NATO arrests Afghan police official accused of aiding insurgents

The man helped make and plant roadside bombs in Kapisa province, Western officials say. But local authorities say it could be a case of mistaken identity.

By Laura King

February 8, 2010

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan

NATO forces swooped down on the home of a senior Afghan police official, arrested him and accused him of helping insurgents make and plant roadside bombs, Western military officials said Sunday.

The incident, which took place last week in Kapisa province in eastern Afghanistan, is likely to raise tensions between foreign forces and the national police.

That partnership is considered a crucial element of plans by the Obama administration to draw down American forces starting next year. Before any large-scale Western pullout occurs, Afghan security forces are supposed to take on more responsibility for safeguarding the country.

If the charges against the arrested official are borne out, the case would represent one of the most serious instances to date of complicity with the Taliban or other militant groups by a ranking Afghan security official.

But Afghan officials raised doubts about the man's guilt, and the Interior Ministry, which oversees the national police, said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had been asked for an explanation.

In a statement describing Friday's raid, NATO did not name the official, who was arrested along with a bodyguard. But provincial authorities identified him as Attaullah Wahab, who served as the deputy chief and security head of the national police in the province.

The NATO statement said the arrested man was suspected of helping distribute and plant bombs on roads surrounding Kapisa's capital, Mahmud-i-Raqi. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, are the principal killer of Western troops across Afghanistan.

In addition to alleged involvement with the explosives ring in Kapisa, the arrested man was accused of corruption in connection with a road project, NATO said. He also allegedly was tied to unspecified illegal activities in the district of Bagram in neighboring Parwan province, where the country's biggest American base is located, and had been linked to a killing last year, the alliance said.

Provincial officials wondered whether it could be a case of mistaken identity. Afghans sometimes try to settle clan vendettas or other disputes by giving false information about an enemy to Western forces.

"We don't know anything about this. They didn't coordinate with us," said Halim Ayar, a spokesman for Kapisa's governor. He said he did not know of any allegations of wrongdoing against the police official.

NATO said Afghan and Western troops, backed by helicopters, took part in the raid. The statement did not specify the nationality or service branch of the foreign forces, but Ayar identified them as American.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-afghan-arrest8-2010feb08,0,5689137,print.story

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Iran to build 10 nuclear plants, beef up military

The nation announces its plans despite international pressure and domestic dissent.

By Borzou Daragahi

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 8, 2010

Reporting from Beirut — Iranian officials trumpeted new nuclear and military ambitions Monday in the face of domestic political discord and stepped up international talk of tightening economic sanctions against the Islamic Republic.

Ali Akbar Salehi, head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, announced that Tehran has informed the United Nations' nuclear watchdog that it intends to launch construction of 10 new nuclear fuel plants in the Persian calendar year starting March 2010 and begin producing 20% enriched uranium to provide fuel for a Tehran medical reactor.

Up until now, Iran has only produced reactor-grade 3.5% enriched uranium and has managed to build only one functioning nuclear fuel plant.

"The 20% enrichment begins on Tuesday under supervision of inspectors and observers from the International Atomic Energy Agency," or IAEA, Salehi said in an interview published on the website of Iran's state-owned Al-Alam television news channel.

As of Monday morning, diplomats and arms inspectors in Vienna, home to the IAEA, had yet to receive anything in writing, said an official in the Austrian capital who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Western diplomats have vowed to pursue tougher sanctions on Iran to pressure it into curbing sensitive components of its nuclear and missile programs that they suspect are the cornerstones of an eventual atomic weapons capability.

Iranian military officials also announced plans to build new military planes, aerial drones and anti-aircraft missiles in a flurry of pronouncements hailing national achievements ahead of annual commemorations of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution on Thursday, when a burgeoning opposition movement and security forces are expected to clash on the streets of Tehran and other cities.

The eight-month political crisis continues to badly divide the Iranian political establishment. The Fars news agency, close to the Revolutionary Guard, reported that pro-government Iranians transferred to the capital from the provinces for Thursday's event had signed a petition demanding the arrest of opposition leaders Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a former Prime Minister, Mehdi Karroubi, a former parliament speaker and Mohammad Khatami, a former president.

Another official hinted at upcoming purges of the nation's security forces. "Well-known intelligence and military elements were instrumental in the post-election sedition," said intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi, according to the news website Aftabnews.ir .

Experts and international inspectors have concluded that Iran's nuclear program has been stagnant in the months since the country's domestic political crisis erupted following the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Any move to escalate the program could alarm Western nations and Israel.

Iran lacks a plant to turn enriched uranium into fuel plates for the medical reactor. Few experts believe it has the infrastructure to build 10 enrichment facilities any time soon.

Ahmadinejad ordered Salehi to produce the 20% enriched uranium fuel on Sunday. Salehi said the fuel would be produced at Iran's Natanz enrichment facility but left the door open to a compromise.

Western officials accuse Iran of failing to respond to a U.N.-backed offer to transfer the bulk of Iran's low-enriched uranium abroad in exchange for 20% pure fuel plates to power the ailing Tehran medical reactor. Iranian officials say they want to conduct the fuel exchange on their own soil, a condition the West has rejected.

Salehi said Tehran's move to further enrich uranium was only meant to help cancer-stricken Iranians. "We will stop enrichment as soon as we get the necessary fuel for the reactor," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fgw-iran-nuclear9-2010feb09,0,4739449,print.story

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From the Daily News

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Nevada's economic meltdown has state in a serious crisis

Proposals being considered by Nevada's governor:

• Closing the 140-year-old Nevada State Prison in Carson City, resulting in 136 layoffs and saving $13 million. Lawmakers rejected a similar move last year.
  
  
• Closing the Summit View Youth Correctional Center in southern Nevada, with 29 layoffs to save $3.7 million.
  
  
• Abolishing the Nevada Equal Rights Commission.
  
  
• Increasing premiums for participants in Nevada Checkup, a children's insurance program for the poor, and eliminating other services for low-income adults.
  

CARSON CITY, Nev. - Nevada's budget is so far out of balance that by one account the state could lay off every worker paid from the general fund and still be $300 million in the red. The economic downturn has hit so hard that prisons may be closed, entire colleges shuttered and thousands left without jobs.

Against the backdrop of an imploding economy and an $881 million shortage, Gov. Jim Gibbons will try to explain the depth of the state's financial crisis and how fixing the gaping hole in the budget will change their lives.

It won't be pretty.

In an emergency "State of the State" address Monday evening Gibbons also will call the Legislature into a special session in late February and instruct lawmakers on what areas they can focus on. It will be left to the state Assembly and Senate to tackle painful cuts to schools, higher education, and social services in the wake of the worst recession in generations.

"Nevadans need to get used to the idea of shrinking state government," said Gibbons' spokesman Daniel Burns.

Senate Majority Leader Steven Horsford, D-North Las Vegas, said the options facing Nevada are "very, very ugly." Horsford will give the Legislature's response immediately after Gibbons' televised 6 p.m. speech.

Details of the governor's address have not been released. But the first-term Republican who is seeking re-election has released pages of proposals he is considering for closing the hole in the $6.9billion budget passed by the 2009 Legislature.

The governor has said he anticipates 234 state layoffs, and notices already are being sent to employees who must be given a 30-day warning.

Lynn Hettrick, deputy chief of staff, said the governor wants to try to avoid more layoffs, because the state must pay the full cost of unemployment benefits for affected workers. Nevada, with a 13 percent unemployment rate, is on track to borrow $1 billion from the federal government to meet jobless claims because its unemployment insurance trust fund has gone broke.

"When we lay somebody off, it doesn't save us very much money," Hettrick said. "Between that and taking the money out of the economy, it really doesn't make sense for Nevada to lay off people."

Still, budget cuts could result in thousands of layoffs, mainly teachers, with the shock waves reverberating through Nevada for years to come.

"Most people living in Nevada have never experienced anything like this," said Guy Rocha, a historian and former state archivist. "The last time we had an economic crisis of this magnitude was the Great Depression."

While Gibbons has told state agencies to prepare for 10 percent cuts, his proposals so far total only $418 million, less than half the deficit.

Assembly Speaker Barbara Buckley, D-Las Vegas, said balancing the budget would require 22 percent cuts across the board. She said the state could lay off every worker paid from the state general fund - and still be $300 million short.

"It's an incredibly dire situation," she said.

Gibbons, a staunch no-tax proponent, has said new taxes will not be an option, and legislative leaders seem to agree raising taxes is unpalatable in the sour economy.

Nevada's economy, with a heavy reliance on discretionary spending through gambling and sales taxes, has been especially hard hit by the recession as tourists and gamblers hold on to their money. A once booming housing market that created thousands of high-paying construction jobs has gone bust, with Nevada topping the nation in foreclosures.

Eric Herzik, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Reno, said the governor's speech will set the tone for Nevada's immediate future.

"This is a time for Jim Gibbons to either cling to his very limited vision of Nevada, or articulate a vision that is very different than the past. Everybody talks about a diversified economy, getting away from a reliance on gaming. But so far nobody's done anything about it."

Nevada's education system could take the brunt of the budget blow.

Schools superintendents have pleaded for flexibility from mandates on class sizes and full-day kindergarten, and appealed for an emergency declaration to suspend collective bargaining agreements with teachers. They also proposed reducing the required 180-day school year. Each day eliminated would save about $13 million.

While most state employees beginning last July were required to take one day off per month without pay - the equivalent of a 4.6 percent pay cut - teachers were essentially exempt because of their contracts.

Administrators say unless negotiations are reopened and teachers agree to salary cuts, layoffs are unavoidable.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14355518

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Cops attack homegrown gang in state's heartland

FRESNO - This is Bulldog Country, or so the bumper stickers say.

But whether that identifies the home of scrappy Fresno State athletics or the deadly turf of a criminal enterprise labeled the most entrenched gang in America depends on the success of a police surge now entering its fourth year. Its goal: To take away the Bulldog gang's homefield advantage in California's agricultural heartland, to break its embrace of a new generation.

The pending trial of two members of the violent gang illustrates its insidious recruiting process: A 7-year-old boy was forcibly tattooed with the gang's emblem, a Bulldog paw, authorities say.

"I felt so... angry," said Detective Jesse Ruelas, describing the case in which Enrique Gonzalez is said to have held down his son while fellow gang member Travis Gorman allegedly applied the tattoo. "Why would you permanently disfigure your child?"

After a pause, the detective added, "Then I felt sad, like the police and the system had let him down and allowed him to be hurt."

These days, police and the system are forcefully asserting themselves, but it's going to take time to determine the future of Bulldog Country.

Here amid the alfalfa fields and almond orchards, where Fresno State University has provided many families their first access to a higher education, the gang's co-opting of the Bulldog brand has had strange and violent effects.

Students in some local schools are banned from coming to class in sportswear showing off the college's snarling red mascot. A young woman jogging in a Bulldog T-shirt 100 miles from Fresno narrowly escaped a hail of bullets fired by a rival gang. A man was shot to death last summer after innocently greeting a gang member with this perceived insult: "What's up, dog?"

Ruelas, the detective, recalled back in high school two decades ago making the connection between the mascot and the gang when he saw some female classmates from a notorious gang neighborhood wearing Fresno State jerseys. "I thought to myself, `What's up? I know those girls aren't going to college."'

In an impoverished region with high dropout rates and few job options outside of agriculture, gang affiliation becomes an easy avenue for self-esteem among the undereducated. And while other U.S. cities fight Crips and Bloods, Nortenos and Surenos, Fresno's homegrown gang has developed a vicious reputation that has kept other gangs at bay.

The Bulldogs are described by authorities as the nation's largest independent street gang. Police estimate there are about 12,000 members in this city of 500,000.

For most of their 20-year existence, the Bulldogs escaped serious law enforcement scrutiny, even as they taunted cops with barks and howls. Police looked upon them mainly as wayward youth. But the gang that grew out of fights at San Quentin prison over respect eventually showed itself to be a deadly criminal enterprise. The 2006 shooting of a cop became a tipping point.

Now police are trying to bulldoze the Bulldogs, before the next generation takes over.

The Fresno police are engaged in year four of tactical warfare against the gang, sweeping through neighborhoods and making more than 12,000 arrests, including many juveniles, and even going after petty offenses such as loitering by seeking injunctions.

It's called "Operation Bulldog."

In other cities, such police pressure might have killed the beast. But with the loosely organized Bulldogs, many are independent operators who will turn on one another over territory.

"When you have structure," Fresno Police Chief Jerry Dyer said, "you can cut the head off the snake and it dies. You can't do that with the Bulldogs."

Although gang activity declined across America between 2001 and 2006, gang membership in Fresno County grew by 33 percent, studies show.

"We found that 10 percent of the people in our city were committing 50 percent of the crime," Dyer said. "If you're talking about robbery, that increases to 80 percent."

In July 2006, a motorcycle officer was critically wounded during a traffic stop by a gun-toting Bulldog, Joaquin Maltos Figueroa, 25, who was shot to death days later by police.

In Maltos Figueroa's car, officers found a magazine of bullets and a scanner tuned to police frequencies. They realized gang members were more sophisticated than they previously had believed.

That same summer, 16-year-old Courtney Rice, a prostitute whom gang members feared was snitching, was raped, tortured and murdered by seven Bulldogs and associates.

In November 2006, Chief Dyer went on TV announcing a 10-person "Operation Bulldog" tactical unit to make gang members' lives miserable. This January, he added 100 more officers to focus on intelligence gathering on the 10 percent who are most active and promised to seek longer, federal sentences when possible.

"We know the war on gangs can never be won," the chief said, "but we also know it can be lost."

Today, easily half of those incarcerated in the county jail on any given day are Bulldogs.

"The chief's directive is to arrest as many Bulldogs as we can," said Sgt. Alex Robles. "He doesn't want us to let up the pressure."

Four days a week for 10-hour shifts, Robles and his team swarm Bulldog territory, the scruffy neighborhoods on the city's east side. Armed with lists of names supplied by parole agents, they make unannounced visits.

Parolees have no right to privacy, and the officers take advantage, searching homes for drugs and alcohol - even inspecting cell phones for gang photos or insignias.

If life is made unpleasant, police figure they will either leave gang life or move away.

"I don't know if we'll ever get rid of them," said Robles. "I know the goal is to get rid of them."

In the first three years of Operation Bulldog records show that violent crime has decreased in Fresno by 14.3 percent, ahead of the 9 percent state average, and police attribute the statistic to pressure on gangs. Rape is down 43.5 percent, and there were 26.3 percent fewer vehicles stolen.

After recording 314 shootings in 2006; in 2008 there were 226 and 231 in 2009.

"Still, it is too many, but it's a far cry from 314," Dyer said. "At least we don't have them standing on the corners barking anymore. Our goal is to take away their neighborhoods."

The figures do not capture the uptick in shootings since July 2009, when the History Channel's Gangland series featured the Bulldogs and egos swelled, prompting a summer police sweep that netted 200 arrests and dozens of confiscated weapons.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14355516

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Danger? What danger?

MEXICO CITY - Decapitated bodies dumped on the streets, drug-war shootings and regular attacks on police have obscured a significant fact: A falling homicide rate means people in Mexico are less likely to die violently now than they were more than a decade ago.

It also means tourists as well as locals may be safer than many believe.

Mexico City's homicide rate today is about on par with Los Angeles and is less than a third of that for Washington, D.C.

Yet many Americans are leery of visiting Mexico at all. Drug violence and the swine flu outbreak contributed to a 12.5 percent decline in air travel to Mexico by U.S. citizens in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, a blow to Mexico's third-largest source of foreign income.

Mexico, Colombia and Haiti are the only countries in the hemisphere subject to a U.S. government advisory warning travelers about violence, even though homicide rates in many Latin American countries are far higher.

"What we hear is, `Oh the drug war! The dead people on the streets, and the policeman losing his head,"' said Tobias Schluter, 34, a civil engineer from Berlin having a beer at a cafe behind Mexico City's 16th-century cathedral. "But we don't see it. We haven't heard a gunshot or anything."

Mexico's homicide rate has fallen steadily from a high in 1997 of 17 per 100,000 people to 14 per 100,000 in 2009, a year marked by an unprecedented spate of drug slayings concentrated in a few states and cities, Public Safety Secretary Genaro Garcia Luna said. The national rate hit a low of 10 per 100,000 people in 2007, according to government figures compiled by the independent Citizens' Institute for Crime Studies.

By comparison, Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have homicide rates of between 40 and 60 per 100,000 people, according to recent government statistics. Colombia was close behind with a rate of 33 in 2008. Brazil's was 24 in 2006, the last year when national figures were available.

Mexico City's rate was about 9 per 100,000 in 2008, while Washington, D.C. was more than 30 that year.

"In terms of security, we are like those women who aren't overweight but when they look in the mirror, they think they're fat," said Luis de la Barreda, director of the Citizens' Institute. "We are an unsafe country, but we think we are much more unsafe that we really are."

Of course, drug violence has turned some places in Mexico, including the U.S. border region and some parts of the Pacific coast, into near-war zones since President Felipe Calderon intensified the war against cartels with a massive troop deployment in 2006. That has made Ciudad Juarez, across the border from El Paso, Texas, among the most dangerous cities in the world.

"The violence, homicides and cruel and inhuman assassinations, which fill the pages of our media, make us feel that there has been much more violence since this war against drug trafficking," said Bishop Miguel Alba Diaz of La Paz, a vacation city at the tip of the Baja California peninsula.

Mexico's violence is often more shocking than elsewhere in Latin America because powerful cartels go to extremes to intimidate the government and rival smugglers.

In just one week in December, the severed heads of six police investigators were dumped in a public plaza, kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva died in a two-hour shootout with troops at a luxury apartment complex in a resort city and gunmen slaughtered the family of the only marine killed in that battle.

In the new year, it's become even more grotesque. Three weeks ago, a victim's face was peeled from his skull and sewn onto a soccer ball. Days later, the remains of 41-year-old former police officer were divided into two separate ice chests.

Authorities say the vast majority of victims are drug suspects, but bystanders, including children, sometimes get caught in the crossfire.

Mexico has the same problems with corrupt police, gang violence and poverty as other Latin American countries with higher homicide rates. So why the decline in murders?

Experts say while drug violence is up, land disputes have eased. Many farmers have migrated to the cities or abroad and the government has pushed to resolve the land disputes, some centuries old.

De la Barreda also attributes the downward trend to a general improvement in Mexico's quality of life. More Mexicans have joined the ranks of the middle class in the past two decades, while education levels and life expectancy have also risen.

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14355410

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From the Wall Street Journal

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China Heralds Bust of Major Hacker Ring

SHANGHAI—China heralded a major bust of computer hackers to underscore its pledge to help enhance global online security, with state media saying officials had shut what they called the country's largest distributor of tools used in malicious Internet attacks.

Three people were arrested on suspicion of making hacking tools available online, the state-run Xinhua news agency said on Monday. Their business, known as Black Hawk Safety Net, operated through the now-shuttered Web site 3800cc.com and generated around $1 million in income from its over 12,000 subscribers, the report said.

The arrests took place in late November as part of a police investigation that spanned three Chinese provinces and resulted in part from Black Hawk's role in domestic cyberattacks, according to Xinhua.

The delay in announcing the case wasn't explained. China in recent weeks has waged an aggressive public-relations campaign on the issue of hacking, apparently at least in part aimed at discrediting allegations from Google Inc. and others last month that China was the source of sophisticated cyberattacks against the Internet search giant and a number of other foreign companies. After U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also raised concerns about hacking from China, Chinese state media said her comments were hypocritical and said Google had become a pawn in an American "ideology war."

State-media reports described Black Hawk as offering hacking "training," which is a euphemism for selling malicious software. Xinhua said the site helped disseminate a computer virus in 2007 that wreaked havoc on private and government computers in the city of Macheng, in the central province of Hubei.

The Macheng prosecutor's office, in a statement, identified two men formally arrested in the case on Dec. 31 as 29-year-old Li Qiang and 28-year-old Zhang Lei. The statement said they were founders of Black Hawk Safety Net. The men couldn't be reached for comment. A man answering phones at an office of Black Hawk in the Henan province city of Xuchang said its servers had been shut down but that he couldn't elaborate.

Chinese hackers have described the Black Hawk operation, which also included the site 3800hk.com, as important, but just among the many on the Internet. Increasingly, they say, programs designed to break into Internet-connected computers, known as hacking tools, are available on Chinese-language sites that are located outside the country.

China's closure of Black Hawk Safety Net reflects the use of a new clause in its criminal law that makes it illegal to offer others online attack programs. Xinhua said some 1.7 million yuan in assets, or about $249,000, were also seized, including cash, nine servers, five computers and a car.

Numerous reports have fingered Chinese sources as the suspects in various cyberattacks, including ones that targeted the offices of the Tibetan spiritual leader Dalai Lama and the German chancellor's office. Within China, various attacks over the years have involved theft of user accounts and whole Web site source code.

Determining the origin of Internet attacks is difficult, however. While Google alleged that the hacking attempts it faced originated China, for instance, outside experts briefed on the attacks say they were actually traced to servers in Taiwan, which some experts say Chinese hackers could have used as a cover.

Some reports say that China hosts far less malicious software on its servers than is held on U.S. systems and is less of a spy threat than the U.S. Other experts point out China is a less-than-ideal location to launch overseas attacks because the Internet's international links are slowed by limited bandwidth and heavy content filtering.

China has described itself as the largest global victim of Internet hackers. According to a report released by the National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Center of China, Xinhua said, the hacker industry in China caused losses of 7.6 billion yuan ($1.11 billion) in 2009.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703630404575052684021385828.html?mod=WSJ_World_LEFTSecondNews#printMode

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From the Washington Times

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Ohio on pace for execution state record

by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

ASSOCIATED PRESS

LUCASVILLE, Ohio | After a relative lull in the number of executions Ohio carries out annually, it appears poised to sharply increase lethal injections in the months to come, possibly setting a state record for the most in a year.

The state executed condemned killer Mark Brown on Thursday, the third execution in as many months and one of nine scheduled for this year.

In addition, prosecutors have asked the Ohio Supreme Court, which schedules executions, to set dates for five additional death row inmates.

Ohio put seven people to death in 2004, a record for the state and second in the nation behind Texas, and executed four last year. It executed two people in each of the two previous years.

Brown, 37, had been sentenced to die for killing a Youngstown store owner in a 1994 shooting that mimicked a scene from the 1993 Samuel L. Jackson movie "Menace II Society." He was pronounced dead Thursday morning from a dose of a powerful anesthetic under the state's new injection procedure. Death came about nine minutes after the drug began flowing.

The state recently switched from a three-drug lethal-injection process, which opponents said could cause severe pain, to the one-drug system.

Though Brown had challenged the qualifications of Ohio's executioners and claimed the procedure could cause severe pain as execution team members tried to find a vein, his death was quick and almost problem-free.

Three months ago, the country had never put someone to death with just one drug. Brown's execution was Ohio's third use of the procedure, and in each case death came in just a few minutes. However, it did take executioners about 30 minutes to insert needles into the arm of condemned inmate Kenneth Biros in December before beginning his execution for killing a woman he had met at a bar.

Ohio is the only one of 35 death penalty states to use one drug, though other states are watching Ohio's experience.

Brown did not give a last statement. After the dose of thiopental sodium was administered at 10:40 a.m., he blinked several times, closed and opened his eyes and swallowed once before shutting his eyes a last time. At 10:42 a.m., his chest heaved, he appeared to yawn, his chest rose and dropped slightly several more times, then he fell still and died several minutes later.

Federal lawsuits claim that Ohio's execution team isn't properly trained, but the procedure went as smoothly Thursday as any other execution in recent memory. Members of the team easily inserted needles into Brown's arms in about five minutes, sticking him just once on each arm.

Relatives of the store owner whom Brown killed, Isam Salman, witnessed the execution.

"As sad as this may be, and it's very sad, justice has been served," sister Terri Rasul said afterward. "I just hope that this is a lesson for the young children today that they will learn not to do what Mark Brown had did to my brother."

Brown also killed a store clerk, and he received a life prison term for that. He said he shot the clerk but didn't remember shooting the store owner.

Last month, he argued unsuccessfully for a new trial, saying witnesses could testify that his friend shot the store owner. A judge said the witnesses weren't credible.

The Ohio Parole Board rejected Brown's request for mercy last month.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/08/ohio-on-pace-for-execution-state-record//print/

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Clinton sees Islamist terror as No. 1 threat

Nicholas Kralev and Jennifer Haberkorn

THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Obama administration figures took to Sunday's political talk shows to rebut charges of White House weakness on Islamist terrorism, with the nation's top diplomat saying such networks pose the greatest threat to national security.

While one of the White House's top national security advisers criticized lawmakers for politicizing national security threats, including the Christmas Day attack over Detroit, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said even a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran isn't as great a threat to the U.S. as al Qaeda and allied jihad groups.

"The biggest nightmare that any of us have is that one of these terrorist member organizations within this syndicate of terror will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction," she said in a Sunday appearance on CNN. "So that's really the most threatening prospect we see."

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told Congress earlier this month he was "certain" there will be an attempted terrorist attack on the United States within the next six months.

Also on Sunday, Iran threw down another gauntlet against international sanctions on its nuclear development, saying it will start Tuesday to enrich uranium to six times the nuclear purity usually used in civilian nuclear power plants, a step toward producing uranium pure enough to use in a nuclear weapon.

While Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that "obviously, a nuclear-armed country like North Korea or Iran pose both a real or a potential threat," she said the terror threat is greater and, unlike some recent Obama administration figures, specified that threat in terms specific to Islam, though not the Muslim religion itself.

"But I think that most of us believe the greater threats are the transnational non-state networks, primarily the extremists, the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected — al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula, al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, al Qaeda in the Maghreb [region of North Africa]," she said.

The Obama administration has drawn considerable criticism from Republicans and conservatives for downplaying the terror threat as if it were a law enforcement or disaster operation. The charge was emphasized most recently by newly elected Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who ridiculed granting foreign terrorists Miranda rights and other protections that civilians have in U.S. criminal courts.

"Quite frankly, I'm tiring of politicians using national security issues such as terrorism as a political football," deputy national security adviser John O. Brennan said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday. "They're going out there, they're unknowing of the facts and they're making charges and allegations that are not anchored in reality."

Mr. Brennan also denounced as opportunistic the Republican attacks on reading Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Detroit-bound airliner bombing suspect, his rights to an attorney and against self-incrimination — the well-known Miranda warning. He said he briefed four top Hill Republicans on Christmas night on Mr. Abdulmutallab and informed them that he was in FBI custody.

"They knew that in FBI custody that there is a process as far as Mirandizing," he said. "None of those individuals raised any concerns … at that point."

Mr. Brennan said he spoke with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner and Republican intelligence committee members Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri and Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan.

Since then, many Republicans have questioned whether Mr. Abdulmutallab would have given U.S. authorities more information had he not had access to an attorney.

In response, Mr. Hoekstra repeated his criticism of the administration's handling of recent security threats.

"Can anyone take seriously the White House's assertion that it consulted with Republicans when President Obama didn't even consult his own director of national intelligence, FBI director or homeland security director concerning Abdulmutallab?" he said in a statement. "The mishandling of this case is the Obama administration's failure and they have no one to blame but themselves."

Mr. Brennan said politicians are merely second-guessing counterterrorism officials with a "500-mile screwdriver" from Washington.

He said Mr. Abdulmutallab was treated just like other terrorism suspects arrested in the United States — under guidelines established in December 2008 by the George W. Bush administration. After the Christmas Day attempted airliner attack, Mr. Obama asked that those guidelines be re-examined.

But on Sunday, Iran had a new challenge for the West, announcing that will begin enriching uranium to a 20 percent "strength" of uranium-235. Uranium found in nature is less than 1 percent of the uranium-235 isotope, the compound suitable for use in a nuclear device. Uranium fuel for commercial nuclear plants is usually "enriched" to 3 or 4 percent uranium-235; weapons-grade uranium is about 90 percent uranium-235.

The development Tuesday confused — but did not surprise — Western officials, coming just days after Tehran appeared to be more accepting of an international plan to send its uranium for enrichment abroad.

After being directed by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Ali Akbar Salehi, said Tehran will inform the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Monday that "the higher enrichment will begin at the Natanz plant."

Western officials immediately condemned Iran's plans, with Britain saying such a move would violate Security Council resolutions.

"If the international community will stand together and bring pressure on the Iranian government, I believe there is still time for sanctions and pressure to work. But we must all work together," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said during a visit to Rome.

In October, the IAEA proposed that Iran's low-enriched uranium be sent abroad for further enrichment, so it can be used to make medical isotopes — the only reason Tehran insists it needs it.

Mr. Ahmadinejad demanded instead that Iran's low-enriched uranium be exchanged for 20 percent fuel simultaneously on Iranian soil, which the West rejected. Last week, however, he suggested for the first time that he might be willing to accept the original proposal.

Rep. Howard L. Berman, California Democrat and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that Iran's Sunday decision underlines the need for new U.N. sanctions.

"With this move, Iran is only escalating the situation over its nuclear activities into a crisis," Mr. Berman said. "It should be abundantly clear to all that Tehran is not interested in a diplomatic resolution on anything other than its own terms, which will inevitably lead to a nuclear weapons capability. This is another reason for the U.N. Security Council to act swiftly so that strong sanctions can be placed on Tehran."

Mrs. Clinton defended the administration's repeated offers to engage with Iran over its nuclear program despite their futility, saying its overtures helped persuade other countries that all options short of more sanctions have been exhausted.

"When we started last year talking about the threats that Iran's nuclear program posed, Russia and other countries said, 'Well, we don't see it that way,'" she said.

Although Russia has moved closer to the West's position, China remains vocally opposed to new sanctions. The U.N. Security Council adopted three rounds of sanctions during the past two years of the Bush administration.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/08/clinton-sees-islamist-terror-as-no-1-threat//print/

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From Fox News

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Terminally Ill Artist Hopes to Help Solve Missing Boy Case in North Carolina

February 08, 2010

Associated Press

MEBANE, N.C. — 

A terminally ill artist says he has produced his last painting in hopes that it will help authorities in North Carolina solve the 10-year-old case of a missing boy.

The News & Record of Greensboro reported that officials unveiled a facial reconstruction by renowned Philadelphia artist Frank Bender.

"This is the last one," Bender said in a telephone interview from his home. "Most people with terminal cancer and eight months to live might not have even attempted this. But I didn't want to turn this down if I could help identify him."

On Sept. 25, 1998, a groundskeeper for a billboard company was mowing along the Interstate 85/ Buckhorn Road exit and discovered something in the long summer grass at the edge of the woods.

It was the scattered remains of a skeleton, a 10-year-old child, with tube socks and new boy's sneakers still on the child's feet. Folded neatly in the pocket of a pair of khaki shorts was $50 — two $20s, one $10.

Before Bender's painting, detectives had no picture to help identify the boy.

Not only was there no clue to John Doe's real name, but detectives couldn't even describe his face until a North Carolina child advocacy group commissioned Bender to create the reconstruction.

On Saturday night, detectives were able to see art meet science. From what was just a hollowed, mummified skull, Bender produced a lifelike painted sculpture.

Bender said the boy, age 10 to 12, had longish brown hair and a severe overbite that may help identify him. He was Caucasian, possibly Hispanic, and Bender has the feeling the boy was killed by someone he knew.

"I would say more than likely a caretaker — aunt, uncle, father, stepfather. That's usually the way it goes," Bender said.

"That's why they don't show up (as missing). You're thinking, 'Oh, the parents are going to be doing everything under the sun to find them.' "

The people who organized the event believe someone will come forward.

"It could be that somebody sees that bust and says, 'Yes, I remember that child, and he disappeared right around then,"' said Mike Craig, a former police officer who founded N.C. SMART, the nonprofit missing-and-abducted response team that commissioned Bender. "Then, the investigation starts anew at that point."

Bender, 68, is credited with solving dozens of murders and disappearances for the FBI, Scotland Yard and America's Most Wanted.

Leslie Denton, who organized Saturday's event for Guardian Digital Forensics, pointed to the famous Jane Doe homicide victim in Boulder, Colo., who was finally identified in 2009 — 55 years after her remains were found beside a creek.

Bender's facial reconstruction portrayed the unknown victim as blond-haired and blue-eyed. She was later identified as Dorothy Gay Howard of Arizona, who was 18 when she disappeared in 1954.

"Frank told us that she would have blue eyes," Denton said, "and she did. How did he know that?"

Bender began this career through a chance anatomy lesson at the morgue.

Now, he is living under hospice care with mesothelioma linked to asbestos exposure, and his wife also has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer.

Suffering from a bout of the flu and unable to travel to Raleigh, Bender said the Mebane case likely will be his last reconstruction. Perhaps it is a fitting swan song: Child victims, to him, are always the most compelling.

"A child is so innocent. They have a whole life ahead, and it's taken away," he said. "It all bothers me, but they bother me the most."

http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,585045,00.html

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From MSNBC

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Wounded, ‘unwavering' al-Qaida shifts tactics

In the past six weeks, Americans have witnessed two jarringly different — but completely accurate — views of al-Qaeda's terrorist network. One image was that of terrorist leaders being hunted down and killed by satellite-guided, pilotless aircraft. The other was of an agile foe slipping past U.S. defenses and increasingly intent on striking inside the United States.

New assessments of al-Qaeda by the top U.S. counterterrorism experts offer grounds for both optimism and concern a year after President Obama took office. Officials say al-Qaeda's ability to wage mass-casualty terrorism has been undercut by relentless U.S. attacks on the network's leadership, finances and training camps. But even in its weakened state, the group has shifted tactics to focus on small-scale operations that are far harder to detect and disrupt, analysts say.

The deadly November shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., and the failed Christmas Day attempt to bomb an airliner — both examples of the low-tech approach — have raised the fear level in Washington and across the country. Some terrorism experts say the worst could be still to come as a wounded jihadist movement thrashes about in search of a victory.

"The noose is tightening, and al-Qaeda's leadership is accelerating efforts that were probably in place anyway," said Andy Johnson, former staff director of the Senate intelligence committee and now national security director for the Washington think tank Third Way.

In the past year, Johnson said, the "good guys have been scoring the points," killing key al-Qaeda leaders and disrupting multiple plots. But pressure on al-Qaeda in Iraq and Pakistan has forced terrorist operatives to flee to new havens, such as Yemen, and step up the search for weaknesses in Western defenses. While battered, "the enemy is unwavering and determined," he said.

The U.S. ability to strike al-Qaeda's nerve center was on display recently with news of the apparent death of the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, a close ally to al-Qaeda in the lawless frontier along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Hakimullah Mehsud, who suffered severe injuries in a missile strike in mid-January, was the second leader of the group to find himself in the path of a CIA Predator aircraft in the past six months. He also was closely linked to the Dec. 30 suicide bombing that killed seven CIA officers and contractors in Afghanistan's eastern Khost province.

U.S. drones have struck al-Qaeda and Taliban targets inside Pakistan 12 times this year, putting the Obama administration on a course to surpass 2009's record-setting 53 strikes, according to a tally by the Web site Long War Journal.

In testimony before two congressional panels last week, top U.S. intelligence officials said the campaign has shaken al-Qaeda's core leadership, the small band of hardened terrorists led by Osama bin Laden. The attacks, combined with a successful squeeze on al-Qaeda's cash supply, have impeded the group's ability to launch ambitious, complex terrorist operations on the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the officials said.

"Intelligence confirms that they are finding it difficult to be able to engage in the planning and the command-and-control operations to put together a large attack," CIA Director Leon Panetta said Tuesday in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

But intelligence officials also warned lawmakers of worrisome new evidence of al-Qaeda's ability to adapt. In an annual "threat assessment" to Congress, spy agencies described the emerging threat as more geographically dispersed and also low-tech, favoring lone operatives and conventional explosives.

'Short-term plots'

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair, who presented the assessment to House and Senate panels, said the attempted bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 over Detroit is emblematic of an evolving threat that relies on "small numbers of terrorists, recently recruited and trained, and short-term plots." The new tactics are less spectacular but also much harder to detect and disrupt, he said.

The suspect, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, is a Western-educated young man who was apparently recruited because he had a U.S. visa and no record of ties to terrorist groups. Officials say that he was trained and equipped by one of al-Qaeda's rising affiliates, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and that he had a bomb made of a common military explosive sewn into his underwear, deliberately designed to thwart the kinds of safeguards put in place after 9/11.

The foiled plot came on the heels of the Fort Hood shooting rampage. That attack, and the arrest of an Army major apparently inspired by al-Qaeda, crushed the widely held perception that Americans were immune from the kind of violent home-grown extremism seen in Muslim enclaves in Western Europe. Blair acknowledged that intelligence agencies are newly concerned that Americans may be traveling overseas for training and returning to the United States to carry out terrorist strikes.

"A handful of individuals and small, discrete cells will seek to mount attacks each year, with only a small portion of that activity materializing into violence against the homeland," he said.

Blair testified that he thought another attempted strike by terrorists was "certain" in the next six months. The assertion was a response to a question by the Senate intelligence panel's chairman, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), about the likelihood that al-Qaeda would try to launch a major attack on Americans in the near future. But Blair also suggested that the rash of news about terrorist plots in recent weeks has created a false impression that the threat is new.

"We have been warning since September 11 that . . . al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists remain committed to striking the United States," he said. "What is different is that we have names and faces to go with that warning. We are therefore seeing the reality."

Terrorism experts and administration officials have described the Dec. 25 bombing attempt as a wake-up call that helped expose gaps in security that are now being addressed. But some analysts say the dramatic successes against al-Qaeda in Pakistan may have led U.S. officials to miss signs that the terrorist threat was morphing in new directions. Now the administration is scrambling to respond to both threats at once, said Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University terrorism expert and senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

"Until Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the prevailing assumption was that we could fight and win by drone attacks. But the threats are diverse and spreading," Hoffman said. "Both administrations — Bush and Obama — had a tendency to focus on one threat, one enemy, emanating from one place. The use of predators in Afghanistan and Pakistan is a very effective tactic. But it's a tactic, and it's not a substitute for a strategy."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35291011/ns/us_news-washington_post/

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