Scores of freed prisoners were convicted of violent crimes

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state corrections officials said the law, passed last year, was designed to improve public safety by concentrating parole supervision on the most dangerous felons. Allowing those convicted of lesser offenses to go unsupervised after their release would mean fewer people being sent back to prison for parole violations, reducing the inmate population and saving the state money.

Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate and state lawmakers repeatedly said that only nonviolent offenders - mostly those convicted of white collar, property and drug crimes - would be freed without monitoring. At the time the law took effect on Jan. 25, Cate promised it would not lead to dangerous felons being unsupervised after their release.

"If you're a serious offender, you're ineligible. If you're a violent offender, you're ineligible. If you're a sex offender, you're ineligible. All that's defined," he said during a news conference the day the law took effect.

The department's own records paint a picture that conflicts with Cate's pledge, although most do not appear to violate the strict letter of the law. A corrections spokesman said the problem is with the law, not with the way the department has handled the releases.

Of the 1,944 convicts left without supervision in the first five weeks after the law took effect Jan. 25, 96 were in jail for possessing weapons or explosives and 120 served time for stalking, domestic violence and child neglect, abduction or cruelty. A smaller number served time for more serious offenses, including sex crimes, false imprisonment, battery and involuntary manslaughter.

Two state lawmakers have introduced a bill seeking to maintain parole supervision for inmates convicted of several of those offenses. They plan to announce the legislative language as early as Wednesday.

"These are multiple crimes that the public would be horrified to know the department considers nonserious or nonviolent," said Assemblyman Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, who obtained the list through the California Public Records Act and shared it with The Associated Press.

Most of the unsupervised releases contained in the corrections department records do not violate the letter of the law, which excludes certain crimes such as rape or inmates with a history of such offenses. But Lieu and state Assemblywoman Alyson Huber, D-Lodi, want to expand the list of crimes for which inmates would be ineligible for unsupervised parole, saying it will close a dangerous loophole.

The list would include solicitation of murder, stalking, domestic violence and gang activity. Lieu, who is running for attorney general this year, said he will add more offenses later.

The bill by Lieu and Huber would let local law enforcement officials object to releasing specific criminals without oversight.

"Parole supervision has been shown to have a deterrent effect, and we just removed it for thousands of state prisoners," Lieu said.

Oscar Hidalgo, a corrections department spokesman, said the releases did not violate the law and that lawmakers can makes changes if they want.

"When we say nonserious, nonviolent and non-sex offender, we follow the penal code," he said. "The Legislature had determined what is a violent, what is a serious and what is a sex offense, not the department."

According to the department's records, one of the former inmates released on unsupervised parole this year had been convicted of oral copulation with a minor, which should have excluded him from the program under the law.

Hidalgo said the specific circumstances of the case led the department to consider it nonserious, nonviolent and not an excludable sex offense under the law. The case involved consensual contact with a 16- or 17-year-old, he said, adding that he didn't know the age of the perpetrator.

Seventeen others had been convicted of statutory rape, 16 were convicted of false imprisonment, seven of battery, three for involuntary manslaughter, three for burning inhabited structures and one for soliciting murder.

The law prohibits sending the ex-convicts back to prison unless they are convicted of new crimes. They can be searched at will by law enforcement until their unsupervised parole ends after one year, but otherwise they do not have to report to parole agents.

It also gives corrections officials discretion, prohibiting the discharge of those deemed to be at high risk of committing new crimes regardless of other criteria.

The parole provision is designed to reduce the state inmate population by 6,500 and save $500 million in its first year. It is separate from other portions of the law that also have drawn attention, including early releases of inmates from state prisons and county jails.

An Associated Press report last week showed that hundreds of inmates being released early from county jails also had been convicted of violent offenses.

California had been one of only two states, along with Illinois, that monitors every ex-convict on parole. The law was projected to reduce the average caseload of a parole agent from 70 to 48 parolees.

Because of that, Cate said the law would increase public safety "by focusing our resources on high-risk offenders, serious offenders, violent offenders and sex offenders."

http://www.dailynews.com/breakingnews/ci_14832195

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From the New York Times

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U.S. Approves Targeted Killing of American Cleric

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has taken the extraordinary step of authorizing the targeted killing of an American citizen, the radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki , who is believed to have shifted from encouraging attacks on the United States to directly participating in them, intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Tuesday.

Mr. Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and spent years in the United States as an imam, is in hiding in Yemen . He has been the focus of intense scrutiny since he was linked to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan , the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood , Tex., in November, and then to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , the Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Dec. 25.

American counterterrorism officials say Mr. Awlaki is an operative of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the affiliate of the terror network in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They say they believe that he has become a recruiter for the terrorist network, feeding prospects into plots aimed at the United States and at Americans abroad, the officials said.

It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president.

But the director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair , told a House hearing in February that such a step was possible. “We take direct actions against terrorists in the intelligence community,” he said. “If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.” He did not name Mr. Awlaki as a target.

The step taken against Mr. Awlaki, which occurred earlier this year, is a vivid illustration of his rise to prominence in the constellation of terrorist leaders. But his popularity as a cleric, whose lectures on Islamic scripture have a large following among English-speaking Muslims, means any action against him could rebound against the United States in the larger ideological campaign against Al Qaeda .

The possibility that Mr. Awlaki might be added to the target list was reported by The Los Angeles Times in January, and Reuters reported on Tuesday that he was approved for capture or killing.

“The danger Awlaki poses to this country is no longer confined to words,” said an American official, who like other current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke of the classified counterterrorism measures on the condition of anonymity. “He's gotten involved in plots.”

The official added: “The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual — through his own actions — has become one. Awlaki knows what he's done, and he knows he won't be met with handshakes and flowers. None of this should surprise anyone.”

As a general principle, international law permits the use of lethal force against individuals and groups that pose an imminent threat to a country, and officials said that was the standard used in adding names to the list of targets. In addition, Congress approved the use of military force against Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. People on the target list are considered to be military enemies of the United States and therefore not subject to the ban on political assassination first approved by President Gerald R. Ford .

Both the C.I.A. and the military maintain lists of terrorists linked to Al Qaeda and its affiliates who are approved for capture or killing, former officials said. But because Mr. Awlaki is an American, his inclusion on those lists had to be approved by the National Security Council , the officials said.

At a panel discussion in Washington on Tuesday, Representative Jane Harman , Democrat of California and chairwoman of a House subcommittee on homeland security, called Mr. Awlaki “probably the person, the terrorist, who would be terrorist No. 1 in terms of threat against us.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07yemen.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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N. Korea Sentences American to Hard Labor

SEOUL, South Korea — An American man who was arrested in North Korea for illegal entry was sentenced to eight years of hard labor, the North's state-run news agency reported on Wednesday.

The American, Aijalon Mahli Gomes, a 30-year-old from Boston, was also fined 70 million North Korean won in the sentence given on Tuesday, said the Korean Central News Agency. Under the North's official exchange rate, the fine amounts to $700,000.

“The accused admitted all the facts which had been put under accusation,” the agency said. “The presence of representatives of the Swedish embassy here to witness the trial was allowed as an exception at the request of the Swedish side protecting the U.S. interests.”

Mr. Gomes was convicted of illegal entry and “hostile acts” against North Korea, it said, without elaborating. Incarceration in a harsh labor camp is a common form of criminal punishment in North Korea.

Washington does not have formal diplomatic ties with North Korea and has relied on Swedish diplomats in Pyongyang to again access to Mr. Gomes.

Last year, North Korea arrested two American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee , and sentenced them to 12 years of hard labor for illegally entering the North. But the women were pardoned and released five months later, after former President Bill Clinton visited Pyongyang in August and met the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il .

Mr. Gomes's former colleagues and friends in South Korea say that he was a devout Christan and very likely crossed into North Korea in support of Robert Park, a Korean-American missionary who entered North Korea illegally on Dec. 25 to call for Mr. Kim, the North Korean leader, to end human rights abuses.

Before his travel to North Korea, Mr. Gomes, an English teacher in South Korea, attended at least two rallies in South Korea calling for Mr. Park's release.

North Korea released Mr. Park in early February, saying that it had decided to “leniently forgive” him and that he had acknowledged his mistakes and repented.

There was no immediate comment available from the United States government on the sentencing of Mr. Gomes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/asia/07korea.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Ensnared by Error on Growing U.S. Watch List

Rahinah Ibrahim, a Stanford University doctoral student, arrived at San Francisco International Airport with her 14-year-old daughter for a 9 a.m. flight home to Malaysia. She asked for a wheelchair, having recently had a hysterectomy.

Instead, when a ticket agent found her name on the no-fly list, Ms. Ibrahim was handcuffed, searched and jailed amid a flurry of phone calls involving the local police, the F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security . Two hours after her flight left, Ms. Ibrahim was released without explanation. She flew to Malaysia the next day.

But when she tried to return to the United States, she discovered that her visa had been revoked. And when she complained that she did not belong on a terrorist watch list, the government's response came a year later in a form letter saying only that her case had been reviewed and that any changes warranted had been made.

Every year, thousands of people find themselves caught up in the government's terrorist screening process. Some are legitimate targets of concern, others are victims of errors in judgment or simple mistaken identity.

Either way, their numbers are likely to rise as the Obama administration recalibrates the standards for identifying potential terrorists, in response to intelligence failures that let a would-be bomber fly to Detroit from Amsterdam last Christmas. On Friday, the administration altered rules for identifying which passengers flying to the United States should face extra scrutiny at the gate. And it is reviewing ways to make it easier to place suspects on the watch list.

“The entire federal government is leaning very far forward on putting people on lists,” Russell E. Travers, a deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said at a recent Senate hearing. Before the attempted attack on Christmas, Mr. Travers said, “I never had anybody tell me that the list was too small.”

Now, he added, “It's getting bigger, and it will get even bigger.”

Even as the universe of those identified as a risk expands, the decision-making involved remains so secretive that people cannot be told whether they are on the watch list, why they may be on it or even whether they have been removed. The secrecy, government officials say, keeps terrorists off balance. But civil liberties advocates say it can hide mistakes and keep people wrongly singled out from seeking redress.

Now, five years after Ms. Ibrahim's arrest at the United Airlines ticket counter, a lawsuit she filed is chipping away at that wall of secrecy. While judges have dismissed many similar cases, a federal appeals court let hers proceed, endorsing a new legal strategy for challenging placement on the watch list. In December, a federal judge scoffed at the government's claim for secrecy and ordered it to release files on Ms. Ibrahim's detention.

Ms. Ibrahim's case has also raised legal questions about detaining people whose names appear on the no-fly list, and it casts light on the role of private contractors in deciding whether someone should be held. The police in San Francisco said they had acted on the instructions of a contractor working for the Homeland Security Department.

The government is fighting back, and there is no guarantee that Ms. Ibrahim, a 44-year-old mother of four, will ever learn more about what happened. However, an examination of her case, along with documents from other lawsuits, government audits and official testimony, offers some broad hints about the murky system.

The watch list is actually a succession of lists, beginning with the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDE, a centralized database of potential suspects. Mr. Travers said that about 10,000 names come in daily through intelligence reports, but that a large percentage are dismissed because they are based on “some combination of circular reporting, poison pens, mistaken identities, lies and so forth.”

Analysts at the counterterrorism center then work with the Terrorist Screening Center of the F.B.I. to add names to what is called the consolidated watch list, which may have any number of consequences for those on it, like questioning by the police during a traffic stop or additional screening crossing the border. That list, in turn, has various subsets, including the no-fly list and the selectee list, which requires passengers to undergo extra screening.

The consolidated list has the names of more than 400,000 people, about 97 percent of them foreigners, while the no-fly and selectee lists have about 6,000 and 20,000, respectively.

The standards for adding names to the lists have gone through a cycle of tightening, then relaxing. After the Sept. 11 attacks, hundreds of names were added with few guidelines, eventually leading to complaints that too many innocent travelers were being stopped. Two years ago, the government developed a reasonable suspicion standard and secret protocols for applying it; their last major revision was outlined in a 72-page memorandum in February 2009 that clarified the “minimum substantive derogatory criteria.”

A federal official involved in the process said that under those rules, associating with a known or suspected terrorist was not enough to warrant being listed; there had to be evidence that the person supported terrorism. The criteria also generally require more than a single source of “derogatory information,” said the official, who requested anonymity to discuss security matters.

A task force formed after the Christmas Day episode is considering changes to the process, including making it easier to label suspects extremists and giving greater weight to credible “single-source walk-ins,” the official said. The suspect in the attempted bombing, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab , was known to American intelligence analysts because his father, a banker in Nigeria, had reported him to the authorities, but he had not been placed on the watch list.

Putting United States citizens on the watch list requires more than just a single tip, although one tip could prompt an investigation that eventually leads to placement on the list. Local police officers are encouraged to file “suspicious activity reports” with the F.B.I. or the Homeland Security Department, which finances about 70 intergovernmental intelligence cooperatives nationwide.

While federal policies prohibit profiling, a wide range of innocent activities can be deemed suspicious. Guidelines distributed by several cooperatives advise landlords to be alert for tenants who prefer ground-floor apartments and have little furniture. Among the warning signs listed by one in Ohio are “immersion in a purely Muslim environment” and the “study of technical subjects” like engineering.

By such standards, Erich Scherfen could look suspicious. A veteran of the Persian Gulf war and a commercial pilot from Pennsylvania, Mr. Scherfen converted to Islam and married a Pakistani-born woman, Rubina Tureen, who runs a small business selling religious books. They have taken part in Islamic conferences and interfaith seminars.

In May 2006, a co-worker told the state police that Mr. Scherfen had retrofitted the family car to carry bombs, court records show. (He said he had simply removed a broken seat from his old Mazda.) Not long after, Mr. Scherfen and Ms. Tureen began being detained at airports, jeopardizing his job.

The couple filed a lawsuit, and his job was saved after a judge was given secret evidence that apparently indicated that Mr. Scherfen had been taken off the selectee list.

“I think some ill-informed people were putting the dots together and came to faulty conclusions,” Ms. Tureen said.

Their lawsuit cited rulings in Ms. Ibrahim's case as precedents.

A Muslim who came to the United States to study civil engineering, Ms. Ibrahim impressed colleagues at Stanford. “Of all the people you could think of who might be on a list of terrorism suspects, she would be pretty close to the bottom,” said Raymond Levitt, one of her faculty advisers.

The judge presiding over her lawsuit appeared skeptical, too.

“It looks like to me it was a monumental mistake, and they identified the wrong person,” the judge, William H. Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco, said at a hearing in December. “I'm just guessing.”

The authorities will not say why they singled out Ms. Ibrahim. A week before her scheduled flight to Malaysia in January 2005, she was visited by two F.B.I. agents, said her lawyer, Marwa Elzankaly.

“They actually claimed they did not know why they were there to interview her,” Ms. Elzankaly said, “and basically just asked her a few background questions about herself, her family, her line of work, her travel plans and her education.”

When the airport ticket agent discovered her name on the no-fly list, he called the San Francisco police, who contacted the Transportation Security Administration in Washington. There, they reached a watch officer working for U.S. Investigations Services, one of several private contractors the agency has hired for its 24-hour operations center.

The contractors' duties “include receiving telephone inquiries and providing direction as to how to handle passengers,” said Kristin Lee, an agency spokeswoman.

The police incident report says the watch officer told the police to “deny the flight to Ibrahim, contact the F.B.I. and detain her for further questioning.” She was driven to a police substation, where she was searched and placed in a holding cell. Eventually, an F.B.I. agent told the police to let her go, adding that she was being moved to the selectee list and could fly home.

Outraged, she decided to sue for wrongful arrest and to find out why she was on the list. But the law creating the T.S.A. made it virtually impossible to mount a legal challenge against it.

Instead, Ms. Ibrahim's lawsuit focused on the F.B.I.'s Terrorist Screening Center, which does not have the same legal protections. After much of her case was thrown out, a divided United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated it.

“If your name or my name or anybody's name in this courtroom were put on that list, we would suffer grievously,” the chief judge, Alex Kozinski, said at a hearing in April 2008. “And we want to have some way of going to our government and possibly to our courts and saying, ‘Look, I shouldn't be on that list.' ”

Another issue raised by Ms. Ibrahim's case is whether inclusion on the no-fly list is sufficient grounds for arrest. At a hearing last December, government lawyers agreed that it was not, although the courts generally allow brief detentions for investigative purposes.

The police, as part of their defense, offered to explain why they detained Ms. Ibrahim, but the F.B.I. and Department of Homeland Security refuse to allow it.

Meanwhile, Ms. Ibrahim earned her doctorate from Stanford but has been unable to return to the United States to participate in the lawsuit. Her lawyers said in a court filing that when she applied for a new visa last September, American Embassy officials in Kuala Lumpur questioned her about the suit, asking what it would take to settle it.

Last month, Ms. Ibrahim accepted a $225,000 settlement from the San Francisco police and U.S. Investigations Services. But she is pursuing her claims against the federal government. None of the defendants' lawyers would comment for this article.

At the December hearing, Judge Alsup showed his displeasure at the government, telling Justice Department lawyers that they were abusing the secrecy privilege.

“You're holding onto this five-year-old information like, you know, like another 9/11 is going to happen if you somehow release it,” the judge said, according to a transcript. “That's just baloney.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/us/07watch.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Study Finds More Woes Following Foster Care

Only half the youths who had turned 18 and “aged out” of foster care were employed by their mid-20s. Six in 10 men had been convicted of a crime, and three in four women, many of them with children of their own, were receiving some form of public assistance. Only six in 100 had completed even a community college degree.

The dismal outlook for youths who are thrust into a shaky adulthood from the foster care system — now numbering some 30,000 annually — has been documented with new precision by a long-term study released Wednesday, the largest to follow such children over many years.

Researchers studied the outcomes for 602 youths in Illinois, Iowa and Wisconsin, and compared them with their peers who had not been in foster care. Most youths had entered the foster care system in their early teens and then were required to leave it at 18 or, in the case of Illinois, 21.

“We took them away from their parents on the assumption that we as a society would do a better job of raising them,” said Mark Courtney , a sociologist at the University of Washington who led the study with colleagues from the Partners for Our Children program at Washington and the Chapin Hall center at the University of Chicago . “We've invested a lot money and time in their care, and by many measures they're still doing very poorly.”

Over the last decade, the federal government and many states have started to assist former foster care youths with education grants, temporary housing subsidies and, in some places, extra years of state custody and support. The new data showed that just over half of them are doing reasonably well and benefit from such aid. But they throw a spotlight, researchers said, on two groups that need more sweeping and lasting help.

About one-fourth of the people in the study, mainly women, are receiving public aid and struggling to raise their own children, usually without a high school degree. Researchers found that one in five in a second group, mainly men, are badly floundering, with multiple criminal convictions, low education and incomes and, often, mental health or substance abuse problems.

Once they leave foster care, these most troubled youths often have no reliable adults to advise them or provide emotional support, said Gary Stangler, director of the Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative , a private foundation. “When these kids make a mistake, it's life altering, they have nothing to fall back on,” Mr. Stangler said.

Finding a mentor who provides “that backbone you need” has made all the difference, said Cameron Anderson, 21, of Tampa, Fla., who entered foster care at 15 after he got into trouble with the law, then lived in group homes.

Mr. Anderson, who is now in community college and works at a printer cartridge company, receives education and other financial aid that has helped him keep an apartment. But he has made some missteps since moving out on his own, he said, like not paying bills in full so he could buy shoes and hanging out with old friends who were bad influences.

Last fall, he was introduced to a mentor, an investor in Tampa, by a Casey program, Connected by 25. The two now speak daily, Mr. Anderson said, discussing “school and life in general, even to the point where he'll say, ‘Hey, are you using protection?' ”

Had he had such a relationship earlier, Mr. Anderson said, “it would have saved me from a ton of bridges I've had to cross.”

While younger children are often adopted when their parents' rights are terminated, fewer prospective parents want to adopt teenagers. Recent research, including the new study, shows that most foster children, even though they have been removed from their homes, maintain ties with a parent or other relative. Some agencies are trying to support such ties or to locate relatives who might adopt the children or provide long-term support.

Illinois, New York, Vermont and the District of Columbia now allow youths to remain in foster care to age 21, and some states help with transitional housing.

Congress in 2008 passed a law providing matching money to states that extend foster care to age 21, something that the authors of the study call for. But in the face of large budget deficits, few states have signed on so far.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/us/07foster.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From the FBI

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THE FBI AND UFOS 

Flying Flapjacks, Saucers, and Saw Blades

04/06/10

If you've ever watched The X-Files or other sci-fi shows like it, you may think that investigating unexplained phenomena is one of the FBI's investigative responsibilities—right along with terrorism, espionage, white-collar crime, etc.  

In fact, the FBI was only occasionally involved in investigating the possibility of UFOs and extraterrestrials over the years. The first Bureau investigations we are aware of began in the summer of 1947—the time of the now well-known incident in Roswell, New Mexico. A rash of reports of flying objects—some shaped like “flapjacks,” saucers, discs, and even a large circular saw blade that supposedly hit a lightning rod on top of a church—started to surface and make headlines across the nation.

Concerned citizens reported many of these strange sightings to the FBI. That wasn't surprising, given that the Bureau had investigated airline crashes such as the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 and aerial dangers like the balloon bombs launched by Japan toward the U.S. Pacific Northwest near the end of World War II. The FBI's lead role in protecting the homeland during the war was also well known, and the Bureau remained front and center in ensuring national security as the Cold War began to unfold.

Initially, it was not clear how UFO sightings should be handled. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover recognized that the Air Force—then part of the U.S. Army—clearly had the lead in such issues, but he did want his agents to investigate any “discs” recovered for their potential impact on FBI responsibilities.

The Army did want the FBI's help—at least at first. On July 30, 1947, the Bureau issued this notice to all of its offices:

(B) Flying Discs – The Bureau, at the request of the Army Air Forces Intelligence, has agreed to cooperate in the investigation of flying discs….You should investigate each instance which is brought to your attention of a sighting of a flying disc in order to ascertain whether or not it is a bona fide sighting, an imaginary one or a prank.

Three years later, that policy changed. A July 1950 FBI statement said that “the jurisdiction and responsibility for investigating flying saucers have been assumed by the United States Air Force. Information received in this matter is immediately turned over to the Air Force, and the FBI does not attempt to investigate these reports or evaluate the information furnished.”

From this point, the FBI's cases on UFOs dropped off dramatically. Neither the public nor the Air Force sought our expertise as they had during the first few years of the Cold War.

There were a few exceptions. In 1977, for example, the Air Force informed us of the end of their “Project Blue Book” investigation of UFO reports. And in 1988, we were asked to look into the release of what appeared to be a 1952 classified document concerning a UFO-related top secret government group called “Majestic 12”—we determined that the document was a fake.

To learn more, see the investigations of “Unusual Phenomena” in our Freedom of Information Act Reading Room.

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/april10/ufos_040610.html

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White Powder Letters Received by Two Schools in the Garland Independent School District

Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Robert E. Casey is requesting the public's assistance in identifying the person or persons responsible for sending two letters containing a white powder substance to the Ethridge School in Garland, Texas, and John Armstrong school in Sachse, Texas.

Earlier this morning, two schools within the Garland Independent School District received letters, through the U.S. Mail, containing white powder. The Garland Police and Fire Department, along with the Sachse Police Department, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, and the FBI responded to the scene. Initial field testing indicated the substance within the envelopes was not toxic and there was no threat to anyone's health or safety. Further laboratory testing is being done in an effort to identify the substance within the envelopes. One school district employee at Ethridge School, who had been exposed to the white powder, was taken to a local hospital as precautionary measure.

The sending of threatening or hoax letters containing a white powder substance is a violation of Title 18, Section 844 (e) and is punishable for up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each letter sent.

SAC Casey has previously stated, and reminds those who may be inclined to send a letter with powder in it, that sending a hoax letter threatening imminent death and containing unknown substances is a serious crime that drains precious, limited first responder resources. Today's mailings resulted in police, fire, and hazmat teams responding to emergency calls in two separate locations, causing anxiety, disruption, and financial costs. Threatening letters, whether they contain white powder or not, even if their threat is a hoax, will be thoroughly investigated by the FBI, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and other law enforcement agencies.

Anyone having information about who may be responsible for sending these white powder hoax letters should call the Dallas FBI office at 972-559-5000 or their local police agency.

http://dallas.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel10/dl040610.htm

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