Battles brew over Fort Hood shooting suspect's past

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's attorney and a Senate committee demand documents that might suggest the Army should have known he was a risk.

By Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times

May 22, 2010

Reporting from Washington

Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan is paralyzed from the chest down. He waits in a small Texas county jail and has not been seen publicly in the six months since he was shot and charged with killing 13 people and wounding nearly three dozen others at the nearby Ft. Hood Army post.

He is about to surface again. Early next month military attorneys will meet for a preliminary hearing on whether the 40-year-old Muslim who became an Army psychiatrist should be court-martialed and perhaps sentenced to die for the Nov. 5 assault.

But even before the gavel comes down, two legal battles are underway to try to force the Army and the Department of Justice to turn over documents dealing with Hasan's past, particularly his personnel files, his mental health records and other documents that might suggest the government should have known he was a dangerously troubled soldier.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee has taken the unusual step of issuing subpoenas demanding the records as part of its investigation into the shooting spree. What they want to know, said committee Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), is "why was he not stopped before he took 13 American lives, and how can we prevent such a tragedy from happening again?"

At the same time, Hasan's defense attorney, John P. Galligan, a retired Army colonel from Belton, Texas, said he has been deprived of the records despite repeated requests. Without the material, he said, it will be very difficult to defend Hasan at the hearing.

Another key issue is whether FBI and Pentagon investigators failed to follow through on information from U.S. intelligence sources about Hasan's reported contacts with Anwar Awlaki, a U.S.-born, Yemen-based Islamic cleric with suspected ties to Al Qaeda. That kind of relationship could help Galligan prove that the Army and the FBI dropped the ball in not warning that Hasan was a danger and mentally unfit to continue serving in the military. It would also help Galligan mount an insanity defense.

"They want to sit around and portray Hasan as a self-radicalized jihadist because of his contacts with Awlaki, and yet I can't get this information," Galligan said. "Does it make sense to go to the hearing without the FBI reports or evidence about my client's mental state?"

According to witnesses, Hasan opened fire after shouting, "Allahu akbar!" — Arabic for "God is great" — inside the Ft. Hood base's Soldier Readiness Center. Outside, he encountered gunfire by base police and fell to the ground wounded.

He was about to deploy to Afghanistan. Instead, he was charged with 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of premeditated attempted murder.

Top attorneys for the Justice Department and the Pentagon wrote the Senate committee last month that they had already turned over nearly 1,000 pages of documents and held briefings with Senate staff members to cooperate with the panel's investigation. To go further, they said, especially in identifying government officials who could be called to testify in the court proceedings, would jeopardize the criminal case.

"We believe we have moved this dialogue significantly in your direction," attorneys William J. Lynn III and Gary G. Grindler wrote to the committee. "We do not believe we can go beyond this point without incurring significant risk to the successful prosecution of Major Hasan."

The committee, in issuing the subpoenas, noted that if Awlaki is considered dangerous enough that the Obama administration has reportedly authorized the CIA to capture or kill him, then everyone he has been in contact with should have been thoroughly vetted — all the more so if one was an Army major.

"I can't wait to join you" in the afterlife, Hasan once reportedly e-mailed Awlaki. After the shootings, Awlaki reportedly praised Hasan as a "hero" and a "man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against its own people."

Two outside experts offered differing opinions on the standoff over government records.

Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale University, saw no harm in giving the material to the committee, as long as it is not publicly released. But he also said the material could be become public record during the court-martial anyway.

"Why not release it?" he said. "I'm not convinced that Congress needs to hibernate while this case goes forward. This is going to be one of the most potentially watched court-martials in American history."

But Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the federal prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, said in an interview that it would cause problems if "Congress gets access to your eyewitnesses, has hearings about your evidence, and draws uninformed conclusions."

In his new book, "The Grand Jihad," McCarthy also questions the decision by FBI and Pentagon investigators to drop their investigation of the Hasan-Awlaki relationship.

"So they didn't remove him," McCarthy writes. "They promoted him to major in May 2009. Five months later, he slaughtered 13 of our best and bravest."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-hood-hasan-20100523,0,5001622,print.story

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Evidence mounts that Pakistani major spoke to Times Square suspect

A Pakistani law enforcement source says the major had cellphone contact with Faisal Shahzad just before the bombing attempt.

By Alex Rodriguez and Richard A. Serrano, Los Angeles Times

May 23, 2010

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Washington

Pakistani and U.S. investigators cited growing evidence Saturday that a Pakistani army major had been in cellphone contact with a man who allegedly attempted to bomb Times Square in New York, including the possibility that they spoke shortly before the failed bombing.

U.S. officials said they were aware of cellphone traffic between Faisal Shahzad and the unidentified Pakistani military officer, bolstering reports days earlier from Pakistani law enforcement sources.

A Pakistani law enforcement source added detail Saturday, saying the major had cellphone contact with Shahzad on May 1, the day of the botched bombing, including a conversation that occurred as the Pakistani American was allegedly parking his SUV rigged with propane tanks, fertilizer and fireworks.

Investigators are keenly interested in the major's role in the bombing attempt because he had more than one cellphone conversation with Shahzad from the time the suspect allegedly loaded his Nissan Pathfinder with bomb components to the moment he parked the vehicle and walked away, said the Pakistani source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the investigation.

U.S. officials said they could not confirm that timing of the conversations between Shahzad and the major. U.S. investigators have limited information about the major, who is in custody in Pakistan, and are negotiating with the Pakistani government to interrogate him, they said.

The Pakistani source said the sequence of phone calls suggests that the major was aware of the plan that Shahzad is accused of trying to carry out — detonating a bomb in one of New York's prime tourist magnets — though investigators are still trying to determine the major's exact role.

Investigators know of at least one meeting between the major and Shahzad in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, sometime in 2009, the Pakistani source said. Authorities have previously said they believed that Shahzad arrived in Pakistan from the U.S. last summer and later went to Pakistan's tribal areas, where he got training in bomb-making at a Taliban camp.

The bomb was poorly constructed and had little chance of causing a large number of deaths, suggesting that its maker was unable to follow through with whatever training he did receive.

Although Pakistani authorities have been cooperating with U.S. investigators in ferreting out Pakistanis linked to Shahzad, they have tried to downplay any ties he might have to the Taliban, instead portraying him as a lone wolf.

Three weeks into the investigation, however, there appears to be little doubt of the Pakistani Taliban's strong link to Shahzad and the bombing attempt.

Pakistani law enforcement sources have said that, while Shahzad was in Pakistan last summer, he met with a Taliban facilitator at least three times. At one of those meetings, the Taliban member provided an undisclosed sum of money because Shahzad had said he was running out of cash. U.S. officials familiar with the case have said that the Taliban gave Shahzad about $15,000 to finance the attack.

A Taliban member who said he was familiar with Shahzad's travels in Pakistan's tribal areas last year said Taliban facilitators transported Shahzad from the northwestern city of Peshawar into the Mohmand region in the tribal belt along the border with Afghanistan.

There, he said, Shahzad was taken to Omar Khalid, the Pakistani Taliban's leader in Mohmand, before getting five days of training at a Taliban camp near the village of Baizai, near the border.

It remains unclear whether the major had any connection with the Taliban. However, his role in the case could become an embarrassment for the Pakistani military, which regards the Taliban as a formidable threat to the country and has launched large-scale offensives against the militant group in the country's restive Swat Valley and in several tribal belt regions, including South Waziristan, Bajaur and Orakzai.

The army has denied that any officer has been arrested in connection with the Shahzad case and said that the major in question was arrested for disciplinary reasons. It also described him as a retired army major. However, the law enforcement source said the major was in the army at the time of his arrest.

The major is one of at least 13 people who have been arrested or detained in Pakistan in connection with the Shahzad case. Pakistani authorities have also arrested Salman Ashraf Khan, the co-owner of a catering company that serves embassies and large companies.

It is unclear how Khan might be tied to the Times Square bombing attempt. On Friday, the U.S. Embassy issued a warning about the catering company, Hanif Rajput Catering Service, saying that it had links to terrorist groups.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan-shahzad-20100523,0,4526703,print.story

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L.A. gang intervention workers' unique assignment: Preventing the next crime

Class was in session the other day in a squat building overlooking MacArthur Park. The assignment: "Baby Mama Drama."

Scenario: A man is pinned down inside a house because he's in the "wrong" neighborhood — outside his territory. He's just visiting the mother of his child, who lives in your neighborhood, but the woman's new boyfriend is out front and not happy. The situation is tense and deteriorating quickly.

Los Angeles officials are preparing to graduate their first class of city-sanctioned gang intervention workers, a significant step in the city's groundbreaking adoption of street outreach efforts designed to augment traditional policing.

This spring, the 34 students of the city's training academy have been gathering twice a week, pondering scenarios like that one, which might sound innocuous to outsiders but can have serious consequences on the streets.

City Hall pledged to offer a program unlike anything that has been seen in crime prevention — and so far, that much is certainly true, though only time will tell the consequences for the city. Officials say gang outreach workers will work behind the scenes, in the most distressed corners of the city, to do what law enforcement cannot: prevent the next crime, as Police Chief Charlie Beck put it, while the cops are working to solve the last one.

The first 15-week academy is scheduled to end next month; it is being run by the Advancement Project, the legal advocacy, civil rights and public policy group that was awarded a $200,000 city contract last fall.

The program is no mere academic exercise: Law enforcement authorities from across the nation are closely monitoring the program to see whether it will succeed. City Hall spends more than $20 million each year on gang intervention and prevention contracts, and soon, a diploma from the academy will be required of anyone working under those contracts.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/05/la-gang-intervention-workers-unique-assignment-preventing-the-next-crime.html#more

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Common Security Clubs offer the jobless a lifeline

The citizen action groups allow the unemployed to help each other by swapping skills. More than a means to save money, the clubs give their members hope.

Arlie Hochschild

May 23, 2010

The jobless in the United States lose far more than their paychecks; they also lose precious social support. Research has found that the health of those who lose jobs is likely to decline and the risk of dying rises. Many not only lose daily contact with factory and office friends, they also retreat from other social interaction. Compared with the employed, the jobless are less likely to vote, volunteer, see friends and talk to family. Even on weekends, the jobless spend more time alone than those with jobs

That's not good. Because as activist and author Chuck Collins has discovered, misery really does love company, especially when social interactions are aimed at helping end the misery. Since January 2009, Collins, an energetic, dark-haired 50-year-old, and his assistant, Andree Zaleska, have launched 115 Common Security Clubs in nine states. The clubs are citizen action groups designed to bring the unemployed — and the anxiously employed — together to help each other. Each club consists of 15 to 20 members, drawn from churches, union halls, environmental groups or neighborhoods. They meet in homes and church basements, and in Marion County, Ore., a group meets in an old Grange Hall.

I heard about Collins' efforts from a friend, and recently interviewed him and eight members of a Common Security Club for a book I am finishing. As we sat at a table in his chilly office in the worn-out, working-class Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain, Collins laid out the concept. "The recession hits us one by one, but we're all in this together," he said. "We start there."

The groups help people cut costs through swapping skills. "A woman who works five hours caring for an elderly person in the group gets it back in repairs to her kitchen sink, transportation and computer lessons," Collins explained. "We organize it through time banks."

Members share things too — baby strollers, clothes, a wheelchair, a guitar, a TV, dining-room chairs, a shovel, a battery charger — anything that one person needs and another has. One elderly woman swapped her late husband's truck for yard and garden work. Members of her Common Security Club saved money on vacations by taking turns staying in a borrowed cabin in the New England woods. Some groups save money by buying local vegetables, fish and poultry in bulk.

Borrowing an idea from a Cambridge, Mass., nonprofit organization called HEET (Home Energy Efficiency Team), Common Security members also weatherize each other's houses in the spirit of old-fashioned barn raisings. "Fifteen of us can do it in one day and cut a heating bill in half. We get a contractor to show us how to seal the windows, and blow insulation into the basement and attic. We end up with a backyard barbecue talking about the next house to work on," Zaleska explained.

In one city, 20 Common Security Club families hired two teachers to set up an inexpensive six-hour weekday summer camp for kids, with science experiments in the morning and backyard sprinkler play in the afternoon.

Each club maintains lists of standing "offers" and "asks." One group's "offers" included babysitting, eldercare, transportation, cooking, shopping and tutoring. "Asks" included "Cut my cat's nails," rides to the supermarket, computer help and leads to literary agents. One unemployed secretary reinvented herself as a "de-clutterer." Members of the club passed the e-mail word to potential clients, and a semi-employed computer whiz helped design her website. "I was charging $25 an hour," she said. "My club urged me to raise it to $35 — and it worked!"

It isn't always easy, Collins warns: "People like to give but dread to ask — especially the 'big ask.' We have to overcome shame. Outside of the family, we've lost that old community-building skill of our ancestors."

Our new teachers in that skill may be immigrants. One young Boston computer repairman and club member who grew up in the Virgin Islands told me: "On St. Thomas, lending and borrowing is a way of life. I'd never buy a ladder if my neighbor had one, nor would he, if I had one. You aren't ashamed to ask or to say — or hear — 'no.' My American friends think asking is mooching. I tell them, 'Give it a try.' "

Common Security Clubs do more than cut costs, save money, heat houses and brainstorm job searches. As one retired social worker who had become isolated caring for a chronically-ill husband put it: "My club has brought me out of my shell. Before I joined, I was sitting alone scared, glued to the TV, watching terrifying CNN financial news flashes — bam, bam, bam. I was ready to sell all I had. The group calmed me down. They got me to a wise financial advisor. I found new friends. I got a new part-time job. It's actually the best thing that ever happened to me."

During the Depression, similar groups called Townsend Clubs — named after Dr. Francis Townsend, a California physician — mobilized 2 million members across the nation to press for what became the Social Security Act of 1935. Most Common Security Club members believe in government support, and in particular, help for the unemployed. But they are also greening the old American dream, forming communities and even having a little fun.

Arlie Hochschild is the author of "The Time Bind" and "The Commercialization of Intimate Life" and the co-editor of "Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-hochschild-unemployed-20100523,0,1760356,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Signs of a Cover-Up After Killings in a Haitian Prison

LES CAYES, Haiti — When the earth shook violently on Jan. 12, the inmates in this southern city's squalid prison clamored to be released, screaming: “Help! We're going to die in here.”

Elsewhere in Haiti , inmates were fleeing largely undeterred. But here, where the prison itself sustained little damage, there was no exit. Instead, conditions worsened for the inmates, three-quarters of them pretrial detainees, arrested on charges as petty as loitering and locked up indefinitely alongside convicted felons.

After the earthquake, guards roughed up the noisiest inmates and consolidated them into cells so crowded their limbs tangled, former prisoners said. With aftershocks jangling nerves, the inmates slept in shifts on the ground, used buckets for toilets and plotted their escape.

The escape plan, set in motion on Jan. 19 by an attack on a guard, proved disastrous. With Haitian and United Nations police officers encircling the prison, the detainees could not get out. For hours, they rampaged, hacking up doors and burning records, until tear gas finally overwhelmed them.

In the end, after the Haitian police stormed the compound, dozens of inmates lay dead and wounded, their bodies strewn through the courtyard and crumpled inside cells. The prison smoldered, a blood-splattered mess.

Haitian officials here say they did not use lethal force but rather found lifeless bodies when they entered the prison. They attribute the killings to a prison ringleader who, they say, slaughtered his fellow inmates before hopping over the wall and disappearing.

But an investigation by The New York Times casts doubt on the official version of events and instead indicates that Haitian authorities shot unarmed prisoners and then sought to cover it up. Many of the bodies were buried in an unmarked grave.

Kesnel Jeudi, a recently released inmate, said in an interview that nobody was dead when the police rushed the prison. “They shouted: ‘Prisoners, lie down. Lie down. Lie down,' ” he said. “When the prisoners lay down — while the prisoners were lying down — they began firing.”

Mr. Jeudi, 28, said the police shootings involved some settling of scores: “There were people they selected to kill.”

Four months later, the death toll remains unknown. But most accounts place it between 12 and 19, with up to 40 wounded. The local morgue attendant, Georges Raymond, said that he initially registered 11 dead detainees, with several more arriving later after they died of bullet wounds at the adjacent hospital.

Prison officials would not allow The Times to enter the walled prison compound, which sits directly behind the police station in the heart of town. But reporters interviewed six witnesses to the disturbance as well as five others who visited the prison either immediately after the shootings or the next day. None saw inmates firing weapons or any evidence that inmates killed inmates. Instead, witnesses said the police shot unarmed prisoners, some in the prison yard, others in their cells. Afterward, the authorities failed to notify inmates' relatives of the deaths, buried bodies without conducting autopsies and burned the surviving prisoners' bloodstained clothing and shoes.

Myrtil Yonel, a human rights leader here, said, “For us, we consider this to be a massacre.”

Under a bare bulb in his office beside the prison, Olritch Beaubrun, the superintendent of the antiriot police unit, scoffed at this accusation. He said that a detainee nicknamed Ti Mousson had slaughtered inmates who resisted his escape plan.

“Ti Mousson put down the 12 detainees,” Superintendent Beaubrun said. “We did not. We never fired our guns.”

This assertion is at odds with what The Times found after reviewing confidential Haitian and United Nations reports and conducting interviews with former detainees, guards, prison cooks, wardens, police officials, judicial officials and relatives of dead prisoners.

Among other things, United Nations police officers noted that day in an internal incident report that the Haitian police had used firearms. The cooks, three women trapped inside during the riot, said that the detainees did no shooting. No weapons were recovered. Ti Mousson — whose real name is Luguens Cazeau — escaped. And the authorities did not treat the prison as the crime scene of what they portrayed as a mass murder by Mr. Cazeau, who was awaiting trial on charges of stealing a satellite dish.

The Haitian government said that it was conducting three separate investigations into the episode. But witnesses and others interviewed by The Times during two visits here last month said that they had never spoken to investigators. The inmates' bodies had not been exhumed, and there was no indication that basic forensic evidence had ever been collected.

The detainees' relatives say they feel not only bereft but also abandoned. During an interview, the widow of Abner Lisius — arrested on suspicions of stealing a cellphone, now dead at 45 — wiped away tears. “My husband was murdered by the authorities,” said Marie Michel Laurencin, the widow.

For four months, American and United Nations officials have made no public comments about the killings at Les Cayes, saying they were urging the Haitians to handle the matter themselves. But after The Times repeatedly raised questions about the case with American officials, the United States Embassy sent a human rights officer to Les Cayes.

The United Nations mission chief in Haiti, Edmond Mulet, has now ordered the United Nations police commissioner here to begin an independent inquiry.

Last week, the United Nations spokesman in Haiti, David Wimhurst, expressed frustration with the Haitian investigations to date, saying that “incomplete and inaccurate” official statements about what happened in Les Cayes suggested a possible cover-up.

“We've waited and waited for the government to do its thing and now we're going to do our thing,” Mr. Wimhurst said. “It's a delicate political business being in Haiti and supporting the government. We're not here to undermine them, but nor are we here to turn a blind eye to gross human rights violations.”

A Fragile Justice System

How Haiti now deals with the killings in Les Cayes offers a test case for this country's commitment to human rights at a time when the world is poised to help rebuild its troubled justice system after the earthquake. The State Department and the Agency for International Development have requested $141.3 million for that purpose.

For 15 years, on and off, the international community has invested in Haiti's police, courts and prisons as a way to shore up its fragile democracy. The effort began in late 1994 when the Haitian Army, long an instrument of political terror, was disbanded.

“After many years of dictatorship, there was no independent police force and no independent judiciary, and the prisons were hellholes,” said William G. O'Neill, director of the Conflict Prevention and Peace Forum at the Social Science Research Council. “The goal was to create institutions that would respect human rights and allow the rule of law to flourish.”

But to date the international investment, focused on police and judicial training in an official culture rife with corruption and cronyism, has netted modest returns. Haiti's corrections system has made few gains.

Before the earthquake, the country's 17 prisons “fell far short of international standards,” the Haitian government acknowledged in a post-disaster needs assessment. Prisons were dilapidated and severely overcrowded; guards, far fewer than needed, were poorly equipped. And — the persistent core problem — most detainees were held in prolonged pretrial detention, often for minor crimes or for things like commercial debt, witchcraft and werewolfery.

“Understand, you can be arrested in Haiti for practically nothing,” said Maurice D. Geiger, an American contractor working on justice reform in Haiti. “And once you are arrested and go to prison, it is not only possible but likely that you will stay there for an extended period of time without seeing a judge.”

Prisons were widely viewed as “powder kegs awaiting a spark,” as a 2007 report by the International Crisis Group put it. And the earthquake provided it.

On Jan. 12, the largest prison in the country, the national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince, emptied completely not long after a section of its surrounding wall collapsed. Guards fled along with inmates, including a few hundred prisoners considered a serious risk to the country's security.

Looking back, police officials said they should have anticipated a “contagion” of escape attempts at other prisons after that.

Panic After a Quake

In Les Cayes, Haiti's third largest city, the earthquake was far less destructive than in Port-au-Prince. But the earth did shake, violently and laterally. And, although children at an orphanage in the city marveled at how the trees danced, adults panicked, dashing into the streets, screaming, crying.

Inside the prison complex, where corroding concrete cellblocks frame a desolate courtyard, inmates hollered, trying to wrench open the doors to their cells.

Built in the 19th century, the prison held 467 detainees in 14 cells that day, more than four times its intended capacity. The ruckus was ear-splitting. When the inmates did not quiet down, Pierre Eddy Charlot, the supervisor, called in reinforcements from the adjacent police station and the United Nations police unit stationed in town.

“Measures were taken to prevent the worst,” Mr. Charlot scribbled in a memo that night.

According to prisoners released after the disturbance, those measures included an effort to silence forcibly the troublemakers. Mr. Jeudi said he watched the guards remove the noisiest detainees from their cells, beat them with batons and then cram them into a few particularly crowded units. Twice-a-day bathroom privileges were eliminated.

Tensions escalated. “The prisoners were riled up,” said one former detainee, recently released. The young man spoke on the condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. “When they beat us, we said, ‘Damn,' ” he said. “Now, you know prisoners. We tried to make a plan to get out.”

Cell 3 was planning central, home to Mr. Cazeau, or Ti Mousson, who had been roughed up by a guard after the quake, according to former detainees. The inmates in that cell got busy, digging holes in the walls, sharpening a toothbrush to a fine point.

Their plotting was no secret. “There was a guy in Cell 3, a former police officer,” Mr. Jeudi said. “Two days before the prison fell apart, he was in the cell when Ti Mousson counted who was with him and who was not. So that guy asked for the warden and informed on what the prisoners were planning. And the warden did nothing.”

After the earthquake, the warden, Inspector Sylvestre Larack, put out a “maximum alert” calling his 29 guards back to duty. But on Jan. 19, with much of Les Cayes still in a post-quake state of emergency, only five guards showed up to work inside the prison.

In the early afternoon, when the cells were to be opened for the dumping of the waste buckets, Inspector Larack left to put gas in his car, said Mr. Yonel, the southern regional director of Haiti's Network for the Defense of Human Rights. Given the long lines at the service stations, this was bound to take time.

For the escape planners, “the stars had aligned,” Mr. Yonel said.

A Cell Erupts

Thélèmaque Guerson, the guard with the keys, found nothing out of the ordinary when he unlocked Cell 1 and then Cell 2.

When he opened Cell 3, however, dozens of detainees “formed a coalition and pushed out together at the same time,” he said in an interview. They threw a bucket of urine at him and pounced, fists first. Mr. Cazeau grabbed him by the chest, saying, “Give me the prison keys.” Mr. Guerson, 28, said he threw the keys in the hopes that the other guards would retrieve them.

The other guards, however, “must have been distracted,” said an internal United Nations report. That report said it was a United Nations police officer patrolling the prison roof who first spied the detainees attacking Mr. Guerson.

Mr. Guerson said he struggled, but, outnumbered, could not stand his ground. He was stabbed in the head and neck with the sharpened toothbrush. Finally, he managed to extricate himself and ran out the front gate. All the other guards fled, too, and they did not lock the door after themselves.

The inmates controlled the prison.

Key ring in hand, Mr. Cazeau opened cell after cell. Inmates poured into the yard. Some rushed the front door. But by this point, United Nations officers and soldiers, who had formed a perimeter around the compound, blocked the entrance, pointing their guns. Detainees withdrew back inside, where they easily found the tools to vent their frustrations, like propane tanks to set fires and pickaxes to chop up the doors.

Although prisons are not supposed to keep firearms, and especially not unsecured firearms, the inmates also found a couple of old guns in the clerk's office, according to some accounts. Mr. Guerson and the former detainees said they thought the guns either did not work or did not have ammunition.

The police station stands directly in front of the prison. Superintendent Beaubrun, who runs the Departmental Unit for the Maintenance of Order, said that he was sitting out front under a tamarind tree when he heard a blast — “Boom!” Running toward the noise — its origin unclear — he saw Mr. Guerson dash out, his head bleeding.

Still, Superintendent Beaubrun said, the police could not intervene without orders from his superior, whom he said he had difficulty reaching by cellphone.

So while the inmates ransacked the prison, the guards were outside, the police were outside and the United Nations officers were outside, too. “We spent three hours discussing what to do,” Superintendent Beaubrun said.

Handling a riot is a delicate affair for prison officials. International standards encourage the use of mediation and nonlethal restraint; law enforcement officers are supposed to use lethal force only after all other means have been exhausted. Haitian officials ordered the United Nations officers, who were better equipped, to enter the prison and open fire on the prisoners, according to the United Nations report. The United Nations officers, most from a Senegalese police unit, vehemently refused.

“It was not right!” Abdou Mbengue, the reporting officer for the Senegalese, said at his office here last month. His commander, Lt. Col. Ababacar Sadikh Niang, said that they were not authorized to discuss the matter but added, emphatically, “It must be said that the Senegalese did not fire a single shot.”

Haitian officials blamed the United Nations officers' “indifference” for allowing the situation to escalate.

Officer Mbengue, in turn, in a report that he wrote the night of the shootings, deplored “the amateurism, the lack of seriousness and the irresponsibility of the Haitian National Police officers.” The senior police official in the region — Superintendent Beaubrun's boss — did not arrive on the scene for more than an hour, he wrote.

With night falling, Superintendent Beaubrun said, the police grew concerned about three female prison cooks who they believed had been taken hostage inside the prison. “They were screaming: ‘Don't kill me. Don't kill me. Don't kill me,' ” he said.

The three women, interviewed while cooking outside the prison last month, said they never feared that the detainees would kill them. They said that some detainees considered using them “as a shield” if the police came in but that others did not permit that. Generally, the detainees were protective of them and did not threaten or harm them, the cooks said.

“Because we used to take good care of the detainees, maybe that's why they did not try to hurt us,” said one, Marie Florence Degan, as she tended a huge metal kettle of rice and beans over a wood fire.

Around 5 p.m., Haitian police officials decided to enter the prison compound. They used tear gas first, hurling 30 grenades that had been given to them by the Senegalese officers.

“A lot of gas,” Mr. Jeudi said. “Myself, personally, I took a T-shirt, wrapped it around my nose and put toothpaste around my mouth” to combat the effects. “I was crying.”

Detainees ran into the infirmary and hid in cells. Some escaped, climbing up and over the walls or through holes they had dug. Mr. Cazeau, the ringleader, fled in plain view, using a prison ladder, according to a report by Mr. Yonel's human rights group.

The Police Take Over

By the time the police penetrated the northern wall to enter the prison, the detainees had been overcome by the gas and were breathing hard, former detainees said.

The prison warden's report said the police, accompanied by guards, were greeted by “a hailstorm of rocks and ammunition coming from the detainees.”

The cooks said the detainees never fired a shot. “No detainees did any shooting,” one of the cooks, Charita Milien, said. No officers were killed, and none were wounded by gunfire, according to police reports.

On entering, the warden's report said, officers found on the ground “detainees who had been executed by the leaders of the movement for refusing to cooperate.”

But two cooks said that they saw no dead detainees on the ground at the moment the police arrived. And, like other detainees interviewed, Mr. Jeudi said, “No one was killed before the police entered the prison.”

Superintendent Beaubrun said that the detainees' account could not be trusted. “The detainees were arrested by us,” he said. “They will never say good things about us. Escape is good for them. If you prevent them from escaping, they won't like you.”

Mr. Jeudi and other former detainees said the police entered firing. “When they started to shoot, people were screaming and crying,” Mr. Jeudi said. Many detainees dropped facedown on the ground and laced their fingers behind their heads.

One middle-aged former prisoner said he was standing on the sidelines trying to calm Fredely Percy, a 27-year-old inmate serving time for marijuana possession. “My friend, Fredely, was standing next to me and we were discussing what to do,” the former prisoner said in an interview. “At that moment, I heard ‘Pow,' and he got hit and fell down.”

Another former detainee, a scrappy man in his 20s, said, in broken English: “They shoot a lot of people. There was a lot of blood on me. Blood, blood. Everybody in the prison have blood on them.”

He said the police shot indiscriminately. “All them people they killed, it's not even like they were going to escape,” he said. “They just shoot them. Like they nervous, they shoot people.”

Mr. Yonel said he believed that some of the victims were singled out. A former prisoner said that the police executed one of the ringleaders, a man serving a life sentence for murder, after the situation had calmed. The officers found the man in his cell, took him into the infirmary, beat him and shot him, the former inmate said.

“They decided because he had escaped death earlier to kill him,” the former inmate said. He added, “They never liked him.”

A Priest's Witness

The next day, the Rev. Marc Boisvert, an American priest who runs a large orphanage on the outskirts of town, heard about the prison violence from a radio report. Father Boisvert, a former United States Navy chaplain, has operated a vocational program at the prison for years, training convicts to be tailors. He immediately got in his car and drove to the prison.

“It was a real mess,” he said. “The place was still smoldering.”

The warden, Inspector Larack, welcomed him, he said. “They brought me in to see the damage that had been caused by the prisoners,” Father Boisvert said. “Especially they wanted to show me the bad side: ‘The prisoners did this. Imagine that. Look at the holes in the walls. Look at the ceilings. They burnt the kitchen out.' ”

Well before the riot, conditions at the prison were “subhuman,” Father Boisvert said. After the riot, with more than 400 prisoners locked down in five or six small cells, the conditions became “seriously inhumane,” he said.

Father Boisvert found several wounded detainees languishing without medical treatment.

One detainee showed him the pellets in his back from a shotgun blast; he said he had been shot at close range, through the bars of his cell. Another detainee, shot by a small-caliber handgun, was writhing in pain, a bullet lodged in his chest. A third had a bloody eye that appeared to be from a bullet casing being ejected, Father Boisvert said.

In the prison yard, one inmate lay catatonic on a bare mattress, apparently in shock from what he had witnessed, Father Boisvert said.

“It was crazy,” he said. “People just lost it. People with guns lost it, and other people lost their lives.”

After Father Boisvert volunteered to provide food to the detainees, he gained relatively free access to the prison, and prisoners began telling him what had happened.

“They all claim that when the shooting started, they had their hands up and were surrendering,” he said. “That the shooting seemed to be at close range, through bars into cells where the people inside had nowhere to go.

“Essentially, when the authorities finally got their act together, they came in full force and shot people indiscriminately in their cells,” he said.

Like Father Boisvert, Ms. Laurencin, 42, also heard about the disturbance at the prison on the radio. She said she was not worried about her husband, Mr. Lisius, the father of her three daughters and a cabinetmaker by trade. In prison since November without having seen a judge, he was too timid to have taken part in an uprising, she said.

Ms. Laurencin said she prepared his favorite dish — fish and plantains — and took it to the prison. But the guards would not let her in. The next day, she returned twice, and the second time she made her way into the yard where she saw prisoners on their knees. They called to her: “Your husband is dead.”

Stunned, Ms. Laurencin went to the morgue to look for her husband's body. What she saw then haunts her now, she said: a bullet hole in his caved-in head, and his rotted entrails spilling out. He was too damaged for a proper funeral, she said, so she and a couple of friends buried him themselves in the town cemetery.

Since his death, the authorities have never contacted her, she said last month.

Gruesome Photographs

On Jan. 19, after the prison was calmed, a United Nations officer took pictures inside the compound. Those photographs, closely guarded by the United Nations, appear to be the only documentary evidence of the killings.

They show bodies in the prison yard and bodies in cells, according to three people who have viewed them. Several bodies bear multiple gunshot wounds. The images are gruesome, said Mr. Geiger, the American contractor working in Haiti on a justice reform project.

Mr. Geiger, a former Justice Department official, said that a picture of two bodies slumped inside one cell, and a third, half in, half out, most disturbed him. “Unarmed prisoners in a cell are not a danger to anybody,” he said. “Any competent and responsible prison authority knows how to take care of a situation where people in a cell are disturbing, hollering or whatever.”

After the episode was over, prison officials summoned the local justice of the peace, Michel Seide, “to certify the damage incurred in the course of the riot,” according to the warden's incident report.

When Mr. Seide stepped inside, he immediately saw two bodies on the ground, “one with a big hole in his head, next to his neck,” he said in an interview. The other bodies lay scattered through the main yard, he said. He counted a total of 10, none inside cells, he said. He said he did not know if bodies had been moved before his arrival.

While he was writing a report, a truck arrived to collect the bodies, he said, and the authorities asked a couple of prisoners in good standing to help move them.

One was Mr. Jeudi, who was just completing a five-year sentence for armed robbery. He said that he transported a dozen dead detainees to the hospital, including one found outside the compound, apparently shot while escaping.

“I carried 12 cadavers,” Mr. Jeudi said. “I was sick about it.”

Mr. Jeudi said he also ferried eight wounded detainees to the hospital.

After the bodies had been removed, Alix Civil, the local prosecutor, arrived at the scene, which he described in an interview as “a catastrophic situation.” He said he saw damaged walls, broken cell doors and blood everywhere — details not included in the report he received from the justice of the peace.

“A lot of things were missing from that report,” Mr. Civil said. “It was written only to please the chief of the prison.”

He ordered Mr. Seide to redo his report. Mr. Seide said that he interviewed hospitalized detainees who told him the police shot them, but he would not divulge the conclusion of his second report, which could form the basis for a local prosecution of the officers.

A few days after the shootings, Antoinetta Dorcinat arrived at the morgue just in time to retrieve the body of Mr. Percy, her boyfriend. Ms. Dorcinat said she gave the morgue attendant a bribe of $6.50 “so they wouldn't throw Fredely away with the others.”

Mr. Yonel, the human rights leader, said the morgue sent 11 bodies to the local cemetery. He said that the cemetery caretaker showed him the muddy clearing where the bodies had been buried.

Detainees' relatives were not notified before the burial. Lisette Charles said she still did not know where her 21-year-old son, Jacklyn Charles, was buried.

“I didn't know about what happened until about five days afterward,” Ms. Charles said. “I was told several of them were put in large zippered body bags and piled up at the cemetery. I don't know what hole they buried him in.”

After word spread, Mr. Yonel said, detainees' relatives kept showing up at his office, a cubbyhole with books and files piled high, asking: “Why? Why? Why?” Over 26 days, his staff investigated, concluding that the police killed the detainees without justification, and he delivered his findings to the local authorities. “I went before the court and said: ‘You have to have an investigation. You can't just let this pass,' ” he said.

But many months did pass, during which the only thing that happened was that Inspector Larack was transferred to the top warden job in the country at the national penitentiary in Port-au-Prince, which is slowly filling back up with prisoners.

At the penitentiary, Inspector Larack declined to discuss the violence under his watch. He welcomed reporters into the prison's rubble-strewn courtyard, “my new office.” But he turned rigid when the episode in Les Cayes was raised. He blocked a video camera with his hand — “Stop!” he said — and demanded the videotape.

A Police Report

A couple of weeks later, the Haitian National Police inspector general's office completed its investigation of the disturbance in Les Cayes and recommended Inspector Larack's demotion. The investigation focused on only prison officials. The police were not questioned, judging by a confidential inspector general's report. The catalyst for the inquiry appeared to be growing concern about the prison escapes across the country — and not concern about the deaths at Les Cayes.

The inspector general, Fritz Jean, blamed Inspector Larack for failing to take steps to prevent the disturbance. He also accused him of lying to investigators about who shot the detainees by accusing Mr. Cazeau of mass murder.

The detainees were actually killed, the inspector general's report said, after Mr. Cazeau, the ringleader, escaped and the police entered the prison.

The inspector general's report does not raise any questions about the police shootings and whether they were justified. It concludes that the police and prison officials did “estimable work” and should be commended for preventing a majority of the prisoners from fleeing.

Shown a copy of the inspector general's report, Mr. O'Neill, who served as an adviser to Haiti's justice reform effort for many years, said it looked like “a whitewash.”

A crucial component of the justice reform effort in Haiti has been to wipe out a culture of impunity, “where government officials literally could get away with murder,” Mr. O'Neill said.

“If things like this can happen in a state-run institution, and it's not handled properly, that's a very bad precedent for the future,” he said. “If whoever killed these people are not brought to justice, it sets a bad tone for post-earthquake reconstruction.”

Senator Patrick J. Leahy , the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Appropriations subcommittee that finances foreign aid programs, said that how Haiti ultimately handled the case in Les Cayes would show if it was serious about justice.

“Absent the will to see justice done,” Mr. Leahy said, “we should not waste our money.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/americas/23haiti.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

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A Small Town in Arkansas Mourns Two Slain Officers

WEST MEMPHIS, Ark. — The sewing machine at the front of Tobey and Kelly Duncan's outdoor apparel store whirred continuously on Saturday as seamstresses stitched together one new police dress uniform after the next.

It has been that way in the shop since late Thursday afternoon, when the first two uniforms — fashioned for two slain police officers, Sgt. Brandon Paudert, 39, and Officer Bill Evans, 38 — were sent to a nearby mortuary. Since then, the Duncans have seen a piecemeal procession of officers at their store as they prepared for calling hours on Sunday and funerals for the officers on Monday.

“They know, in the back of their head, what they wear that for,” Kelly Duncan said of the officers, gesturing toward the long-sleeved black uniforms bearing West Memphis police patches. “They're shellshocked, but they're doing better than you'd expect.”

Sergeant Paudert and Officer Evans were shot to death on Thursday during a traffic stop on Interstate 40 East, prompting a wide dragnet that paralyzed the area and ended in a hail of gunfire between the police and two suspects — Jerry R. Kane Jr., 45, and his son Joseph, 16 — in a Wal-Mart parking lot here about 90 minutes later, as shoppers scurried for cover.

The Kanes were killed in the gun battle, and Sheriff Dick Busby of Crittenden County and his chief deputy, W. A. Wren, were wounded.

The Kanes held strident antigovernment views and, according to Internet video and audio postings featuring them, traveled the country giving seminars on debt avoidance. According to his Web site, Jerry Kane had given a two-day seminar in Las Vegas that ended May 16 and was set to give another in Safety Harbor, Fla., beginning on Friday.

It remained unclear on Saturday why the Kanes were pulled over. Bill Sadler, an Arkansas State Police spokesman, declined to release any details of what he described as a continuing investigation.

But as the authorities worked to piece together the sequence of events that led to Thursday's shootings, residents of West Memphis continued to wonder sadly how their small community had become the scene of such a gritty tableau — one that left their police department's drug task force cut in half.

The town of about 30,000 sits just west of the Mississippi River flood plains and the Memphis skyline, near Interstates 40 and 55, and its truck stops teem with nonstop activity.

Flags flew at half-staff, and bouquets framed the doors of police headquarters.

“Pray for our police officers,” read the marquee at a nearby tire shop.

Inside a gymnasium at West Memphis High School, officials met to discuss memorial details. Absent among the clutch of officials who stood in the darkened building at midday was Police Chief Robert Paudert, whose son was one of the two slain officers.

Charles Cooper, 80, said his daughter, Terri Doyle, called the police on Thursday shortly after the two noticed a suspicious white minivan parked outside Ms. Doyle's apartment, about a third of a mile from the Wal-Mart. Mr. Cooper and Ms. Doyle spotted the Kanes in the van after returning from lunch in downtown Memphis and, at the time, knew nothing of a frantic search for the car after the shooting.

“They backed the van in, and that was unusual — nobody parks their cars like that here,” Mr. Cooper said. “I could see the young guy in the passenger's side. I didn't even think about that being the people. I told Terri, ‘You get back in the house there, because you don't know where they might be.' I didn't realize they were right there in front of us.”

He said that while his daughter was talking to the police, the van pulled out toward the Wal-Mart. “While she was on the phone, she heard the shots,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/us/23arkansas.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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From MSNBC

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Honoring America's fallen service members

For Memorial Day, share your thoughts, photos and video of loved ones who died while serving in the U.S. military

Do you want to pay tribute to a fallen member of the U.S. military? Tell us what your fondest memory of that person is, and why he/she should be remembered. Include a photo or video if available. We'll publish a selection of your stories on Memorial Day weekend.

(Submission form is included on site)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37256050/ns/us_news-life/

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Calif. bill aimed at molesters would cost millions

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A state corrections department analysis of a bill being considered by California lawmakers found that mandating life sentences for some child molesters and lifetime parole for others would cost tens of millions of dollars annually after the first decade.

The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst puts the ultimate tab much higher: hundreds of millions of dollars each year, some of it to build new cells for sex offenders serving longer terms.

The projections come as the Assembly Appropriations Committee prepares to consider on Friday whether the state can afford the bill named after 17-year-old Chelsea King. Convicted child molester John Albert Gardner III was sentenced to life in prison this month after pleading guilty to raping and murdering King and 14-year-old Amber Dubois in San Diego County.

Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher, R-San Diego, said AB1844, nicknamed Chelsea's Law, would have a relatively low cost for the first decade. He said it is worth the money to protect children.

The annual cost would top $1 million in 2015, $9 million by 2020, and $54 million by 2030, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

It would add nearly 400 inmates and increase the number of parolees by more than 7,300 by 2030, the department projects.

"We would consider this to be a conservative estimate," Jay Atkinson, chief of the department's Offender Information Services Branch, said Saturday. "The impact won't truly be seen until way far out in the future."

The legislative analyst said increasing penalties would cost "at least a few tens of millions of dollars annually within the next decade" and "at least in the low hundreds of millions of dollars annually after several decades."

Backers, who include Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic Assembly Speaker John Perez, have not suggested any funding source beyond taking the money from the existing state budget, which faces a $19 billion deficit this year.

"There's virtually no cost for a decade," said Fletcher. "If you look at a budget that annually exceeds $100 billion a year, that's a small price to pay to protect our children."

His bill would allow life sentences for a first offense of forcible sex crimes involving a child under 18, up from the current 15-year to 25-year sentence. The life term would be reserved for cases with aggravating factors that include kidnapping, using a weapon, torture, binding or drugging a victim or a previous sex crime conviction.

It would double sentences for some other sex crimes involving children and double parole to 10 years for felons released after serving sentences for forcible sex crimes.

The bill also would require the state to use GPS tracking for lifetime monitoring of those convicted of forcible sex crimes against children under 14. Currently, most tracking ends when offenders leave parole, despite an existing state lifetime monitoring law.

It would ban sex offenders from parks, going beyond the state law that already limits how close offenders can live to schools and parks.

The Assembly analysis suggests deleting provisions that could potentially send offenders to prison for life for inflicting a bruise during a sex crime, or subject them to lifetime parole for acts that could include touching a child over his or her clothing. That would cut the bill's costs substantially, the analysis said.

"I think it's undeniable there are significant costs," said Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, who chairs the Senate Public Safety Committee. "It's clearly a very important issue, a highly emotional issue, and we need to be grounding ourselves in fact."

Fletcher said he is open to minor changes. But he said backers will go to voters with an initiative before they accept major amendments.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37293743/ns/business/print/1/displaymode/1098/

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