By Richard A. Serrano, Tribune Washington Bureau

August 17, 2010

Reporting from New Orleans

LaTrell Washington, one of 25 recruits at the New Orleans Police Academy, said what everyone was thinking when she addressed her class at their graduation ceremony this month.

"Mistakes have been made before our time," she said. "We are here to change the image of the New Orleans Police Department."

The cadets are the first to graduate under a new mayor and a new police superintendent who have done something that for this city is unprecedented. This spring they invited the Justice Department to help them clean up a police force that many think had crossed the line from petty corruption to brutality and murder.

"I have inherited a police force that has been described by many as one of the worst police departments in the country," Mitch Landrieu wrote to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. two days after becoming the city's mayor. Now, he said, "nothing short of a complete transformation is necessary and essential to ensure safety for the citizens of New Orleans."

The response from Washington has been almost unparalleled, its scope not seen in the nearly two decades since Washington targeted the Los Angeles Police Department after the Rodney King beating and riots. A team of prosecutors, civil rights attorneys, FBI agents and other officials has come here not only to investigate individual officer misconduct, but to recommend reforms to win back the public's trust in their police.

Sixteen current and former officers have been accused this year of charges including murder, assault and covering up misconduct. Five have pleaded guilty. The former police superintendent stepped down and other high-ranking officers have left.

Among those charged are six current and former officers and sergeants in what has come to be known as the Danziger Bridge case, in which two civilians were shot and killed and four others wounded as they tried to cross the bridge after Hurricane Katrina five years ago.

"Just because they wear a uniform, they think they rule the city," said Marie Parque, longtime owner of the Pearl Restaurant and Oyster Bar on Canal Street. "Some of them are evil. It was murder on that bridge. They won't clean themselves up."

Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's civil rights division, sent in his special litigation section to examine allegations of excessive force, unconstitutional searches and seizures, racial profiling and other "related misconduct."

At the same time, Perez said, federal prosecutors working with the U.S. attorney's office in New Orleans continue to pursue other cases of possible criminal misconduct.

But one assistant U.S. attorney with experience prosecuting cops predicted that the Washington lawyers would have a hard time gaining convictions.

"You're in front of judges you haven't practiced before," said the prosecutor, who asked that he not be identified because he is still with the Justice Department. "You're trying to deal with local rules and local trial practices you don't know anything about. And some of the local judges will be hostile about Washington coming in, and a lot of the police aren't going to like you either."

The police force in New Orleans has long been associated with petty corruption and the frustrations of trying to keep the peace in a city where many of the bars never close, gang membership runs high, the summer heat is relentless and the racial dimension can be polarizing.

When Adolph Archie, a black man, shot and killed white Officer Earl Hauck in 1990, Archie was allegedly beaten to death by other officers.

Officer Antoinette Frank was sentenced to death in 1995 for killing three people, including a fellow officer, in a restaurant holdup.

The police reputation was further tarnished by what happened during and after Hurricane Katrina. In addition to the bridge shootings, officers were caught after the storm beating a man they thought was intoxicated in the French Quarter, and joining in with looters who ransacked stores.

But the efforts by the mayor and the police superintendent he brought in, Ronal Serpas, appear unprecedented.

Police squad room meetings are now held at City Park, where community members are invited to learn about recent crime trends in their neighborhoods and how the police are fighting them.

"The purpose is to provide some real transparency," said Deputy Superintendent Kirk Bouyelas, the chief of detectives.

The department installed an independent civilian monitor who works with the city inspector general's office with wide latitude to investigate allegations of misconduct.

"You look at the indictments and the behavior was just so outrageous, and customer service is not good either," said Susan Hutson, the monitor. "The real problem is that you call the police and a lot of times they don't write reports and they don't dust for fingerprints and sometimes they even take the people who called them to jail. So people don't feel like the police are on their side."

But turning around a police department can take time, especially in New Orleans, where many are still hurting from Katrina.

"There's a collective sense of relief that the old guard is gone," said Marjorie Esman, executive director of the Louisiana chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "But whether that translates to a collective sense of optimism, it's too soon to know."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-new-orleans-police-20100817,0,3992026,print.story

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ADAM GOLDMAN, MATT APUZZO

Associated Press Writers

August 17, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) — The CIA has tapes of 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh being interrogated in a secret overseas prison. Discovered under a desk, the recordings could provide an unparalleled look at how foreign governments aided the U.S. in holding and questioning suspected terrorists.

The two videotapes and one audiotape are believed to be the only remaining recordings made within the clandestine prison system.

The tapes depict Binalshibh's interrogation sessions at a Moroccan-run facility the CIA used near Rabat in 2002, several current and former U.S. officials told The Associated Press. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the recordings remain a closely guarded secret.

When the CIA destroyed its cache of 92 videos of two other al-Qaida operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, being waterboarded in 2005, officials believed they had wiped away all of the agency's interrogation footage. But in 2007, a staffer discovered a box tucked under a desk in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and pulled out the Binalshibh tapes.

A Justice Department prosecutor who is already investigating whether destroying the Zubaydah and al-Nashiri tapes was illegal is now also probing why the Binalshibh tapes were never disclosed. Twice, the government told a federal judge they did not exist.

The tapes could complicate U.S. efforts to prosecute Binalshibh, 38, who has been described as a "key facilitator" in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. If the tapes surfaced at trial, they could clearly reveal Morocco's role in the counterterrorism program known as Greystone, which authorized the CIA to hold terrorists in secret prisons and shuttle them to other countries.

More significantly to his defense, the tapes also could provide evidence of Binalshibh's mental state within the first months of his capture. In court documents, defense lawyers have been asking for medical records to see whether Binalshibh's years in CIA custody made him mentally unstable. He is being treated for schizophrenia with a potent cocktail of anti-psychotic medications.

With military commissions on hold while the Obama administration figures out what to do with suspected terrorists, Binalshibh has never had a hearing on whether he is mentally fit to stand trial.

"If those tapes exist, they would be extremely relevant," said Thomas A. Durkin, Binalshibh's civilian lawyer.

The CIA first publicly hinted at the existence of the Binalshibh tapes in 2007 in a letter to U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema in Virginia. The government twice denied having such tapes, and recanted once they were discovered. But the government blacked out Binalshibh's name from a public copy of the letter.

At the time, the CIA played down the significance, saying the videos were not taken as part of the CIA's detention program and did not show CIA interrogations.

That's true, but only because of the unusual nature of the Moroccan prison, which was largely financed by the CIA but run by Moroccans, the former officials said. The CIA could move detainees in and out, and oversee the interrogations, but officially, Morocco had control.

CIA spokesman George Little would not discuss the Moroccan facility except to say agency officials "continue to cooperate with inquiries into past counterterrorism practices."

Moroccan government officials did not respond to questions about Binalshibh and his time in Morocco. The country has never acknowledged the existence of the detention center.

Morocco has a troubled history of prison abuse and human rights violations. A government-created commission identified decades of torture, forced disappearances, poor prison conditions and sexual violence. And this year's State Department report on Morocco notes continued accusations of torture by security forces.

But current and former U.S. officials say no harsh interrogation methods, like the simulated drowning tactic called waterboarding, were used in Morocco. In the CIA's secret network of undisclosed "black prisons," Morocco was just way station of sorts, a place to hold detainees for a few months at a time.

"The tapes record a guy sitting in a room just answering questions," according to a U.S. official familiar with the program.

That would make them quite different from the 92 interrogation videos of Zubaydah and al-Nashiri being subjected to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics.

Binalshibh was captured Sept. 11, 2002, and interrogated for days at a CIA facility in Afghanistan. Almost immediately, two former CIA officials said, Binalshibh exhibited mental instability that would worsen over time.

When FBI agents finally had a chance to interview Binalshibh, they found him lethargic but unharmed.

"He had a certain toughness about him, like he didn't care," said Raymond Holcomb, a retired FBI agent who spent five days alongside the CIA with Binalshibh in Afghanistan and wrote about it in a forthcoming book, "Endless Enemies: Inside FBI Counterterrorism."

Though Binalshibh was uncooperative during his early interrogations, his interviews formed the foundation for parts of the 9/11 commission report. One official said he also provided intelligence about a plot to crash aircraft into London's Heathrow Airport.

Binalshibh spent five months in Morocco in late 2002 and early 2003, the first of three trips through the facility during his years in CIA custody.

Since his incarceration was established at Guantanamo Bay in 2006, Binalshibh has appeared increasingly erratic. Court records show him acting out, breaking cameras in his cell and smearing them with feces.

He has experienced delusions, believing the CIA was intentionally shaking his bed and cell, according to court records and interviews. He has imagined tingling sensations like things were crawling all over him and developed a nervous tic, obsessively scratching himself.

Nine years after his capture, there is no indication when Binalshibh and other admitted 9/11 terrorists will face military or civilian trials.

Binalshibh and other accused 9/11 conspirators have openly admitted their roles, praising the attacks. Binalshibh and the others have asked to plead guilty, a move that would head off any trial and almost certainly guarantee the videotapes never get played in any court.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-us-cia-videotapes,0,6510397,print.story

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New motorcoaches would for the first time be required to have lap-shoulder seat belts under a proposal announced Monday by Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood.

The plan affects large tour-style buses, not smaller vehicles such as city buses or school buses.

The motorcoach industry, which transports 750 million passengers a year, has 90 days to respond to the proposal. It would take effect three years after it's made final.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration indicated in the proposal that it is also considering requiring existing buses be retrofitted with belts, which is more expensive than incorporating belts into new buses. The proposal solicits comments on how that might best be done and whether lap-shoulder or lap-only belts should be required.

An average of 19 people a year are killed in motorcoach accidents in the U.S. But a lack of seat belts has been cited by safety investigators in several deadly crashes.

In a January 2008 accident near Mexican Hat, Utah, nine passengers were killed and 43 injured when their motorcoach took a turn too fast at night as they returned from a ski trip. The bus tumbled down an embankment, its roof was sheared off and everyone aboard ejected except for the driver, who was wearing the only seat belt on the bus, and one man who was pinned between two seats.

In March 2007, five members of Ohio's Bluffton University baseball team were killed along with their driver and his wife when their bus hurtled over an Atlanta highway overpass onto an interstate below. Twenty-eight people were injured.

Wearing lap-shoulder belts on motorcoaches could reduce the risk for passengers of being killed in a rollover crash by 77%, according to NHTSA.

“Seat belts save lives, and putting them in motorcoaches just makes sense,” LaHood said in a statement.

The motorcoach industry supports the concept of requiring seatbelts on coaches so long as the regulations are based on “sound science,” said American Bus Assn. President Pete Pantuso. He said he was reviewing the proposed rules.

The proposal is one of a series of initiatives from the Transportation Department in recent months to improve motorcoach safety. The department has also announced steps to address driver fatigue or inattention and improve operator maintenance. Research on improving motorcoach structure, fire safety protection and exiting in an emergency is also underway and may lead to new federal standards in the future, the department said.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/dcnow/2010/08/dot-wants-seat-belts-installed-on-new-motorcoaches.html

Jonah Goldberg

August 17, 2010

The ground zero mosque controversy is one of the stupidest debates of our time. I don't mean the substance of the debate (though there's no shortage of stupidity on that front either). I mean that we are having it at all.

The CIA usually defends its existence by pointing out that we never hear about its successes, only its failures. The bombs that don't go off don't make headlines. Politics works the same way. Good politicians instinctively see down the road and around the corner. Great politicians do this not just with political headaches but with weighty affairs as well. We call such foresight statesmanship.

With the ground zero mosque, we have gotten the exact opposite. The supposedly pragmatic political wise men have been blinded by ideology or incompetence and have failed to see what was so obviously around the corner. It's as if they've wanted to turn a dumb idea into an emotional and unwinnable national controversy.

Let's start with the incandescent idiocy of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. If Bloomberg had a scintilla of foresight, he would have prevented anyone from ever hearing the words "ground zero" and "mosque" in the same sentence (for the record, it's really an Islamic cultural center two blocks away that includes a mosque).

Bloomberg is not only the mayor. He's also a billionaire with massive sway in the city's media, finance and cultural institutions. Moreover, the Big Apple is a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape for landlords and developers. Rent control, historic preservation, zoning, environmental impact, community protests, union delays — not to mention plain old red tape and corruption — offer enough tools to stop any project before it starts (ground zero is still a gaping hole and everyone has wanted that land to be developed, fast).

The notion that Bloomberg couldn't have quietly stopped this in New York is like saying Satan is powerless to do anything about the heat in Hades. He could have kept the molehill from becoming a mountain with an afternoon's worth of phone calls. The center would be built, just not so close to ground zero; no big deal.

But instead of quietly extinguishing a controversy, Bloomberg said it was as important a "test of the separation of church and state" as "we may see in our lifetimes."

He also insists that opponents should be "ashamed" of their bigotry, even though he himself expects "special sensitivity" from the mosque's backers. Apparently, it's only shameful to think ground zero requires "special sensitivity" if you oppose the mosque. Bloomberg needs a tutor to pass his own church-state test.

Which brings us to President Obama (who himself could have quietly intervened months ago) and what may be his most embarrassing blunder yet. At a White House dinner with Muslim leaders Friday night, Obama offered what every major journalistic outfit in the country took to be unqualified support for building the mosque. Indeed, Obama aides preened over his moral courage, telling the New York Times that there was no doubt which side he would take.

"He felt he had a responsibility to speak," said David Axelrod. But by Saturday morning, Obama tried to weasel out of it with the sort of lawyerly parsing everybody despises. Speaking to reporters in Florida, Obama claimed he had no position on the "wisdom" of the project, and anyone who mistook his academic comments about building a mosque in Lower Manhattan for an endorsement misunderstood him.

Well, if his real intent was to remain agnostic, he should fire his speechwriter immediately.

But of course that wasn't his intent. He wanted to seem heroically principled. But when he was hit with an entirely foreseeable backlash (according to one poll, nearly 70% of Americans oppose the mosque), he once again led with his glass jaw and, in effect, told everybody they were too dimwitted to grasp the brilliant nuance of his remarks.

This was the opposite of statesmanship. By elevating an already stupid idea and a poisonous debate, he forced everyone to take a side on a polarizing issue (including vulnerable Democrats like Nevada Sen. Harry Reid who, late Monday, came out against the mosque), while undermining his own credibility, not to mention America's reputation around the world.

And it all could have been avoided with a some foresight and a few phone calls.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg-mosque-20100817,0,6567538,print.column

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August 16, 2010

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution speaks in unusually emphatic language: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." Not most persons or only those who are white or who are born to citizens. All persons.

Yet some Americans hold a fringe view and would deny citizenship to those whose parents entered this country illegally. That idea so violates our history and law that it has long been consigned to the periphery, but recent political posturing by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and others has brought the debate about birthright citizenship into the mainstream. Graham's motives are transparent: He has made one too many deals with Democrats and now is eager to placate his base. Others are in the same situation. Gone is the statesmanship of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who once reminded his constituents that illegal immigrants were "God's children too." And only months ago, Graham himself braved his party's ire to craft reform legislation that included a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Today, as if referring to cats and dogs instead of women and babies, he says of illegal immigrants: "They come here to drop a child."

Graham knows that birthright citizenship is not about to be repealed. That would require an amendment to the Constitution. Two-thirds of both the House and the Senate would have to approve it, as would three-quarters of the states. Here in California, neither Meg Whitman nor Carly Fiorina, Republican candidates for governor and senator, respectively, supports the idea, nor do their Democratic opponents. So why is this issue being debated? Because it's a freebie: Conservatives can tout it without fear of it coming to pass, thereby proving their toughness without having to take responsibility for the consequences.

At the same time, birthright citizenship strikes a nerve with a middle class that feels exploited by the interests of well-to-do employers seeking low-wage labor, and that is fed up with a Byzantine system of laws that appear to be ignored or enforced with no discernable logic. Animosity toward illegal immigrants often intensifies during hard times, and now is no different. Unemployment is stuck at 9.5%, foreclosures rose 75% in urban areas during the first half of this year, and in California, income dropped for the first time since World War II. And that's not all. The complexion of the United States is changing. The nation's Latino population doubled from 1990 to 2008. By 2050, Latinos will make up almost one-third of the U.S. population; whites are projected to become a minority, at 47%. As they attempt to hold back that tide, those who are unsettled by it have turned to the idea of denying citizenship to those born here.

But what would it solve? Citizenship does not confer the right to live or work in the United States. Immigrants, legal and otherwise, have jobs, buy homes, start businesses, send their children to school, have access to the healthcare system and pay taxes. The Supreme Court has ruled that all children have a right to K-12 education, and federal law requires hospitals to provide emergency medical care to all. Eliminating birthright citizenship would not change any of that.

What it would do is deny American children the right to be a part of the country of their birth. The 14th Amendment was enacted in response to Southern states' attempts to create laws to keep newly freed slaves in bondage. By extending to blacks a right that had been automatically bestowed on almost all others — the glaring exceptions were Native Americans and Chinese immigrants — the 14th Amendment corrected a fundamental flaw in the Constitution. It ended a permanent underclass, a laboring class of noncitizens. Withdrawing citizenship wouldn't drive immigrants away; it would simply increase the population of illegal immigrants exponentially, generation after generation.

Were there compelling reasons to revoke this fact of American life and law, it would be one thing. But what are the arguments in support of it? That birthright citizenship draws immigrants to the U.S.? No. Studies have shown that the majority of illegal immigrants come to work and to be reunited with family already here. That the citizen children of illegal immigrants provide a route to permanent residence for their parents? No. Those children first must reach 21, and only then can they petition for their parents to join them; the wait can last more than 18 years. So much for "anchor babies." Lastly, there is the supposed industry of "birth tourism" — the phenomenon of wealthy foreigners visiting the U.S. specifically for the purpose of giving birth to a child who will be a citizen. Yes, it is an abuse of birthright citizenship, but it is a small one. There is no evidence that millions of children are the products of luxury vacations.

There is one truth buried in the arguments of those who would tamper with the Constitution to deny citizenship to children born here. Many immigrants come to this country, legally and illegally, because they want their children to grow up in America and participate in its dynamic society. That is a testament to this nation's allure. It should be a source of pride, not fear.

The immigration system is broken, but it's not our Constitution that is to blame, it's Congress. No matter how much politics distorts this debate and vilifies immigrants, it is not constitutional guarantees that are hurting the nation. It is the refusal of legislators to enact reform.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-birthright-20100816,0,3794438,print.story

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OPINION

Gregory Rodriguez

7:07 AM PDT, August 16, 2010

Just when you thought the Republican far-right had enough enemies to keep itself busy — gays, socialists, Muslims, Arabs, illegal immigrants — it launched a new war against babies "dropped" (in the loving words of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham) by illegal immigrant mothers. These politicians want to change the 14th Amendment so that those U.S.-born children would be excluded from "birthright citizenship."

Their main contention is that the framers of the 14th Amendment did not have the children of illegal immigrants in mind when they explicitly stated that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside." And I suppose that has to be true given that there was essentially no restriction on migration to the U.S. back then and, therefore, there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant.

But their argument misses the forest for the trees. Though blacks were the immediate beneficiaries of the 14th Amendment, the principle it promoted was clearly broader. In essence, its framers were seeking to put an end to the social divisions that the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision of 1857 had judicially recognized.

The Scott decision, as you might remember from high school civics, held that blacks were excluded from membership in the national community because they had been "considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority." As UCLA legal scholar Kenneth L. Karst has written, the birthright citizenship provision in the 14th Amendment "constitutionalized" the end of America's caste system.

So it stands to reason that to deny birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants would serve to reestablish that system: a hierarchical structure in which classes are determined by heredity. Because your father was classified as inferior, you will be too.

At first glance — and also on the second — this is a notion that we'd otherwise consider anathema in American society. Imagine, for instance, if criminal convictions or bankruptcies passed from one generation to the next.

Scholars have been telling us for years that the belief in liberty and equality is just as much rooted in culture as in law. After a point, it becomes a chicken-and-egg situation. To create a native-born caste of permanent foreigners — noncitizens who could do nothing to improve their status — would infect the interpretation of equality under the law and would betray and undermine our cultural commitment to equal rights.

Of course, members of a nation, a political community, have the right to determine the rules as to who among outsiders can or cannot become a member. But it's more than a little problematic to categorize a class of native-born children, who have generally never known any other home, as permanent, essentially stateless outsiders. As political philosopher Michael Walzer has written, "The denial of membership is always the first of a long train of abuses."

Citizenship defined by where one is born, by territory, is not without its imperfections, but it best upholds not only our belief in equality but the need for a cohesive community. In ancient Greece and Rome, only children of citizens received citizenship because that was the most efficient way to maintain social distinctions in a society in which slavery and other forms of status subordination were accepted. (The U.S. confers citizenship on the children of citizens too in some situations, but territory remains important: In some instances, at least one parent has to have lived in the U.S. within a prescribed number of years.)

By contrast, birthright citizenship was established early on under English common law, a legacy of the medieval system of feudalism and reciprocal obligation. A child was deemed worthy of protection of the sovereign in whose territory he was born. In exchange, the child owed the sovereign loyalty. That reminds us that citizenship is not just about rights. It's also about responsibilities.

In the long term, it's in this country's best interest to absorb the children of those who have made their way here, and thereby to establish the reciprocal obligations of citizenship. We all know the adage that owners take better care of their residences than renters. The same applies to full citizens and their nation. The more residents of a national community who feel obligated reciprocally, the stronger the community.

American history has proved that the broader our sense of civic inclusion, the stronger our nation. The Republican Party's search for enemies will only make us weaker.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rodriguez-14th-20100816,0,6604262,print.column

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From the New York Times

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Murder Suspect Wasn't on Suicide Watch

BOSTON — There were no signs that Philip Markoff , the former medical student accused of killing a woman he met through Craigslist , was planning to commit suicide, the authorities said Monday.

“I'm not aware of anything that was sort of a red flag,” the Suffolk County sheriff, Andrea Cabral, said of Mr. Markoff, who apparently committed suicide at the Nashua Street Jail while awaiting trial.

Mr. Markoff, 24, had been put on suicide watch for about three weeks in April 2009, when officials found marks on his neck, Sheriff Cabral said. But the next month, a psychiatrist cleared him to be in the general prison population, where he remained.

Sheriff Cabral said she was unaware of any contraband or unusual items in Mr. Markoff's cell at the time of his death.

She would not comment on details of his death, citing a pending investigation by the Sheriff's Department, the Boston police and the district attorney's office.

The Boston Globe reported late Monday that Mr. Markoff had scrawled his former fiancée's name in blood on his cell wall, attributing the information to law enforcement authorities.

A preliminary autopsy was conducted Monday, but the cause of death is being withheld pending additional testing.

Emergency medical technicians who responded to a call from the jail on Sunday morning found Mr. Markoff unresponsive on the floor of his cell, with a wound on his neck and wounds near both ankles, said Jennifer Mehigan, a spokeswoman for Boston EMS.

Ms. Mehigan would not comment on news reports that Mr. Markoff had stabbed himself with a pen or severed his arteries and was found with a plastic bag over his head.

City Councilor Stephen J. Murphy, chairman of the council's Public Safety Committee, is calling for an independent investigation into Mr. Markoff's death.

Sheriff Cabral said Mr. Murphy, who is running for state treasurer and lost the sheriff's race to her in 2004, was “grandstanding.”

Mr. Markoff, a former Boston University medical student, was charged last year in the killing of Julissa Brisman on April 14, 2009, in a Boston hotel. The authorities said Mr. Markoff responded to an advertisement she put on Craigslist for massage services.

Mr. Markoff was found dead the day after what would have been his first wedding anniversary. His fiancée called off the nuptials after he was charged.

In a statement, Ms. Brisman's family said Mr. Markoff's death has taken away “the long-awaited criminal prosecution,” which was their “only opportunity to confront him.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/us/17craigslist.html?ref=us&pagewanted=print

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OPINION

The Muslims in the Middle

New Delhi

PRESIDENT OBAMA'S eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.

Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world's second-largest religion.

Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn't mean he's in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors.

Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion.

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America's leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn't be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.

While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan's second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.

This was only the latest in a series of assaults against Pakistan's Sufis. In May, Peeru's Cafe in Lahore, a cultural center where I had recently performed with a troupe of Sufi musicians, was bombed in the middle of its annual festival. An important site in a tribal area of the northwest — the tomb of Haji Sahib of Turangzai, a Sufi persecuted under British colonial rule for his social work — has been forcibly turned into a Taliban headquarters. Two shrines near Peshawar, the mausoleum of Bahadar Baba and the shrine of Abu Saeed Baba, have been destroyed by rocket fire.

Symbolically, however, the most devastating Taliban attack occurred last spring at the shrine of the 17th-century poet-saint Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass in northwest Pakistan. For centuries, the complex has been a place for musicians and poets to gather, and Rahman Baba's Sufi verses had long made him the national poet of the Pashtuns living on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “I am a lover, and I deal in love,” wrote the saint. “Sow flowers,/ so your surroundings become a garden./ Don't sow thorns; for they will prick your feet./ We are all one body./ Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.”

THEN, about a decade ago, a Saudi-financed religious school, or madrasa, was built at the end of the path leading to the shrine. Soon its students took it upon themselves to halt what they see as the un-Islamic practices of Rahman Baba's admirers. When I last visited it in 2003, the shrine-keeper, Tila Mohammed, described how young students were coming regularly to complain that his shrine was a center of idolatry and immorality.

“My family have been singing here for generations,” he told me. “But now these madrasa students come and tell us that what we do is wrong. They tell women to stay at home. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they just encounter more problems.”

Then, one morning in early March 2009, a group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn and placed dynamite packages around the squinches supporting the shrine's dome. In the ensuing explosion, the mausoleum was destroyed, but at least nobody was killed. The Pakistani Taliban quickly took credit, blaming the shrine's administrators for allowing women to pray and seek healing there.

The good news is that Sufis, though mild, are also resilient. While the Wahhabis have become dominant in northern Pakistan ever since we chose to finance their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, things are different in Sindh Province in southern Pakistan. Sufis are putting up a strong resistance on behalf of the pluralist, composite culture that emerged in the course of a thousand years of cohabitation between Hinduism and Islam.

Last year, when I visited a shrine of the saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in the town of Sehwan, I was astonished by the strength and the openness of the feelings against those puritan mullahs who criticize as heresy all homage to Sufi saints.

“I feel that it is my duty to protect both the Sufi saints, just as they have protected me,” one woman told me. “Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is heresy. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the prophet.”

There are many like her; indeed, until recently Sufism was the dominant form of Islam in South Asia. And her point of view shows why the West would do well to view Sufis as natural allies against the extremists. A 2007 study by the RAND Corporation found that Sufis' open, intellectual interpretation of Islam makes them ideal “partners in the effort to combat Islamist extremism.”

Sufism is an entirely indigenous, deeply rooted resistance movement against violent Islamic radicalism. Whether it can be harnessed to a political end is not clear. But the least we can do is to encourage the Sufis in our own societies. Men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should be embraced as vital allies, and we should have only contempt for those who, through ignorance or political calculation, attempt to conflate them with the extremists.

William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/opinion/17dalrymple.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the FBI

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Watch Video: Liaison officer Alejandro Lares describes working in Tijuana with the FBI. Cooperation and Training In addition to establishing strong relationships and coordinating international investigations with Mexican law enforcement, our border liaison officers also provide valuable training. In the late 1980s, the Bureau established the Mexican-American Liaison and Law Enforcement Training (MALLET) program to teach some of our time-tested investigative techniques such as evidence recovery and crime scene management. The weeklong courses, held about four times a year, also offer instruction in ethics and managing investigations. The training is conducted by border liaison officers and other FBI instructors. “The training is another way we foster good partnerships,” said Special Agent Mike Eckel, one of our border liaison officers.

ON THE SOUTHWEST BORDER Forging Ties in Tijuana 08/16/10 Amid the car horns, engine exhaust, and constant flow of people on foot and in cars, Special Agent Mike Eckel inched through traffic at the San Ysidro Port of Entry—the world's busiest land border crossing—on his way from San Diego to Tijuana. Although the Mexican city can be a dangerous place for Americans, in his role as one of the Bureau's five border liaison officers, Eckel makes the trip about once a week. On this day, he will visit his counterpart at the Tijuana Police Department in hopes of locating a U.S. citizen wanted for a 2009 murder in Nevada who may be hiding with relatives in that region of Mexico. “The idea behind the border liaison program is to build relationships and to exchange information with Mexican law enforcement,” said Eckel, who speaks fluent Spanish. “We try to take geography out of the equation so we can share intelligence and help each other and bring criminals to justice on both sides of the border.” In the past, such relationships were difficult to cultivate in Tijuana because of the level of corruption there, according to U.S. and Mexican officials. “But the tide is turning,” Eckel said. “There is less corruption now, and the FBI and other federal entities have established solid working relationships with our Mexican partners.” Less than an hour after crossing the border, Eckel sat in a small office in a busy Tijuana police substation. He was speaking with officer Alejandro Lares about the Nevada murder fugitive and other matters, including suspected cartel members who live freely in San Diego, where they have committed no crimes. Lares, who has been on the Tijuana force for four years, has served as the liaison officer for U.S. law enforcement for the past year. “Today, the cartels have less power than they had in the past,” Lares said, largely because the Mexican federal government has exerted its military presence in the area. “We are moving in the right direction,” he added, but acknowledged that the crime and corruption associated with the drug trade will never disappear completely. Thanks to drug money, the cartels have enormous power—and they use it to bribe, intimidate, and murder. To get what they want from police and government officials in Tijuana and elsewhere along the Mexican border, the cartels offer “the silver or the lead”: the silver being money and the lead being bullets.

Even well-intentioned public servants who refuse outright bribes might be compelled to look the other way if their lives—or the lives of their families—have been threatened. “And these are not hollow threats,” Eckel said. “They will kill you.”

But efforts such as the border liaison program and the determined, collaborative work of law enforcement on both sides of the border are making a difference.

“Sharing information is the key,” Eckel said. “By being able to gather intelligence and quickly analyze and share it, we can actually save lives. I have seen that happen.” Working with the Mexicans as well as other U.S. partner agencies, he added, “We help keep each other safe. We all get along extremely well, because our lives can depend on it.”

Next: A Drug Buy in El Paso

About This Series FBI.gov recently visited the Southwest border region for a firsthand look at what the Bureau and its law enforcement partners are doing there to combat crime. Part I: Border Crime | Gallery  | Video Part II: Public Corruption | Video Part III: Violence Too Close to Home

By the Numbers The Southwest border crime problem measured in numbers. - View infographic

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/august10/border_081610.html

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