High-tech border fence is slow going

The radar, cameras and satellite signals, originally expected to be completed by 2011, will probably not be ready for at least seven years. 'It was a great idea, but it didn't work,' an official says.

By Richard A. Serrano

February 22, 2010

Reporting from Washington

An ambitious, multibillion-dollar project to hot-wire the new Southwest border fence with high-tech radar, cameras and satellite signals has been plagued with serious system failures and repeated delays and will probably not be completed for another seven years -- if it is finished at all.

The system, originally intended to be completed next year, languishes in the testing phase in two remote spots of the border in Arizona.

There, the supposedly state-of-the-art system combining sensor towers, communication relay systems and unattended ground sensors has been bogged down with radar clutter, blurred imagery on computer screens and satellite time lapses that often permit drug smugglers and undocumented workers to slip past U.S. law enforcement agents, government officials candidly admit.

"It was a great idea, but it didn't work," said Mark Borkowski, executive director of the electronic fence program at the Homeland Security Department.

"One of the kickers was that these radars had too many problems with clutter," Borkowski said. "Wind moving a tree shows up on the radar. And if you have too much of that, how do you find the person in the clutter? Same with cameras. The image is blurry."

The problems have prompted Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to order a department-wide assessment of the technology project once billed as the capstone to the controversial 2,000-mile combined physical and electronic border fence.

Borkowski acknowledged in an interview that the government and its main contractor, Boeing Co., had made a series of mistakes since announcing in 2005 the plan to build sensor towers and radar scans alongside the new border fence.

Although they remain hopeful the problems can be fixed, he cautioned that the technology ultimately might not cover the entire border.

"It turned out to be a harder technological problem than we ever anticipated," Borkowski said. "We thought it would be very easy, and it wasn't."

He said the government was primarily to blame for not being more specific in its contract with Boeing. But, he added, "we have a border we've got to secure, and technology has to be a key part of the plan. It's not there. So what do we do in the meantime?"

Tim Peters, vice president of Boeing Global Security Systems, which is handling the project, said his company remained dedicated to correcting the problems, acknowledging that in the Arizona testing sites "our customer's and our expectations were not initially met."

Although the testing has taken longer than planned, costing about $20 million so far, Peters said a much-improved high-tech system would evolve.

"We have every reason to be confident," he said, that "future deployments will do exactly what they are designed to do -- provide the Border Patrol with an unprecedented level of situational awareness to enhance border security and improve agent safety."

But the delays and breakdowns have prompted critics on both sides of the border debate to call for fresh ideas to improve security along the frontier with Mexico.

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the nonprofit Federation for American Immigration Reform, said his group thinks that more and higher conventional fences and old-fashioned border agent surveillance are more reliable than the technology.

"Instead of spending a lot of time reassessing," Mehlman said, "they should get out there and do the sorts of things we know work effectively to get control of the border, such as double fencing and more manpower."

That thought is not lost on Napolitano, who in ordering the reassessment said that "a comprehensive border security strategy must include an effective combination of physical infrastructure, manpower and technology."

The Secure Border Initiative was once heralded as a sweeping plan to throw up a physical barricade and high-tech equipment to keep drugs, guns and undocumented workers away from what has for years been criticized as a far too porous border.

Borkowski said nearly all of the planned physical fencing was in place along about 620 miles of terrain "where we think we need it." He said an additional 30 miles still must be fenced in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. The cost for the physical fence was $3.4 billion.

The high-tech phase, known as SBInet, carries a price tag upon completion of about $8 billion. It was initially envisioned for the entire 2,000 miles of the border.

The technological wizardry was designed to send signals and video images to Border Patrol command centers, much like an aircraft control center, so agents could be quickly dispatched to investigate border breaches.

But it still has not gotten out of the testing phase in the two Arizona sites, which cover just 50 miles of border. Borkowski said satellite communications, even sending signals at two-second intervals, were too slow because by the time cameras could fix on trouble spots, the people or vehicles passing the border were often gone.

"As it turned out, a few seconds is enough to lose the image," he said.

Borkowski and Peters, the Boeing vice president, said the company was trying to work out what Peters called the "bugs or issues." The government has not given up, Borkowski said.

"I have to know what's going on. I have to have good, accurate, timely intelligence. I have to have the ability to act on that knowledge," Borkowski said.

And either way, "technology usually helps with the surveillance part. A couple of towers frees up to 50 agents to do more response work. They really complement each other."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-border-fence22-2010feb22,0,7978324,print.story

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A death in Egyptian police custody

An Egyptian family is left looking for answers, and accountability, after a young waiter dies in prison, his body bearing the marks of beatings and torture. The odds are against them.

By Jeffrey Fleishman

February 22, 2010

Reporting from Cairo

They come every day, the dead. Some die in accidents, others from natural causes, but the body washer knew something scary had happened when the sheet was lifted off Farouk Sayed.

"I realized he was beaten to death once I saw him. I could see the marks on his wrists, chest and back," said Moetaz Abdel Aziz, who bathes and purifies the dead at a Cairo morgue as part of the Muslim burial rite. "While I was washing him, I kept saying, 'I protest to God, who is my best resort, against whoever did this to him.' "

Sayed's wife, Takwa, thought her husband seemed so small in death, shrunken almost. On that September day, her family arrived with a rented station wagon and a borrowed coffin. They headed out of the city and south along the Nile, until they reached the graveyard where Sayed, a 38-year-old waiter trying to stay clean and raise a family, was lowered into the earth before sunset.

It's been months; a holy feast and a new year have passed. Sayed's killers are still at large, but Takwa said they'd be easy to find. Her husband died in police custody.

The prosecutor's office is investigating whether three officers, including a lieutenant, handcuffed Sayed and tortured him to death. There is no hurry to solve the case; the prosecutor has yet to even interrogate the officers.

"It might take a long time for the cops to be questioned in this crime," said Maha Yousef, a human rights lawyer representing Sayed's family. "Many prosecutors in cases like these were once police officers and some have practiced torture themselves. Out of hundreds of torture victims and their families I've represented over the last decade, I've won only 10 convictions against the police."

The Interior Ministry, which oversees the police, would say only that the matter was under investigation. Yousef has been granted no official documents on the case; her slim file comprises scattered pages of handwriting on notebook paper, an eerie and incomplete narrative she's sketched of Sayed's final days.

Sayed fell into a crack in the world, where a broken motorcycle on a wrong street on a particular day can lead a man into the body washer's hands. It happens in Egypt: Dissidents, Islamists, troubled people, or people with no troubles at all, end up manacled and beaten in the hallways and holding cells of police stations.

The morning Sayed was arrested, he awoke beside his wife and children in a small room with no running water. It was the only home a man who earned no more than $3 a day could afford. He dressed and slipped away, past photos of him pasted near the front door, one taken at the beach, his face tan, his muscles long; the other at a mosque, his coat bright in winter light.

He walked downstairs and into an alley beneath laundry hanging out of windows, drooping so low it feels like you're hiding in the back of a deep closet. He rode his motorcycle across town to Sayeda Zeinab, his childhood neighborhood, where he was going to pick up his mother and prepare for iftar , the sunset meal that breaks the daylong fast during Ramadan. He knew the neighborhood well; never wanted to leave it, but boys become men and things change.

The motorcycle broke down near Ali Barakat's cafe. He rolled it a few doors down to a mechanic friend on a street of butchers, bottle collectors, undercover policemen and drug dealers. Hashish and heroin were peddled through the neighborhood, and at night, the streets were filled with smoke from water pipes and the whispers of cops seeking bribes. Sayed knew its intricacies: He had served a three-year prison sentence for selling hash, but friends and family say he had not strayed since he got out in 1998.

"If he was trafficking drugs, would we live like this?" said Takwa, who was 15 when she married her cousin, not out of love, but because Sayed and both their families agreed that the round-faced girl who spoke her mind would make a good wife.

Sayed waited for his motorcycle; around the corner, next door to the cafe, his mother sat in a room off a littered foyer. She and his father had lived there since his father fled their Nile Delta village after two of his fingers were shot off in a clan feud. His father got a job as the doorman, and when Sayed was 8, he started waiting tables at the cafe, sleeping in a stairwell because his parents' room was too small for him and his brother.

The cafe's chairs and tin-topped tables once sprawled over the sidewalk; the place glowed deep into the night, men dropping tips on Sayed's tray. As he grew into a man, though, the cafe seemed less grand, the chairs splintered, and Sayed, a husband and father of four now, was still relying on tips. He tried waiting tables in his wife's village south of the city. The pay there was less and he returned to Barakat's, settling his family miles from Sayeda Zeinab, beneath smokestacks and brown skies along Cairo's ring road.

The motorcycle couldn't be fixed right away. Takwa and Sayed's brother, Mahmoud, said friends told them that a patrolman arrived near the mechanic's garage and questioned Sayed. Sayed was taken to the police station, where he spent the night; the next morning he was charged with possession of hashish and ordered held for 19 days until an investigation was completed. His family said police for years had leaned on him to become a snitch and often threatened and harassed him. As a former convict, Sayed knew the dealers, and as a waiter, he overheard everyone's business, the good parts and the bad.

"The police wanted him to be an informant," Takwa said. "They'd hassle him and sometimes bring him to the station or take bribes from him on the street. They kept pressing him to be an informant, but he didn't want to do that. He didn't want to be part of the corruption. He became defiant. He wasn't afraid of the police anymore, and that's when it turned dangerous for him."

Sayed was "going straight, raising his family," said Ahmed Saeed, the mechanic. "The police had problems with him. He wanted to return to this neighborhood to live, but he couldn't because the police wouldn't forget his past. When he was outside my shop, the cops asked him for 'tips' for the upcoming holy feast, but he said he didn't even have enough money to buy feast presents for his own kids. There was a brief argument and they took him away."

For days, Takwa brought meals to the police station. She wasn't allowed to see Sayed and she never knew whether the food reached him. A man at the desk, she said, hinted that her husband had been taken to solitary confinement and was being tortured. On Sept. 25, more than two weeks after his arrest, a nurse married to a cousin told Takwa that a dead man matching Sayed's description had been brought to the hospital.

Takwa said a policeman told her that Sayed had had a stroke; another officer said his heart had failed. She went to the hospital and was led into a room.

"They'd only let me see his face. A lieutenant told me it was against religion to see his naked body. But I pulled down the sheet. They couldn't stop me, I was his wife," she said. "His body was yellow and stiff; black and blue marks ran under his eyes. A bruise and marks behind his ears. Rows of marks were on his back as if he had been beaten with a stick. Handcuff cuts on his wrists, and his arms swollen from wrists to elbows."

Takwa cannot read. A relative read her the hospital's preliminary report on the body, which, she said, concluded that he had been beaten. The police took the report from the relative and after a few minutes, Takwa said, "officers at the hospital offered me money. I refused. They said: 'You might as well take it. This is the government. You won't win and you could get hurt.' "

An autopsy was ordered. The prosecutor has not released the findings. The burial form from the Health Ministry gives no specific date of death, but indicates trauma: "Reasons for his death: Bruises and abrasions; random samples from the body were taken for further examinations."

Takwa sits on the floor of her room beneath the photos of Sayed with her children, a 7-year-old, 5-year-old and 18-month-old twins. They climb on her, tug her sleeve. Nine years she was married, drawing water every day from an outside tap, washing her face in a bowl.

"We never had enough money, but it was OK," she says.

Mahmoud listens, occasionally slipping a hushed sentence into Takwa's hurried cadence. He picks at his jacket; he has no job, but somehow he must care for his brother's family. His mother, Nabila, sits next to him on the bed, dressed in black, folding and unfolding her hands.

The room is crowded, like a bus stop on a rainy night. Kids run in the alley outside; the junkman hollers, his cart scraping walls. It quiets for a while, and then Nabila mentions that she glimpsed her son in the police station window before he died. Takwa and Mahmoud shake their heads and whisper that this is not so, that this is what a mother needs to believe.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-egypt-torture22-2010feb22,0,6859582,print.story

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OPINION

Fewer Mexican immigrants dream of returning

Violence in their homeland has caused many to sink deeper roots in the U.S.

Gregory Rodriguez

February 22, 2010

Mexico's violent drug war may be pushing Mexican immigrants and their families to put down deep roots in the United States more quickly and firmly than ever.

For generations, immigrants have dreamed of going back to Mexico to enjoy the fruits of their U.S. labors. Today, fear of violence is keeping more people focused on their futures north of the border and changing longtime patterns of assimilation and migration.

We generally think of integration as an affirmative process by which immigrants are absorbed into a new country through a combination of hazing and courtship. But negative forces in their original homelands can also play a powerful role in shaping newcomers' and their children's attitudes and behavior.

It wouldn't be the first time events in Mexico have had a powerful effect on immigrants living north of the border. In the early 20th century, fears that the Mexican revolution would create chaos throughout the Southwest led to heightened discrimination against ethnic Mexicans here. During the Depression, the Mexican government, which thought it could benefit from the skills its emigrants had acquired in the U.S., assisted in efforts to kick immigrants out of this country.

Mexico's influence has been particularly strong because of its proximity. If you came here from Mexico, you knew you and your children had the relative luxury of crossing the border; you could stay in touch, literally. In news reports in the last two years, it's clear that violence is beginning to shut down what was for so many an easy transnationalism.

At the University of Texas at El Paso, where classes once took advantage of their proximity to Mexico, administrators have been forced to suspend activities in violence-wracked Ciudad Juarez. Binational scholarly exchanges that were once conducted over glasses of wine now only happen over the Internet.

Here in Southern California, the murder of El Monte educator Bobby Salcedo in Durango at Christmas is a clear example. Salcedo, a second-generation Mexican American, had been going back and forth across the border since his parents packed the family into a van for summer vacations when he was a child. After his killing -- collateral damage in the drug wars -- Hector Delgado, a City Council member in the heavily Latino town of South El Monte, urged people to boycott travel to Mexico. He told the Pasadena Star-News that he would never visit Mexico again.

According to Stanford sociologist Tomas Jimenez, author of "Replenished Ethnicity: Mexican Americans, Immigration, and Identity," moments like these reshape acculturation. "Going back to Mexico helps refortify Mexican Americans' ethnic identity," he told me. With a foot in two worlds, they keep up their Spanish and stay current with trends in the homeland. What's happening now "may speed up the severing of ties with Mexico."

The effect will be felt mostly with first- and second-generation Mexican Americans. The third and fourth generations, he said, already live at a profound distance from their grandparents' or great-grandparents' homeland.

Not surprisingly, the undocumented are squeezed hardest by Mexico's turmoil. They are unwelcome here, yet Mexico is less and less desirable. As Jimenez puts it, the drug war only "heightens their sense of being in limbo."

For its part, the Mexican government is doing what it can not to alienate its recent emigrants, who, according to Mexico's central bank, last year sent $21.6 billion back home. Mexico has launched a media campaign to convince Mexicans on both sides of the border that the government is winning the war against the narcos . Mexican officials are watching for an updated travel advisory that the U.S. State Department is scheduled to release Monday. Presumably they fear losing a connection to their most generous emigrants almost as much as they dread the loss of tourism income.

If this brewing trend to steer clear of Mexico solidifies, it would be a game changer for scholars as well as for the transnational culture of the Southwest. "We always used to assume two things," explains Jimenez. "Migrants will always go back and forth, and that migration will always continue. Now, though, it's wait and see. "

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rodriguez22-2010feb22,0,4963764,print.column

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From the Wall Street Journal

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Iran to Work on Two New Enrichment Sites

TEHRAN, Iran—The head of Iran's nuclear program said Monday his country hopes to begin construction within a year on two uranium-enrichment facilities, which it plans to build deep inside mountains to protect them from possible attack.

Ali Akbar Salehi, who is also Iran's vice president, said Tehran intends to use its more advanced centrifuges at the new sites, a decision that could add to growing concerns in the West over Tehran's program because the technology would allow Iran to accelerate the pace of its program.

"Hopefully, we may begin construction of two new enrichment sites in the next Iranian year as ordered by the president," the semiofficial ISNA quoted Mr. Salehi as saying Monday. The Iranian calendar year begins March 21. "As of now, our enrichment sites ... will be built inside mountains," Mr. Salehi added, according to ISNA.

The decision appears to be aimed at shielding the facilities from potential military attack. Israel considers Iran's nuclear program a strategic threat, and has hinted at the possibility of airstrikes against Iran if world pressure doesn't halt Tehran's nuclear efforts.

Iran's enrichment of uranium is the central concern of the U.S. and other nations negotiating with the country over its disputed nuclear program. The technology can be used to generate fuel for power plants and isotopes for medical purposes, but it can also be used to make weapons-grade uranium for atomic bombs.

Tehran insists its enrichment work is only meant for peaceful purposes, but Washington and its allies worry the program masks efforts to build a nuclear weapon. Tehran has already said it may install its more advanced centrifuges at its small enrichment site near the holy city of Qom, which was made public last September. The new centrifuges are more advanced than the decades-old P-1 type centrifuges in use at the country's main enrichment facility at Natanz, in central Iran.

Centrifuges are machines used to enrich uranium—a technology that can produce fuel for power plants or materials for a nuclear weapon. Uranium enriched to a low level is used to produce fuel, but further enrichment makes it suitable for use in building nuclear arms.

The new models will be able to enrich uranium much faster than the old ones—which means Iran could amass more material in a shorter space of time that could be turned into the fissile core of missiles, should Tehran choose to do so.

Mr. Salehi said the new enrichment sites will be equal to that of Natanz in terms of production capacity but smaller in geographical size, another indication that more advanced centrifuges will be installed, requiring less space to churn out the same enriched uranium.

More than 8,600 centrifuges have been set up in Natanz, but only about 3,800 are actively enriching uranium, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The facility will eventually house 54,000 centrifuges.

Tehran produced its first batch of uranium enriched to a higher level earlier this month, prompting the U.S. and its allies to seek new U.N. Security Council sanctions.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704454304575081044037611932.html?mod=WSJ_World_LEFTSecondNews#printMode

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From the Washington Times

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Parks open to holders of concealed guns

by Stephen Dinan

U.S. national parks will open Monday to holders of concealed firearms as a hard-fought law passed last year takes effect, but both sides expect more battles over exactly what the legislation means in practice.

The law - probably the biggest legislative achievement for conservatives in what was otherwise a year dominated by President Obama's agenda - says national parks will be governed by the same rules as the states in which they are located. That means about 370 of the country's 392 National Park Service properties will permit visitors to carry firearms.

But the Park Service says exceptions are in place and that another federal law requires guns to be kept out of federal facilities. That means firearms are still prohibited at any building where park employees regularly work, including office buildings, maintenance sheds and, most contentious of all, visitor centers.

"I think you're going to have people on both sides of the issue test this in what is or is not a federal facility," said David Barna, a spokesman for the National Park Service.

Gun rights advocates said they are pleased that weapons will no longer be off limits but that the Park Service should not poke exemptions into the law.

"That's ludicrous. You're going to tell someone if they have a concealed weapon permit they can't go into the visitor center to use the restroom?" said Rep. Rob Bishop, Utah Republican. "If they come up with restrictive exemptions, what they're asking for is a lawsuit to try and stop implementation of what Congress clearly told them to do."

The new rules, for example, prohibit concealed firearms on tours of the caves at Carlsbad Caverns, because it's a location where park employees regularly work.

The law was written by Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, and adopted as an amendment to a bill rewriting rules for the credit card industry. The law included a delayed enactment date of Feb. 22.

Under the rules, those permitted to carry a firearm by state law can now do so on park property.

"Prior to this, there would be a patchwork of laws that governed different lands governed by different federal agencies. What this does, it provides uniformity within a state," said Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association.

Advocates of gun control were dismayed that House Democrats accepted the language and that Mr. Obama signed the bill. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence gave Mr. Obama an "F" for his first year in office.

"In just one year, Barack Obama has signed into law more repeals of federal gun policies than in President George W. Bush's eight years in office," the Brady Center said in its one-year report, which also noted rules that restored Amtrak passengers' ability to carry firearms in checked luggage.

Mr. Bishop said the success of the park rules shows that even under a Democrat-controlled Congress, Second Amendment rights remain powerful.

"If I were to list anything positive that's come out of Congress in the last year, year and a half, this is it. And anything that restricts Second Amendment rights are going nowhere in Congress," he said.

Mr. Barna, the Park Service spokesman, said his agency doesn't expect any problems from the new law.

He said city gun laws still prohibit firearms on the National Mall and other park properties in Washington, D.C., but not at places like the George Washington Memorial Parkway in Virginia.

However, he said, Virginia law prohibits firearms at sites that are holding educational programs for children, such as at Wolftrap during children's theater events. Hotels, bookstores and other concessions in parks not operated by Park Service employees will follow local rules.

Mr. Barna said gun owners, particularly those who carry their firearms, tend to be knowledgeable about state and local laws.

He said parks are updating their Web pages to explain what is or isn't allowed, and will post signs at the buildings that are still off limits to firearms.

As of Sunday, the George Washington Memorial Parkway's Web site had a page that said firearms could be legally possessed in the park in accordance with state law, then listed links to the D.C., Virginia and Maryland legal codes, though users had to hunt for the portions that dealt with firearms.

Mr. Barna said that firing a gun likely would incur a penalty in most parks.

By carving out so many exceptions, he said, the Park Service is creating a problem that doesn't exist with other federal land agencies.

The Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service have allowed state laws to govern firearms on their property. Mr. Bishop said that policy is less complex than what the Park Service is imposing.

"The Park Service could treat Americans as Americans and respect the Constitution if they wanted to. I wish they wanted to," he said.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/22/national-parks-will-open-gates-to-holders-of-conce//print/

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Black History Month: Waterways to Freedom and Other Event

How much do you know about Black History Month? 

Do you know that this remembrance was founded as “Negro History Week” in 1926 by African-American historian, author and journalist Carter Godwin Woodson (b. 12/19/1875-d.4/3/1950) is known as the Father of Black History.

The son of James and Anna Eliza Riddle Woodson, who were slaves that found freedom, Carter became an activist that put him at the very core of a devoted group of black intellectual and activist. 

At the age of 25 (1900), Woodson became principal of Douglass High School prior to working in the Philippines as a school supervisor.  In 1908 he attended the University of Chicago, receiving his M.A.   In 1912, Carter Godwin Woodson received his Ph.D. from Harvard University

Dr. Woodson founded “Negro History Week,” devoting his career to authoring books, journals, articles and publishing newspapers, in part, to insure that the role of the African-American was neither ignored nor misrepresented by scholars and people.

Dr. Woodson is not only the founder of what is now Black History Month, he is also one of the reasons we should take pause and consider the stories of some of this countries most remarkable citizens.

One historian walking in Dr. Woodson's footpath is Dr. Cassandra Newby-Alexander, Ph.D., Associate professor of History, Norfolk State University.

In 2003, Dr. Newby-Alexander began work on Waterways to Freedom: The Underground Railway in Virginia.  Part of that project included working with the City of Norfolk, Virginia to develop an interactive map that tells the story of the Underground Railway in Norfolk.

A conversation with Dr. Newby-Alexander was very enlightening as I learned:

“The story of the escaping Slave is interesting for many reasons, “ said Dr. Newby-Alexander from his Norfolk University office.  “But at the heart of that story is a person willing to risk everything to run to freedom.”     

Visit the Waterways to Freedom  and explore twelve areas of importance to the Underground Railroad. 

An 1873 map reflects a very different Norfolk, Virginia than the one that is there today.  Click on the twelve different points and learn about the men and women, and places that played an important part in the Underground Railroad.

“Slaves escaping from Norfolk left primarily by water,” Dr. Newby-Alexander said.  “In a rural area contiguous with a border to a northern state, it would have been difficult to make the journey undetected."

 “They escaped Norfolk by ship, usually paying a white captain for their escape.”

Many of those ships left out of Higgins Wharf (Clickable #1), located at the far end of Widewater Street, near New Castle Street.   Click and learn that the wharf's owner, John A. Higgins, was the former owner of Shadrick Minkins.

Mr. Minkins place in history is recorded as he was being hunted under the Slave Fugitive Act.  Abolitionists helped him to evade trial in Boston, MA and escape to Canada.

Lewis Hayden (b.1811-d.1889) led the Vigilance Committee group that abetted Mr. Minkins escape.

Mr. Lewis was an ex-Slave that, once finding his freedom, became a representative from Boston to the State Legislature in 1873.

Mr. Minkins escaped from the ownership of John DeBree, a prosperous landowner and former navy man (see #4). 

Visit the Wharf where in 1855, Captain Alfred Fountain sailed to Philadelphia with 21 fugitive Slaves.   Just before leaving dock with fugitive brothers, Thomas and Frederick Nixon, owned by merchant B.T. Bockover, Norfolk Mayor William Lamb and a group of men boarded the ship to search for escaping Slaves.

The Captain most surely received payment for his services but, if caught, would have been tried under the Fugitive Slave Act.

Though slavery's origins tentacle back as far as the 1560, it was from 1654 until 1865 that slavery for life was legal within the boundaries of much of the United States.

Until the 18 th Century, however, slave labor was often ruled by a form of bonded labor, or indentured servitude, in which whites and blacks alike would work to pay the cost of their transportation to the American colonies.

In the 18 th century, Federal Court rulings allowed a racial bias to grow, establishing the right to “own” Black Africans as property, forcing them to unpaid, and usually harsh labor, particularly in the Southern plantations where tobacco and cotton were particularly labor intensive, big cash crops. 

At the heart of this movement was the need for cheap, expendable labor that ensured the success of large plantations.

From the 16 th to the 19 th centuries, twelve million Africans were shipped to the Americas, with the majority being sent to South America, mostly to Brazil.  However, during that period approximately 650,000 persons were sold into slavery from the transporters, however by 1860, the Slave population in the United States had grown to four millions persons.

“The story of the Underground Railroad is not the story of just Black people,” Dr. Newby-Alexander said. “It is the story of those people, black and white, that worked together against something that they saw as oppressive and wrong.”

“Ship Captains may have been paid in coin, but they still transported people at great risk.  All along the Underground Railroad are stories of white and black abolitionists who worked together, helping people to escape to freedom.  To evade those that would recapture them. “

Visit Waterways to Freedom  and explore Norfolk's role in the Underground Railroad.

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/donnes-world/2010/feb/10/black-history-month-waterways-freedom-and-other-ev/

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From MSNBC

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Fight back! Take the Red Tape pledge

Posted: Monday, February 22 2010 at 06:00 am CT by Bob Sullivan

You probably have a workout buddy. You might have a dieting buddy.  Maybe you are part of a moms' support group or a car pool. Perhaps you decided to run a half-marathon this year, but only after one of your friends promised to train with you. 

So why don't you have a stop getting ripped off buddy?

We all know the power of social commitments and positive peer pressure.  It's oh so much easier to wake up at 6 a.m. and go running when you know a friend is waiting for you at the corner --- and you'll face her mocking wrath if you don't show.

We also know that everyone hates overpaying for credit cards, pay TV or cell phone service -- yet we're all busy and hate the hassle of fighting back. We're distracted, we dread all the time spent listening to hold music, we fear rejection.  We know we should, but we just don't get around to it.

Now's your chance to take a stand.

We're going to harness the power of public commitment to motivate one other to take on unfair fees and charges.  Today, we're starting a new msnbc.com feature -- the Red Tape Fight Pledge. 

Click now to join a Facebook group devoted to helping you take on companies and monthly bills that just aren't right.

Pledge to spend one hour in the next 30 days fighting against a company that's trying to take you to the cleaners, then come back and tell everyone how you did.  Your stories will be part of upcoming msnbc.com Red Tape Chronicles reports.

But more important, you'll have made a public commitment to make that phone call or write that letter you've been putting off. To give up that one lunch hour to make sure your cable company isn't overcharging you. And you'll swap success stories and tips along the way.  Found a phone number that worked? Great. Have a Web site that helped you find the right customer service department?  Tell everyone. And if you hit a brick wall, share that too. You might find an answer from a compatriot here.

To kick start the effort, here's a few ideas

*This month I will call my pay TV company and tell them I want the same discounted deal they give new customers. Why should I be punished for being loyal?

*I'll research a new credit card.  My bank has hiked my rate and lowered my limit, so it's time to shop around for new plastic. I tried 6 months ago, but I think it's time to try again. Things may have changed.

*I hate my bank, so I will research small community banks and credit unions.  I hear it takes a little effort to switch, but one solid lunch hour might be enough.

*I will carefully examine my 401(k) holdings. I've heard that some mutual funds have high expense ratios, and that those fees could eat up one-third of my retirement fund before I reach 65.  I will switch to low-cost index funds instead.

There are plenty of others.  So jump over to the Facebook group now and leave your pledge. And remember to come back within a month and tell us what happened.  We'll offer helpful reminders right in this space.

Now, fight for your money!

CLICK HERE TO JOIN THE 'RED TAPE FIGHT PLEDGE' on Facebook.

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/02/you-probably--have-a-workout-buddy-you-might-have-a-dieting-buddy-maybe-you-are-part-of-a-moms-support-group--or-a-car-pool.html#posts

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Homeland chief: Domestic extremism is top concern

WASHINGTON - Americans who turn to terrorism and plot against the U.S. are now as big a concern as international terrorists, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Sunday.

The government is just starting to confront this reality and does not have a good handle on how to prevent someone from becoming a violent extremist, she said.

In the last year, Napolitano said, she's witnessed a movement from international extremism to domestic extremism — cases in which Americans radicalized and decided to plot attacks against the country.

"What really is it that draws a young person being raised in the United States to want to go and be at a camp in Yemen and then come back to the United States with the idea of committing harm within the United States?" Napolitano asked without citing specific cases. "Where in that person's formulation is there an opportunity to break that cycle?"

One case is that of Najibullah Zazi, the Denver airport driver who has been charged with plotting to use explosives to attack the U.S.

Born in Afghanistan, Zazi had lived in the U.S. since he was 14 years old. In recent years, prosecutors say, he traveled overseas to receive training from al-Qaida.

Speaking to governors who are in Washington for their annual conference, Napolitano said this problem is one that needs to be drilled down and analyzed.

Napolitano was in a wheelchair Sunday because she broke her ankle playing tennis a few weeks ago, a Homeland Security official said.

John Brennan, President Barack Obama's homeland security adviser, echoed Napolitano's concerns about violent extremism Sunday.

Countering violent extremism is not just a federal issue, Brennan told the governors; it's something that needs to be addressed as a nation.

The White House hosted a meeting to discuss these issues Friday, Brennan said.

"There needs to be community engagement," he said.

Brennan pointed to a case from late last year when five young Pakistani men living in Northern Virginia traveled to Pakistan seeking training from al-Qaida.

The FBI learned of the missing men from their families. After the men disappeared in late November, their families, members of the local Muslim community, sought help from a non-governmental organization, which put them in touch with the FBI.

"It's that engagement with those local communities that's going to be the critically important mechanism to detect that radicalization even before they depart," Brennan said.

The government has been engaged in this sort of outreach for years. Homeland Security officials have periodic meetings with Muslim communities. And FBI agents in certain parts of the country regularly reach out to Muslim communities and leaders.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35510644/ns/politics/

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