in Sacramento. Analysis of those suggestions resulted in a few minor changes to the protocols, mostly dealing with the arrangements for witnesses to executions and access to the condemned inmate by chaplains and spiritual advisors. As under the previous practices, an inmate sentenced to death can choose whether to be executed by lethal gas or lethal injection.

Once the lethal injection protocols are formally adopted by the corrections department, both the Marin County judge and Fogel must review and approve them before executions can resume.

California has 697 inmates on death row, but only six are known to have cleared all legal hurdles to their execution.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/01/state-of-california-proposes-lethal-injection-revisions-first-step-to-resuming-executions.html#more

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Male prostitution is Nevada's newest legal profession

After months of debate in the state's surprisingly squeamish brothel community, Nye County officials agree to let Shady Lady Ranch near Death Valley hire men.

by Ashley Powers

January 6, 2010

Reporting from Tonopah, Nev.

Brothel owner Bobbi Davis got the go-ahead Tuesday to hire what her website cheekily calls "a few good men."

Her Shady Lady Ranch is searching for "service-oriented" guys willing to become Nevada's first legal male sex workers.

"I personally feel, as do the many other women who have made contact with me since I started this, that this is a service whose time has come," Davis said in a letter to Nye County officials.

A county board's vote Tuesday affirming that Davis could offer "shady men" to her clientele followed months of rancorous debate among the state's legal brothel community. The industry, in its own peculiar way, is somewhat conservative: Considered an anachronism of bawdy mining camps by some Nevada newcomers, it often balks at change.

Of course, new ideas in a business unique to Nevada (in its legal form) are a touch different. Adding porn stars to brothel lineups rankled some owners. Overturning a ban on brothel advertising, a battle Davis and the American Civil Liberties Union helped lead, also stirred up debate. Though neither change shuttered the state's 25 or so bordellos -- some would argue the publicity helped -- many owners still operate in an off-the-grid manner, wary of being shut down.

George Flint, longtime lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Assn., has said that allowing male prostitutes could be the industry's Pearl Harbor. He has hinted that brothels possibly offering gay sex -- a choice each prostitute, as an independent contractor, would be free to make -- might sour some legislators on the entire brothel system.

Nevada lawmakers are notoriously skittish when discussing the birds and bees. The Legislature, even when severely cash-strapped, has repeatedly declined to tax the brothels (which are banned in Reno and Las Vegas) for fear of, well, legitimizing the business.

"This is the first time in the history of the world . . . that men have been licensed to sell sex," Flint said Tuesday, his voice rising. "It's never been done!"

Davis and her husband, Jim, merely hope to boost business. Their small outpost near Death Valley, about 150 miles northwest of Las Vegas, offers as many as five women, relies heavily on travelers and has gotten some requests for gigolos.

After announcing her plans this summer, Davis and attorney Allen Lichtenstein succeeded where the better-known Hollywood Madam, Heidi Fleiss, had failed. In 2005, Fleiss announced that she was moving to Pahrump, in southern Nye County, in hopes of creating a "stud farm." She opened a Laundromat instead.

Davis figures that, even if it's a flop, adding men to her roster is worth trying. She has been inundated with more than 100 applications, she said, though she held off on hiring until she'd cleared all bureaucratic hurdles.

The final one: Tuesday's meeting of the Nye County Licensing and Liquor Board, which is made up of five county commissioners and Sheriff Tony DeMeo, who had been openly skeptical of Davis' plan.

Opponents who promised to take buses to Tonopah, however, failed to show up. Not one constituent spoke about the proposal. But DeMeo, Flint and Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite BunnyRanch, raised concerns about monitoring the spread of infectious diseases, though state health regulators had already cleared the way for male sex workers.

"You guys can't scare me," said Commissioner Lorinda Wichman before voting in Davis' favor. "I'm going to try this."

Though the vote was relatively nonconfrontational, the discussion beforehand showed how much controversy remains. For much of Davis' speech, officials rested their chins in their hands, lowered their eyes or slumped in their chairs. When the sheriff noted that Davis' statement varied from her letter to commissioners, she read aloud one section with force.

"It seems the biggest hoopla is a great fear in some people's minds that some kind of homosexual activity might go on," she said. "Why panic I don't understand . . . it's not my intent to encourage or promote or to turn my business into a 'gay property.' "

DeMeo wondered whether sex workers could check female customers for signs of disease as easily as men. Davis said yes.

"If you want me to go into the inspection routine, I will," she said.

"Please don't!" said a commissioner, to laughter.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-male-prostitutes6-2010jan06,0,1279875,print.story

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U.N. agency halts food aid in southern Somalia

The World Food Program suspends its assistance in the region because of attacks and threats by Islamic militants, putting a million people at risk of starvation.

by Robyn Dixon

January 6, 2010

Reporting from Johannesburg, South Africa

A million people in southern Somalia risk starvation after the World Food Program on Tuesday suspended humanitarian aid because of attacks and threats by Al Qaeda-linked Islamic rebels.

"Rising threats and attacks on humanitarian operations, as well as the imposition of a string of unacceptable demands from armed groups, have made it virtually impossible for WFP to continue reaching up to one million people in need in southern Somalia," the United Nations organization said in a statement.

The World Food Program has evacuated staff members, equipment and food aid from the south to central Somalia.

The shutdown is one of the group's largest retreats in years, meaning its food aid may reach only 1.8 million people instead of its target of 2.8 million.

The militant Islamic group Shabab, which has taken control of much of the country's south, last year gave the World Food Program a deadline of Jan. 1 to leave. The agency says farmers can't provide the food required to feed the million hungry Somalis in the south.

"WFP is deeply concerned about rising hunger and suffering among the most vulnerable due to these unprecedented and inhumane attacks on purely humanitarian operations," the agency's statement said. The organization said it was ready to provide food aid to refugees who moved north because of hunger.

Shabab has threatened human rights activists, journalists and aid workers in recent months. Some have been kidnapped, others shot.

The insurgents have looted several World Food Program compounds in the south in recent weeks and have issued a series of demands to the agency, including the removal of female staffers from their positions and regular payments of $20,000 for protection.

Last month, a World Food Program security officer was shot dead in the town of Beledweyne, near the Ethiopian border.

Shabab aims to introduce Taliban-style Islamic law throughout the country and has stoned numerous people it had accused of adultery. Other people have been flogged publicly. One of those stoned to death was a mentally disturbed 13-year-old girl who had been raped by three armed men, according to an aunt who was interviewed by the BBC.

In areas the militant group controls, music is not allowed, cinemas have closed down and women are forced to wear hijabs covering their bodies from head to toe.

Somalia has been in almost-constant civil war since 1991, despite many efforts to stabilize it and establish a government. In recent years, it's become a hub for pirates who attack ships off the Horn of Africa, collecting millions each year in ransoms.

The only solution to the piracy problem, most analysts say, is to stabilize the country and establish a functioning government.

The Western-backed interim government in Mogadishu has no authority beyond a few key neighborhoods in the capital.

In 2006, the Islamic Courts Union -- an Islamic group that ran the country's court system -- won control of the capital and other parts of the country, briefly restoring order. Six months later, an interim government took power with the support of Ethiopian and African Union forces.

Shabab is one of several Islamic groups that arose from the Islamic Courts Union.

"Staff safety is a key concern for WFP, and recent attacks, threats, harassment and demands for payments by armed groups have decimated the humanitarian food lifeline," the U.N. agency statement said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-somalia-aid6-2010jan06,0,4998204,print.story

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Court upholds U.S. right to hold Guantanamo prisoners

An appeals court says suspects may be detained indefinitely so long as the government can show their ties to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

by David G. Savage

January 6, 2010

Reporting from Washington

With a wide war on terrorism still being fought, an appellate court said Tuesday that Guantanamo Bay prison detainees had few legal rights, so long as the government could show they fought for or actively supported the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the government's broad power to hold indefinitely suspected former Taliban fighters and their supporters who were captured abroad and sent to the U.S. military prison in Cuba.

The decision was the first by the appeals court to interpret what legal rights and rules apply to the Guantanamo detainees who are seeking their freedom through the courts. Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that these long-term prisoners had the right to appeal their detention before a judge, but the justices did not spell out the law that would apply in such hearings.

The appellate judges rejected the claim of Ghaleb Nassar Bihani, a Yemeni native who served as a cook for a Taliban brigade in the fall of 2001, that he deserved to go free because the U.S. war against the Taliban ended when the Islamist forces surrendered in 2002.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown said nothing in the law required the release of military prisoners just because the fighting ended in one sector. The law permits "what common sense tells us must be true: release is only required when the fighting stops," she wrote. Otherwise, "each successful campaign of a long war . . . would trigger an obligation to release Taliban fighters captured in earlier clashes" who could then return to battle.

The judges also rejected the notion that these military prisoners were entitled to the full protections of the criminal law. For example, Bihani asserted that when he admitted to U.S. military investigators in Afghanistan that he fought alongside the Taliban, his statement should be deemed as "hearsay" and not used against him in a federal court hearing in Washington.

But Judge Brown said the habeas corpus hearing was not the same as a criminal trial. Otherwise, the military investigators from Afghanistan would be required to appear in a court to be cross-examined by the defense lawyers, she said.

"In a detainee case, the judge acts as a neutral decision maker charged with seizing the actual truth of a simple, binary question: Is detention lawful?" she wrote. "This is why the one constant in the history of habeas has never been a certain set of procedures, but rather the independent power of a judge to assess the actions of the executive."

In this case, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon had decided there was ample evidence to conclude that Bihani had fought with the Taliban. That was reason enough to uphold his detention, Brown concluded. Appellate judges Brett Kavanaugh and Stephen Williams joined her in the ruling on Bihani, though Williams said he thought Brown's opinion had gone too far on the legal issues.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-gitmo-court6-2010jan06,0,4830383,print.story

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OPINION

Obama's fight against secrecy

The president has the right idea but his proposals don't go far enough.

by Jon Wiener

January 6, 2010

'For a long time now there's been too much secrecy in this city." That's what President Obama said on his first day in office. He was talking about the way George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had used 9/11 as a pretext for pulling a veil over many of their key policies and actions. Last week, Obama announced he was replacing Bush's executive order on classified documents with a new one designed to reduce secrecy. Obama's policies are a distinct improvement, but they don't really solve the underlying problem.

The basic idea is a simple one. As Obama said in the order: "Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their government." Officials rely on secrecy to avoid being held responsible for their failures and to conceal illegality and misconduct -- waterboarding of suspected terrorists, for example. If practices like waterboarding are a good idea, the details of why, when, how and who should be knowable and defendable in public debate. That's the principle behind the Freedom of Information Act, which permits "any person" to request government documents.

As the new rule states, the "secret" classification should be reserved for documents "that would clearly and demonstrably reveal: (a) the identity of a confidential human source or a human intelligence source; or (b) key design concepts of weapons of mass destruction."

Obama's order requires all federal agencies to review their classification systems and identify information that no longer needs protection. Most important, the order states: "No information may remain classified indefinitely."

But the enemies of openness have had powerful weapons in their hands, and Obama probably hasn't done enough to defeat them. Agencies maintain secrecy first of all by delay. It took 19 years for the government to release documents -- long supposed to be declassified -- on the 1959 Berlin crisis requested by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Four hundred million documents dating from World War II and the Cold War remain classified, despite a long-standing mandate that all such documents be released after 25 years unless they fall under a few narrowly specified exemptions. In 2000, President Clinton gave agencies a deadline of Dec. 31, 2003, to obey the order. When they failed to do so, President Bush established a new deadline: Dec. 31, 2009. They didn't meet that one either. Obama's approach? Set a new deadline, four years from now.

He has also introduced procedures that ought to help agencies meet the deadline. The review is one of them, but so is a new rule about documents that belong to more than one agency. If a document has been circulated to the FBI, the CIA and the State Department, for example, each in sequence must review it before it can be released. To avoid this, Obama established a single authority, the National Declassification Center.

Another weapon in the hands of the enemies of openness was a rule decreed by Bush in 2003 giving the head of the intelligence community the power to veto decisions to release documents made by an interagency panel. Since the CIA lives by secrecy, the results were disastrous. Obama has repealed that rule; now only the president can reverse such decisions.

But there's a bigger problem that Obama's new order does not address. We have an antiquated Cold War-era secrecy machine that kept citizens in the dark about what their government was doing, but it didn't prevent the Soviets from getting our biggest secrets. Rather than tweaking the present system, as Obama is doing -- eliminating some roadblocks to declassification, streamlining the review process -- we need wholesale changes, in part because the threats today are so different from what they were in the 1950s. We need a broader public debate about how to combat terrorism, and we need a public that is knowledgeable and informed about how we are dealing with terrorist threats.

To start, all documents more than 25 years old should be automatically declassified. Cold War secrets are irrelevant in today's world. We don't need to spend taxpayer dollars going through these documents page by page. (In fact, a Department of Defense task force concluded that "perhaps 90%" of technical and scientific information could be safely revealed within five years of classification.)

Then we need a requirement that declassification rules serve the public's right to know. Without such a directive, it will be much easier for the Obama administration to continue to keep secret aspects of Bush-era national security policy. Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU National Security Project, has a list: "The CIA is still withholding documents about its rendition, detention and interrogation program. The Justice Department is still withholding the legal memos that supplied the basis for the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. The Defense Department is still withholding the interrogation directives used by special forces in Afghanistan." We need this information if we are to avoid repeating abuses from the past and to evaluate the wisdom of government policy in the present.

The principle that democracy requires open government applies not only to Bush administration records but also to Obama's. And yet Obama has violated that principle in his executive order by increasing the secrecy around his own decision-making, as pointed out by Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org.

Under Clinton, information originating from the president and his staff was exempt from release while the president remained in office. George W. Bush added to that the vice president and his staff. Now Obama has expanded that to include "committees, commissions or boards appointed by the incumbent president; or other entities within the executive office of the president that solely advise and assist the incumbent president."

The strongest counterargument to greater openness is that it would permit terrorists to learn more about our vulnerabilities -- for example, if security lapses at nuclear sites were made public. But what's more likely to lead to improving nuclear site security: public disclosure of lapses, followed by public outrage and public demands for change, or continued secrecy?

In 2000, Congress created a Public Interest Declassification Board to solicit suggestions from the public and make recommendations about declassifying documents. In 2008, according to Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, Bush ordered the FBI, the CIA and other agencies to comment on the board's recommendations. Open government groups then filed FOIA requests for copies of the agencies' comments. The agencies refused to release them. That suggests how difficult it will be to get the agencies to change, even with Obama's new policies.

Jon Wiener, a contributing editor of the Nation, teaches American history at UC Irvine and is the author of, among other books, "Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-wiener6-2010jan06,0,7845074,print.story

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EDITORIAL

Airline security and the real world

Adopting an irrational air safety policy based on fear could hand Al Qaeda another success.

January 6, 2010

The ultimate objective of terrorism is to sow fear. In that sense, the Christmas Day plot to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight succeeded, even though the bomb that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab carried in his underwear failed to explode. The near-miss understandably revived American anxieties, which then were whipped into a frenzy by President Obama's opponents. The challenge now, as the administration seeks to address the lapses that allowed Abdulmutallab to board the plane, is to do so without handing Al Qaeda another opportunity to portray the U.S. as an enemy of Islam.

Clearly the U.S. government has made strides in security since the 9/11 attacks, which is why would-be bombers have been unable to launch another large-scale attack, and why they must now resort to hiding explosives in their shoes or underwear. But Al Qaeda is adaptable; the more secure airports become, the more likely the organization and its allies will turn to subways or buses, as they have done in Europe. That is why the Obama administration must respond with flexibility and creativity of its own, and not get bogged down in reacting to the tactics of the most recent attack.

Obama is right to focus on failures of the intelligence system. U.S. officials had heard that an attack against the United States was being plotted in Yemen, possibly by a Nigerian. Abdulmutallab's father had reported his son's radicalization to U.S. officials in Nigeria, including details about his son's trips to Yemen. Abdulmutallab had even been denied a British visa renewal. Yet when he paid cash for his ticket and checked no luggage, he was nevertheless allowed to board. As Obama noted, the intelligence was in hand, but agencies failed to "connect the dots."

Obama is wrong, however, to mandate intensive screening of all passengers carrying passports from or traveling through 14 so-called countries of interest, such as Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Shoe-bomber Richard Reid, after all, carried a British passport, and "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla is American. Nigeria wouldn't even have been "of interest" before Christmas, and Egypt, which has produced many violent extremists, still isn't on the list.

While it's true that most of those targeting the U.S. and Europe have been young men from Muslim countries, the vast majority of people from these countries are not violent, religious extremists. Therefore, many terrorism experts contend that such mass screening would be of marginal benefit. The risk, meanwhile, is that in treating entire nations as potential suspects, we will drive away like-minded business partners and political allies -- and hand Al Qaeda another success.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-terror6-2010jan06,0,7465655,print.story

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From the Daily News

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LAX is strong on safety

As airports across the country continue to increase security in the wake of an attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Tuesday that travelers should feel safe using Los Angeles International Airport.

More police officers will be hired at the nation's third-busiest airport, while officials plan to increase the use of full-body imaging scanners at security checkpoints, Villaraigosa said.

"While LAX may continue to be in the sight of terrorists, I want to send a strong message today that we're constantly looking for ways to improve on our safety record," Villaraigosa said during a news conference held inside LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal.

Security was heightened at LAX and airports across the country after 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to ignite an explosive device aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day.

This week, President Barack Obama announced additional security measures on domestic and overseas flights, while the Transportation Security Administration warned that international travelers would be subjected to more pat-downs and intensive baggage screenings.

"The TSA has a huge mission to protect America's transportation network and we do not have the ability to do that alone," Larry Fetters, the TSA's federal security director at LAX, said while adding that the agency collaborates with city, state and federal authorities on anti-terrorism intelligence.

Airport officials said a series of security measures were implemented at LAX in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Last year, the TSA introduced two types of machines that can peer beneath clothing to determine whether a passenger is carrying a weapon or explosives.

In Terminal 5, passengers pulled aside for a secondary security screening may be asked to step into the Millimeter Wave Whole Imaging Body System. The machine resembles a roomy phone booth and uses radio waves to produce a three-dimensional image based on energy reflected back from the body.

Secondary screenings in Terminals 4 and 6 may be done with "backscatter" machines, which use low-level X-rays to produce an extremely detailed chalk outline of a person's body.

While the American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy advocates claim that the scanners act as a virtual strip search, Villaraigosa and other politicians are calling for wider use of the technology at airports across the country.

"We've got to accept the fact that those small incursions on our privacy are well worth the lives that it could save if we're doing everything possible," Villaraigosa, a former president of the ACLU's Southern California chapter, said after testing one of the machines.

LAX Police Chief George Centeno said he would support the deployment of more full-body imaging scanners if the technology was improved so that airline passengers could be screened more quickly.

"The other threat that occurs when you delay the screening process is that you have long lines and large groups of people. That's a vulnerability," Centeno said. "In order for it to be a viable detection measure, it has to be done quickly so you can minimize those lines."

A new $670 million baggage screening system will be installed in a hidden location in all of LAX's terminals by 2012, funded with $481 million worth of TSA grants. For now, huge baggage-screening and explosives-detection devices take up a large amount of space in the ticketing lobbies of airport terminals.

Last year, several large concrete flower planters were placed in front of airport terminals to serve as a barricade from vehicles loaded with explosives.

Villaraigosa also said he plans to hire more airport police officers and bomb-sniffing dogs at LAX. At a cost of $60,000 each, the dogs can be trained to detect illegal explosives and narcotics stashed inside bags or carried by airline passengers.

The LAX police department has grown over eight years, from 202 officers in 2001 to 363 officers during the last fiscal year, according to figures provided by airport officials.

"LAX will be safer for travelers and employees in 2010 because of the mayor's pledge to increase airport police staffing while harnessing new technologies such as full-body scanners," said Marshall McClain, president of the union representing LAX police officers.

LAX served 68 million airline passengers in 2000, but took a severe hit following 9-11 and never fully recovered, unlike many other airports across the country. Passenger traffic at LAX dwindled again over the past two years due to the national recession, with an estimated 55 million passengers passing through the airport during 2009.

Despite the increased security measures and sagging economy, Villaraigosa remains optimistic that tourists would continue to visit Los Angeles.

"If people know they can fly into the safest airport in the United States of America, they're going to want to come here," Villaraigosa said. "I believe that (safety measures) will encourage air travel if people know that air travel is as safe as it can possibly be."

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14129282

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L.A. mayor supports expanded use of full-body scanners at LAX

The mayor met with police and airport security officials at LAX, and told reporters he supports the expanded use of full-body scanners at the airport.

"It's great to start off the new year thinking not only about the past year but also thinking forward," Villaraigosa said.

"Fortunately, here at LAX, we're ahead of the curve on security measures, making our airport safer. I'm proud to say we're not resting on our laurels," he said.

Security has been stepped up worldwide since a passenger unsuccessfully tried to detonate an explosive device aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas. The passenger, 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was arrested and has reportedly told authorities he was recruited by al-Qaida operatives.

On Monday, the head of the Los Angeles Airport Peace Officers Association urged the federal government to quickly adopt body scanners on a wide scale to keep explosives off jetliners.

"This incident is a solemn reminder of the need for proactive airport security at U.S. airports, especially at Los Angeles International Airport, long considered the state's top terrorist target," association president Marshall McClain said.

LAX is one of 19 airports using whole-body imagers, but the devices generally are deployed only after a passenger has been selected for secondary screening, McClain said.

"Testing of whole-body scanners at LAX has shown them to be highly effective in keeping dangerous materials off airplanes," McClain said.

"The Transportation Security Administration should be allowed to rapidly expand to 100 percent the population of airline passengers screened with the next-generation equipment. All available technology and tools must be used to fix an obvious gap in security that puts airline travelers and crew members at risk."

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14126050

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FBI: Vegas shooter had "lengthy" criminal history

LAS VEGAS - Authorities say a gunman shot dead in a gunbattle after killing a courthouse security guard and wounding a federal marshal in Las Vegas had a "lengthy" criminal history in Tennessee and California.

FBI Special Agent in Charge Kevin Favreau said Tuesday that 66-year-old Johnny Lee Wicks faced murder charges in Memphis, Tenn., in the mid-1970s, and sex assault charges in Sacramento, Calif., in the late 1980s.

Records show Wicks lost a federal lawsuit last year challenging a cut in his Social Security benefits after moving from California to Las Vegas.

The FBI and local police say Wicks torched his apartment and walked three miles to the courthouse before opening fire Monday morning, killing 72-year-old security officer Stanley Cooper.

Officials say the wounded marshal has been released from the hospital.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14126959

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From the Wall Street Journal

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President Says U.S. Missed Key Bomb Clues

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama, in his harshest remarks yet on the terrorism threat facing the nation, said U.S. intelligence agencies knew that al Qaeda in Yemen was targeting the U.S., but "failed to connect those dots" to thwart a Christmas Day bombing attempt.

The remarks capped a day in which the president, facing heat from Republicans over what they paint as a lackluster initial response, summoned most of his cabinet and security team to meetings on counterterrorism in an effort to show his administration's engagement on the issue.

The White House suspends transfers of Yemeni detainees held at Guantanamo Bay to their home country. Plus, Google debuts the Nexus One, its first "super" phone, and Ford sales surge with a 33% rise in December.

The early days of the year, in which the White House hoped to focus on jobs and the deficit, instead have been dominated by the fallout from the attempted bombing of the Northwest Airlines jet.

Evidence now shows that U.S. intelligence agencies knew before Christmas that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist group centered in Yemen, not only wanted to strike U.S. assets in the region but planned to hit the U.S. itself, the president said. The suspect in the case, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, wasn't stopped even though he had conferred with a known Islamist extremist in Yemen, received a visa, bought a one-way ticket from Amsterdam to Detroit in cash and checked no luggage.

Mr. Obama didn't provide new security policies and didn't single out individuals in the administration for criticism or discipline. But he made his most direct criticism yet of U.S. intelligence performance, saying he will hold accountable "our intelligence, homeland security and law-enforcement systems, and the people in them.

Gibbs Defends Administration Over Abdulmutallab

At a news conference, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs defends the administration's choice not to treat Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the man accused of trying to blow up Northwest Flight 253, as an enemy combatant.

"The bottom line is this: The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack, but our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the no-fly list," he said. "In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had."

Initial agency reviews of the incident will be completed this week, Mr. Obama said. He has requested "specific recommendations for corrective actions" that can be implemented immediately. Further steps to better integrate intelligence information and bolster airline-passenger screening will be announced in the coming days, the president said.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation "gleaned usable, actionable intelligence" before Mr. Abdulmutallab reportedly clammed up. Mr. Gibbs wouldn't say what that intelligence was, but in recent days, Yemeni security forces have moved against targets in their country.

In a move that had been expected, the Obama administration announced Tuesday that it has suspended transfers of Yemeni prisoners held at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to their home country. Mr. Gibbs said dozens of Guantanamo Bay prisoners once believed to be bound for Yemen will instead be sent to a prison in Thomson, Ill., once the all-but-empty penitentiary is purchased and refurbished by the federal government.

The suspension of Guantanamo transfers to Yemen came after days of equivocation on the issue. At least one of the Christmas Day plotters in Yemen had been released from the military prison by the Bush administration.

Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Christopher Bond (R., Mo.), often a harsh critic of Obama security policies, hailed the Guantanamo decision as "a step in the right direction," even as he called again for the president to abandon efforts to close the off-shore military prison.

About 45 of the more than 90 Yemeni detainees remaining at Guantanamo qualify for repatriation, U.S. officials say. If they were nationals of another country they would be sent home, officials say, but instead could end up being held at the Thomson Correctional Center.

News Hub: White House Readies Security Panel

President Obama will meet with security advisers today and review criteria for tighter travel restrictions, Washington bureau chief John Bussey reports.

White House officials portrayed the president as furious with what he called intelligence lapses more than airline security flaws. The failure to tie together bits of intelligence into a clearer picture that should have stopped the plot came despite the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the Directorate of National Intelligence and other entities in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"The president is as frustrated as I'm sure many American people are," Mr. Gibbs said. "We've spent a lot of money in the intervening years. We have set up new positions."

Congressional leaders served notice Tuesday that they intend to be involved in whatever new policies and procedures the administration adopts in response to the Northwest attack. Several House and Senate committees have announced plans to hold hearings on the issue.

Mr. Gibbs said the key players, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair and Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta, still have the confidence of the president. But Rep. Peter King of New York, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said he thought some officials could lose their jobs.

"For the last six to eight months there's been a feud between the [Director of National Intelligence] and the CIA, and that has to have a negative impact. These agencies are using their skills that should be used against the terrorists against each other," Mr. King said.

Mr. Blair vowed to do better. "The intelligence community received the president's message today -- we got it, and we are moving forward to meet the new challenges," he said. The intelligence system should have prevented Mr. Abdulmutallab from boarding a U.S.-bound plane, he said. "We can and we must outthink, outwork and defeat the enemy's new ideas," he added.

But the information wasn't analyzed with data from other agencies like the National Security Agency, which had fragments of data indicating al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was grooming a Nigerian for an attack.

The consensus from the preliminary reviews, the official said, is that the Christmas Day attack exposed a weakness in intelligence analysis: Information may be shared but disparate pieces of data aren't being assembled.

"In some ways it's a different problem than 9/11," the official said. "9/11 was a no-kidding failure to share [intelligence]. Here, you've got a lot of sharing but you don't have deep analytic expertise" on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula plotting against the U.S. homeland.

Another issue identified in intelligence reviews was that the watch-list process wasn't fully connected to counterterrorism analysis. "We don't have our best and brightest working on watch lists," the intelligence official said, and there isn't a constant reviewing of watch-list data at the National Counterterrorism Center.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126270284028916439.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLETopStories#printMode

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U.S. Retools Military Intelligence

WASHINGTON -- A top U.S. general in Afghanistan has ordered an overhaul of military intelligence-gathering efforts after concluding that commanders weren't receiving the information they needed to win the war.

In a report published this week, Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn, the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, said U.S. military and civilian analysts have focused too much on Afghanistan's insurgent groups and will be redeployed to devote more attention to its complex tribal, cultural and economic dynamics.

The U.S. surge in Afghanistan could involve a change in intelligence gathering. WSJ's Yochi Dreazen says the focus may shift from Afghan insurgents to Afghan culture.

The blunt critique comes after a Jordanian suicide bomber last week killed seven Central Intelligence Agency employees at a remote base in eastern Afghanistan. The report was written before the CIA bombing, and its authors say its conclusions were meant to apply to military intelligence personnel. But coming days after the CIA bombing, the report highlights the challenges and dangers of collecting viable intelligence in Afghanistan.

In the report, Gen. Flynn and two of his aides argue that the U.S. intelligence community is "ignorant" about key aspects of Afghan society and can often "do little but shrug" in response to questions from senior policymakers.

"Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy," Gen. Flynn wrote. "History is replete with examples of powerful militaries that lost wars to much weaker opponents because they were inattentive to nuances in their environment."

The report was published by the Center for a New American Security, a centrist Washington think tank. It is unusual for a senior commander to release such an assessment in a nongovernmental venue, and a defense official said that the Pentagon was surprised and disappointed by the report's publication by the think tank. The report's authors wrote that they wanted to "broaden its reach" inside and outside the military by publishing it through CNAS.

U.S. officials say the CIA bomber, Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, was an informant who had secretly begun working with al Qaeda as a double agent. On Tuesday, Jordanian officials said the country's General Intelligence Department detained and interrogated Mr. al-Balawi around a year ago because of concerns he was tied to al Qaeda.

The GID subsequently released Mr. al-Balawi after concluding he'd become a loyal covert asset of the agency, the officials said. Mr. al-Balawi, who was living in Pakistan, began contacting the GID by email and passing on "credible" information about al Qaeda leaders and plots against Jordan, the U.S. and other Western allies, the officials said.

The GID turned the information over to the CIA and other Western governments, which maintain close ties to the Jordanian intelligence agency, they said.

U.S. intelligence officials are working to verify their belief that the double-agent was working with al Qaeda. The meeting, one official said, was about "important people" in al Qaeda. "It was the most promising lead" the agency had, the official said. "If you've got promising leads brought to you by your friends, coupled with information that checked out," he added, "it was the agency's first duty to meet with this person."

The agency hasn't yet had a chance to do a full review of what happened. But questions it seeks to answer include why the bomber was allowed onto the compound without being checked and why so many officers were near the bomber at the time of the explosion.

Jordanian officials said they expected a team of CIA investigators to visit Amman in coming days to seek information about Mr. al-Balawi and the circumstances surrounding the attack.

Improving U.S. intelligence efforts in Afghanistan has long been a priority of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the senior American officer in Kabul. Gen. McChrystal, who commands the 100,000-strong International Stability Assistance Force, has warned that a failure to better understand the Afghan people threatens the success of the war.

Gen. Flynn has the power to carry out the changes outlined in the report. He and his co-authors said they would overhaul intelligence gathering and analysis by creating teams of analysts who will focus on individual regions of the country, rather than on single issues such as narcotics. Gen. Flynn likened the analysts to journalists, and said they'd be directed to visit individual units throughout their regions to collect localized information.

The analysts will be assigned to new Stability Operations Information Centers, which will work to collate disparate streams of information about individual regions of Afghanistan and then make the data available to military and civilian personnel from the U.S. and its Western allies, as well as Afghan officials.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126273596828417151.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLTopStories#printMode

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Mobility Helps al Qaeda Extend Reach

Al Qaeda's decentralized structure across the Middle East is proving one of its biggest advantages over American firepower.

U.S. and allied-government officials have claimed significant progress against al Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq recently. But the group appears able to nimbly deploy forces to places where international military pressure isn't as concentrated or has eased, including most recently Yemen and Somalia, according to officials and analysts.

Arab intelligence officers say they have tracked foreign fighters allied with al Qaeda traveling from one Mideast battlefield to another -- in particular from Iraq to Yemen, and, over the summer, from Pakistan to Yemen.

High-profile plots -- like the Christmas Day attempted plane bombing in the U.S., linked by U.S. officials to al Qaeda's affiliate in Yemen -- can also boost regionwide recruitment efforts for local chapters, without much help from affiliates or from al Qaeda's global leadership.

The global network "moves to the weakest point," says Mustafa Alani, director of security and terrorism studies at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, a think tank. "In Yemen, they have found opportunity."

After almost a decade of concerted U.S. and allied offensives, al Qaeda's affiliate groups work with a high degree of autonomy. The global group's top leadership, Osama bin Laden, and his lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are both believed by U.S. officials to be in Pakistan.

Following Mr. bin Laden's expulsion from Sudan in 1996, al Qaeda found a well-established jihadi infrastructure in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The group never inspired an official affiliate, instead forming what U.S. officials and experts describe as "symbiotic" relationships with already established Islamist militant groups.

But al Qaeda's ability to operate in Pakistan and Afghanistan has been tightly curtailed over the past year or two. Senior military and civilian officials familiar with Afghanistan and Pakistan operations, speaking before the Christmas attack, said the pressure on al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan had prompted some operatives to shift to Yemen and Somalia.

The U.S. and allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan may have also killed operatives who provided key links to affiliated groups, forcing local cells to boost their own autonomy. One casualty in Pakistan was Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior commander slain in a January 2008 missile strike. U.S. officials believe he oversaw operations in parts of Africa.

As it was battling U.S. and allied forces elsewhere, including Iraq, al Qaeda branched out to northern Africa, effectively opening a new franchise in 2006. Mr. al-Zawahiri permitted a militant Algerian group to take the name al Qaeda in the Maghreb. It has claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in Algeria and for abducting foreigners in Mali and Mauritania.

In Somalia, al Qaeda is suspected of sending fighters to buttress the Islamist group al Shabaab, which is battling the U.S.-backed government. The government is staying afloat with the protection of African Union peacekeeping troops stationed in Mogadishu, the capital.

At least 47 people were killed in weekend fighting between al Shabaab and a moderate pro-government Muslim group in Dusamareb, 350 miles north of Mogadishu, Reuters news agency reported.

For the past year, foreign fighters linked to al Qaeda have been arriving in Somalia to support al Shabaab, according to Western and Somali officials. Since then, attacks by Somali militants have grown more sophisticated and deadly. Over the weekend, al Shabaab's leadership said it was ready to send fighters to Yemen to counter any U.S. military attack there.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126255817317714101.html?mod=article-outset-box#printMode

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Faulty Camera Cited at Newark Airport

NEWARK, N.J.--Federal agents weren't able to immediately retrieve surveillance images of a man who breached security at Newark Liberty International Airport because a camera system wasn't working properly.

John Kelly, a Port Authority of New York and New Jersey spokesman, said the camera at a security checkpoint was streaming live images but wasn't recording them.

That made it impossible for Transportation Security Administration personnel to check an image of a man seen walking in through an exit door Sunday evening until it could view tapes from a nearby Continental Airlines surveillance camera.

It wasn't known how long the camera at the TSA security checkpoint had stopped storing footage because archived images are only retrieved if an incident has occurred or is suspected, TSA spokeswoman Ann Davis said Tuesday. According to Davis, TSA will check the cameras' archiving daily.

The cameras were installed by the Port Authority about two years ago, and the agency maintains and operates them.

The incident shut down an entire terminal at the airport and stopped flights for six hours. The man, who has not been identified or located, was seen on a surveillance camera image leaving the terminal about 20 minutes after the security breach.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126278581101217839.html#printMode

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U.S. Ends Its Closure of Embassy

SAN'A -- The U.S. Embassy in Yemen reopened Tuesday after a two-day closure, citing "successful counterterrorism operations" by the local government.

The U.S. Embassy and at least five other embassies closed for business as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the branch of the group here is called, vowed revenge for U.S.-supported attacks against their strongholds.

Over the weekend, Washington promised to increase aid to Yemen in its effort to combat terrorism, in the wake of the attempted plane bombing on Christmas Day allegedly linked to the Yemeni-based branch of al Qaeda.

Yemeni military forces have stepped up their raids on suspected al Qaeda cells operating in the rugged country, and government officials say they have killed or arrested dozens of militants in the past three weeks. On Monday, officials said they made an attack north of San'a that killed two alleged al Qaeda operatives.

Yemeni government officials say their efforts have ended any immediate threat to foreigners in the country. "There is nothing to fear from any threats of terror attack," the Interior Ministry said.

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Slovakia Admits Mistake in Air-Security Test

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia -- Slovak officials said Wednesday "a silly and unprofessional mistake" during an airport-security test led to a civilian man unwittingly carrying hidden explosives in his bag on a flight to Dublin.

Dublin security chiefs said it was foolish for the Slovaks to hide bomb parts in the luggage of innocent passengers under any circumstances. Slovak Interior Minister Robert Kalinak expressed "profound regret" to the Irish government for the oversight and the three-day delay in alerting Irish authorities about the Saturday incident.

The explosives never posed a danger to the flight, the interior ministry said Wednesday, even as it ordered an immediate halt to such tests and took steps to prevent a repeat of failed security test.

Tibor Mako, the head of Slovakia's border and foreign police whose people carried out the exercise, offered his resignation Wednesday. There was no immediate word on whether it would be accepted.

Security experts said the episode illustrated the inadequacy of security screening of checked-in luggage -- the very point the Slovak authorities had sought to test when they placed real bomb components in nine passengers' bags Saturday.

"The aim of the training was to keep sniffer dogs in shape and on alert in a real environment," the ministry said.

Eight items were detected. But one bag had two bomb components in it. The sniffer dog found one but the police officer in charge failed to remove the second, which wasn't detected by the dog, because he was busy, the ministry said.

That allowed 90 grams (3 ounces) of RDX plastic explosive to travel undetected through security at Poprad-Tatry Airport in central Slovakia onto a Danube Wings aircraft. The Slovak carrier launched services to Dublin last month.

"The police officer made a silly and unprofessional mistake, which turned the good purpose of protecting people into a problem," the statement said. Slovak authorities realized their error and told the pilot of the Danube Wings flight, who then decided to still take off with the sample on board, the ministry statement said.

"No one was in danger, because the substance without any other components [needed to bring it to a detonation] and under the conditions it was stored, is not dangerous," the ministry said.

Slovak border police subsequently traced the man and told him where the explosive was planted so that he was able to find it Monday evening, said the ministry. Mr. Kalinak, the interior minister, called him to apologize. The man wasn't identified.

The ministry said it contacted Irish authorities and explained the situation on Tuesday, prompting Irish police to raid the man's Dublin apartment. A major north Dublin intersection was shut down Tuesday and neighboring apartment buildings were evacuated as a precaution while Irish Army experts inspected the explosive.

The man was detained for several hours then released without charge. Irish police said they initially were led to believe the man might be a terrorist until the Slovaks explained the situation further.

Irish Justice Minister Dermot Ahern said Dublin police eventually confirmed that the explosive "was concealed without his knowledge or consent ... as part of an airport security exercise."

The Slovak statement criticized the Irish police action. "For an incomprehensible reason for us, they took the person into custody and undertook further security measures," it said.

Authorities in Slovakia were considering "new forms of sniffer dog training" to avoid a repeat of the scare, the ministry said.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126278299997917787.html?mod=WSJ_World_LEFTSecondNews#printMode

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The Ramzi Yousef Standard

The Administration has ways of making terrorists not talk.

Ramzi Yousef, you may recall, was the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who is now serving a life sentence in a supermax prison in Colorado. The Obama Administration likes to cite his arrest, conviction and imprisonment as a model for its faith that the criminal justice system is the best way to handle terrorist detainees.

"Our courts and our juries, our citizens, are tough enough to convict terrorists. The record makes that clear," said President Obama last May 21 at the National Archives. "Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center. He was convicted in our courts and is serving a life sentence in U.S. prisons."

On June 9, 2009, the Justice Department repeated the claim in a fact sheet arguing for handling terrorists in criminal courts:

"1993 World Trade Center Bombing : After two trials, in 1993 and 1997, six defendants were convicted and sentenced principally to life in prison for detonating a truck bomb in the garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring hundreds more. One of the defendants convicted at the second trial was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the attack."

The World Trade Center trials were successful in winning convictions, and they were understandable because at the time we didn't understand the war we were in. But more than a decade later, the real news in these Administration statements is what they don't claim: Whether Ramzi Yousef told U.S. interrogators anything of actionable value about al Qaeda and its future terror plans.

We now know that when Yousef was captured, in 1995, al Qaeda leaders were working feverishly to attack American targets. Yousef's uncle is none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11 and one of Yousef's co-conspirators in the failed Bojinka plot to blow up airliners across the Pacific Ocean.

Yet as far as we know, Yousef told U.S. interrogators little or nothing about KSM's plots and strategy once he was in U.S. custody. This isn't surprising, since once he was in the criminal justice system Yousef was granted a lawyer and all the legal protections against cooperating with U.S. interrogators. To this day, we don't recall any official claim that Yousef has provided useful intelligence of the kind that KSM, Abu Zubaydah and other al Qaeda leaders later did when they were interrogated by the CIA.

All of this is directly relevant to the Administration's rash decision to indict Abdulmutallab on criminal charges immediately after his arrest in Detroit on Christmas weekend. The Nigerian jihadist could have been labeled an enemy combatant, detained indefinitely, and interrogated with a goal of discovering who he had met in Yemen, whether other plots are underway, and much else that might be relevant to preventing the next terror attempt. This is a far higher priority than convicting Abdulmutallab and sending him to jail.

John Brennan, the top White House counterterrorism official, tried to defend the criminal indictment on the Sunday talk shows but mainly revealed the Administration's confusion about the law and the uses of interrogation. Asked by David Gregory on NBC's "Meet the Press" why Abdulmutallab wasn't named an enemy combatant, Mr. Brennan said, "Well, because, first of all, we're a country of laws, and what we're going to do is to make sure that we treat each individual case appropriately."

But there is nothing illegal about holding an enemy combatant indefinitely, as the Supreme Court has upheld and as the Obama Administration has argued in court.

When Mr. Gregory pressed about "additional intelligence that could be gleaned" by interrogation, Mr. Brennan replied:

"Well, first of all, we have different ways of obtaining information from individuals according to that criminal process. A lot of people, as they understand what they're facing and their lawyers recognize that there is advantage to talking to us in terms of plea agreements, we're going to pursue that. So—and we are continuing to look at ways that we can extract that information from him."

A plea agreement ? Mr. Brennan seems to be saying that now that he has a public defender, Abdulmutallab has clammed up. But the Administration might be able to coax him to talk if it offers him a lower sentence or some kind of other legal concession, even though he tried to kill nearly 300 people aboard an American airliner.

In other words, because the Obama Administration is loath to interrogate terrorists outside the criminal justice system, our only lever to get them to talk is offering a legal reprieve. This is bizarre to say the least, and self-destructive if it turns out that Abdulmutallab has information that could help prevent future attacks.

Mr. Brennan's other defense on Sunday was that the Bush Administration also prosecuted terrorists as criminals on occasion, in particular shoe bomber Richard Reid and Zacarias Moussaoui. But Reid was captured only months after 9/11 when the system of military commissions wasn't in place, and Moussaoui's trial was a legal fiasco that took years to prosecute. In neither case did they provide intelligence that revealed anything close to what KSM did about al Qaeda.

The lesson of these cases, like that of Ramzi Yousef, is not that the criminal justice system can sometimes convict terrorists. It is that criminal prosecution is far less vital to U.S. security than is conducting the interrogations that can yield information that saves innocent lives.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703436504574640560502410466.html#printMode

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OPINION

One 'Allegedly' Too Many

In her raw and disastrous way, Janet Napolitano is revealing.

JANUARY 5, 2010

by DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Shocking though it was, the Christmas Day terror attempt by a 23-year-old Nigerian has only hardened Americans' awareness that they confront an implacable enemy in a war whose end is nowhere in sight. It is a hard-won new sense of reality and an invaluable one, achieved event by embittering event. The holy warrior assigned to blow up that passenger plane and who almost succeeded has, we learn, been granted the chance to strike a deal. His attack effort had come on the heels of the all-too-successful terror assault by that other Soldier of Islam, Maj. Nidal Hasan who murdered 13 fellow members of the American military. This, even as it was becoming clear that the number of our homegrown jihadis involved in terror plots, or who had enlisted in training toward that goal, had increased markedly.

It wasn't always easy to preserve a healthy sense of reality about terrorism in the years since 9/11, as the comments of ethical counselors, privacy advocates and civil liberties sentinels aghast at the possibility of government snooping have reminded us in the last week. They were around in force for media interviews, equipped as ever with a variety of arguments for the sanctity of privacy rights, warnings against surveillance that threatened the rights of citizens in a democracy. Day after day came the same breezy assurances—we had only to balance our security needs with privacy rights. As though, in this deadly war or any other, sane people could consider the values equivalent. The latest threat to privacy rights, advocates charged, was the use of full body scanners: the technology that would have immeasurably decreased the chances someone like Umar Abdulmutallab would have been able to get past security wearing his terror panties—intimate underwear, that is, in which 80 grams of PETN had been concealed.

It was that prospect of images revealing intimate areas of the body that apparently disturbed Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican and sponsor of a House measure banning the use of full body scanners other than as a "secondary device"—i.e. to be used on select subjects. He didn't think, he told a New York Times reporter, "anybody needs to see my 8 year old naked in order to secure that airplane." A useful bit of reassurance, that, for the plotters of terror assaults who have in the past shown no compunction about the use of children as suicide bombers.

Another argument we heard frequently held that no matter what technology was put in place, our dauntless enemies would find ways to get around it. The picture was clear. With an unbeatable, ever resourceful enemy working night and day devising ingenious strategies, what point could there be in developing better detection capacities? Historians of the future may one day well ponder the powerful streak of defeatism in the U.S. in the era of its terrorist wars—and the superhuman characteristics Americans ascribed to their enemies in that 21st century battle against terrorism: a view in no small way nurtured in their media and political culture.

No guardians of privacy rights had weighed in earlier against the body imaging scanners than the American Civil Liberties Union. In October, 2007, the ACLU issued a statement decrying the use of this technology as "an assault on the essential dignity of passengers." "We are," the agency declared, "not convinced it is the right thing for America." This reasoning is clear. The right thing is for America to reject the scanners. Its citizens may then face increased risk of being blown up in mid-air but their privacy would remain inviolate to the end. Who could ask for anything more?

It took the president a second speech to weigh in on the issue of the security, or lack thereof, that had nearly led to tragedy. The first speech, two and a half days after the event, was in its own way noteworthy. In it the president observed that a passenger on the plane had "allegedly tried to ignite explosives. . . ." Mr. Obama's use of a familiar legalistic evasion would, it was soon clear, raise hackles—though the term is one routinely used in crime reporting. No matter. It was one "allegedly" too many in the world, jarring coming from the president in this circumstance.

Consider the justly famed speech an enraged American president delivered the day after Pearl Harbor. Then try imagining that address by Franklin Roosevelt—a leader to whom Mr. Obama has been compared—as it would sound in Obama language.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date that will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces allegedly from the Empire of Japan . . . Yesterday the Japanese government allegedly launched an attack on Malaya. Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked Hong Kong. Last night Japanese forces allegedly attacked Guam . . ."

Still it wasn't the president's comments but those of Janet Napolitano that reverberated. It wasn't the first time the Homeland Security chief's struggles to utter the kind of views she understood to be fitting for an Obama administration official ended in trouble—this time with interviews in which she made her now famous assertion that the airport security system had worked. She followed up, the next day, with retractions and clarifications that ended, as such things do, sounding worse than the original.

Asked in an interview with the German magazine "Der Spiegel" last March why she had avoided using the word "terrorism" in her testimony to Congress, she explained that she had instead preferred to use another term: "man-caused disasters." That choice of words demonstrated, she said, that "we want to move away from the politics of fear." The idea now, she added mysteriously, was to be prepared for all risks that could occur. There was nothing mysterious about the intended point. In the new forward looking administration she served—its leader had after all travelled far tendering apologies for his country's past sins and arrogance toward other nations—emphasis on terrorism was to be dispatched, along with the words war on terror and terrorists. The use of such references was to be equated with the low, the deceitful, the politics of fear, with indeed, a false claim of danger.

Ms. Napolitano would go on in other ways to prove the potency of man-made disasters—of which she was clearly proving one. In April, she issued a report seeming to target military veterans as potentially dangerous right-wing extremists. She soon apologized. In the same month she managed to suggest that the 9/11 terrorists had entered the U.S. through Canada, which appalled Canadian leaders. Apologies and clarifications followed.

Mr. Obama can't be happy with his Homeland Security chief. It's fair to say no president deserves an appointee so extravagantly unequipped for her job. Still there is much in Ms. Napolitano's attitudes and pronouncements, including talk of "the politics of fear," that reflect with glaring accuracy the Obama team's values, ideology and prime political targets. In her disastrous and raw way she is its voice revealed.

Terrorism will continue to provide its hardening education, though not entirely from terrorists themselves. We have before us now the spectacle of Jihadi Abdulmutallab, lawyered up, with full rights as though a U.S. criminal defendant. The impossibly expensive, dangerous, and unavoidably chaotic trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and associates still lies ahead, slated for a Manhattan courtroom. Even now a majority of Americans can't fathom the reason for their government's insistence that the agents chiefly responsible for the 9/11 attack be tried under the U.S. criminal justice system with all due rights and constitutional privileges, instead of in a military court. That insistence itself is answer enough—an unforgettable testament to the ideological drives and related evasions of reality that shape this administration's view of the world.

Ms. Rabinowitz is a member of the Journal's editorial board.

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From the Washington Times

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Massachusetts college bans face coverings

by Jay Lindsay ASSOCIATED PRESS

BOSTON | A Massachusetts pharmacy college instituted a ban on clothing that obscures the face, including veils and burqas, weeks after a Muslim alumnus who is also the son of a professor was charged with plotting terrorist strikes.

The policy change at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Services, announced in a campuswide e-mail last month, went into effect Friday.

Michael Ratty, a college spokesman, said the policy was developed in the fall during the school's annual review of its public safety procedures and was unrelated to the arrest of 2008 graduate Tarek Mehanna.

"It is not directed to any group or individual. It applies to all students and faculty," Mr. Ratty said.

Mr. Ratty said the school thinks everyone entering the small Boston campus should be able to be properly identified. He said the college discussed the policy with Muslim students and officials at the Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission, and all understood the need for the change.

The policy bans only head coverings that entirely conceal the face, but it also could apply to winter clothing such as scarves or ski masks, Mr. Ratty said. The college has about 4,300 students, including 3,300 at its Boston campus. The school remains closed for winter break this week.

Jonathan Kassa, executive director of Security on Campus, a nonprofit that advocates for safer college campuses, said his group had not heard of similar policies at any other U.S. college.

Mr. Mehanna, of Sudbury, was arrested Oct. 21. He is accused of conspiring with two men to randomly shoot mall shoppers and kill U.S. public officials and soldiers in Iraq. Mr. Mehanna's family has denied the charges, and Mr. Mehanna has drawn strong, public support from friends and students he taught at a Muslim school in Worcester.

Mr. Mehanna's father, Ahmed Mehanna, teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy's campus in Boston. He did not respond to requests for comment.

The school's revised "identification policy" reads that for "reasons of safety and security, all students must be readily identifiable while they are on campus and/or engaged in required off-campus activities. … Therefore, any head covering that obscures a student's face may not be worn, either on campus or at clinical sites, except when required for medical reasons."

The policy would effectively ban face veils, as well as burqas and niqabs, which either cloak the entire body or cover everything but the eyes. Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said he has contacted school officials about providing a religious exemption. He said the policy makes a medical exemption.

He said the revision was aimed at two female Muslim students who wear face veils because of their religious beliefs. Mr. Hooper said a minority of Muslims believe that wearing clothes that cover the face is required and that stopping them from practicing their faith is "un-American."

Mr. Hooper said strong security can be maintained at a college without sacrificing religious freedom.

"If you can get on an airplane wearing a face veil, you can go to class at Massachusetts College of Pharmacy wearing a face veil," he said.

Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and a frequent critic of militant Islam, applauded the college for the policy change, noting that numerous terrorist attacks have been committed by people hiding themselves and their weapons under veils.

"I think the college was alerted to the dangers that could come from its student body by the arrest of Tarek Mehanna … and realized that it needs to take preventative steps to protect itself, its student body, its staff," he said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/06/massachusetts-college-bans-face-coverings//print/

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Facility opens to help military families with bereavement

Associated Press

DOVER, Del. | The military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base, where U.S. war casualties from overseas are brought home, will open a new facility Wednesday to serve families who travel there to witness the return of their loved ones' remains.

The Center for Families of the Fallen will be staffed by counselors and support specialists who will assist families awaiting the return of their loved ones to the nation's largest military mortuary. Families also will be able to meet with casualty assistance officers who are assigned to them.

Officials said the new center will be more convenient both for families and mortuary officials than the space now shared by the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operations Center at Dover with the base's active duty and Reserve wings.

"Sadly, as the death toll has grown in Afghanistan and Iraq, we find we need a larger facility," said Maj. Shannon Mann, a spokeswoman for AFMAO.

Also, with the lifting of an 18-year ban on news coverage of returning U.S. war dead in April 2009, more families are traveling to Dover to witness the return of loved ones killed overseas. The new policy allows each family to decide whether to allow media coverage of their loved one being returned, and many families who consent to media coverage also choose to come to Dover themselves.

In the past year, more than 400 war dead have been returned to Dover from Iraq and Afghanistan, Maj. Mann said.

About 56 percent of families have consented to external media coverage of what military officials call "dignified transfers" since the media ban was lifted, said Lt. Col. Les Carroll, an AFMAO spokesman. About 25 percent have allowed coverage only by the Air Force, which provides families with video and still photographs of the dignified transfers, and 19 percent of families have requested no media coverage at all.

The new center also will be used as a point of contact for Air Force families requesting follow-up counseling or other help as they cope with their loss. Other branches of the armed forces already have such long-term support programs based at other locations, said Maj. Mann.

The new, 6,000-square-foot center will be housed in a former base convenience store refurbished at a cost of about $1.6 million. The facility is about twice the size of the "spiritual operations center" that AFMAO chaplains and support staff have shared until now with chaplains serving Dover's 436th Airlift Wing and the Reserve 512th Airlift Wing.

"We really needed a separate place specific to the AFMAO mission to bring those families," Maj. Mann said.

The new facility will be much closer to the mortuary than the multipurpose spiritual operations center, which is on the other side of the base, and will make it easier for support staff to assist not just families of the casualties, but mortuary workers as well.

"There's a high level of stress in the business that we do," Maj. Mann said.

Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, was scheduled to preside over the dedication Wednesday.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/06/facility-opens-to-help-military-families-with-bere//print/

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Better a vigilante than a target

by Henry I. Miller

In the Wild West, when law enforcement was spotty or nonexistent, vigilantes sometimes stepped in. A known cattle rustler might be found face-down in a gully with a terminal case of "lead poisoning," as they used to say in TV westerns. Flawed law was better than no law.

Whatever purpose was served in such circumstances by vigilantism (a term derived from San Francisco's Committee on Vigilance, formed by citizens in 1851 to combat organized crime), it is a practice that most Americans now find abhorrent. The all-too-common reality of mob violence and lynching make those days nothing to yearn for.

Although the world has changed since the West was tamed, vigilantism still has a place. For example, few would question the action taken by passengers who intervened as a Nigerian terrorist tried to ignite an incendiary device on a Christmas Day Northwest airlines flight as the plane was preparing to land in Detroit.

There have been other incidents of varying degrees of concern since the prototypic example of justifiable vigilantism, when on Sept. 11, 2001, the passengers and crew of United Air Lines Flight 93 fought hijackers and caused the plane to crash in western Pennsylvania. In 2001, "shoe-bomber" Richard Reid unsuccessfully attempted to detonate explosives hidden in his shoes and was subdued by a flight attendant and a passenger; and in 2006, on a London to Washington flight, an apparently psychotic woman became unruly and had to be subdued and handcuffed by other passengers.

But some other incidents occupy gray areas. Airlines have informed pilots and flight attendants that terrorists appear to have staged dry runs of attacks on airplanes in order to provoke, test and analyze security measures. There was, for example, the suspicious 2004 incident on a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit to Los Angeles during which a group of 14 Syrian musicians indulged in several hours of bizarre and terrifying behavior that passengers and members of the flight crew suspected was terrorism-related. The men loitered in small groups during the flight; made innumerable trips to the lavatories, often carrying a large paper bag that passed from hand to hand; and finally, as the plane was making its final approach into Los Angeles, "suddenly, seven of the men stood up in unison" and walked to various parts of the plane, according to a fellow passenger who later wrote about the experience.

For the millions of us who fly regularly, these sorts of incidents, and the prospect of would-be terrorists testing the vulnerability of airplane security, brings up the questions of under what circumstances passengers should intervene, and what they should do.

Tommy Hamilton, SWAT team commander for the police force at Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport, who has worked with air marshals, cautions against a rush to vigilantism and urges reliance on the professionals.

"Federal air marshals have credentials and will identify themselves as soon as practical. It will be easy to see who they are. They will not identify themselves until after someone has identified themselves [sic] as a terrorist-hijacker."

However, if no air marshals are aboard (currently they are assigned to most international flights but only a small percentage of domestic flights), flight attendants and passengers are the first line of defense. Passengers should obey the directions of the flight crew, but they should be prepared, mentally and physically, to act. Like a basketball player getting ready for a jump ball, or a sprinter in the starting blocks, every able-bodied passenger needs to be ready to move, and to act definitively, not tentatively.

In spite of the Christmas Day incident in Detroit, experts feel that only rarely will terrorists be able to get firearms or explosives onto a plane. Having to rely on "softer" weapons puts them at a disadvantage when confronted by scores of passengers, who have plenty of potential, improvised weapons at hand: a hard kick in the knee (easier to administer and more likely to succeed than in the groin, according to law enforcement officials); an elbow in the face or ribs; any sharp object in the eyes; a soda can torn in half, which yields a sharp edge; a computer cord or belt used as a garrote; an oxygen canister (in one or more of the overhead bins) or metal coffee pot or wine bottle used as a club. Go for the bridge of the nose or the temple, and swing for the fences. Remember that you're dealing with a would-be mass murderer.

For most Americans, thinking about how we'd respond to a threat with violence of our own just isn't a part of life. Terrorism has forever changed things. If the killers regarded civilians as targets, civilians have to be prepared to be militant.

Henry I. Miller is a physician and a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/06/better-a-vigilante-than-a-target//print/

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From Fox News

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Authorities Suspect $30M Fla. Lottery Winner Was Killed

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

LAKELAND, Fla. — 

In 2006, Abraham Shakespeare — a truck driver's assistant who lived with his mother — won $30 million in the Florida lottery. His good fortune may have cost him his life.

Shakespeare vanished months ago. His mother hopes he is somewhere in the Caribbean, lying on a beach and enjoying the good life away from all the hangers-on who were constantly hitting him up for money.

The sheriff has a more ominous theory: Shakespeare was killed.

"There are a lot of odd and bizarre circumstances in this case," Sheriff Grady Judd said. "We fear and are preparing for the worst. We're working this case as if it were a homicide."

Shakespeare, 43, won the big jackpot after buying a lottery ticket at a convenience store in a town called Frostproof, claiming later that he gave the last $3 in his pocket to a homeless man just before the winning numbers were announced.

Shakespeare — who had a criminal record that included arrests and prison time for burglary, battery and not paying child support — took a lump-sum payment of $16.9 million instead of annual installments.

He bought a Nissan Altima, a Rolex from a pawn shop, a $1 million home in a gated community. He talked about starting a foundation for the poor and insisted the money wouldn't change him.

"I'm not a material person," he said in 2007. "I don't let material things run me. I'm on a tight budget."

The money quickly caused him problems.

A former co-worker sued him in 2007, accusing Shakespeare of stealing the winning ticket from him. Six months later, a jury ruled the ticket was Shakespeare's.

Then there were the people constantly asking him for a piece of his fortune.

"They didn't wait. They just came right after they found out he won this money," his mother, Elizabeth Walker, said recently.

She said her son was generous, paying for funerals, lending money to friends starting businesses and even giving a million dollars to a guy known only as "Big Man."

Not long after he bought the million-dollar home in early 2007, he was approached by a woman named Dee Dee Moore, said family and officials.

Moore — who could not be reached by The Associated Press — said she was interested in writing a book about Shakespeare's life. She became something of a financial adviser to Shakespeare, who never graduated high school.

Property records show that Moore's company, American Medical Professionals, bought Shakespeare's home for $655,000 last January. His mother said the last time she saw him was shortly afterward, around her birthday in February.

The sheriff said the last time anyone saw Shakespeare was in April — but it wasn't until Nov. 9 that he was reported missing, by a police informant.

And the story gets more bizarre.

According to The Ledger of Lakeland, the 37-year-old Moore contacted reporters at the newspaper in April, saying Shakespeare was "laying low" because people tried to suck money out of him.

That made sense to Shakespeare's mother — sort of. "I remember once, talking with me over the phone, he said he might go to Jamaica," she said.

On Dec. 5, a sobbing Moore told The Ledger that she helped Shakespeare disappear, but now wants him to return because detectives were searching her home and car and looking for blood on her belongings.

One reason he wanted to leave, she said, was a child support case for a child he allegedly fathered after winning the lottery. "Abraham sold me his mess to get a better life," she told the paper.

She even gave the paper a video that she said she took of Abraham. In the video, he says he is tired of people asking him for money. "They don't take no for an answer," he says.

"So where you wanna go to?" Moore asks in the video.

"It don't matter to me. I'm not a picky person," Shakespeare replies.

Moore told the paper that she took the video to "protect herself."

Moore said she filed paperwork to take over five mortgages totaling about $370,000 that had been owed to Shakespeare. She said she sold the loans at a loss to another person. She added that many of the people who borrowed from Shakespeare have refused to pay, and she feels threatened by some of them.

Moore's past includes a year of probation after she was charged with falsely reporting that she was carjacked and raped in 2001. Officials said she concocted the scheme so her insurance company would reimburse her for the SUV, which she claimed had been stolen.

The woman did not answer several calls placed to a number listed for her in public records. During a recent visit to the home she bought from Shakespeare, a security box rang to a phone number that had been disconnected.

Sheriff's officials won't comment on Moore's involvement in Shakespeare's life.

The sheriff said that Shakespeare spent the bulk of his lottery winnings. The fact that he didn't call his mother on Christmas reinforces the theory that Shakespeare is not just hiding, Judd said.

"I hope so much that he is alive somewhere," said his mother. "And I want people to know, if they ever win the lottery, I hope they know how to handle the people that come after them. They can be dangerous."

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,582119,00.html

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Wash. State Court Rules Felony Inmates Have Right to Vote

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

ASSOCIATED PRESS

OLYMPIA, Wash. — 

In a decision that could give momentum to other efforts to expand voting to inmates, a federal appeals court ruled that incarcerated felons should be allowed to vote in Washington state.

There's a patchwork of laws across the nation concerning restoration of felons' voting rights, but only Maine and Vermont allow those behind bars to cast ballots.

The 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday overturned the 2000 ruling of a district judge in Spokane. That judge had ruled that Washington state's felon disenfranchisement law did not violate the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and dismissed a lawsuit filed by a former prison inmate from Bellevue.

The two appellate judges ruled that disparities in the state's justice system "cannot be explained in race-neutral ways."

A spokeswoman said state Attorney General Rob McKenna is weighing the state's next step. Spokeswoman Janelle Guthrie said that they could either ask a larger group of judges from the 9th Circuit to reconsider the ruling or go straight to the U.S. Supreme Court. If appealed, it's likely that the state would seek a stay on inmate's ability to vote until the case is resolved.

While the ruling only currently covers Washington state, if it stands, Guthrie said it could be the basis for litigation in any area covered by the 9th Circuit — Oregon, Idaho, Montana, California, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska, Hawaii, Guam and the Northern Marianas.

Of the more than 18,000 felons currently in state custody who could get their right to vote back under this ruling, 37.1 percent are minorities. Of that group, blacks make up the largest percentage, at 19.2 percent.

The issues the ruling raises about racial bias in the justice system are not unique to Washington state, said Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C., group promoting sentencing reform.

"They are issues that permeate the justice system and are relevant in every state," he said.

Mauer said that an estimated 5.3 million people nationwide are ineligible to vote because of a felony conviction.

Tuesday's court's ruling is "an embarrassment," said Trent England, a policy director at Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington state.

"It flies in the face of precedent," he said. "Not only is felon disenfranchisement constitutional but it's good policy. People who commit the most heinous crimes should be deprived of their voice in our system of government at least for a time."

The lawsuit was filed by Muhammad Shabazz Farrakhan, formerly of Bellevue. He was serving a three-year sentence at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla for a series of felony-theft convictions when he sued the state in 1996.

Ultimately, five other inmates, all members of racial minority groups, joined as plaintiffs.

The lawsuit contended that because nonwhites make up a large percentage of the prison population, a state law prohibiting inmates and parolees from voting is illegal because it dilutes the electoral clout of minorities. That was a violation of the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965, the lawsuit said.

An attorney for Farrakhan equated disenfranchisement laws to poll taxes and literacy tests of the past.

"In this case, we have proved that the criminal justice system in this state is biased against African-Americans, and the impact has been a violation of their voting rights," said Larry Weiser, a law professor at Gonzaga University School of Law who is the lead attorney in the lawsuit.

The state contended that the lawsuit should be dismissed because the law was not intended to discriminate against minorities.

David Ammons, a spokesman for the state's head elections official, said that Secretary of State Sam Reed "supports minority rights, but believes it is a rational and reasonable sanction for society to demand that felons lose their voting rights while in prison or under community supervision."

Last year, lawmakers passed a law that allows convicted felons to reregister to vote once they're no longer on parole or probation. Previously, felons who were no longer in Washington state custody but owed court-ordered fines and restitution were not allowed to vote. Under the new law that took effect last July, voting rights could be revoked if a felon willingly fails to make regular payments on those financial obligations.

In her dissent, 9th Circuit Judge Margaret McKeown wrote that the majority "has charted territory that none of our sister circuits has dared to explore," and notes that three other appellate courts — the 1st Circuit in a Massachusetts case, the 2nd Circuit in a New York case, and the 11th Circuit in a Florida case — "have all determined that vote denial challenges to felon disenfranchisement laws are not cognizable under the Voting Rights Act."

She wrote that since Washington state passed a law changing voting rights just last year, and after the 9th Circuit heard the Farrakhan case, the case should go back to district court.

"It is not our job to consider, in the first instance, the effect this new law has on plaintiffs' case and whether the totality of the circumstances analysis under ... the Voting Rights Act should be different now that plaintiffs' case remains viable only as to currently incarcerated felons," she wrote.

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,582151,00.html

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From the White House

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"The Urgency of Getting This Right"

by Jesse Lee

January 05, 2010

This afternoon the President met with relevant agency heads to discuss the ongoing reviews of the attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day and move forward on rectifying the problems that were exhibited that day.  Afterwards he spoke to the press and the American people about what he and his Administration is doing to keep America safe:

THE PRESIDENT:  Good afternoon, everybody.  I just concluded a meeting with members of my national security team, including those from our intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement agencies involved in the security reviews that I ordered after the failed attack on Christmas Day.

     I called these leaders to the White House because we face a challenge of the utmost urgency.  As we saw on Christmas, al Qaeda and its extremist allies will stop at nothing in their efforts to kill Americans.  And we are determined not only to thwart those plans, but to disrupt, dismantle and defeat their networks once and for all. 

     Indeed, over the past year, we've taken the fight to al Qaeda and its allies wherever they plot and train, be it in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Yemen and Somalia, or in other countries around the world. 

Here at home, our intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement agencies have worked together with considerable success:  gathering intelligence, stitching it together, and making arrests -- from Denver to Texas, from Illinois to New York -- disrupting plots and saving American lives.  And these successes have not come without a price, as we saw last week in the loss of our courageous CIA officers in Afghanistan.

     But when a suspected terrorist is able to board a plane with explosives on Christmas Day the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way.  And it's my responsibility to find out why, and to correct that failure so that we can prevent such attacks in the future.

     And that's why, shortly after the attempted bombing over Detroit, I ordered two reviews.  I directed Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano to review aviation screening, technology and procedures.  She briefed me on her initial findings today, and I'm pleased that this review is drawing on the best science and technology, including the expertise of Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and his department.

     I also directed my counterterrorism and homeland security advisor John Brennan to lead a thorough review into our terrorist watch-listing system so we can fix what went wrong.  As we discussed today, this ongoing review continues to reveal more about the human and systemic failures that almost cost nearly 300 lives.  We will make a summary of this preliminary report public within the next few days, but let me share some of what we know so far.

     As I described over the weekend, elements of our intelligence community knew that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had traveled to Yemen and joined up with extremists there.  It now turns out that our intelligence community knew of other red flags -- that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula sought to strike not only American targets in Yemen, but the United States itself.  And we had information that this group was working with an individual who was known -- who we now know was in fact the individual involved in the Christmas attack.

     The bottom line is this:  The U.S. government had sufficient information to have uncovered this plot and potentially disrupt the Christmas Day attack.  But our intelligence community failed to connect those dots, which would have placed the suspect on the "no fly" list.
In other words, this was not a failure to collect intelligence; it was a failure to integrate and understand the intelligence that we already had.  The information was there.  Agencies and analysts who needed it had access to it.  And our professionals were trained to look for it and to bring it all together. 

     Now, I will accept that intelligence, by its nature, is imperfect, but it is increasingly clear that intelligence was not fully analyzed or fully leveraged.  That's not acceptable, and I will not tolerate it.  Time and again, we've learned that quickly piecing together information and taking swift action is critical to staying one step ahead of a nimble adversary.

     So we have to do better -- and we will do better.  And we have to do it quickly.  American lives are on the line.  So I made it clear today to my team:  I want our initial reviews completed this week.  I want specific recommendations for corrective actions to fix what went wrong.  I want those reforms implemented immediately, so that this doesn't happen again and so we can prevent future attacks.  And I know that every member of my team that I met with today understands the urgency of getting this right.  And I appreciate that each of them took responsibility for the shortfalls within their own agencies.

     Immediately after the attack, I ordered concrete steps to protect the American people:  new screening and security for all flights, domestic and international; more explosive detection teams at airports; more air marshals on flights; and deepening cooperation with international partners.
In recent days, we've taken additional steps to improve security.  Counterterrorism officials have reviewed and updated our terrorist watch list system, including adding more individuals to the "no fly" list.  And while our review has found that our watch-listing system is not broken, the failure to add Abdulmutallab to the "no fly" list shows that this system needs to be strengthened.  

     The State Department is now requiring embassies and consulates to include current visa information in their warning on individuals with terrorist or suspected terrorist connections.  As of yesterday, the Transportation Security Administration, or TSA, is requiring enhanced screening for passengers flying into the United States from, or flying through, nations on our list of state sponsors of terrorism, or other countries of interest.  And in the days ahead, I will announce further steps to disrupt attacks, including better integration of information and enhanced passenger screening for air travel.

     Finally, some have suggested that the events on Christmas Day should cause us to revisit the decision to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.  So let me be clear.  It was always our intent to transfer detainees to other countries only under conditions that provide assurances that our security is being protected. 

     With respect to Yemen in particular, there's an ongoing security situation which we have been confronting for some time, along with our Yemeni partner.  Given the unsettled situation, I've spoken to the Attorney General and we've agreed that we will not be transferring additional detainees back to Yemen at this time.

     But make no mistake:  We will close Guantanamo prison, which has damaged our national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda.  In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  And, as I've always said, we will do so -- we will close the prison in a manner that keeps the American people safe and secure. 

Our reviews -- and the steps that we've taken and will continue to take -- go to the heart of the kind of intelligence and homeland security we need in the 21st century.  Just as al Qaeda and its allies are constantly evolving and adapting their efforts to strike us, we have to constantly adapt and evolve to defeat them, because as we saw on Christmas, the margin for error is slim and the consequences of failure can be catastrophic.

     As these violent extremists pursue new havens, we intend to target al Qaeda wherever they take root, forging new partnerships to deny them sanctuary, as we are doing currently with the government in Yemen.  As our adversaries seek new recruits, we'll constantly review and rapidly update our intelligence and our institutions.  As they refine our tactics, we'll enhance our defenses, including smarter screening and security at airports, and investing in the technologies that might have detected the kind of explosives used on Christmas.

     In short, we need our intelligence, homeland security and law enforcement systems -- and the people in them -- to be accountable and to work as intended:  collecting, sharing, integrating, analyzing, and acting on intelligence as quickly and effectively as possible to save innocent lives -- not just most of the time, but all the time.  That's what the American people deserve.  As President, that's exactly what I will demand. 

Thank you very much.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/05/urgency-getting-right

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From Parade Magazine

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Who's on the FBI's Terrorist Watchlist?

January 03, 2010

.. Who Are the World's Most Wanted Criminals?

The FBI's list of known or suspected terrorists includes more than 400,000 people, about 2% of them U.S. citizens. The FBI says its Terrorist Watchlist is a useful tool for intelligence analysts, but others say it's too big to be helpful and endangers the rights of people who may be included without just cause.

According to FBI figures, the list continues to grow. The Terrorist Screening Center (TSC) evaluates up to 1200 new pieces of information each day, including additions, deletions,  and modifications to existing entries submitted by law-enforcement agencies across the country.

What qualifies someone for the list? TSC officials won't say but insist that people are included only if they meet a standard of “reasonable suspicion” after review by the TSC and several other government agencies. You'll never know if you're on the list—it's classified. People who suspect they might be listed without cause can file a request through the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program website, which is then reviewed by officials. Chad Kolton, a TSC spokesman, says the vast majority of Americans who inquire about their status are not, in fact, on the watch list.

But Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, claims that the system allows too many people to come under scrutiny and diverts the attention of authorities from real threats. “Every day, they are deciding that more and more people are terrorists,” he says. “At a minimum, these people will have a hard time flying, and the suspicion that they are terrorists will be shared with local law enforcement.”

Despite its size, Kolton insists that the watch list is working as intended: “It helps combat terrorism, period."

http://www.parade.com/news/intelligence-report/archive/100103-whos-on-the-fbis-terrorist-watchlist.html

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