In New York, never enough security

The city has spent billions on upgrades, gadgets and manpower, but the threat of terrorist attacks remains. Officials say they need even more federal funding.

By Tina Susman and Geraldine Baum, Los Angeles Times

May 8, 2010

Reporting from New York

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg spoke bluntly as he stood in Times Square at 2:30 a.m. last Sunday, his red bow tie and black tux testament to the haste with which he had left a White House dinner upon learning of a car bomb in Midtown Manhattan.

If anything showed that New York deserves more federal funding for security, this was it, the grim-faced Bloomberg said as lights blazed in the background from bomb experts, firefighters and police scouring the scene.

"Homeland Security funds should come to where there is a threat," the mayor said after what police said was the 11th attempted terrorist strike on New York City since Sept. 11, 2001.

Since then, New York has spent billions of dollars on security upgrades, some visible and others undetectable to locals and the visitors who swarm its subway stations and sidewalks and wander goggle-eyed among its tourist sites.

There are bomb-sniffing dogs and police checking subway riders' bags. There are signs urging people to report "suspicious" activities. There are checkpoints on bridges. There is a counter-terrorism bureau and intelligence division established by Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, a former Marine colonel and onetime U.S. Customs Service chief. In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Kelly made it his mission to have New York police — not Washington-based agencies — take the lead in defending the city.

Operating from precincts in New York as well as Paris; Tel Aviv; Amman, Jordan, and other foreign posts; the 1,000 agents speak 50 languages, including Urdu, Pashto, Arabic and Persian. Surveillance equipment can scrutinize anything, whether license plates or tattoos.

It is not just Sept. 11 that has inspired changes. After the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, carried out by assailants firing assault rifles, some New York officers were trained in the use of similar weapons.

After the 2005 bomb attacks on the London public transport system, New York began erecting a "ring of steel" in Lower Manhattan, outfitting a 1.5-square-mile area with 3,000 surveillance cameras and radiation detectors. City and state officials are pushing Washington to provide an additional $24 million to expand the protective barrier to Midtown, which would include Times Square as well as Grand Central Terminal and Penn Station.

But city leaders face the problem of how to further circle the wagons without turning New York into a U.S. version of the Green Zone, the fortified enclave in Baghdad. "There is a balance between being so safe you can't go out of your house, and enjoying freedom — freedom to come and go, and to talk and to be in charge of your own destiny," Bloomberg said.

As the police chief and state leaders join the chorus for more security funds, they also face alienating other states who say they need federal money in these cash-strapped, security-conscious times.

After Sept. 11, many New York lawmakers "were always banging our fists about the fact that the city needed more than any place else in America," said Michael Balboni, a former state lawmaker who has served as the governor's domestic security advisor. "But politics being what it is, if you want to get a vote on an appropriations bill, you have to get support from say, a Kansas congressman. And why is he going to support New York City if he doesn't get some piece of the funding for his state?"

New York City is by far the biggest recipient of Department of Homeland Security funds. Last year, it received more than $145 million of the $798 million allocated from the department fund to secure high-risk cities. That was more than twice the $68 million given the Los Angeles/Long Beach area. And although nobody has seriously argued that New York should not get the bulk of funds, altering the equation to give New York more would take money away from other cities and states.

"The needs are everywhere," said Julia Fenwick, who oversees the requests for Homeland Security grants for Montana, which last year received $6.6 million. "We could always use more," she said, citing the vast unpatrolled wilderness areas and Montana's 500-mile border with Canada.

Underscoring the nagging quest for money are questions about the ultimate value of high-tech gadgetry aimed at preventing attempted terrorist attacks, which even New York officials acknowledge are inevitable given the city's high profile.

Diverse, crowded and historically populated by minority groups with deep grievances, New York City has long been a terrorist target, according to Newsweek's Christopher Dickey, author of 2008's "Securing the City," which described how Kelly revamped the NYPD's anti-terrorism effort. In 1920, anarchists rammed a horse-drawn bomb into the J.P. Morgan building on Wall Street, killing 30 people and injuring 200.

"Listen, it's just not possible to totally prevent an attack," said former Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton, who ran the New York department in the mid-1990s and returned to live here last year. "You can harden Times Square and harden Wall Street, but the next time a car with a bomb drives up to a crowd during a Yankee or Mets game, or for that matter in Boston at a Red Sox game … boom — there it all goes." In a nod to Kelly, Bratton said the city is significantly safer from attack now.

The attempt to bomb Times Square last weekend at the height of the pre-theater dinner hour followed by eight months the discovery of a plot by Afghan immigrant Najibullah Zazi to carry out a suicide attack on the New York subway system.

Pakistani American Faisal Shahzad, who is suspected of parking his bomb-laden SUV in Times Square, was arrested Monday night after he had boarded a flight bound for Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The Nissan Pathfinder was packed with 100 pounds of fertilizer, but not the explosive kind that was used in the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing.

Former New York Deputy Police Commissioner John Timoney says that that fact and other apparent blunders — such as Shahzad's house keys being left in the SUV — shouldn't diminish the fact that the suspect was bent on terrorism. "This guy was a professional killer, except he was incompetent," Timoney said.

Indeed, the whys and what-ifs linger. What if Times Square street vendors hadn't noticed the vehicle and alerted police? What if customs agents hadn't spotted Shahzad's name on a manifest of the Dubai-bound jet after it had been added to the no-fly list?

"The good news is we're so much farther along than we were," Bratton said. "The bad news is, we still have a long way to go."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-ny-security-20100509,0,6036456,print.story

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From the Wall Street Journal

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In Counting Illegal Immigrants, Certain Assumptions Apply By CARL BIALIK How many people in the U.S. can be considered illegal immigrants? A range of estimates, including one by the U.S. government, put the number at between 10.8 million and 11.9 million. But not everyone believes those figures, which rely on a host of sometimes shaky assumptions. Even the demographers who compile estimates admit that coming up with a reliable number for a population that generally wants to avoid having its status known is very challenging. The size of the illegal-immigrant population has become a potent political question again, as government officials attempt to track the effectiveness of border controls and Congress considers taking up a long-stalled immigration initiative. Meanwhile, a controversial new law in Arizona that aims to crack down on illegal immigrants has put the spotlight on states with large numbers of undocumented residents.

Of the many studies that have attempted to calculate the size of the illegal-immigrant population, the most widely cited are from three sources: the Department of Homeland Security; the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., group opposed to increased immigration; and the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center. The government and CIS both put the number at 10.8 million in 2009, while Pew counted 11.9 million in 2008.

All three estimates were calculated in part by analyzing death rates and surveys about emigration patterns. But other researchers have criticized this approach, saying it leads to underestimates. Steven Camarota, director of research for CIS, acknowledges that the methodology used in the three main estimates is far from perfect. "I don't think we can be absolutely sure," he says. "We might be wrong, and that's bad."

Researchers at CIS and Pew and in the federal government use a decades-old technique that looks at the number of foreign-born people in the U.S., as counted by annual census surveys. Then they subtract the number of foreign-born people in the U.S. legally, based on immigration records and projections of deaths and outmigration. The remainder is believed to be the number of illegal immigrants.

There are several assumptions that underlie these estimates, including the figures for outmigration, which isn't tracked by the U.S. government. The biggest problem, though, is that no one really knows what proportion of illegal immigrants respond to census interviewers and how honest they are about their place of birth.

The Numbers Guy Blog

• The Pitfalls of Counting Illegal Immigrants

These studies presume that about 10% of illegal immigrants aren't counted by census takers. But that figure largely is based on a 2001 University of California-funded survey of 829 people born in Mexico and living in Los Angeles, in which individuals were asked, among other things, whether they responded to census interviewers a year earlier. Representatives of nearly two in five households refused to answer that survey, and those who didn't might have been more likely to skip the census count as well.

"Whether that's applicable to illegal immigrants today is far from clear," says George Borjas, professor of economics and social policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. "These are people who don't want to be found."

Others have estimated much higher numbers of illegal immigrants. In 2005, Robert Justich, then a portfolio manager for Bear Stearns, co-wrote a report putting the population at as high as 20 million, citing increases in remittances to Mexico and in housing permits in communities with enclaves of illegal immigrants.

Mr. Justich left Bear Stearns in 2007 and hasn't updated his estimate. But he still thinks the government, Pew and CIS numbers are too low. "The assumption that illegal people will fill out a census form is the most ridiculous concept I have ever heard of," says Mr. Justich, who now owns a music and film production firm in Hoboken, N.J.

Other researchers criticize the Bear Stearns analysis for failing to note that the surge in remittances might simply reflect better record-keeping. Nor would a rise in remittances necessarily mean a surge in illegal immigration. Using such figures involves "making a lot of assumptions," says Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer for the Pew Hispanic Center.

Mr. Justich says that the number is no longer as high as 20 million, citing the weakening economy and stepped-up enforcement.

Though the Census Bureau's studies are the basis for most of these counts, the agency itself doesn't seek to identify individuals' immigration status. Robert M. Groves, director of the Census Bureau, cites two major reasons. First, asking people about their citizenship might drive down the overall response rates to the census.

Second, the Census Bureau doesn't have the funds to conduct a massive effort to count illegal immigrants.

"There is no magic bullet that anyone has discovered" to count them, Dr. Groves says. "This is really very difficult to estimate."

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704370704575228432695989918.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_10#printMode

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From the New York Times

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Imam's Path From Condemning Terror to Preaching Jihad

WASHINGTON — In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, the eloquent 30-year-old imam of a mosque outside Washington became a go-to Muslim cleric for reporters scrambling to explain Islam. He condemned the mass murder, invited television crews to follow him around and patiently explained the rituals of his religion.

“We came here to build, not to destroy,” the cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki , said in a sermon. “We are the bridge between Americans and one billion Muslims worldwide.”

At first glance, it seemed plausible that this lanky, ambitious man, with the scholarly wire-rims and equal command of English and Arabic, could indeed be such a bridge. CD sets of his engaging lectures on the Prophet Muhammad were in thousands of Muslim homes. American-born, he had a sense of humor, loved deep-sea fishing, had dabbled in get-rich-quick investment schemes and dropped references to “Joe Sixpack” into his sermons. A few weeks before the attacks he had preached in the United States Capitol.

Nine years later, from his hide-out in Yemen , Mr. Awlaki has declared war on the United States.

“America as a whole has turned into a nation of evil,” he said in a statement posted on extremist Web sites in March. Though he had spent 21 of his 39 years in the United States, he added, “I eventually came to the conclusion that jihad against America is binding upon myself, just as it is binding on every other able Muslim.”

His mix of scripture and vitriol has helped lure young Muslims into a dozen plots. He cheered on the Fort Hood gunman and had a role in prompting the attempted airliner bombing on Dec. 25, intelligence officials say. And last week, Faisal Shahzad , who is charged in the attempted bombing in Times Square, told investigators that Mr. Awlaki's prolific online lectures urging jihad as a religious duty helped inspire him to act.

At a time of new concern about the attraction of Western Muslims to violent extremism, there is no figure more central than Mr. Awlaki, who has harnessed the Internet for the goals of Al Qaeda . Counterterrorism officials are gravely concerned about his powerful appeal for many others who are following his path to radicalization.

“He's a magnetic character,” said Philip Mudd, a veteran of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center who just stepped down after nearly five years as a top F.B.I. intelligence adviser. “He's a powerful orator in a revolutionary movement.”

Convinced that he is a lethal threat, the United States government has responded in kind. This year Mr. Awlaki became the first American citizen on the C.I.A.'s list of terrorists approved as a target for killing, a designation that has only enhanced his status with admirers like Shahidur Rahman, 27, a British Muslim of Bangladeshi descent who studied with Mr. Awlaki in London in 2003.

Other clerics equivocated about whether terrorist violence could be reconciled with Islam, Mr. Rahman said, but even seven years ago Mr. Awlaki made clear that he had few such qualms.

“He said suicide is not allowed in Islam,” Mr. Rahman said in an interview, “but self-sacrifice is different.”

There are two conventional narratives of Mr. Awlaki's path to jihad. The first is his own: He was a nonviolent moderate until the United States attacked Muslims openly in Afghanistan and Iraq, covertly in Pakistan and Yemen, and even at home, by making targets of Muslims for raids and arrests. He merely followed the religious obligation to defend his faith, he said.

“What am I accused of?” he asks in a recent video bearing the imprint of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. “Of calling for the truth? Of calling for jihad for the sake of Allah? Of calling to defend the causes of the Islamic nation?”

A contrasting version of Mr. Awlaki's story, explored though never confirmed by the national Sept. 11 commission, maintains that he was a secret agent of Al Qaeda starting well before the attacks, when three of the hijackers turned up at his mosques. By this account, all that has changed since then is that Mr. Awlaki has stopped hiding his true views.

The tale that emerges from visits to his mosques, and interviews with two dozen people who knew him, is more complex and elusive. A product both of Yemen's deeply conservative religious culture and freewheeling American ways, he hesitated to shake hands with women but patronized prostitutes. He was first enthralled with jihad as a teenager — but the cause he embraced, the defeat of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, was then America's cause too. After a summer visit to the land of the victorious mujahedeen, he brought back an Afghan hat and wore it proudly around the Colorado State campus in Fort Collins where he studied engineering.

Later, Mr. Awlaki seems to have tried out multiple personas: the representative of a tolerant Islam in a multicultural United States (starring in a WashingtonPost.com video explaining Ramadan); the fiery American activist talking about Muslims' constitutional rights (and citing both Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown); the conspiracy theorist who publicly doubted the Muslim role in the Sept. 11 attacks. (The F.B.I., he wrote a few days afterward, simply blamed passengers with Muslim names.)

All along he remained a conservative, fundamentalist preacher who invariably started with a scriptural story from the seventh century and drew its personal or political lessons for today, a tradition called salafism, for the Salafs, or ancestors, the leaders of the earliest generations of Islam.

Finally, after the Yemeni authorities, under American pressure, imprisoned him in 2006 and 2007, Mr. Awlaki seems to have hardened into a fully committed ideologist of jihad, condemning non-Muslims and cheerleading for slaughter. His message has become indistinguishable from that of Osama bin Laden — except for his excellent English and his cultural familiarity with the United States and Britain. Those traits make him especially dangerous, counterterrorism officials fear, and he flaunts them.

“Jihad,” Mr. Awlaki said in a March statement, “is becoming as American as apple pie and as British as afternoon tea.”

‘Skinny Teenager With Brains'

Twenty years ago, long before the Sept. 11 attacks and the wars that followed, a shy freshman named Anwar turned up at the little mosque in a converted church a short walk from the Colorado State campus. His American accent was misleading: born in New Mexico in 1971, when his father was studying agriculture there, he had lived in the United States until the age of 7.

But he had spent his adolescence in Yemen, where memorizing the Koran was a matter of course for an educated young man, and women were largely excluded from public life.

His father, Nasser, was a prominent figure who would serve as agriculture minister and chancellor of two universities and who was close to President Ali Abdullah Saleh , the country's authoritarian leader. Anwar was sent to Azal Modern School, among the country's most prestigious private schools.

“I recall Anwar as a skinny teenager with brains,” said Walid al-Saqaf, a neighbor in the 1980s in Sana, the Yemeni capital. For boys of their generation, Afghanistan and its fight to oust the godless Soviet Army was the greatest cause.

“There was constant talk of the heroes who were leaving Yemen to join the fight and become martyrs and go to paradise,” recalled Mr. Saqaf, now a doctoral student in Sweden. In the Awlakis' neighborhood, families would gather to watch the latest videotapes of the mujahedeen, he said.

But Nasser al-Awlaki had other ideas for his son, who studied civil engineering in Colorado in preparation for the kind of technocratic career his father had pursued. There was one odd note, given the family's relative wealth: just after arriving, Anwar applied for a Social Security number and claimed falsely he had been born in Yemen, evidently to qualify for scholarship money reserved for foreign citizens.

Yusuf Siddiqui, a fellow student who was active with Mr. Awlaki in the mosque and the Muslim Student Association, said there were regular reminders of his Yemeni upbringing.

“If you made some pop culture reference, he might not recognize it,” Mr. Siddiqui said. Once, Anwar astonished his Americanized friends by climbing a nearby mountain barefoot. “He just said, ‘That's how we do it in Yemen,'” Mr. Siddiqui recalled.

Accustomed to Yemeni mores, he was not comfortable interacting with women. Once, when a female American student stopped by the Muslim Student Association to ask for help with math homework, “He said to me in a low tone of voice, ‘Why don't you do it?'” Mr. Siddiqui said.

Still, Mr. Awlaki was neither among the most conservative Muslim students nor among the libertines who tossed aside religious restrictions on drinking and sex. He ran successfully for president of the Muslim Student Association against a Saudi student who was far stricter.

“I remember Anwar saying, ‘He would want your mom to cover her face. I'm not like that,'” Mr. Siddiqui said.

His vacation trip to Afghanistan, around the time the Soviet-backed Communist government fell from power, appears to have brought a new interest in the nexus of politics and religion. He wore an Eritrean T-shirt and the Afghan hat and quoted Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian scholar who provided theological justification for the Afghan jihad and was later known as a mentor to Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, at the Islamic Center of Fort Collins, the little mosque where volunteers took turns giving the Friday sermon, Mr. Awlaki discovered a knack for preaching. If he could boast of no deep scholarship, he knew the Koran and the sayings of the prophet, spoke fluent English and had a light touch.

“He was very knowledgeable,” said Mumtaz Hussain, 71, a Pakistani immigrant active in the mosque for two decades. “He was an excellent person — very nice, dedicated to religion.”

He expressed no anti-American sentiments, said Mr. Hussain, whose son served in the National Guard. “This is our motherland now. People would not tolerate sermons of that kind,” he said.

Years later, on his blog, Mr. Awlaki would compare Thomas Gradgrind, Charles Dickens's notoriously utilitarian headmaster in “Hard Times,” “to some Muslim parents who are programmed to think that only medicine or engineering are worthy professions for their children.”

It sounds like a hint at his own experience, and some family acquaintances say there was tension between Anwar and his father over career choices. But in 1994, Mr. Awlaki married a cousin from Yemen — whom by custom he did not introduce to his male friends — left behind engineering, and took a part-time job as imam at the Denver Islamic Society.

‘He Had a Beautiful Tongue'

Like many an evangelical Christian pastor, Mr. Awlaki preached against vice and sin, lauded family values and parsed the scripture, winning fans and rising to successively larger mosques.

In Denver, however, there was an episode that might have been an omen. A Saudi student at the University of Denver told an elder that he had decided, with Mr. Awlaki's encouragement, to travel to Chechnya to join the jihad against the Russians. The elder, a Palestinian American in his 60s, thought it ill advised and confronted Mr. Awlaki in a loud argument.

“He had a beautiful tongue,” recalled the elder, who asked not to be named. “But I told him: ‘Don't talk to my people about jihad.' He left two weeks later.”

At 25, he landed for five years at Arribat al-Islami, a stucco building with blue-green tile under a towering palm tree at the edge of San Diego. “He lit up when he was with the youth,” said Jamal Ali, 40, an airport driver. He played soccer with younger children and took teenagers paintballing. “I saw him evolving in trying to understand where he fit into Islam,” Mr. Ali said.

Lincoln W. Higgie III, 71, an art dealer who lived across quiet Saranac Street from the mosque and the small adjoining house where Mr. Awlaki lived with his wife and two toddlers, recalls an engaging neighbor who apologized about parking problems that came with the flood of Friday worshipers.

On Thursdays, Mr. Higgie remembered, Mr. Awlaki liked to go fishing for albacore, and he would often bring over a sample of the catch, deliciously prepared by his wife. The Awlakis' son and daughter would play on Mr. Higgie's floor, chasing his pet macaw, while the men compared notes on their travels.

“I remember he was very partial to the Blue Mosque in Istanbul,” Mr. Higgie said. He detected no hostility to non-Muslims, no simmering resentment against America.

In his private life, he was not always puritanical. Even as he preached about the sanctity of marriage amid the temptations of American life (“especially in Western societies, every haram is available,” he said, using the Arabic word for the forbidden), he was picked up twice by the San Diego police for soliciting prostitutes; he was given probation.

He displayed a very American entrepreneurial streak, exploring a possible business importing Yemeni honey and attending seminars in Las Vegas focused on investing in gold and minerals (and once losing $20,000 lent by relatives). Eventually a regular at the mosque proposed a venture that would prove hugely successful: recording Mr. Awlaki's lectures on CD.

Starting in 2000, Mr. Awlaki would record a series of highly popular boxed sets — three, totaling 53 CDs, devoted to the “Life of Muhammad” alone; others covering the lesser prophets of Islam (including Moses and Jesus), the companions of the prophet and an account of the hereafter.

The recordings appear free of obvious radicalism. (IslamicBookstore.com has added a notice to its Web listings of Mr. Awlaki's work, saying the recording “has been reviewed and does not contain any extremist statements.”)

Shakir Muhammad, a Fort Collins engineer who is active in the mosque there, said he became a fan of the CD sets, finding them enthralling even on repeated listening. Only once did a passage give him pause; Mr. Awlaki discussed suicidal violence and did not quite condemn it.

“I thought, ‘This guy may be for it,'” Mr. Muhammad said. “It bothered me.”

A Mysterious Goodbye

One day in August 2001, Mr. Awlaki knocked at the door of Mr. Higgie, his neighbor, to say goodbye. He had moved the previous year to Virginia, becoming imam at the far bigger Dar al-Hijrah mosque, and he had returned to pick up a few things he had left behind.

As Mr. Higgie tells it, he told the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area — and got a strange response. “He said, ‘I don't think you'll be seeing me. I won't be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you'll find out why,'” Mr. Higgie said.

The next month, when Al Qaeda attacked New York and Washington, Mr. Higgie remembered the exchange and was shaken, convinced that his friendly neighbor had some advance warning of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In fact, the F.B.I. had first taken an interest in Mr. Awlaki in 1999, concerned about brushes with militants that to this day remain difficult to interpret. In 1998 and 1999, he was a vice president of a small Islamic charity that an F.B.I. agent later testified was “a front organization to funnel money to terrorists.” He had been visited by Ziyad Khaleel, a Qaeda operative who purchased a battery for Osama bin Laden's satellite phone, as well as by an associate of Omar Abdel Rahman , the so-called Blind Sheik, who was serving a life sentence for plotting to blow up New York landmarks.

Still more disturbing was Mr. Awlaki's links to two future Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi. They prayed at his San Diego mosque and were seen in long conferences with the cleric. Mr. Alhazmi would follow the imam to his new mosque in Virginia, and 9/11 investigators would call Mr. Awlaki Mr. Alhazmi's “spiritual adviser.”

The F.B.I., whose agents interviewed Mr. Awlaki four times in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, concluded that his contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random, the inevitable consequence of living in the small world of Islam in America. But records of the 9/11 commission at the National Archives make clear that not all investigators agreed.

One detective, whose name has been redacted, told the commission he believed Mr. Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” An F.B.I. agent, also unidentified, said that “if anyone had knowledge of the plot, it would have been” the cleric, since “someone had to be in the U.S. and keep the hijackers spiritually focused.”

The 9/11 commission staff members themselves had sharp arguments about him. “Do I think he played a role in helping the hijackers here, knowing they were up to something?” said one staff member, who would speak only on condition of anonymity. “Yes. Do I think he was sent here for that purpose? I have no evidence for it.”

The separate Congressional Joint Inquiry into the attacks suspected that Mr. Awlaki might have been part of a support network for the hijackers, said Eleanor Hill, its director. “There's no smoking gun. But we thought somebody ought to investigate him,” Ms. Hill said.

Alarmed about Mr. Awlaki's possible Sept. 11 connections, a State Department investigator, Raymond Fournier, found a circuitous way to charge Mr. Awlaki with passport fraud, based on his false claim after entering the United States in 1990 that he had been born in Yemen.

A warrant was issued, but prosecutors in Colorado rescinded it, concluding that no criminal case could be made. Mr. Awlaki returned from a trip abroad in October 2002 — an act some colleagues say was evidence for his innocence of any 9/11 role — for what would prove to be his last stay in the United States.

During that trip, he visited Ali al-Timimi, a Virginia cleric later convicted for encouraging Muslims to join the fight against American troops in Afghanistan. Mr. Awlaki “attempted to get al-Timimi to discuss issues related to the recruitment of young Muslims,” according to a motion filed in his criminal case. Mr. Timimi wondered if Mr. Awlaki might be trying to entrap him at the F.B.I.'s instigation, his friends say.

But if Mr. Awlaki was cooperating with the government, it would have astonished his associates. As the American authorities rounded up Muslim men after 9/11, he had grown furious.

After raids in March 2002 on Muslim institutions and community leaders in Virginia, Mr. Awlaki led a chorus of outrage, noting that some of the targets were widely viewed as moderates.

“So this is not now a war on terrorism, we need to all be clear about this, this is a war on Muslims!” Mr. Awlaki declared, his voice shaking with anger. “Not only is it happening worldwide, but it's happening right here in America that is claiming to be fighting this war for the sake of freedom.”

Around that time, Johari Abdul-Malik, a former Howard University chaplain who was joining the staff at Mr. Awlaki's Virginia mosque, met him at a cafe. Mr. Awlaki said he planned to leave the United States.

“I tried to convince him that the atmosphere was not as bad as he thought, that it was a positive time for outreach,” Mr. Abdul-Malik recalled. But Mr. Awlaki was shaken by what he saw as an anti-Muslim backlash. And always fond of the limelight, Mr. Abdul-Malik said, Mr. Awlaki was looking for a bigger platform.

“He said he might have a TV show for the gulf,” Mr. Abdul-Malik said. “He might run for Parliament in Yemen. Or he might teach.”

‘Never Trust a Kuffar'

In a bare lecture room in London, where Mr. Awlaki moved after leaving the United States, he addressed his rapt, young followers, urging them never to believe a non-Muslim, or kuffar in Arabic.

“The important lesson to learn here is never, ever trust a kuffar,” he said, chopping the air, his lecture caught on video. “Do not trust them!”

The unbelievers are “plotting to kill this religion,” he declared. “They're plotting night and day.”

If he had the same knowing tone and touches of humor as in earlier sermons, his message was more conspiratorial. You can't believe CNN, the United Nations, or Amnesty International, he told his students, because they, too, were part of the war on Islam.

“We need to wisen up and not be duped,” Mr. Awlaki said. “Malcolm X said, ‘We've been bamboozled.'”

Many of his young British Muslim listeners, accustomed to preachers with heavy accents and an otherworldly focus, were entranced by his mix of the ancient and the contemporary, his seamless transition from the 29 battles of the Prophet Muhammad to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. “He was the main man who translated the jihad into English,” said Abu Yahiya, 27, a Bangladeshi-British student of Mr. Awlaki's lectures in 2003.

At a personal level, said Mr. Rahman, one of the students who studied with Mr. Awlaki in 2003, Mr. Awlaki made it clear that they could no longer pretend to be Muslims while going clubbing at night.

“I could not be Mohammed in the morning and ‘Mo' in the evening,” he said.

Mr. Awlaki's demand that they make a choice, devoting themselves to a harsh, fundamentalist strain of Islam, offered clarity, he said.

“It would hit the audience automatically in their hearts and minds,” Mr. Rahman said. When others claimed the popular cleric was brainwashing them, Mr. Rahman said, “When you got a lot of dirt in your brain, you need a washing. I believe he did brainwash me.”

Mr. Awlaki's fame grew, his CDs kept selling, and he traveled around Britain lecturing. But he had a hard time supporting himself, according to people who knew him, and in 2004 he had moved to Yemen to preach and study.

In mid-2006, after he intervened in a tribal dispute, Mr. Awlaki was imprisoned for 18 months by the Yemeni authorities. By his later account on his blog, he was in solitary confinement nearly the entire time and used it to study the Koran, to read literature (he enjoyed Dickens but disliked Shakespeare) and eventually, when it was permitted, to study Islamic scholarship.

Notably, he was enraptured by the works of Sayyid Qutb , an Egyptian whose time in the United States helped make him the father of the modern anti-Western jihadist movement in Islam.

“Because of the flowing style of Sayyid I would read between 100 and 150 pages a day,” Mr. Awlaki wrote. “I would be so immersed with the author I would feel Sayyid was with me in my cell speaking to me directly.”

Two F.B.I. agents questioned him in the Yemeni prison, and Mr. Awlaki blamed the United States for his prolonged incarceration. He was right; John D. Negroponte, then the director of national intelligence, told Yemeni officials that the United States did not object to his detention, according to American and Yemeni sources.

But by the end of 2007, American officials, some of whom were disturbed at the imprisonment without charges of a United States citizen, signaled that they no longer insisted on Mr. Awlaki's incarceration, and he was released.

“He was different after that — harder,” said a Yemeni man who knows Mr. Awlaki well.

Mr. Awlaki started his own Web site, reaching a larger audience than ever. But finding that he was constantly followed by Yemeni security in Sana, the capital, he moved to the house of an uncle in Shabwa, the rugged southern province and his tribe's traditional turf.

Last October, friends said, he heard the distant whine of a drone aircraft circling overhead. Worried that he was endangering his relatives, he fled to the mountains. While his role is unclear in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terrorist network's Yemeni affiliate, American officials believe he has become “operational,” plotting, not just inspiring, terrorism against the West.

From his hide-out, Mr. Awlaki sends out the occasional video message. But his reported influence on the Times Square bombing suspect, Mr. Shahzad, suggests that no matter what happens to him, his electronic legacy is secure. His message will endure in hundreds of audio and video clips that his followers have posted to the Web, a mix of religious stories and incitement, awaiting the curious and the troubled.

Mr. Awlaki's transformation has left a trail of bewilderment, apprehension and fury among many people who knew and worshiped with him in the United States. Mr. Siddiqui, his college friend, said he was “surprised and disappointed.”

“He's turning his back not only on the country where he was born but on his Muslim brothers and sisters in this country,” he said.

Mr. Abdul-Malik said that his former fellow imam at the Virginia mosque “is a terrorist, in my book” and that Mr. Awlaki and his like-thinkers were trying to reduce Islam to a “medieval narrative. It's the Hatfields and the McCoys: you hit me, I hit you.”

Some Muslim families have asked whether they should keep Mr. Awlaki's scriptural CDs, Mr. Abdul-Malik said. He tells them it is their decision, but he has advised shops not to carry even the earlier, benign Awlaki material.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/world/09awlaki.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Offline

Min Liu, a 21-year-old liberal arts student at the New School in New York City, got a Facebook account at 17 and chronicled her college life in detail, from rooftop drinks with friends to dancing at a downtown club. Recently, though, she has had second thoughts.

Concerned about her career prospects, she asked a friend to take down a photograph of her drinking and wearing a tight dress. When the woman overseeing her internship asked to join her Facebook circle, Ms. Liu agreed, but limited access to her Facebook page. “I want people to take me seriously,” she said.

The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members of the tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud.

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley , found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent's age or older with that worry.

They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

The erosion of privacy has become a pressing issue among active users of social networks. Last week, Facebook scrambled to fix a security breach that allowed users to see their friends' supposedly private information, including personal chats.

Sam Jackson, a junior at Yale who started a blog when he was 15 and who has been an intern at Google , said he had learned not to trust any social network to keep his information private. “If I go back and look, there are things four years ago I would not say today,” he said. “I am much more self-censoring. I'll try to be honest and forthright, but I am conscious now who I am talking to.”

He has learned to live out loud mostly by trial and error and has come up with his own theory: concentric layers of sharing.

His Facebook account, which he has had since 2005, is strictly personal. “I don't want people to know what my movie rentals are,” he said. “If I am sharing something, I want to know what's being shared with others.”

Mistrust of the intentions of social sites appears to be pervasive. In its telephone survey of 1,000 people, the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California found that 88 percent of the 18- to 24-year-olds it surveyed last July said there should be a law that requires Web sites to delete stored information. And 62 percent said they wanted a law that gave people the right to know everything a Web site knows about them.

That mistrust is translating into action. In the Pew study, to be released shortly, researchers interviewed 2,253 adults late last summer and found that people ages 18 to 29 were more apt to monitor privacy settings than older adults are, and they more often delete comments or remove their names from photos so they cannot be identified. Younger teenagers were not included in these studies, and they may not have the same privacy concerns. But anecdotal evidence suggests that many of them have not had enough experience to understand the downside to oversharing.

Elliot Schrage, who oversees Facebook's global communications and public policy strategy, said it was a good thing that young people are thinking about what they put online. “We are not forcing anyone to use it,” he said of Facebook. But at the same time, companies like Facebook have a financial incentive to get friends to share as much as possible. That's because the more personal the information that Facebook collects, the more valuable the site is to advertisers, who can mine it to serve up more targeted ads.

Two weeks ago, Senator Charles E. Schumer , Democrat of New York, petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to review the privacy policies of social networks to make sure consumers are not being deliberately confused or misled. The action was sparked by a recent change to Facebook's settings that forced its more than 400 million users to choose to “opt out” of sharing private information with third-party Web sites instead of “opt in,” a move which confounded many of them.

Mr. Schrage of Facebook said, “We try diligently to get people to understand the changes.”

But in many cases, young adults are teaching one another about privacy.

Ms. Liu is not just policing her own behavior, but her sister's, too. Ms. Liu sent a text message to her 17-year-old sibling warning her to take down a photo of a guy sitting on her sister's lap. Why? Her sister wants to audition for “Glee” and Ms. Liu didn't want the show's producers to see it. Besides, what if her sister became a celebrity? “It conjures up an image where if you became famous anyone could pull up a picture and send it to TMZ ,” Ms. Liu said.

Andrew Klemperer, a 20-year-old at Georgetown University , said it was a classmate who warned him about the implications of the recent Facebook change — through a status update on (where else?) Facebook. Now he is more diligent in monitoring privacy settings and apt to warn others, too.

Helen Nissenbaum, a professor of culture, media and communication at New York University and author of “Privacy in Context,” a book about information sharing in the digital age, said teenagers were naturally protective of their privacy as they navigate the path to adulthood, and the frequency with which companies change privacy rules has taught them to be wary.

That was the experience of Kanupriya Tewari, a 19-year-old pre-med student at Tufts University . Recently she sought to limit the information a friend could see on Facebook but found the process cumbersome. “I spent like an hour trying to figure out how to limit my profile, and I couldn't,” she said. She gave up because she had chemistry homework to do, but vowed to figure it out after finals.

“I don't think they would look out for me,” she said. “I have to look out for me.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/fashion/09privacy.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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Overseas, an Enemy That May Mutate and Grow

WASHINGTON — When President Obama decided last year to narrow the scope of the nine-year war in Afghanistan and Pakistan , he and his aides settled on a formulation that sounded simple: Eviscerate Al Qaeda , but just “degrade” the Taliban , reversing that movement's momentum.

Now, after the bungled car- bombing attempt in Times Square with suspected links to the Pakistani Taliban, a new, and disturbing, question is being raised in Washington: Have the stepped-up attacks in Pakistan — notably the Predator drone strikes — actually made Americans less safe? Have they had the perverse consequence of driving lesser insurgencies to think of targeting Times Square and American airliners, not just Kabul and Islamabad? In short, are they inspiring more attacks on America than they prevent?

It is a hard question.

At the time of Mr. Obama's strategy review, the logic seemed straightforward. Only Al Qaeda had the ambitions and reach to leap the ocean and take the war to America's skies and streets. In contrast, most of the Taliban and other militant groups were regarded as fragmented, regional insurgencies whose goals stuck close to the territory their tribal ancestors have fought over for centuries.

Six months and a few attempted bombings later, including the near-miss in New York last weekend, nothing looks quite that simple. As commanders remind each other, in all wars the enemy gets a vote, too. Increasingly, it looks like these enemies have voted to combine talents, if not forces. Last week, a senior American intelligence official was saying that the many varieties of insurgents now make up a “witches' brew” of forces, sharing money handlers, communications experts and, most important in recent times, bomb makers.

Yes, each group still has a separate identity and goal, but those fine distinctions seem less relevant than ever.

The notion that the various groups are at least thinking alike worries Bruce Riedel, who a year ago was a co-author of President Obama's first review of strategy in the region. “There are two separate movements converging here,” said Mr. Riedel, a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution . “The ideology of global jihad has been bought into by more and more militants, even guys who never thought much about the broader world. And that is disturbing, because it is a force multiplier for Al Qaeda.”

Mr. Riedel also notes, “The pressure we've put on them in the past year has also drawn them together, meaning that the network of alliances is getting stronger, not weaker.” So what seemed like a mission being narrowed by Mr. Obama, focusing on Al Qaeda and its closest associates (which included the Pakistani Taliban), “now seems like a lot broader mission than it did a year ago.”

Figuring out cause-and-effect when it comes to the motivations of Islamic militants is always tricky. Whenever he was asked whether America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were goading Islamic militants into new attacks, President Bush used to shoot back that neither war was under way on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. When President Obama came into office, the conventional wisdom held that the mere arrival of a black president with some Muslim relatives and an eagerness to engage the Islamic world would be bad news for Al Qaeda and Taliban recruiters. One rarely hears that argument now.

A year after Mr. Obama's now-famous speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, Pakistanis talk less about outreach than Predator strikes. And White House officials say they suspect that their strategy of raising pressure may explain the amateurish nature of the recent bombing attempts.

The militants, they argue, no longer enjoy the luxury of time to train their bombers. To linger at training camps is to invite being spotted by a Predator. The tale told to interrogators by Faisal Shahzad , the suspect in the Times Square case, suggests that he hooked up with one set of militants and was passed off to another, and given only cursory bomb-making training. “He wasn't the greatest student, but they weren't stellar teachers, either,” a senior administration official said last week, after reviewing the interrogation record. What Mr. Shahzad had was the one thing the insurgents most covet: easy, question-free ability to leave and enter the United States on a valid passport.

Of course, the United States might more effectively identify citizens who pose a threat. But, similarly, terrorist groups could find ways to more effectively train recruits. As Mr. Riedel notes: “You don't need a Ph.D. in electrical engineering to build a car bomb. You don't even need to be literate.”

Indeed, the Pakistani Taliban have set off plenty of car bombs that worked well against the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies. It was those bombings that finally convinced the Pakistani government to go after the group. In Washington, officials differentiate between the relatively young Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan Taliban, which have deep political roots in its country. “The Pakistani Taliban gets treated like Al Qaeda,” one senior official said. “We aim to destroy it. The Afghan Taliban is different.”

In fact, one Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud , was killed in a C.I.A. drone attack last summer while receiving a massage on the roof of an apartment building. His successor was believed killed in a similar attack until he showed up on a recent video. As one American intelligence official said, “Those attacks have made it personal for the Pakistani Taliban — so it's no wonder they are beginning to think about how they can strike back at targets here.”

To the disappointment of many liberals who thought they were electing an antiwar president, Mr. Obama clearly rejects the argument that if he doesn't stir the hornets' nest, American cities will not get stung. His first year in office he authorized more Predator strikes — more than 50 — than President Bush did in his last four years in office. In December, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Mr. Obama stated that sometimes peace requires war.

“I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people,” he said. Negotiations “could not have halted Hitler 's armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms.”

In fact, recent history and the politics of a polarized Washington are pushing Mr. Obama to step up the pressure. The civil war that paved the way for the Afghan Taliban began when President George H. W. Bush pulled out of Afghanistan once the Soviets left. The Taliban took power and began sheltering Osama bin Laden on Bill Clinton 's watch; as vice president, Dick Cheney often criticized Mr. Clinton's approach to terrorism, saying he dealt with it as a criminal justice issue, not an act of war. The second Bush administration drove the Taliban from power, but the early histories of the Bush years largely agree that the Taliban saw their opportunity to return when the American war on terror refocused on Iraq. Even the United States, they concluded, could not give its all to two wars at once.

That narrative helped form Mr. Obama's argument, throughout his presidential campaign, that the Afghan-Pakistan border, not the Sunni triangle in Iraq, was the center of global terrorism. That, he said, was where all attacks on the United States and its allies had emanated.

Now, six months after setting his course, Mr. Obama is discovering, on the streets of New York, the deeper meaning of his own words.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/weekinreview/09sanger.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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EDITORIAL

Fixing the Treaty

The world has a chance this month to send a powerful message about its determination to curb the spread of nuclear weapons. To do that, 189 nations, whose diplomats have gathered in New York, must strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

At a frightening time — when Iran and North Korea are defying the Security Council and pressing ahead with their nuclear programs, and terrorists are actively trying to buy or steal their own weapon — there has to be a law to make clear that proliferation will not be tolerated. The treaty is that law. But it is badly fraying.

Iran, which is a “non-weapons” state, managed for years to hide its nuclear activities. North Korea secretly diverted fuel and built weapons, then suddenly withdrew from the treaty and tested a weapon.

Ideally, the treaty would be strengthened with legally binding amendments. But that requires a consensus, and even then could take years of votes. A strong political document from the conference could make the world safer. That should include:

Four decades ago, a bargain was struck. Countries without nuclear weapons signed the treaty and forswore them in return for access to peaceful nuclear energy. The five weapons states — the United States, Britain, France, Russia, China — promised to eventually disarm and provide nuclear energy technology to non-weapons states.

The bargain was always tenuous, and countries that gave up nuclear arms have some right to feel aggrieved. For too long the United States and Russia did little to shrink their huge arsenals. China's arsenal is still expanding. Washington's agreement to sell nuclear energy technology to India (which like Pakistan boycotted the nonproliferation treaty so it could develop weapons) enshrined unequal treatment.

President Obama has shown that he is willing to lead by example. He has downgraded the importance of nuclear arms, pledged to build no new weapons, and signed a new arms reduction treaty with Moscow. All five weapons states issued a useful joint statement pledging not to test a weapon and promising to cooperate with countries seeking peaceful nuclear energy programs.

A successful conference — with robust commitments — would give real momentum as the Security Council tries to negotiate a fourth round of sanctions for Iran. That is why Iran is working so hard to dilute or block a strong consensus document.

Egypt, which leads the Nonaligned Movement, is also playing games by pressing for a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East that seeks to force Israel to give up its nuclear arsenal. That is not going to happen any time soon. All states need to ante up and reverse the treaty's slide. The world's security depends on it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/opinion/09sun1.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From Fox News

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Terrorists May Have New Focus on Striking U.S., Officials Say

The failed attack on New York's Times Square could be only the first by terrorist groups that seek to avoid detection by using simpler methods that are more independently planned, U.S. counterterrorism officials said.

WASHINGTON -- The failed bombing in New York's Times Square is a possible signal that militant leaders in Pakistan have shifted their focus to targets in the U.S. and other Western countries instead of sticking to their home base, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials.

The attack, they also warned, could be only the first by terrorist groups that seek to avoid detection by using simpler methods that are more independently planned. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.

U.S. investigators and intelligence agencies are trying to establish whether accused bomber Faisal Shahzad was trained or recruited for the Times Square operation by any Pakistan-based terrorist organization, including the Pakistani Taliban. Shahzad, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, spent five months in Pakistan before returning to the United States in February and preparing his attack.

Shahzad has told investigators that he trained in the lawless tribal areas of Waziristan, where both Al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban operate. He was arrested aboard an Emirates Airlines jet in New York just minutes before it was scheduled to take off for Dubai.

A senior military official told The Associated Press that investigators believe Shahzad had bomb-making training in Pakistan, sponsored in part by elements of the Pakistani Taliban.

If those suspicions prove correct, it suggests that groups based in Pakistan, including the Taliban along the Afghan border, may be taking on a more global approach after years of focusing attacks largely on government or coalition forces in their region.

That focus could stem from the Taliban's continued close association with senior Al Qaeda leaders, who are believed to be hiding in the lawless regions on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, said one former Obama administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

This former official said the Pakistan Taliban may be another potential Al Qaeda affiliate that wants the U.S. out of Afghanistan and the Pakistan Army out of their villages. After months of intensified attacks from drone aircraft, mainly by the CIA in a classified program, Taliban leaders may be more intent on going after the U.S.

One counterterrorism official said the groups were "deadly enemies of the United States" before the U.S. began destroying their leadership, fighters, and camps from the air.

The counterterrorism officials say the Times Square attempt also shows a continuing shift to opportunistic attacks by the Pakistani Taliban and other militant groups that don't have much money for overseas operations. So they use whatever method they can afford, wherever they happen to find a willing operative. As a result, U.S. authorities must figure out how to deal with less predictable patterns of behavior.

The officials say one major concern is that terrorist groups could send people to the U.S. to train homegrown extremists instead of people going to Pakistan or elsewhere for training.

Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said the alleged bomber's possible links to the Pakistani Taliban will not change the U.S. approach to Pakistan or support for Pakistan's step-by-step approach to confronting internal terrorism threats.

"We are in the passenger seat, they are behind the wheel," Morrell said. "They are the ones who are going to determine the direction, the pace, the speed of their operations."

Morrell said he had no information on whether the suspect trained at a terrorist camp in North Waziristan, a sanctuary for militants who attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He said the possible link would not increase pressure to deal with North Waziristan more quickly.

"There is a recognition on everybody's part that all the terrorist safe havens in Pakistan must be dealt with," Morrell said.

Juan Zarate, President George W. Bush's former deputy national security adviser, agreed that the Times Square attack may mark a new chapter in the terrorist threat. "The model may be shifting here, in part because they may have made a calculus that it's much more difficult to have a big ticket attack, and secondly, they may have moved to a model of disruption rather than destruction," he said.

He added that the sloppiness of the attack has raised questions, as U.S. officials work to unravel Shahzad's possible ties to terrorist organizations in Pakistan.

"If he was trained, he was trained pretty poorly," said Zarate, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

He said it may be, in part, be a reflection of the pressure that the U.S. and the Pakistani military has put on the militant cells in Pakistan. It may suggest the poorer quality of training available or the lack of higher quality recruits that they've been able to attract.

"Maybe they're weren't quite sure about this guy, so they gave him a little bit of training and, kind of threw spaghetti at the wall," said Zarate.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/08/terrorists-new-focus-striking-officials-say/print

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Video of Seattle Police Stomping on Robbery Suspect Sparks Brutality Probe

A video showing Seattle police officers stomping on a man's head and body and using a racial epithet has prompted an internal investigation by authorities and disgust from the mayor.

SEATTLE -- A video showing Seattle police officers stomping on a man's head and body and using a racial epithet has prompted an internal investigation by authorities and disgust from the mayor.

One of the officers involved, a 15-year veteran, apologized at a Friday night news conference for his "hateful words."

The incident occurred as Seattle police were responding to an armed robbery call near a nightclub in Seattle's Westlake neighborhood on April 17. Patrons had called police and described the suspects as Hispanic.

The video -- shot by a freelance videographer and aired Thursday by KIRO -- shows a group of officers surrounding two men lying on the ground.

At one point, an officer approaches one of the men and can be heard saying: "You got me? I'm going to beat the (expletive) Mexican (expletive) out of you homey. You feel me?"
Soon after, officers kick the man in the head, hand and leg.

It turned out the man was not the robbery suspect, and the officers let him go.

A tearful Detective Shandy Cobane told reporters the words he used "were offensive and unprofessional."

"A day has not passed that I wished I could rewind the events of that night and take back those hateful words," he added.

Cobane apologized to the Latino community, saying, "I know that my words cut deep and were very hurtful."

"Please know that I am truly, truly sorry," the officer said.

He also apologized to Interim Police Chief John Diaz and his fellow officers.

Diaz said it was Cobane's decision to offer a public apology. The chief adds an internal investigation will continue.

"I watched the video and found it disturbing," Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn said earlier in a statement, adding he has spoken with Diaz.

Cobane and a female officer seen in the video are both on administrative leave.

In a statement, police said the internal investigation of possible officer misconduct was being handled by the Office of Professional Accountability.

The video shows the unidentified man gingerly getting up after being on the ground. The man is approached by the videographer and asked why he was kicked.

"I don't know. They knocked me down and kicked me in the head," the man responds.

Click here to see video and more on this story at Q13Fox.com.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/08/video-seattle-police-stomping-robbery-suspect-sparks-brutality-probe/print

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Arizona Sheriff Greeted by Protesters in Las Vegas

For about 20 minutes Friday, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio stood just feet from protesters outside Stoney's Rockin' Country bar and dance hall as demonstrators yelled "Arpaio go home!" and "Racist!"

LAS VEGAS -- About 200 protesters squared off with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio over Arizona's tough new immigration law before he spoke to a conservative group in Las Vegas.

For about 20 minutes Friday, the sheriff stood just feet from protesters outside Stoney's Rockin' Country bar and dance hall as demonstrators yelled "Arpaio go home!" and "Racist!"

"He needs to go to Germany and to concentration camps, where his beliefs are valued," protester Sara Elsing, 50, told the Las Vegas Sun.

Arpaio's visit was scheduled before passage of Arizona's sweeping new law, which requires police to question people about their immigration status if officers suspect they are here illegally.

"I have a right to be in Las Vegas," Arpaio said.

Las Vegas police Lt. Dan McGrath said about 25 officers were at the event as a precaution. Several officers stood between the sheriff and protesters.

A handful of counter-demonstrators also stood outside Stoney's, the loudest of whom was Joseph Tatner, a Republican congressional candidate.

"To all illegals I say the same: Do it legally," he shouted.

The Arizona law mirrors many of the policies Arpaio has put into place in the Phoenix area, where he set up a hot line for the public to report immigration violations, conducts crime and immigration sweeps in heavily Latino neighborhoods, and frequently raids workplaces for people in the U.S. illegally.

Arpaio said his deputies arrested 25 illegal immigrants working in a Phoenix business Thursday. He said some of them had phony IDs.

"I should be a hero," the sheriff said. "They should be thanking me."

But Fernando Romero, president of Hispanics in Politics, accused Arpaio of "splitting immigrant families."

"We wanted to send him a message, that the hatred he spews is not wanted here," he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

During an hourlong interview with reporters earlier Friday, Arpaio said he doesn't understand the fuss over the Arizona law. He disagrees the law will lead to widespread racial profiling by police.

"We've been doing almost the same as that new law. ... I'm not a racist like people say I am," Arpaio said.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/05/08/arizona-sheriff-greeted-protesters-las-vegas/print

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From MSNBC

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N.J.'s Tent City closes as homeless go to hotel

CAMDEN, N.J. - A tent city built by the homeless next to a highway exit was disbanded abruptly Thursday as quick-moving and well-off benefactors took some 50 residents off in a bus with a promise of free housing and other services for a year.

The first stop was pampering. The people who lived in the encampment in Camden, one of the nation's poorest cities, were getting a night's stay at an upscale hotel in suburban Mount Laurel. They were getting a dip in a pool, manicures, fresh clothes and a new start.

The last day of Tent City, also known as Transitional Park, came three weeks after a deadline to close the place came and went.

Many of the residents — some had lived there for as long as three years — wanted to live under roofs, but they didn't want to be shoved around by government. The county government and a cadre of social service agencies, meanwhile, could not find them all places to live by the April 15 deadline.

Change came quickly

But then, change came quickly.

It began last week when Amir Khan's son showed him some video shot at the self-governing settlement, hidden on public land between train tracks and a highway exit.

Khan is the son of a doctor who worked for decades in Camden. He's also a wealthy entrepreneur, currently president of NextGen Wireless, pastor of a church in Camden's suburbs, and the founder of The Nehemiah Group, a nonprofit devoted to helping prisoners reintegrate into society.

Khan said he couldn't sleep for days after he saw the conditions in a place so close to home. "We said, 'How dare we live in the lap of luxury and have this in our backyard,'" he said.

While the people who stayed in Tent City were proud of how they built a sense of community, shared their meals and lived by a set of rules they've posted on boards nailed to a tree, the place had troubles. No running water. No bathroom. The fire extinguishers attached to some trees are an inadequate defense against open fires. In summers past, the population has surged to about 100.

On Sunday, members of his Khan's congregation, the Solid Rock Worship Center in Lindenwold, pledged $25,000 to help. The next day, he visited the encampment for the first time. Its founder and acknowledged mayor, Lorenzo "Jamaica" Banks, said his people would leave if they knew they could have free housing for a year.

By Thursday, Khan and his group had worked out the details.

They'd raise at least $250,000. After the night in the hotel, the homeless would move to a Nehemiah Center facility in Bridgeton, where they could stay for 21 days and have their needs assessed. Couples would have to live separately.

After that, they would occupy several rented homes and condominiums in and around Camden.

Some residents skeptical

The social service agencies that assisted them in Tent City would keep helping. So would job training and drug treatment programs.

Even as they knocked down their tents and sorted out their possessions Thursday, residents were skeptical.

In the morning, 31-year-old Jason Strom worried about the next 48 hours.

For Strom, a heroin addict for half his life, and others with drug problems, medical detoxification was to begin Saturday.

With no access to drugs, he was worried that people were going to be sick during the hotel stay.

And as others shuffled onto a tour bus at midday, he and wife, Jessica Kron, still hadn't managed to sift through everything they kept in the tent that has been home for the past year or so.

"If I came to their home and said, 'Pack up and come with me,' how would they feel?" he asked.

Before he got on the bus with his laptop computer, James Boggs, one of the top officials in Tent City's governing structure, seemed amazed that the help he always wanted to line up had arrived. And he wondered whether it was real.

"Where the hell were they before?" he asked. "Is this a backdoor way to get us to leave because they couldn't do it any other way?"

But Hal Miller, a homeless outreach coordinator for Volunteers of America of the Delaware Valley, said all of the residents had agreed to join The Nehemiah Group's rescue effort.

Volunteers assist moving effort

So residents and volunteers spent the morning carting away their possessions in wheelbarrows, shopping carts and wheelchairs.

Tom Lind, a doctor who often brought his family with him to hand out sandwiches and medical equipment for diabetics, took the rules off a tree. They were destined for the walls of his living room in Sewell.

Robins found a fresh source of food as they poked in the flattened mud where tents had sat.

And finally, around 1:30 p.m. Banks hopped in Khan's Cadillac Escalade and stood up with his head through the sun roof.

A few minutes, the busload of Tent City refugees followed.

About that time, another homeless man took an abandoned shopping cart.

He made his away across Federal Street with it and pushed it to the place where he's living — a single tent less than a block from the erstwhile Tent City.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37001384/ns/us_news-giving/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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