Residents defend Arizona after immigration law

Conservative Chandler, Ariz., is home to both critics and supporters of the harsh new law. But they agree on one thing: The rest of the country needs to stop hating on their state.

By Nicholas Riccardi, Los Angeles Times

May 6, 2010

Reporting from Chandler, Ariz.

Christie Vollmecke has one thing to say to people calling Arizona racist for passing the toughest law against illegal immigration in the nation: You don't know what we're going through.

There are constant reports on television of criminals smuggling migrants. Just Friday night, a sheriff's deputy patrolling the desert was wounded in a shootout with suspected drug traffickers. Vollmecke says she is too scared to visit the southern part of the state anymore.

"I don't think I'm racist; I don't think the vast majority of us are racist," the 57-year-old real estate agent said. "I just want to feel safe in my own state."

Arizona's law, signed by Republican Gov. Jan Brewer last month, makes it a state crime to lack immigration papers and requires police to determine whether people are in the country legally. It has sparked national calls for boycotts, protest marches across the country and biting cartoons that compare the state to Nazi Germany.

Chandler is the sort of comfortable, conservative suburb that politicians point to when they claim broad local support for the law — 70% of likely voters backed it in one statewide poll. Even here, though, there's a wide range of opinions on the law's merits.

Chandler is a prototypical Phoenix suburb: stucco subdivisions, golf courses, shopping centers and lots of palm and palo verde trees. Its crime rate is comparable to that of Redondo Beach. But residents say it's more than just crime that causes them to be unhappy about illegal immigrants.

Jessica Lonkard, 30, noted that developers were trying to sell new condominiums in the town's faded downtown. "They have 50 day laborers on every street corner every day," she said. "How are they going to sell those?"

Her husband, Nick, added that the law may be "a little drastic," but said it could allow authorities to go round up day laborers at, say, the local Home Depot without bothering Latinos who are citizens.

"I don't like racial profiling," said Nick, 30. Then he paused. "I guess I do." He concluded: "Something's got to be done."

David Padilla used those exact same words to describe his thoughts on the immigration mess. But the 47-year-old garbage collector and U.S. citizen fears police will now be focused on Latinos like himself.

"I don't want to have to carry around my passport," he said. "[But] something's got to be done; you can't have people just running back and forth across the border."

Arizona became the most popular illegal crossing point in the nation in the late 1990s, after increased security on the California border drove migrants east. Crime has steadily dropped here despite that influx, but the routes used by illegal immigrants looking for work are also used by drug smugglers. Despite the numbers showing the state is becoming safer, many Arizonans think crime is on the rise.

Stephanie De La Ossa, 36, grew up near the border in southern Arizona, and remembers how eerie it was to have strangers running through the yard, speaking another language. She's married to a Latino man and said those who accuse Arizona of racism are wrong.

"A lot of people haven't lived in this state," she said of the critics. "They're making it into a race issue, but for the normal, law-abiding citizen it's not."

Local critics and supporters of the law agree on at least one point: The rest of the country needs to stop hating on Arizona.

"I feel sad for Arizona. We're always looked on as cowboy and backward," said Malcolm Hartnell, 59, a teacher who opposes the law. His son-in-law, of Filipino descent, is constantly pulled over by law enforcement officers who are trying to find illegal immigrants. "But Arizona is really a great place to live," he added.

Gjergj Mihilli, 59, owns Mama Mia, a shop at the southern edge of Chandler's downtown that caters to Latino immigrants. He argues that the immigrant influx has been good for the city's economy and safety. "When Ronald Reagan was president, he gave amnesty to 10 million Mexicans," said Mihilli, an immigrant from Italy. "The colors of the flag of this country did not change."

He too is dismayed by the reaction of the country to Arizona's new law — but only because he fears the backlash will devastate the economy. He cited a Chicago friend who called him after the law was passed and asked, "What's going on in Arizona?"

It was more than a bout of friendly ribbing. The man is in the hotel industry and was looking to open new locations in the state. He has since decided that the atmosphere is too toxic for that.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-arizona-chandler-20100506,0,3894326,print.story

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U.S. analyzes glitches in Times Square car bomb manhunt

Officials move to plug holes in the system that almost let suspect Faisal Shahzad fly out of the country, and look at whether investigators should have been alerted to Shahzad sooner.

By Ken Dilanian and Richard A. Serrano, Tribune Washington Bureau

May 6, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The federal government began requiring airlines Wednesday to recheck no-fly lists every two hours, an effort to patch a hole in the security net that allowed the man suspected of putting a bomb in Times Square to board a jetliner hours after being barred from air travel.

The new rules were designed to correct a glitch that marred an otherwise successful law enforcement operation that caught Faisal Shahzad 53 hours after authorities say he drove a bomb-laden SUV into one of the world's major tourist centers.

"This is a success story, as far as I'm concerned," said Ralph Basham, who was commissioner of Customs and Border Protection and head of the Secret Service during the George W. Bush administration. "In my opinion, this was at warp speed, the way they were able to bring this thing to a close."

Rep. Jane Harman, the California Democrat who chairs the Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence, said: "I understand there were glitches, but that's why we have a layered system. They got the guy."

Still, huge questions lingered in the wake of the failed attack, including what allegedly prompted Shahzad, a 30-year-old Pakistani American who had built a stable, suburban life with his wife and children in Connecticut, to turn to extremism.

Government officials and terrorism experts also were pondering whether anything could or should have alerted authorities to Shahzad, who was pulled aside in February for special screening by customs officials because he had spent time in Pakistan.

"We've got to find out a lot more about his connections in Pakistan, his travel records, who he may have been traveling with … whether or not authorities had information about those people and whether we may have missed connections that way," said Juan Zarate, who was deputy national security advisor for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009.

Looking forward, experts said local and federal officials had to refocus on the types of threats they are likely to encounter in the future.

"I'm unwilling to call this a failure, but at the same time, we need to understand there's been a basic shift in strategy about how they're going to come at us, and I think we need to learn from that," said Frances Townsend, who was the senior counterterrorism advisor to former President George W. Bush.

American-based extremists "understand you don't need a big, complicated attack to have an impact," she said. "You can have a dramatic political and economic impact with a failed moron."

Although a naturalized American citizen, Shahzad had family and friends in Pakistan and traveled there extensively. Investigators are trying to determine whether he had ties to extremist groups.

Several people who had contact with Shahzad have been arrested in Pakistan, including a member of Jaish-e-Muhammad, an Al Qaeda-allied militant group, intelligence sources in Karachi said Wednesday.

Shahzad has been charged with terrorism, attempting to use weapons of mass destruction, and explosives violations, but has not yet appeared before a federal judge for arraignment. It was not clear when a hearing would be held. A scheduled appearance was canceled Tuesday in part because of Shahzad's continuing cooperation with investigators.

In a criminal complaint, U.S. authorities said Shahzad acknowledged that he traveled to the Waziristan region in the Pakistani tribal region for training in bomb-making. The complaint did not specify whether Shahzad went to North or South Waziristan, but both regions long have been strongholds for the Pakistani Taliban.

The saga began Saturday night, when a Times Square vendor alerted two police officers to a smoking 1993 Nissan Pathfinder on the southwest corner of 45th Street and Broadway. The officers called in the bomb squad, which defused the makeshift device.

A vehicle identification number on the engine block started investigators down a trail that led to Shahzad.

After investigators pieced together his identify, Shahzad's name was placed on the no-fly list at 12:39 p.m. Monday, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

But he was able to buy a one-way ticket with cash around 7:30 p.m. and later to board an Emirates airliner headed to Dubai. The plane was scheduled to take off at 11 p.m. Monday.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials, who review every airline passenger manifest 30 minutes before departure, matched his name and other details with information from the no-fly list and pulled him off the plane after calling it back to the gate.

"As we saw with Faisal Shahzad … the airline is responsible for manually checking the name against the no-fly list within 24 hours," a Department of Homeland security official said. "In his case, the airline seemingly didn't check the name, and the suspect was allowed to purchase a ticket and obtain a boarding pass."

In a statement, Emirates did not address how it handled the no-fly list, but said: "Emirates fully cooperated with and responded immediately to all local and federal authorities on all matters related to" the flight.

Under the new rules, the airline would be required to recheck the list within 2 hours of being notified that a new name was being placed on the list under special circumstances.

Beginning later this year, the Transportation Security Administration plans to take over responsibility for checking passenger names against no-fly lists from airlines. The move comes after a long battle with privacy advocates, who opposed granting the government that authority.

In another mishap during the investigation, Shahzad slipped away from FBI surveillance after he left his house in Bridgeport on Monday en route to the airport, according a top FBI official familiar with the investigation.

That was not at all unusual, said the official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of surveillance operations. "It's not like on TV, where you follow a guy and it's all clean and nice," the official said.

John Timoney, who spent 29 years with the New York Police Department and was police chief in Philadelphia and Miami, agreed.

"I've done surveillance, and I've lost suspects and found them again," he said. "That's typical."

The most troubling aspect of the case to terrorism experts was what the attempted attack says about the evolving threat from violent Islamic extremism. 

There have been a number of cases in recent years involving American citizens or those living in the United States who attempted small-scale attacks that are harder to defend. In the Times Square case, only the seeming incompetence of the bomb-maker's skills averted casualties.

The device, cobbled together with M-88 firecrackers, propane tanks, gasoline and fertilizer, had "a number of opportunities to fail,"  John Pistole, deputy director of the FBI, told reporters.

When ordinary people without longstanding extremist ties become radicalized, they are difficult to detect, Harman said.

"It a tough problem," she said. "Think about this kid living in the suburbs of Connecticut. Nobody knew who he was. How do you uncover this?"

Harman and other experts theorize that Al Qaeda and other extremist groups, long believed to have been planning another spectacular attack on the level of Sept. 11, are now willing to settle for smaller-bore violence.

"Perhaps they haven't been able to pull off the big bang, and so they've decided that in order to be relevant they will go conventional," she said. "The second theory is they're getting somewhat desperate because a lot of their leadership has been decapitated."

The problem, said Paul Rosensweig, who was a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the Bush administration, is that small attacks such as vehicle bombs are difficult, if not impossible, to stop.

"Are we going regulate the purchase of propane gas, firecrackers and fertilizer?  That means regulating every farmer in America," he said. "That's a hard thing to do."

He said government resources are best reserved for the biggest threats: possible nuclear, chemical and biological attacks.

"The American public has to understand," Rosensweig said. "We cannot protect against everything, all the time, everywhere. "

Townsend disagrees. What's needed is a "dynamic and target-based intelligence system" she said, that would pay special attention to a person who spends five months in Pakistan while his house goes into foreclosure, as happened with Shahzad.

"In hindsight," she said, "you say, 'maybe that's the trigger.'"

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ny-bomb-20100506,0,4690027,print.story

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Link emerges between Times Square bomb attempt and Pakistani militant group

A member of the Al Qaeda-allied Pakistani militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad is being held by authorities in Pakistan. That man spent time with Faisal Shahzad, the person charged in the failed bomb plot, although sources say that does not mean Jaish-e-Muhammad engineered the plot.

By Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times

May 5, 2010

Reporting from Karachi, Pakistan

One of the men arrested in Pakistan this week in connection with the failed attempt to bomb Times Square is a member of Jaish-e-Muhammad, an Al Qaeda-allied Pakistani militant group, intelligence sources in the city of Karachi said Wednesday.

The revelation marks the first indication that a specific Pakistani militant group has been associated with the case of Faisal Shahzad, the 30-year-old Pakistani American charged in the failed bomb plot. But it does not necessarily mean that the organization engineered the plot or directed the suspect.

The intelligence sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media on the case.

The man arrested Tuesday in Karachi, Sheik Mohammed Rehan, allegedly drove with Shahzad from Karachi to Peshawar on July 7, 2009, in a pickup truck, authorities said. They returned to Karachi July 22. It is not known why they went to Peshawar and whether they met with anyone there.

Peshawar is a large, mostly Pashtun city perched on the edge of Pakistan's tribal areas, where Al Qaeda, the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups maintain strongholds. It is also where Shahzad's father and other relatives live.

Jaish-e-Muhammad emerged in the mid-1990s as a militant organization primarily focused on overthrowing Indian forces in the Indian-administered portion of Kashmir. Most of the violent attacks linked to the group have occurred in Kashmir, the disputed region claimed by India and Pakistan.

Over the years, though, the group has expanded its reach and has trained thousands of young men to fight U.S. and NATO forces battling the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was also linked to the 2002 kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl in Karachi.

Based principally in Punjab province, the heartland of Pakistan, the group has been designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government and was banned by Pakistan in 2002.

But experts believe Jaish-e-Muhammad still benefits from links with Pakistan's powerful government intelligence community. Some experts believe Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency facilitated the group's formation.

Authorities said they have not linked Jaish-e-Muhammad or any other militant group to two other men arrested Tuesday in Karachi in connection with the case. Pakistani officials have not explained why those men — Tauseef Ahmed, a cousin of Shahzad's, and Ahmed's father-in-law — were detained.

Pakistani authorities are continuing to investigate any potential link Shahzad might have with the Pakistani Taliban, the militant group based in the tribal areas that has beset the country with waves of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks over the last two years.

In the criminal complaint filed in Shahzad's case, U.S. authorities said Shahzad acknowledged traveling to the Waziristan region in the tribal areas for training in bomb-making. The complaint did not specify whether Shahzad went to North or South Waziristan, but both regions have long been strongholds for the Pakistani Taliban.

Several young extremists from Western Europe accused recently of trying to carry out terrorist attacks in the West or planning such attacks have traveled beforehand to Pakistan's tribal areas for training with militants there.

Pakistan has launched military offensives in South Waziristan and other tribal regions, but it has yet to carry out a decisive attack against militants in North Waziristan, home to Pakistani Taliban leaders and groups such as the Haqqani network that have focused their violence on Western troops in neighboring Afghanistan instead of Pakistan.

Shahzad's arrest, and his admission that he trained in Waziristan, could prompt the U.S. to make the case more forcefully to Pakistan to mount an offensive against militants in North Waziristan. Up until now, the government in Islamabad has rejected Washington's demands that the Pakistani military shift its focus to that area, arguing that it already has thousands of troops in the Swat Valley and in much of the tribal belt, and is stretched too thin to deploy more troops elsewhere.

In a recently released video, the Pakistani Taliban claimed it planned the attempted attack in Times Square in retaliation for the U.S. drone missile strike that killed the insurgent group's leader, Baitullah Mahsud, in August. Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mahsud in a separate video warned that his insurgent group would soon carry out attacks in major American cities.

Although Pakistani officials have agreed to cooperate in the Shahzad case, they remain reluctant to accept the possibility that the Pakistani Taliban may be linked to the Times Square bomb incident. If the insurgent group's claim is true, it would mark its first attack outside South Asia.

"Anybody can claim anything, but whether the organization has that kind of reach is questionable," army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas told the Associated Press. "I don't think they have the capacity to reach the next level."

In Pabbi, the small northwestern Pakistan town where Shahzad was born, villagers said news of his arrest came as a shock, mostly because there never was any sign of radicalism in his upbringing. His father, Bahar-ul Haq, is a retired senior air force officer who years ago moved his family to Hayatabad, an upscale district of Peshawar.

"I know his family for a long time, and they are very humble people," said Faiz Ahmad, a Pabbi villager. "I met Shahzad a year ago.... I found him to be very calm and quiet."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/asia/la-fg-pakistan-shahzad-20100506,0,3476902,print.story

Budget cuts prompted LAPD to eliminate a counter-terrorism task force

Duties of the Protective Security Task Force — officers who went undercover at high-risk events and tested security of key buildings — will done by others in counter-terrorism bureau, officials say.

By Joel Rubin, Los Angeles Times

May 6, 2010

Los Angeles Police Department officials acknowledged Wednesday that they disbanded a counter-terrorism unit earlier this year as part of Chief Charlie Beck's efforts to put more patrol officers on the streets amid budget cuts.

The Protective Security Task Force team consisted of about two dozen plainclothes cops who were dispatched to provide a "cloak" of high-level security at buildings or events that had been threatened or were otherwise believed to be at risk, said Deputy Chief Michael Downing, head of the LAPD's Counter Terrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau.

Task force officers also tested the vulnerabilities of city skyscrapers, landmark buildings and other possible high-value targets and then worked with the buildings' private security forces to review ways to tighten their defenses, he said.

Officials said disbanding the unit was a tough decision, but stressed that it made up only a small part of the LAPD's counter-terrorism efforts and that the bureau's primary function of gathering intelligence continues. Roughly 270 people are assigned to the bureau, Downing said.

"It was a valued asset and I would have liked to keep it," he said, "but every part of the department has to make sacrifices right now and this made the most sense."

Beck said the reduction won't hinder the department's counter-terrorism efforts. "Nothing is going undone, it's just getting done in a different way. It is a very small amount of people who were moved."

In the wake of New York City's failed terrorist attack this week, the cut underscores the difficult decisions Beck faces as he struggles to mitigate the impacts of the city's fiscal crisis.

Since the Times Square bomb was discovered Saturday, city officials in New York have pressed the federal government for more anti-terrorism funding to help the New York Police Department. Some of that money would go for more video surveillance systems for high-value targets. Like L.A., New York City has been tightening its belt.

Since taking over the department late last year, Beck has reassigned about 300 officers, using them to bolster the ranks in the department's 21 regional police stations.

Coming into the chief's job, Beck said the LAPD had become too dependent on special crime-fighting units that operated independently from the regional stations and said he planned to give station commanders control over more officers.

That idea took on added urgency as city coffers ran low and the department could no longer afford to pay officers for overtime.

Beck instituted a policy that requires officers to take time off in lieu of cash payments. With hundreds of officers forced to take time off each month, the policy has left station commanders scrambling to adequately patrol the city.

The reassigned officers have provided some relief. Beck, however, has indicated that the fiscal crisis forced him to move more officers than he otherwise would have wanted.

"We're having to rob Peter to pay Paul," he has said on several occasions.

http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/topofthetimes/topstories/la-me-0506-counter-terror-lapd-20100506,0,1022575,print.story

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Inmates allege serious abuse by L.A. County prison guards

An ACLU report includes complaints from scores of prisoners who say deputies assaulted them or arranged attacks by other inmates.

By Robert Faturechi, Los Angeles Times

May 6, 2010

Dozens of inmates at Los Angeles County's Men's Central Jail have alleged serious physical abuse by deputies — broken ribs, black eyes and head wounds that needed to be stapled shut, according to a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday.

The extent of abuse at the downtown L.A. facility is impossible to gauge, the report said, because the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department refuses to share information on the number of use-of-force incidents investigated and its findings.

Sheriff's Department officials said all complaints are investigated thoroughly by the Office of Independent Review, which oversees the department.

"Whether these investigations are shared isn't relevant," said sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore. "What is relevant is the complaint itself is thoroughly investigated."

The ACLU report, spanning a 12-month period from 2008 to 2009, was based on weekly visits to the facility and inmate complaints. Many were anonymous, the report said, because inmates feared retribution from deputies. The complaints detail direct assaults from deputies and prisoner attacks orchestrated by guards.

Whitmore denied that guards masterminded any prisoner attacks.

The civil rights advocacy group has long called for Men's Central Jail to be shut down, or have its inmate population significantly reduced. Sheriff Lee Baca and others from the department have acknowledged deficiencies in the past, lobbying to open a more modern facility.

The department is seeking federal stimulus money to revamp the jail and replace it with a "high-tech facility," Whitmore said.

The report includes a complaint from an inmate who says he was assaulted by about a dozen guards. He said they entered his cell and hit him with flashlights repeatedly. "They used their flashlights like a bat, like I was a baseball or something," the inmate told the ACLU. The inmate reported that he needed stitches but refused to visit the medical clinic because guards had intimidated him.

"I refused stitches. I refused a tetanus shot," the complaint says. "I refused everything."

The report suggests cutting the number of inmates by releasing some and monitoring them through electronic devices and drug and mental health programs.

Whitmore downplayed overcrowding at the facility, saying its capacity is 5,200 inmates with a current population of 4,175. In recent years, great improvements have been made, Whitmore said, especially compared to decades ago when "inmates were sleeping on the roof."

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/crime/la-me-aclu-jail-20100506,0,7856362,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Money Woes, Long Silences and Islamic Zeal

Theirs was an arranged marriage: two well-educated children of prominent Pakistani families set up through a mutual friend. He was the quiet one; she was the one who laughed at parties.

At their wedding in Peshawar six years ago, men and women danced separately but also together, “a rarity at that time,” recalled one guest. “It was such a huge gathering that even their family friends from Qatar came.”

When they returned to the United States, his colleagues at the cosmetics maker Elizabeth Arden celebrated with a small office party.

The husband, Faisal Shahzad , put photographs of his wife, Huma Mian, on his desk at the Arden office in Stamford, Conn. They bought a brand-new house for $273,000, 35 miles away on Long Hill Avenue in Shelton. By the time they moved in, she was pregnant, the neighbors recalled.

As another day passed with Mr. Shahzad talking to investigators about the car bomb he had admitted driving into Times Square on Saturday, details emerged on Wednesday about the couple and their life together, along with speculation about his radicalization. People who knew them, both in Connecticut and in Pakistan , said he had changed in the past year or so, becoming more reserved and more religious as he faced what someone who knows the family well called “their financial troubles.”

Last year, one Pakistani friend said, he even asked his father, Bahar ul-Haq, a retired high-ranking air force pilot in Pakistan, for permission to fight in Afghanistan.

Mr. Haq, now in his 70s, adamantly refused, according to a person familiar with the conversation, saying that he disapproved of the mission and reminding his son that Islam does not permit a man to abandon his wife or children.

As a newlywed, the wedding guest said of Mr. Shahzad by e-mail from Pakistan, “there was no sign of him being extremist or, for that matter, he wasn't a bit religious.” But in the past couple of years, after changing jobs and fathering two children, Mr. Shahzad “started talking more of Islam.” The guest spoke on the condition he not be identified because of concerns about his safety in the wake of the attempted car bombing.

“The recession had taken a toll on them, I guess,” he wrote in an e-mail message from Pakistan. He said that their money worries became apparent in 2008 or 2009 and that Mr. Shahzad “lost his way during the financial problems.” JPMorgan Chase has since moved to foreclose on the Shelton house, which the couple had abandoned in a hurry, leaving behind clothes and toys.

In February, Mr. Shahzad leased a two-bedroom apartment in Bridgeport, Conn. His landlord said he never saw Mr. Shahzad's wife. Faiz Ahmad, a friend from the Shahzad family's ancestral village, Mohib Banda, said that when he last saw Mr. Shahzad, at a wedding a year and a half ago, he was sure that something was wrong. Mr. Shahzad seemed changed, he said, sitting by himself and not talking very much.

He was “completely quiet on the sofa, like someone who has some worries, and undergoing some internal change,” Mr. Ahmad said. “So he was sitting silent, silent. And silence in itself is a question.”

A Pakistani man said that an acquaintance of his who was a friend of the Shahzad family told him that within the past year, Mr. Shahzad had peered critically at a glass of whiskey the friend was holding, indicating a judgmental stance typical for rigid jihadis.

Mr. Shahzad, now 30, appeared to be tracing a familiar arc of frustration, increasing religiosity and, finally, violence. He was born and raised in Pakistan, with a privileged upbringing in a moderate family that lived in at least three places — Karachi, Rawalpindi and Mohib Banda. Mr. Haq, according to Mr. Ahmad, “was a man of modern thinking and of the modern age.”

Family friends interviewed on Wednesday said they believed that Mr. Haq was in hiding in the city of Dera Ghazi Khan in western Pakistan, where the family has wheat fields. Mr. Shahzad's wife was also believed to be in Pakistan, though her whereabouts was unknown. Dawn, a Pakistani daily, reported that her father had been arrested in Karachi, but Pakistani authorities would not confirm that.

Mr. Shahzad, the youngest of four, was born into a new generation in the years after a military autocrat, Zia ul-Haq, began to inject a rigid version of Islam into Pakistan's education system. At the same time, hard-line mosques were given money and land, elevating a narrow, often sectarian world view that cast a pall over young Pakistanis.

Ms. Mian, the oldest of four, was born in Colorado, though she spent summer vacations in Pakistan and lived with her family in Qatar for a while as a child, according to the wedding guest. Her father, Mohammad Asif Mian, earned two master's degrees at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colo., in the 1980s, and has written four books.

In the best-selling “Project Economics and Decision Analysis,” published in 2002, Mr. Mian thanked family members for their patience and support, adding, “Special thanks to my daughters at the University of Colorado for being on the dean's list; this has contributed a lot to my enthusiasm.”

Ms. Mian and her sisters, Saba and Hina, all studied at Denver-area colleges and shared a house just off the campus of the University of Colorado in Boulder in 2003 and 2004.

Huma Mian married Mr. Shahzad soon after earning an accounting degree in 2004, and moved to Connecticut, where he was pursuing an M.B.A. at the University of Bridgeport and, on an H-1B visa for highly skilled workers, was working as an operation analyst at Elizabeth Arden, managing and analyzing accounts receivable, according to a résumé obtained by MSNBC.

“I was always surprised, with her having to buy milk for the baby and everything else, how they afforded this on one income,” recalled Brenda J. Thurman, a neighbor in Shelton.

The couple did not socialize much with people on their block. “It was three years before I knew she spoke English,” Ms. Thurman said.

Ms. Thurman said that Ms. Mian left for a couple of months in late 2008 or early 2009, and that Mr. Shahzad told her she was going to Pakistan to have their second child. Within a few months of her return, they packed up and left again last summer. Mr. Shahzad, who had left Elizabeth Arden in 2006 to become a client reporting analyst at Affinion, a financial marketing services company in Norwalk, Conn., quit his job there.

Piles of garbage remained outside the home in Shelton this week, filled with clues about their lives. There were packets of Nair, moisturizer with Arabic writing on the back, a makeup brush, a Japanese cherry blossom scent body spritzer, wrapping paper and gift bags that appeared to be for baby gifts.

There was an envelope addressed to “Faisal, Huma and Alishaba,” which contained a card proclaiming, “Congratulations on your new little girl!”

How, why or where Mr. Shahzad became radicalized remains unclear. Dr. Saud Anwar, the founder of a Pakistani-American association in Connecticut, said that as soon as Mr. Shahzad's name surfaced in connection with the car bomb, he canvassed Connecticut Muslim and Pakistani groups and found he was not involved with any of them.

But Dr. Anwar said he had been in touch with a university classmate of Mr. Shahzad's, a man of Pakistani descent who told Dr. Anwar he did not want to be interviewed by reporters. The classmate said he had remained friends with the couple and had noticed something different about Mr. Shahzad about a year ago.

“His personality had changed — he had become more introverted,” Dr. Anwar said the classmate told him. “He had a stronger religious identity, where he felt more strongly and more opinionated about things.” Dr. Anwar said he had asked the classmate whether this change had come through association with a group, and the friend said it seemed to be “on his own that he was learning all these things.”

Mr. Ahmad, the friend from Mohib Banda, speculated that the transformation was rooted in Karachi. An associate of Mr. Shahzad's was arrested in a mosque believed to have ties with a militant group in Karachi early Tuesday, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

“The question is who has put Faisal in this path?” Mr. Ahmad asked. “The Faisal with the beard that you see, he was not the old Faisal. He was like you, like me, handsome, liberal and an active person.”

According to Pakistan's information minister, Mr. Shahzad traveled to Pakistan 13 times in the past seven years. One Pakistani official who knew the family said it was unlikely that Mr. Shahzad would have been radicalized in Pakistan if he was only on short trips, which tend to be dominated by family commitments like weddings; the criminal complaint against him filed on Tuesday says that he returned in February from a five-month stint. It also said Mr. Shahzad had been trained in bomb-making in Waziristan.

Another family friend in Pakistan, Kifayat Ali, called Mr. Shahzad “emotional” and said that he used to carry a dagger around with him as a boy. He speculated that Mr. Shahzad had become enraged by the United States' military actions, fueled by the Pakistani press blaring conspiracy theories and anti-American vitriol.

“A person sees the brutality of Afghanistan and Iraq,” Mr. Ali noted. “These scenes affect people.”

The résumé posted Wednesday on msnbc.com said Mr. Shahzad held three different positions at Elizabeth Arden over five years starting in mid-2001, and then spent three years at Affinion. At Arden, he said he had “decreased bad debt write-offs by 47 percent” and “recovered over $2.5 mil in ‘lost' revenue.” At Affinion, he said he prepared “monthly commission forecasting for high-profile Affinion clients such as Citibank, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland, Peoples Bank, US Bank, Wells Fargo and a couple of smaller clients.”

But James Hart, an Affinion spokesman, said “there's a lot of résumé puffery in there” and that Mr. Shahzad had been “one rung up from entry level” when he left.

A former manager at Elizabeth Arden said that he was the only Pakistani working for the company at the time, but never asked for special accommodation for prayer. And she remembered that on Sept. 11, Mr. Shahzad, like everyone else, huddled around the one radio in the office, listening to bulletins about the attacks on the World Trade Center.

“I think he was just normal,” she recalled. “Isn't it always the case, though? It's always the normal ones that you don't really think they're going to do something like this.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/nyregion/06profile.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Suspect's Gun Proved Easy to Obtain

The mammoth clock-to-wire-to-gasoline-to-propane car bomb that the authorities said Faisal Shahzad hoped would claim many lives in Times Square has been analyzed, diagrammed, prodded and examined. But not long before his arrest, Mr. Shahzad was also equipped with a less-eccentric — and yet more dependably lethal — weapon. And he owned it legally.

It is fearsome looking, a carbine hybrid of a pistol and a long gun with a mouthful of a name: the Kel-Tec Sub Rifle 2000 . Mr. Shahzad bought it, new, in March for about $400. It was found in the Isuzu Trooper that he drove to Kennedy International Airport on Monday, loaded, with multiple extra clips.

Because the Kel-Tec Sub Rifle 2000 is classified as a rifle, it required no permit, as pistols do in Connecticut. But with its folding stock, hand grip and appetite for pistol ammunition and not rifle ammunition, the Kel-Tec was about as close as one could get to a pistol that is not technically one.

The authorities have not disclosed, if they have learned, what Mr. Shahzad planned to do with that gun. But some law enforcement experts have surmised that he had it to fire at officers in case he was pulled over.

The Kel-Tec was briefly center stage in Washington on Wednesday as New York's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly , addressed the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He said that Mr. Shahzad bought the gun amid obtaining supplies for the bomb.

“It appears from some of his other activities that March is when he decided to put this plan in motion,” Mr. Kelly told the committee . Of the gun, he said, “It may well have been an indicator of putting something catastrophic in motion.”

The terrorists in Mumbai, India, in 2008 carried out a rampage that killed more than 160 people chiefly with the use of automatic weapons. The guns were much more powerful than the one Mr. Shahzad bought, and the strategy was simple: kill as many people as possible in a city crowded with tourists and residents.

Mr. Shahzad — whom the authorities have described as bent on taking American lives — made missteps while he was designing and building his bomb, including buying what looks to be the wrong kind of fertilizer aimed at making the explosion more powerful. But all along he possessed a weapon that could have easily done extreme damage, one rapidly fired round at a time.

The Kel-Tec, while not being capable of producing the far-reaching devastation of a well-constructed car bomb, at least might have produced a measure of Mr. Shahzad's desired effect.

It was about two months ago when he walked into Valley Firearms in Shelton, Conn., which is on a downtown street beside a tattoo parlor and beneath a karate studio. Two American flags fly in front of the gun store.

Inside were the urban parapets of the trade: metal prison bars behind the windows, glass cases securing the guns. He had not lived in Shelton for nine months, having had lost his home there to foreclosure while on a long trip to Pakistan. For the last month, he had lived 12 miles away, in an apartment in Bridgeport.

On its recording to callers to the store, Valley Firearms described itself as “the area's largest used gun buyer.”

Mr. Shahzad made his choice of gun and produced his Connecticut driver's license. He left for a two-week waiting period, and returned March 15, putting down about $400 not for a used gun, but for a new rifle, serial number E7L98, according to a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives tracing report.

The gun was manufactured by Kel-Tec CNC Industries, founded 19 years ago in Cocoa, Fla., which makes semiautomatic pistols, rifles and the Sub 2000, a combination of the two. The gun was designed by George Kellgren, perhaps best known for having designed early versions of the Tec-9 handgun that became a favorite of street criminals and was later banned.

The Kel-Tec gun is about two and a half feet long, but for storage or carrying, the barrel can be folded back over the stock, cutting its length almost in half.

It weighs four pounds unloaded, has front and rear sights for aiming and a grip like one on a pistol. The rifle is unusual in that it fires pistol rounds — in this particular gun's case, 9-millimeter rounds. It fires as quickly as one can pull the trigger; it is not a machine gun. The number of bullets it holds varies with the size of the magazine. Kel-Tec sells it with 10-round magazines.

It is, in effect, a low-powered rifle. Unlike those of some rifles, its bullets probably would not penetrate a police officer's bullet-resistant vest, a law enforcement official said.

It was unclear what attracted Mr. Shahzad to that particular gun. “Why not just get a pistol if somebody wants a handgun round?” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the case.

One theory: “It looks more intimidating than a pistol. It's an intimidating-looking contraption. It's black, it has some plastic and polymer — it has that military look, but all it really is a really big handgun.”

Unlike the Tec-9, it is not frequently used by criminals, the official said. The manufacturer said the long barrel increases accuracy and range. “The superior precision is also very useful against small or partially covered targets at shorter range,” Kel-Tec said on its Web site. “The amount of training to master the SUB 2000 is only a fraction of that required for a handgun.”

A Kel-Tec customer service representative named Bill — company policy allows employees to use first names only so that they cannot be identified and threatened by someone who wants guns — said the Sub 2000 is good for hunting and target shooting. The company sells 2,000 or 3,000 of them a year.

Suggested retail price: $390.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , in his testimony on Wednesday before the Senate committee, urged that suspects on terrorism watch lists be blocked from buying guns and explosives.

“When gun dealers run background checks, should F.B.I. agents have the authority to block sales of guns and explosives to those on the terror watch lists — and deemed too dangerous to fly?” the mayor asked. “I believe strongly that they should.”

Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office has released data showing that suspects on the terror watch lists were able to buy guns and explosives from licensed dealers in the United States more than 1,100 times from 2004 to 2010. Such a statistic seems irrelevant in Mr. Shahzad's case, as he was on no such list in March.

It is unclear whether, in the 50 days Mr. Shahzad was a registered gun owner, he ever once pulled the trigger.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/nyregion/06gun.html?hp

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On Formspring, an E-Vite to Teenage Insults

It is the online version of the bathroom wall in school, the place to scrawl raw, anonymous gossip.

Formspring.me , a relatively new social networking site, has become a magnet for comments, many of them nasty and sexual, among the Facebook generation.

While Formspring is still under the radar of many parents and guidance counselors, over the last two months it has become an obsession for thousands of teenagers nationwide, a place to trade comments and questions like: Are you still friends with julia? Why wasn't sam invited to lauren's party? You're not as hot as u think u are. Do you wear a d cup? You talk too much. You look stupid when you laugh.

By setting up a free Formspring account and linking it to their Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook accounts, young people invite their hundreds of online friends to ask questions or post comments, without having to identify themselves.

In part, Formspring is just the latest place to hang out and exchange gossip, as teenagers have always done. But because of the anonymity, the banter is unvarnished.

Comments and questions go into a private mailbox, where the user can ignore, delete or answer them. Only the answered ones are posted publicly — leading parents and guidance counselors to wonder why so many young people make public so many nasty comments about their looks, friends and sexual habits.

“I'd never heard of Formspring until yesterday, but when I started asking kids, every seventh and eighth grader I asked said they used it,” said Christine Ruth, a middle school counselor in Linwood, N.J. “In seventh grade, especially, it's a lot of ‘Everyone knows you're a slut,' or ‘You're ugly.' It seems like even when it's inappropriate and vicious, the kids want the attention, so they post it. And who knows what they're getting that's so devastating that they don't post it?”

Users can choose not to accept anonymous questions, but most young people seem to ignore that option. And some Formspring users say it is precisely the negative comments that interest them.

“Nice stuff is not why you get it,” said Ariane Barrie-Stern, a freshman at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School in New York City. “I think it's interesting to find out what people really think that they don't have the guts to say to you. If it's hurtful, you have to remind yourself that it doesn't really mean anything.”

Ariane, who has more than 100 posts on her site, said she had not been terribly bothered by anything she has read so far, but she acknowledged that after one comment about a certain pair of leggings, she stopped wearing them.

Her father, Larry Stern, who like most other parents interviewed had never heard of Formspring until a reporter's call, was aghast.

“It's just shocking that kids have access to all these things on the Internet and we don't even know about it,” Mr. Stern said. “And it's disturbing that what goes on there will influence how somebody behaves. How do you block it? How do you monitor it?”

Even teenagers who do not set up Formspring accounts can peruse their friends' accounts to see if they are mentioned.

Many families on Long Island became aware of Formspring after the March suicide of Alexis Pilkington , a 17-year-old West Islip soccer player who had received many nasty messages.

Since it began in late November, Formspring has caught on rapidly. More than 28 million people visit the site each month, 14 million of them in the United States, according to Quantcast, a service that analyzes Web traffic.

The company, started in Indianapolis by John Wechsler and Ade Olonoh, recently raised $2.5 million from a group of Silicon Valley investors and moved to San Francisco.

According to Formspring, more than three million questions have been asked and answered on the site. Mr. Olonoh said in an e-mail message that the company did not know what percentage of users were teenagers.

Formspring is not the first site to allow anonymous comments. Some schools say students have been demoralized by comments on Honesty Box, a Facebook add-on. And Juicy Campus, a college gossip site, caused so much grief that some colleges blocked it, and some state attorneys general began consumer-protection investigations. The site shut down last year.

Formspring is one of many question-and-answer Internet sites that are widely used to find, say, the calorie count of avocados. But Formspring spread like wildfire among young people, who used it to for more intimate topics — or flat-out cyberbullying.

Many schools say they have seen students crushed by criticism of their breasts, their body odor or their behavior at the last party.

“There's nothing positive on there, absolutely nothing, but the kids don't seem to be able to stop reading, even if people are saying terrible things about them,” said Maggie Dock, a middle school counselor in Kinnelon, N.J. “I asked one girl, ‘If someone was throwing rocks at you, what would you do?' She said she'd run, she'd move away. But she won't stop reading what people say about her.”

In some schools, the Formspring craze may already be burning out.

“We all got Formspring about two months ago, when it began showing in people's Facebook status,” said a 14-year-old from a New York City private school. “It's actually gone down a little bit in the past few weeks, at least in my grade, because a lot of people realized it wasn't a good thing, that people were getting hurt, or posting awful comments.”

Some young Formspring users say they strive for a light touch in answering questions about their relationships (hookups, that is, or “hu” in online parlance). Several said they admired friends' skills at deflecting the often-asked question about how far they had gone, with answers like, “I've been to Morocco.”

One mother in Westchester County, N.Y., discovered Formspring when her daughter came to her, sobbing, after reading putdowns of her breasts and her teeth.

“She was very, very upset,” the woman said. “She's always been self-conscious, and in a way this just flushed out what people might been thinking all along. She worked very hard on figuring out how to answer. But there's a kind of obsessiveness to it. She still wants to read everything.”

Unknown to her daughter, the woman has learned her password, and occasionally checks her Facebook and Formspring accounts.

“The comments are all gross and sexual,” the mother said. “And yet, of course, this is coming from her friends. I wish I could just erase it, but all of her friends are online, and so much of their social interaction is online that I don't think I could just take away her Internet access. But I do think this whole online social media thing is a huge experiment on our children.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06formspring.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Government Tightens No-Fly Rules

WASHINGTON — Homeland security officials on Wednesday ordered airlines to speed up checks of names added to the no-fly list, a requirement that might have prevented Faisal Shahzad , the accused Times Square bomber, from boarding a flight to Dubai on Monday night.

Airlines have been required to check the no-fly list for updates only every 24 hours. But the new rule, sent to airlines on Wednesday to take effect immediately, requires that they check within two hours of receiving notification that a high-priority name has been added to the list.

In the case of Mr. Shahzad, security officials added his name to the no-fly list at 12:30 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, and sent airlines an electronic notification three minutes later. But the Department of Homeland Security said Emirates Airline apparently did not check the updated list, and sold Mr. Shahzad a ticket to Pakistan by way of Dubai for cash at 7:35 p.m. Monday, seven hours after he was added to the list.

In addition, an F.B.I. surveillance team that had found Mr. Shahzad in Connecticut lost track of him — it is not clear for how long — before he drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the officials said. As a result, investigators did not know he was planning to fly abroad until a final passenger list was sent to officials at the federal Customs and Border Protection agency minutes before takeoff.

Top Obama administration officials and some members of Congress on Tuesday praised the government's handling of the investigation, noting that Mr. Shahzad was identified, tracked and arrested before he could escape.

But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg , while saying he was reluctant to criticize those in charge of airport security , added: “Clearly the guy was on the plane and shouldn't have been. We got lucky.”

Senator Susan M. Collins , Republican of Maine, said she applauded the work of law enforcement officials in quickly solving the case. Still, she added, “A key question for me is why this suspect was allowed to board the plane in the first place. There appears to be a troubling gap between the time they had his name and the time he got on the plane.”

At a news conference in Washington, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said that despite the break in physical surveillance, he had never been concerned that Mr. Shahzad would get away.

“I was here all yesterday and through much of last night, and was aware of the tracking that was going on,” Mr. Holder said. “And I was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him.”

Janet Napolitano , the Homeland Security secretary, called the capture of the accused terrorist “a great team effort.” She added: “The law enforcement work in this case was truly exemplary.”

While the officials emphasized the successful outcome to the chase, a more detailed account, in interviews with officials who spoke of the continuing investigation mostly on condition of anonymity, gave a mixed picture.

On Sunday night, about 24 hours after the smoking Nissan Pathfinder was left on a bustling Manhattan street, investigators identified Mr. Shahzad as the buyer of the car. While the vehicle identification number had been removed from the passenger compartment, a detective found a duplicate number on the engine block.

But at that point, officials said, they were uncertain of Mr. Shahzad's role and did not think they had enough evidence to arrest him and charge him with a crime. Instead, they began an urgent manhunt; F.B.I. agents located Mr. Shahzad in Bridgeport, Conn., and began to follow him.

It remained uncertain Tuesday night at what time Mr. Shahzad had been found and when he was lost. Paul Bresson, an F.B.I. spokesman, declined to comment on the surveillance issue.

Airlines are not required to report cash purchases, a Homeland Security official said. Emirates actually did report Mr. Shahzad's purchase to the Transportation Security Administration — but only hours later, when he was already in custody, the official said.

As is routine, when boarding was completed for the flight, Emirates Flight EK202, the final passenger manifest was sent to the National Targeting Center, operated in Virginia by Customs and Border Protection. There, at about 11 p.m., analysts discovered that Mr. Shahzad was on the no-fly list and had just boarded a plane.

They sounded the alarm, and minutes later, with the jet still at the gate, its door was opened and agents came aboard and took Mr. Shahzad into custody, officials said. The airliner then pulled away from the gate but was called back.

“Actually I have a message for you to go back to the gate immediately,” an air traffic controller told the pilot, according to a recording posted to the Web by LiveATC.net , which tracks air communications. “I don't know exactly why, but you can call your company for the reason,” the controller added.

After the plane was called back, the authorities removed two more passengers. They were questioned and cleared. They and all the rest of the passengers were rescreened, as was the baggage, and the flight took off about seven hours late.

An Emirates spokeswoman, who said she was not allowed to speak on the record, declined to comment on the claims by government officials that the airline had neglected to recheck the no-fly list. “Emirates takes every necessary precaution to ensure the safety and well-being of its passengers and crew and regrets the inconvenience caused,” the airline said in a statement.

One long-planned change in security procedures may reduce the chances of a repeat failure to check an updated no-fly list, officials said. The Transportation Security Administration is taking over the job of checking passenger manifests against the no-fly list under its Secure Flight program.

Such checks are currently being done by the T.S.A. for domestic flights, and the agency is scheduled to be checking all international flights by the end of the year, agency officials said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/nyregion/06plane.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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Suspect Was Tracked Through Phone Numbers

WASHINGTON — Investigators discovered the name of the suspect in the failed Times Square bombing because of a telephone number he provided when he returned to the United States from Pakistan in February, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.

The phone number he gave three months ago was entered in a Customs and Border Protection agency database and came up Monday when investigators were checking the record of calls made to or from the prepaid cellular telephone used by the purchaser — at that point unidentified — of the vehicle used in the failed bombing, the official said.

Only when they matched the phone number did investigators learn that “that was the guy we were looking for,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive investigation.

The phone-record link underscored the combination of investigative skill, increased government integration and sheer luck that helped authorities track down Faisal Shahzad just 53 hours after a vehicle packed with explosives was parked in the heart of Manhattan. Once investigators had Mr. Shahzad's identity, they were able to put his name on a no-fly list that ultimately led to his being pulled off a plane about to leave the country.

Mr. Shahzad, 30, a Pakistani-American who was naturalized as a United States citizen last year, has been charged with terrorism-related crimes and has waived his right to a speedy arraignment, officials said, meaning that he does not have to be brought to court right away. The government has said Mr. Shahzad admitted receiving bomb -making training in the tribal regions of Pakistan and then driving the car bomb into Times Square over the weekend.

The latest details about how investigators tracked him down add to a detective story worthy of a Hollywood movie. When New York police were alerted to the presence of the smoking Nissan Pathfinder and rendered it safe on Saturday night, they started out without any immediate suspects. The owner had evidently taken steps to avoid being identified, buying the vehicle with cash and apparently removing the visible vehicle identification number.

But after the police found the vehicle number on a hidden part of the engine, they tracked down the Connecticut woman who had sold it. While she did not remember the buyer's name and had no paperwork from the sale, she did have the number of the phone he had used to contact her. That number led to a prepaid cellphone with no registered owner.

The authorities have said that phone received four calls from Pakistan in the hours before he bought the 17-year-old sport utility vehicle for $1,300. When they ran all the numbers tied to that phone through government databases, the only match they got was the number Mr. Shahzad had given when he returned to the United States on Feb. 3 on an Emirates flight.

Because he was coming from Pakistan, Mr. Shahzad was pulled aside for secondary screening upon arrival, the authorities said. After a Nigerian man tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight bound for Detroit on Dec. 25, the federal government mandated additional screening for all passengers arriving from 14 mostly Muslim countries , including Pakistan. That program has since been dropped in favor of a more selective screening system.

Mr. Shahzad was questioned by Customs and Border Protection agents, who in such sessions typically ask where the passenger has been, why he was there, whom he saw and so forth. As part of that process, a report was generated on Mr. Shahzad including all passenger data and at least one phone number that he provided. It was not clear whether the number was the emergency contact number he had given the airline or one that he provided to agents during questioning.

Either way, Customs and Border Protection passed along the data to the Federal Bureau of Investigation , which put it in its own database. Three months later, when F.B.I. agents checked the numbers tied to the prepaid telephone, the Customs and Border Protection report came up. The F.B.I. then contacted the agency for more information about Mr. Shahzad.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06cellphone.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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New Orleans Asks U.S. to Help Police Department

NEW ORLEANS — Citing the need for “transformational change,” the city's new mayor, Mitch Landrieu, announced on Wednesday that he was inviting the Justice Department to help restructure the troubled New Orleans Police Department.

“We have a systemic failure,” said Mr. Landrieu, who has been in office for less than three days. Speaking at a news conference, he said that the state and city governments would be involved in a sweeping reform of the police, but that “this was not going to get done without the help and the intervention and partnership of the Department of Justice.”

For a city to invite federal intervention in its police department is rare, and a testament to just how discontented New Orleanians have become with a police force that has been seen for years as corrupt, abusive and ineffective. Nearly four dozen community activists, some of whom stood next to the mayor at Wednesday's news conference, sent a letter to the Department of Justice on Tuesday, urging federal oversight.

The Justice Department is now expected to conduct a top-down investigation of the police force, which would lead to some kind of legally binding agreement for a restructuring. Mr. Landrieu said he hoped Washington and the city could enter into a consent decree, which involves the appointment of a federal monitor to oversee reform.

In a statement, Alejandro Miyar, a Justice Department spokesman, said, “We will consider these requests to determine what action, if any, is appropriate.”

But Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department, has made no secret of his opinion that the Police Department needs a major overhaul. On a visit to the city in March, Mr. Perez described the department as the most problematic in the country and made clear that all options were on the table, including a consent decree.

The investigation would look at patterns of misconduct by the New Orleans police, a more overarching form of scrutiny than the existing federal criminal investigations into specific incidents. There are at least eight such investigations into accusations of brutality and unjustified killings of citizens at the hands of the police, both immediately after Hurricane Katrina and in more recent years.

The most prominent of the investigations, which is examining shootings by the police on the Danziger Bridge days after the hurricane, leaving two people dead, has already led to guilty pleas from four former police officers. The accounts of the shootings from the officers described the strafing of unarmed civilians, the slaying of a mentally disabled man and a widespread and blatant police cover-up.

Mr. Landrieu has been searching for a new police chief since the moment he was elected in February, a search that is now down to two candidates and is expected to conclude soon.

A new independent police monitor was also appointed recently, and Mr. Landrieu announced on Wednesday that all police records requested by the monitor's office would be turned over. The previous police chief, Warren Riley, who stepped down as Mr. Landrieu took office, had a contentious relationship with the monitor's office and repeatedly refused requests for records.

“I have inherited a police force that has been described by many as one of the worst police departments in the country,” Mr. Landrieu wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. “It is clear that nothing short of a complete transformation is necessary and essential to ensure safety for the citizens of New Orleans.”

There are very few instances in which a city government actively invites federal involvement, said Samuel Walker, emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, and an expert on police reform.

“It's usually quite the other way around,” Mr. Walker said. “Typically there's a lot of resistance and resentment.”

But given the endemic problems of the New Orleans police, he said, “this is an excellent idea — it establishes a collaborative relationship and it gets the ball rolling.”

Federal officials would have many issues to address, including a system of accountability that has apparently broken down and a stubbornly high crime rate.

“Tomorrow is not soon enough for me,” Mr. Landrieu said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/us/06orleans.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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EDITORIAL

Fear Itself

There are many important and urgent questions about the man accused of trying to set off a car bomb in Times Square.

Officials say Faisal Shahzad admitted to the attempt and said he learned bomb-making at a camp in Pakistan. Is Mr. Shahzad indeed connected to the Pakistani Taliban, which American officials now say seems likely? Was he working with others in this country who may be at large? How did Mr. Shahzad, a naturalized citizen whose family includes a senior Pakistani military officer, end up trying to murder countless people?

There are questions, too, about how the F.B.I. lost track of Mr. Shahzad for a time and why he was allowed to board an international flight despite a special alert issued by United States authorities.

The answers to such questions directly affect the security of Americans, and law enforcement officials are beginning to get them. That hasn't stopped a familiar group of politicians from cynically trying to use this incident as yet another excuse to weaken the rule of law and this country's barely recovering reputation.

Lawmakers like Senators John McCain of Arizona and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Representative Peter King of New York were immediately outraged that Mr. Shahzad — a United States citizen accused of an attempted attack on civilians in an American city — was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and eventually read his Miranda rights.

They are demanding that Mr. Shahzad be declared an illegal enemy combatant, stripped of any rights and brought before a military tribunal. They have opened another round of sneering at “the law enforcement approach” to terrorism. That is contemptuous, first of all, of the police officers whose quick actions may have saved untold numbers and the other people who identified and tracked Mr. Shahzad with amazing speed.

It also ignores reality. According to all reports, Mr. Shahzad started talking even before he was read his rights (“the law enforcement approach” allows investigators to question suspects immediately if there is an imminent threat to the public). When he was read his rights, Mr. Shahzad seems to have kept talking. The Times reported on Wednesday that he waived his right to a speedy arraignment — to go on talking.

To get around the inconvenient fact that Mr. Shahzad is a citizen, Mr. Lieberman is even calling for a law allowing Americans accused (not convicted) of unspecified crimes to be stripped of their citizenship and retroactively deprived of due process under the law.

This is not Mr. Lieberman's first foray into this dark territory. He is co-author with Mr. McCain of a bill that would require that anyone arrested on any terrorism-related charge, including American citizens, be declared an enemy combatant and tried in a military court.

Let's be clear about what works and what doesn't.

There is no evidence that vital intelligence has been lost, or a terrorist attack allowed to happen, because a suspect was questioned lawfully. The men who interrogated top-ranking terrorist suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said the prisoners gave up their valuable knowledge before being subjected to waterboarding and other illegal acts.

Federal courts have convicted hundreds of people on terrorism-related charges since 2001. The tribunals have obtained one guilty plea from a prisoner who may not have done anything and was subsequently released.

Senators McCain and Lieberman say military trials will show strength. Abandoning democratic institutions in the face of terrorism is an act of surrender. It will not make this country safer. It will make it more vulnerable.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06thu1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Department of Justice

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A former Guatemalan special forces soldier was arrested today in Palm Beach County, Fla., for lying on his naturalization application about his participation in a 1982 massacre at a Guatemalan village known as Dos Erres, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division, U.S. Attorney Wifredo A. Ferrer for the Southern District of Florida and Assistant Secretary John Morton of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Gilberto Jordan, 54, of Del Ray Beach, Fla., was arrested today by ICE special agents based on a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, which charges him with unlawful procurement of naturalized U.S. citizenship. The former Guatemalan soldier allegedly lied to U.S. immigration authorities in his naturalization application about his past foreign military service and criminal role in the Dos Erres massacre.

The criminal complaint alleges that in November 1982 a Guatemalan guerrilla group ambushed a military convoy near Dos Erres, Guatemala, killing soldiers and taking a number of rifles. In response, a patrol of 20 Guatemalan special forces soldiers, known as “Kaibiles,” were deployed in December 1982 to the village of Dos Erres to search for the stolen rifles and find suspected guerillas. Allegedly, the Kaibiles searched the houses for the missing weapons, forced the villagers from their homes and interrogated them about the missing rifles. According to the complaint, the Kaibiles then proceeded to systematically murder the men, women and children at Dos Erres by, among other things, hitting them in the head with a hammer and then throwing them into the village well. These special forces soldiers also allegedly raped many of the women and girls at Dos Erres before killing them.

The criminal complaint alleges that Jordan admitted he served as a Kaibil in the Guatemalan military. Jordan stated that he was present at Dos Erres, and that he participated in the killings. Specifically, Jordan stated that the first person he killed was a baby, whom he murdered by throwing into the village well.

“The acts alleged in this complaint are horrific.  It is unacceptable for participation in them allegedly not to have been disclosed to the authorities determining whether to grant citizenship,” said Assistant Attorney General Breuer.  “Through the work of our Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, in conjunction with our partner U.S. Attorneys' Offices and law enforcement agencies, the United States will not allow those who commit human rights abuses abroad to find save haven in this country.”

“The massacre at Dos Erres was a dark moment for the Guatemalan people, and we will not allow suspected perpetrators to escape justice by taking refuge in our cities and towns,” said U.S. Attorney Ferrer. “Although South Florida has a long and proud history of welcoming immigrants and exiles, we will not provide shelter and cover to those who lie about their criminal past, especially human rights abuses, to gain U.S. citizenship.”

 “Those who commit human rights abuses abroad cannot subvert U.S. immigration laws in order to take shelter in the United States,” said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John T. Morton.  “We are firmly committed to denying human rights abusers entrance into this country, weeding out those that are already here, and will enforce this U.S. government policy of no safe haven for human rights violators.”

The criminal complaint alleges that approximately 12 years after the Dos Erres massacre, a Guatemalan judge appointed an Argentinean forensic anthropology team to exhume the corpses at Dos Erres. According to the complaint, this forensic team uncovered approximately 162 skeletal remains from the village well, whose deaths were presumed to have occurred in December 1982 as a result of traumatic injuries and gunshot wounds.

In 1996, Jordan allegedly applied to naturalize as a U.S. citizen. Under penalty of perjury, Jordan allegedly falsely stated in his naturalization application that he had never committed any crime for which he had not been arrested and he denied past military service.

If convicted on charges of naturalization fraud, Gilberto Jordan faces up to 10 years in prison and revocation of U.S. citizenship upon conviction.

The case is being prosecuted by Trial Attorney Hillary Davidson and Brian Skaret of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section of the Criminal Division, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Marie Villafana of the Southern District of Florida. The case was investigated by ICE special agents and ICE's Human Rights Violators and War Crimes Unit. The Criminal Division's Office of International Affairs provided assistance in this matter.

The Department of Justice Criminal Division announced the formation of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section (HRSP) on March 30, 2010, as part of the U.S. government's efforts to bring human rights violators to justice and deny those violators safe haven in the United States. The new section represents a merger of the Criminal Division's Domestic Security Section (DSS) and Office of Special Investigations (OSI).

A criminal complaint is merely an accusation. All individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty at trial beyond a reasonable doubt.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/May/10-crm-530.html

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