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From the Los Angeles Times

Border Patrol gives contract to firm stocked with former insiders

Ex-workers with the agency will be paid about $240 an hour to act as consultants at conferences. One expert calls it 'contracting as usual.'

By Ken Dilanian, Tribune Washington Bureau

September 21, 2010

Reporting from Washington

The Border Patrol wants its leaders to talk to one another, and the agency is willing to pay some former government employees nearly half a million dollars to help make that happen.

In an example of how common it has become for government agencies to outsource seemingly routine tasks to former officials, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has awarded a "strategic consulting" contract worth up to $481,000 over five years to a small firm staffed by former agency insiders.

One of the three major tasks outlined in the deal is to "facilitate discussions among senior Border Patrol leaders" at conferences near the agency headquarters in Washington, according to the contract documents. The fees work out to about $240 an hour — not including travel expenses or the cost of the conferences.

Among those who will benefit from the contract are the agency's former commissioner and the husband of a current agency spokeswoman. It's legal as long as the officials observe a one-year ban on landing work from their former agency.

"It really is just contracting as usual," said Allison Stanger, a Middlebury College professor who detailed the explosive growth of government contracting in her 2009 book "One Nation Under Contract." "When contractors are doing so much of the work of government, these sorts of private companies are seen as extensions of government. When former agency employees are involved, the lines are blurred even further."

In a statement, Homeland Security Department spokesman Rafael Lemaitre said the contract was intended to "solicit independent, expert input for CBP's ongoing efforts to design a 21st century border security strategic framework," and that the agency "will not utilize this or any other contracts to organize conferences for CBP officials."

The contract documents say the consultants will facilitate discussions at the conferences, not organize them.

In July, the agency requested proposals for strategic consulting. The request sought three senior consultants for a total of 389 hours a year, with four years of renewable options.

The consultants' role is to help Border Patrol leaders "discuss strategy, policy, outreach, development and the delivery of a unified corporate direction and message," the documents said.

After a competition, the contract was awarded to Sentinel HS Group, a 12-person company that includes Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of U.S. Customs and then U.S. Customs and Border Protection from September 2001 to November 2005.

The firm, which reported annual revenue of $3.2 million in contract documents signed last week, was founded by one of Bonner's top aides and includes three other former agency officials.

Among the firm's "senior consultants" is Michael Ivahnenko, who worked at the border agency from November 2003 to January 2008. He is the husband of Kelly Ivahnenko, a Customs and Border Protection public affairs officer based in Washington.

Kelly Ivahnenko said in an e-mail that she played no role in the contract award and did not speak to any agency decision-makers about it.

In addition to Michael Ivahnenko, Sentinel Chief Executive Brian Goebel said he would work as one of the agency's other two senior consultants, along with Joshua Kussman, a former senior policy advisor at the agency.

Goebel, who said he was speaking for all members of the firm, said Sentinel won the contract through "fair and open competition."

"There are circumstances in which the government needs outside assistance," he said. "From our vantage point, there are people who bring specialized knowledge. … Sometimes it's a question of extra arms and legs, to help people who have to do their day job."

Goebel said he worked as an advisor to Bonner at the agency in 2001.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-conference-contract-20100921,0,3693100,print.story

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Oregon sex-literature laws ruled unconstitutional

Two measures intended to keep pedophiles from giving explicit work to children are too broad, an appeals court says, adding that one law criminalized fiction 'no more tawdry than a romance novel.'

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times

September 21, 2010

Two Oregon laws that prohibit making sexually explicit literature available to minors violate the Constitution because they are too broad and infringe on free-speech rights, a federal appeals court ruled Monday.

A lawsuit brought by Powell's Books, other booksellers, librarians, publishers and sex-education professionals contested the 2007 legislation and warned that what might have been "a well-intended effort to target sexual predators" puts parents, publishers, educators, health counselors and others at risk of jail or fines.

Powell's, a Portland-based bookseller, and the other plaintiffs asked a federal district judge in the city to declare the laws unconstitutional, but the judge dismissed their petition in 2008.

The two laws were intended to prevent predators from providing sexually arousing material to potential victims.

The first law, intended to shield children under 13 from all sexually explicit content, "reached a substantial amount of material that does not appeal to the prurient interest of a child under 13, but merely appeals to regular sexual interest," a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said in reversing the district court.

The second law, restricting sexual references available to those under 18, "criminalizes fiction no more tawdry than a romance novel," the judges added.

States may restrict minors' access to materials found to be harmful to them, the panel said. "However, speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them."

Powell's Books, the Assn. of American Publishers, Planned Parenthood Columbia/Willamette, Cascade AIDS Project and the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon had argued in their appeal that if the laws were allowed to stand, a 17-year-old who lends her 13-year-old sister a copy of Judy Blume's "Forever" could be arrested and prosecuted. Likewise, the plaintiffs warned, a health educator could be charged with a felony for discussing safe sex with anyone under 18.

Lawyers with the Oregon Department of Justice were still studying the opinion and had not decided whether to appeal the 9th Circuit ruling, said department spokesman Tony Green.

Bookstore owner Michael Powell said the laws put booksellers in the uncomfortable position of having to verify the age of young customers and determine which books might be subject to the age restrictions.

"One person's bad influence is another's piece of literature," Powell said. "Those requirements are very unnerving to a bookseller, and they created a sense of bookstores being off-limits to young people, which is the opposite of what we want."

ACLU attorney P.K. Runkles-Pearson said her organization would be willing to work with state officials "to come up with a constitutional law that meets their concerns."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-oregon-pornography-20100921,0,4901538,print.story

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A desperate plea from a Mexican newspaper

Two of its reporters murdered in less than two years. The killings by presumed drug gangs have pushed one of the leading newspapers in Mexico's northern border region to make an unusual, sad plea .

"What do you want from us?" El Diario de Ciudad Juarez asks in a front-page editorial , addressing the traffickers who are fighting for control of Mexico's deadliest city (link in Spanish).

"Explain what it is that we should publish, or not publish, so we know what to expect."

The editorial asks for a truce, adding, "It is impossible for us to do our jobs under these conditions." Saying the newspaper is not surrendering, the editorial suggests it will nevertheless change, perhaps diminish, the way it covers the drug war.

Many newspapers in Mexico impose a kind of self-censorship , avoiding coverage of violent drug cartels as a way to avoid angering them. El Diario de Ciudad Juarez had not been one of those papers and was known for its courageous reporting. 

In November 2008, one of the paper's star crime reporters, Armando Rodriguez , was shot to death as he took his daughters to school. And last week, Luis Carlos Santiago, a 21-year-old photographer with just six months on the job, was gunned down as he went to lunch with an intern, who was badly injured. El Universal has a Spanish-language video report of the most recent shooting here.

El Diario's editorial was most scathing in asserting that journalists will continue to die because the government does not investigate killings and has lost control over much of the border region. "You," the paper says to the traffickers, "are at this time the de facto authorities in this city."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2010/09/a-desperate-plea-from-a-mexican-newspaper.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LaPlaza+%28La+Plaza%29

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More than 8 million lost their jobs in the longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. The damage done in the 18 months of recession may take years to fix.

Recession's over, economists say to a skeptical public A declaration that the turning point came in June 2009 gets an indignant reaction, showing that many Americans see little difference between the recession and current conditions. Reporting From Washington— This just in: The recession ended more than a year ago — in June 2009. That may seem perplexing, given the sour state of the economy, but the panel of experts designating when serious economic downturns begin and end typically takes a year or so to make the calls. Even so, minutes after the experts announced Monday that the worst recession in more than half a century had officially ended 15 months ago, its members felt the sting of indignant reaction from a public for whom economic pain continues to be an everyday reality.

"Hallucinatory news," one blogger snapped in response to the report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private nonprofit research group that is considered the official arbiter of economic contractions and expansions.

"I'll start believing the recession is over when I stop seeing endless numbers of people sleeping on the streets," said another.

And the public reaction was only the latest evidence that, with unemployment high, job creation low, the housing market on life support and other day-to-day economic realities still bad, most Americans see little difference between the recession and current conditions.

President Obama acknowledged the widespread dissatisfaction with the economy during a town-hall-style meeting broadcast on the business news channel CNBC . Alluding to the announcement that the recession had officially ended, he remarked on the public's "understandable" frustration.

"The hole was so deep that a lot of people out there are still hurting, and probably some folks here in the audience are still having a tough time," he said. "So the question then becomes, what can we now put in place to make sure that the trend lines continue in a positive direction, as opposed to going back in the negative direction?"

During the hourlong event, Obama pressed for extending tax relief for the middle class and insisted that he has "absolutely not" vilified or enacted policies harmful to the business community — criticisms that Republican leaders have made in blaming the administration for the nation's tepid recovery and job growth.

The NBER committee made its determination after considering numerous economic data and concluding that several key measures of economic activity — including total output and industrial production — pointed to June 2009 as the trough of that business cycle.

The 18-month recession that started in December 2007 was the longest since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said it was noteworthy that the panel settled on June, as it was during that month that the spending from the Recovery Act stimulus was at its maximum.

"One conclusion is that the stimulus played an important role in bringing the recession to an end," said Zandi, who has been an economic advisor to officials and lawmakers in both parties.

The NBER panel, in a lengthy statement that seemed to anticipate the public reaction to its decision, noted that employment was typically a lagging indicator and that unlike other broad measures of the economy, employment didn't hit bottom until December 2009.

What's more, the panel took pains to note that a determination of the end of the recession doesn't mean the economy has returned to vigorous growth.

"The committee did not conclude that economic conditions since that month have been favorable or that the economy has returned to operating at normal capacity," the statement said.

The committee said it made its determination based on the length and strength of the recovery to date. It said the nation's gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic activity, reached its low point in the second quarter of 2009.

But with new and more recent indicators pointing to a slowdown, the panel, which usually dates beginnings and ends of recessions about 12 months after the fact, took a little longer this time before issuing a final say in the matter.

"It's been such a weak recovery that they waited to make sure they could call it a trough," said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial in Chicago.

The NBER determination is important in that it marks an end to a recession that could have been much worse, she said, but it doesn't mean a whole lot to Main Street. "You can't escape the reality that it's a subpar recovery."

Indeed, for most ordinary Americans, what may matter most are jobs, the value of their homes and their incomes. And on those fronts, the recession hardly looks like it's over for many people.

Housing sales and prices remain depressed, and the jobs added since the start of the year have been far below the levels needed to bring down the unemployment rate, currently at 9.6%. Income gains also have lagged.

The recession is two months longer than either of the two previous longest postwar recessions, in 1973-75 and 1981-82. From 1945 to 2001, there have been 10 recessions that on average lasted 10 months, according to the NBER.

Robert Hall, a Stanford economics professor and one of seven NBER panel members who deliberated on the matter, followed the immediate reaction on the Internet to his group's announcement.

"At least half of them excoriate us for saying that the recession is over," Hall said. "But we are only saying that things started to get better in June 2009, not that times are good."

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-recession-over-20100921,0,2428295.story

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Why Hillary Clinton was right about Colombia and Mexico

By recognizing the parallels between the two conflicts, the U.S. and Mexico can learn valuable lessons from Colombia's battle with narco-insurgents.

OPINION

By Thomas E. McNamara

September 20, 2010

Washington and Mexico City are unsure whether Mexico today resembles Colombia's insurgency of 20 years ago. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton thinks it does; some Mexicans and, maybe, President Obama think not ("The wrong solution in Mexico," Opinion, Sept. 10). As the American ambassador in Colombia when the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar was at riding high, and later when he was defeated, I side with Clinton in seeing many parallels.

The parallels begin with the Colombia of the Escobar days being a large, progressive democracy with a vibrant economy. Colombia had a determined president and political leaders who understood the terrible consequences of failing to take control of their own country. This parallels Mexico today.

Colombia suppressed the cartel insurgencies with armed force and a political program. This approach was, and is, largely supported by the Colombian people (witness the election victory of President Juan Manuel Santos, who served as defense minister under predecessor Alvaro Uribe). Cartel insurgencies no longer plague Colombia; only a reduced guerrilla insurgency continues. New drug mafias still operate, but Colombian trafficking has been greatly reduced.

In both countries cartels demanded that they, not the government, determine the rules, settle disputes and control police power. This is clearly insurgency: usurpation of sovereign power, control of territory and the use of force to maintain control. What is unusual — and what causes confusion — is that drug lords have a very limited political agenda.

Thus, in matters they don't care about, they don't interfere. The government can run the hospitals and schools, set taxes, pay benefits, have elections, collect the garbage, put out fires and so on. When the cartels' interests are involved, however, they insist that government must be subservient to them on their territory — or deadly violence will result. This is quite different from organized crime by American drug mafias. Our mafias do not attempt to usurp sovereign power.

In one respect, Colombia is different. Besides mafias, there are narco-insurgents with full political agendas — the guerrillas. These are the usual, easily recognized types who proclaim their agenda in revolutionary political statements, military structures and, above all, in their insistence on sovereign control of all territory, not just territory needed for criminal activity.

What is surprising is Mexican denial of the obviously correct comparison with Colombia by Clinton, which is why Obama tried to quiet this contretemps in Los Angeles last week. Rather than object, Mexicans should acknowledge parallels, study the many mistakes and successes of Colombia over the last 20 years and learn from them. Mexicans, Colombians and Americans are partners in the struggle against narco-insurgency, whether of the unusual or the usual kind.

As Colombia learned, so Mexico and Central America will also: Retaking lost sovereign control is violent. Americans must understand that these battles are to regain government control. Reducing trafficking comes later. Mexico's mafias will not disappear, but they can be forced to abandon insurgency.

The U.S. properly supports our neighbors by giving them political, military and law enforcement assistance, as our drug consumption is one cause of the insurgencies — as is drug production south of our border. We cannot just move out of our neighborhood, so we have an interest in cleaning it up. These insurgencies corrupt us, just as they corrupt others.

While we have been a good partner overall, we have failed to control arms smuggling south across the border. Make no mistake: We armed Escobar and the Colombian drug insurgents 20 years ago; we still arm the guerrillas. We also arm the Villarreal Barragan and Beltran Leyva cartels in Mexico. Our pitiful border controls are a national disgrace and a major cause of the blood spilled in Mexico and Colombia.

What we need today is not for Mexico to claim its situation is far different from the Colombians', or Americans thinking this is only a Mexican or a Colombian drug problem. We need all three to recognize that we are partners in a common struggle for legitimate governments to fully control their territories and borders and suppress insurgency by all legitimate means. The three partners are getting there, but none is there yet.

Thomas E. McNamara was ambassador to Colombia from 1989 to 1991. He served as a State Department official in the Clinton administration and both Bush administrations.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/tv/la-oew-mcnamara-mexico-colombia-20100920,0,2339655,print.story

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Where the interracials may take us

Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end identity politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism.

OPINION

By Eli Steele

September 21, 2010

We may be in the midst of an interracial baby boom. A recent Pew Research Center study reported that interracial marriages rose from 6.7% in 1980 to a record 14.6% in 2008. If these marriages produce children at the national average, one out of seven Americans could claim two or more races. In Western states where interracial marriage is more common, the ratio rises to nearly one out of four.

The day will arrive when this interracial generation reaches political consciousness and finds itself at odds with America's divisive identity politics. Of all Americans, they represent the best opportunity to end these politics and point America back to its tradition of individualism.

Most minorities today fall conveniently within categories such as African American, Chinese American or Mexican American. These labels arose during an era of political correctness that literally placed race, ethnicity or religion before national identity. Since the 1960s, minorities have found in their racial identity a preferential gateway into public and private institutions.

Will such identity politics survive the interracial baby boom? Will new categories arise for the African German American or Chinese Latino American? Will a critical mass of interracials become an eclectic race in their own right? Or will they bypass the labels and embrace individualism?

These questions await my children. The birth of my son two years ago, and my daughter four months ago, marks the third interracial generation in my family. At first glance, their names — Shelby Jack Steele and June Rose Steele — signify little. But in fact these are what might be called melting pot names.

Shelby is the name of their paternal great-grandfather, who was born to slaves and married a white woman he met in the early civil rights movement. Jack is their other paternal great-grandfather, who survived the Holocaust and rebuilt his life in New York City. June is their maternal great-aunt, who was a flower child and a direct descendant of the first Mormons. Rose is their paternal great-great-grandmother (great-grandfather Shelby's mother), a slave who gave birth to 13 children. Rose is also Rosario, their maternal great-grandfather, who raised cattle in the Sonora mountains of Mexico.

Jack and June will grow up hearing stories of their ancestors' struggles, triumphs and defeats. They will learn how each forebear's unique journey converges in their blood, giving them no easy allegiance to a single race. Individuals rather than tribes will form the foundation for their individuality.

Then one day a stranger will stare into their faces, unable to deduce a single race in the mix of features: "What are you?" If they are anything like I was when I was growing up, they will begin with their family history, only to be asked again, "But, what are you?" In the age of identity politics, it is not stories but race that matters.

Jack and June may have a hard row to hoe. Identity politics have made racial identity a social currency, rewarded by preferences in college admissions, government contracts and employment. Jack and June have the bloodlines to win preferences. But if they do, they enter into a world where no choice is clean-cut. Do they join the black, Jewish or Latino organizations — or all of them? Do they publicly cultivate one racial identity while privately living free of such categories with family and friends? Or do they come to the conclusion that identity politics cannot offer anything but the pretense of racial purity?

And then the ultimate irony: Jack and June are naturally more diverse than any amount of social engineering in neighborhoods, schools or offices can achieve. They are creations of a high humanism: the love of their parents, grandparents and great-great grandparents. Jack and June are the result that social engineering — integration, inclusion and diversity — often fails to achieve.

My hope is that my children and their peers will restore a weakened American legacy: the self-invented and self-made individual. If they do, they will be free, as their ancestors were, to carve out identities and contribute to an already rich heritage for future generations.

Eli Steele is a filmmaker and graduate student at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy. He is developing a documentary on interracial Americans.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-steele-interracial-20100921,0,5401654,print.story

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A birthright that shouldn't be

It would be best to get rid of the anachronism of birthright citizenship, but that may be impossible. So how about enforcing the immigration laws we've got?

OPINION

By Charlotte Allen

September 20, 2010

Support is mounting for efforts in Congress to stop granting birthright — that is, automatic — citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Such a measure would bring America's citizenship policies into line with those of most of the rest of the world, where even the children of legal noncitizens do not automatically become citizens of the country where they are born.

It's not hard to see why many Americans would like to change the law. The Pew Hispanic Center issued a report in August indicating that one out of every 13 babies born in the United States in 2008 — about 340,000 out of a total of 4.3 million — had at least one parent who was an illegal immigrant. About 85% of those parents were Latinos.

The center also found a recent huge increase in the number of children under age 18 living in the United States whose parents were illegal immigrants: 4 million in 2008, compared with 2.7 million in 2003. On Sept. 3, The Times reported online that Los Angeles County paid out a record $52 million in July in welfare checks and food stamps to illegal immigrants for their U.S.-born children, according to figures released by county Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich. The amount represented 23% of all county welfare and food stamp assistance.

There is just one problem with getting rid of birthright citizenship: the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It declares: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

You can argue — and some distinguished legal scholars have done so — that the purpose of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, was solely to ensure that newly freed black slaves possessed all the rights of other Americans. Congress inserted the citizenship clause, as it is called, into the amendment to overrule the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court held that even free blacks were not U.S. citizens.

Nonetheless, in 1898 the Supreme Court ruled that Wong Kim Ark, a U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants, was a birthright citizen under the 14th Amendment. The Wong boy's parents were legally in America, however, and some scholars have argued that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States may not apply to people who have committed fraud or otherwise flouted U.S. laws in order to live here. That is the thinking behind a pending GOP-backed House bill that would, in most cases, limit U.S. citizenship to the offspring of U.S. citizens and others who are here legally.

If passed and signed into law, that bill almost certainly would be challenged in court, possibly successfully. That is probably why several prominent Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, have talked about holding hearings on the 14th Amendment with a possible eye toward revising the citizenship clause itself. But amending the Constitution is a notoriously difficult process.

This is unfortunate, because the United States is one of only 30 countries that grants automatic citizenship to practically anyone who happens to be born here. No European country confers automatic birthright citizenship (the three that once did — Britain, Malta and Ireland — ended the practice in recent decades). The overwhelming majority of nations follow the concept of jus sanguinis (Latin for "right of blood") in which the citizenship of the parents governs the citizenship of their children.

The converse, jus soli, ("right of the soil") is mostly a New World phenomenon, dating from a time when underpopulated Western Hemisphere countries were desperate for new residents. Birthright citizenship also made sense back when any sort of travel to America, including immigration, was arduous, there was typically no going back, and assimilation to American mores and American patriotism (including learning English) was the enforced cultural norm. Nowadays we live in a different world, one in which a multicultural ideology discourages assimilation and travel has made it easy to cross borders

It would be nice to get rid of the anachronism of birthright citizenship, but that may be legally or practically impossible. So here's an alternative idea: How about enforcing the immigration laws we've got?

An estimated 400,000 people enter the United States illegally each year (the number was twice as high before the recession), and most of them manage to stay here unimpeded. During the Reagan years, in 1986, Congress decided to solve the problem by granting amnesty to the 3 million illegal immigrants then living here and then making it a crime for employers to hire illegal immigrants.

The result nearly 25 years later? An estimated 11 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S., only sporadic prosecutions of employers, and only on-again-off-again work on the "border fence," a series of barriers between the United States and Mexico intended to deter illegal immigration. President George W. Bush, trying to wean Latinos from the Democratic Party, launched another amnesty effort in 2007 that failed in Congress.

The worst offender, however, has been the Obama administration, which seems to be doing everything in its power to ensure that those numbers continue to rise. It has pushed for amnesty, refused requests to beef up border enforcement, made it difficult to detain illegal immigrants pending deportation proceedings, and waged an all-out courtroom war against legal efforts to slow illegal immigration in Arizona.

This is outrageous. Polls indicate that 68% of U.S. voters support the completion of the border fence, and 57% of Americans think that states (like Arizona) and localities ought to be able to enforce immigration laws if the federal government won't.

No, none of those measures will completely halt illegal crossings. But effective steps can be taken. John Feere, legal policy analyst for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, suggests a simple one that would discourage much illegal immigration: "Congress could mandate that all businesses across the country use E-Verify," an Internet-based system for checking job applicants' legal employment status that some states now require but others, such as California, don't.

Some 58% of voters responding to a recent Rasmussen poll say they still welcome legal immigrants. What they oppose is the uncontrolled flood of people who have broken our laws to enter the country and then claim, via their U.S.-born children, benefits reserved for American citizens and legal residents. That's what the move to repeal birthright citizenship is all about. It may be unconstitutional or impossible to implement, but it speaks to a need to restore law to a lawless situation.

Charlotte Allen, the daughter of a legal Latino immigrant, is the author of "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus" and a contributing editor to the Minding the Campus website of the Manhattan Institute.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-allen-fourteenth-amendment-20100920,0,1409477,print.story

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Dashing the DREAM Act

There is a slim to none chance that the bill to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented students will pass.

OPINION

By Peter Schrag

September 20, 2010

The chances that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid can deliver on his promise to move the so-called DREAM Act toward passage in the Senate this week range from slim to none.

But the announcement that it would be added as an amendment to the Defense Department authorization bill has energized pro-immigrant groups, even as it underlines the fact that there'll be no comprehensive immigration reform any time in the near future. Not this year, certainly, and probably not next year either.

The bipartisan DREAM (for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act, which was to have been part of comprehensive reform, would make it possible for as many as 2.1 million undocumented young immigrants to start on the path to legalization. Roughly 26% are in California. In the Senate, the leading sponsors are Republican Richard G. Lugar of Indiana and Democrat Richard J. Durbin of Illinois. In the House, they are Democrats Howard L. Berman of Valley Village and Lucille Roybal-Allard of East Los Angeles and Republican Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida.

Most of the beneficiaries of the act were brought to the United States by their parents as young children and thus can't be accused of knowingly breaking any law. Unless you believe in visiting the sins of the fathers on the sons (and daughters), there's nothing to punish them for. To qualify for provisional legal residency, they must be of "good character, have lived here for at least five years at the time the bill passes, be in school or have graduated from high school and they must intend to go to college or serve in the military."

Most don't know the country of their birth and have no intention of returning there. In virtually all respects, they're Americans. But they're shut out from good jobs and can't legally drive. Although they're eligible for in-state tuition at public colleges in California and some other states, they're generally ineligible for financial aid and, in some states, shut out of public colleges altogether. They're trapped in an economic and cultural limbo.

The DREAM Act has been around for nearly a decade. The last time it came up in Congress, in 2007, it fell eight votes shy of the 60 needed to overcome a threatened filibuster. In the years since, it's been held hostage in the hope that as part of comprehensive reform, it would help generate support for the big bill.

In 2007, as now, it was tagged onto the bill authorizing funds for the Defense Department. The hope of its Senate backers is that members will be reluctant to vote against funding for the armed forces.

But because the authorization bill also includes provisions that would facilitate the repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy in the armed forces, and that would allow abortions at military hospitals, its chances are so slim that passage, as one opponent said, "strains credulity."

And because it comes in an election year and when unemployment and under-employment run well into the double digits, anything that seems to bring yet more people into the economy, however sensible as long-range policy, is probably doomed. Some of the Republicans who supported DREAM in 2007 are gone; others, like John McCain, who've been buffeted on the right, have reversed their position.

Last week, as soon as Reid announced his intention to take up the DREAM Act, Republicans attacked it. Attaching the act to the defense authorization bill, said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, "has made it needlessly controversial." Republicans weren't afraid to block the authorization bill three years ago. It's hard to imagine they wouldn't block it now.

Is this nothing then but a bare-faced political ploy by Reid, facing a tough challenge for reelection in Nevada? Is it simply a pitch for Latino votes? Not exactly. Even for Reid, DREAM could cost almost as many votes as it gains. Yet at a time when the chances are slim that any comprehensive immigration bill can pass — or even be crafted — DREAM could be a hopeful first step, the beginning of the much more difficult debate that the nation's immensely complex immigration problems urgently require.

However it plays as politics, for all but the most adamant immigration restrictionists DREAM is eminently sensible as policy, on both humane and hard-nosed economic grounds. Not only does it begin to bring millions of young people out of the shadows, offering incentives to work hard at school — and reducing the dropout rate — it also would give the nation a chance to get a return on the billions it's already invested in their K-12 education.

As the economy revives, and as baby boomers retire, the nation will need millions of skilled, educated people to replace them. Keeping generations of near-Americans in the shadows, or pushing them out of the country altogether, falls somewhere between self-defeat and unmitigated insanity.

Peter Schrag's latest book is "Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America."

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-schrag-dream-20100920,0,1845555,print.story

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From the New York Times

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Afghan Boys Are Prized, So Girls Live the Part

KABUL, Afghanistan — Six-year-old Mehran Rafaat is like many girls her age. She likes to be the center of attention. She is often frustrated when things do not go her way. Like her three older sisters, she is eager to discover the world outside the family's apartment in their middle-class neighborhood of Kabul.

But when their mother, Azita Rafaat, a member of Parliament, dresses the children for school in the morning, there is one important difference. Mehran's sisters put on black dresses and head scarves, tied tightly over their ponytails. For Mehran, it's green pants, a white shirt and a necktie, then a pat from her mother over her spiky, short black hair. After that, her daughter is out the door — as an Afghan boy.

There are no statistics about how many Afghan girls masquerade as boys. But when asked, Afghans of several generations can often tell a story of a female relative, friend, neighbor or co-worker who grew up disguised as a boy. To those who know, these children are often referred to as neither “daughter” nor “son” in conversation, but as “bacha posh,” which literally means “dressed up as a boy” in Dari.

Through dozens of interviews conducted over several months, where many people wanted to remain anonymous or to use only first names for fear of exposing their families, it was possible to trace a practice that has remained mostly obscured to outsiders. Yet it cuts across class, education, ethnicity and geography, and has endured even through Afghanistan 's many wars and governments.

Afghan families have many reasons for pretending their girls are boys, including economic need, social pressure to have sons, and in some cases, a superstition that doing so can lead to the birth of a real boy. Lacking a son, the parents decide to make one up, usually by cutting the hair of a daughter and dressing her in typical Afghan men's clothing. There are no specific legal or religious proscriptions against the practice. In most cases, a return to womanhood takes place when the child enters puberty. The parents almost always make that decision.

In a land where sons are more highly valued, since in the tribal culture usually only they can inherit the father's wealth and pass down a name, families without boys are the objects of pity and contempt. Even a made-up son increases the family's standing, at least for a few years. A bacha posh can also more easily receive an education, work outside the home, even escort her sisters in public, allowing freedoms that are unheard of for girls in a society that strictly segregates men and women.

But for some, the change can be disorienting as well as liberating, stranding the women in a limbo between the sexes. Shukria Siddiqui, raised as a boy but then abruptly plunged into an arranged marriage, struggled to adapt, tripping over the confining burqa and straining to talk to other women.

The practice may stretch back centuries. Nancy Dupree, an 83-year-old American who has spent most of her life as a historian working in Afghanistan, said she had not heard of the phenomenon, but recalled a photograph from the early 1900s belonging to the private collection of a member of the Afghan royal family.

It featured women dressed in men's clothing standing guard at King Habibullah's harem. The reason: the harem's women could not be protected by men, who might pose a threat to the women, but they could not be watched over by women either.

“Segregation calls for creativity,” Mrs. Dupree said. “These people have the most amazing coping ability.”

It is a commonly held belief among less educated Afghans that the mother can determine the sex of her unborn child, so she is blamed if she gives birth to a daughter. Several Afghan doctors and health care workers from around the country said that they had witnessed the despair of women when they gave birth to daughters, and that the pressure to produce a son fueled the practice.

“Yes, this is not normal for you,” Mrs. Rafaat said in sometimes imperfect English, during one of many interviews over several weeks. “And I know it's very hard for you to believe why one mother is doing these things to their youngest daughter. But I want to say for you, that some things are happening in Afghanistan that are really not imaginable for you as a Western people.”

Pressure to Have a Boy

From that fateful day she first became a mother — Feb. 7, 1999 — Mrs. Rafaat knew she had failed, she said, but she was too exhausted to speak, shivering on the cold floor of the family's small house in Badghis Province.

She had just given birth — twice — to Mehran's older sisters, Benafsha and Beheshta. The first twin had been born after almost 72 hours of labor, one month prematurely. The girl weighed only 2.6 pounds and was not breathing at first. Her sister arrived 10 minutes later. She, too, was unconscious.

When her mother-in-law began to cry, Mrs. Rafaat knew it was not from fear whether her infant granddaughters would survive. The old woman was disappointed. “Why,” she cried, according to Mrs. Rafaat, “are we getting more girls in the family?”

Mrs. Rafaat had grown up in Kabul, where she was a top student, speaking six languages and nurturing high-flying dreams of becoming a doctor. But once her father forced her to become the second wife of her first cousin, she had to submit to being an illiterate farmer's wife, in a rural house without running water and electricity, where the widowed mother-in-law ruled, and where she was expected to help care for the cows, sheep and chickens. She did not do well.

Conflicts with her mother-in-law began immediately, as the new Mrs. Rafaat insisted on better hygiene and more contact with the men in the house. She also asked her mother-in-law to stop beating her husband's first wife with her walking stick. When Mrs. Rafaat finally snapped the stick in protest, the older woman demanded that her son, Ezatullah, control his new wife.

He did so with a wooden stick or a metal wire. “On the body, on the face,” she recalled. “I tried to stop him. I asked him to stop. Sometimes I didn't.”

Soon, she was pregnant. The family treated her slightly better as she grew bigger. “They were hoping for a son this time,” she explained. Ezatullah Rafaat's first wife had given birth to two daughters, one of whom had died as an infant, and she could no longer conceive. Azita Rafaat delivered two daughters, double the disappointment.

Mrs. Rafaat faced constant pressure to try again, and she did, through two more pregnancies, when she had two more daughters — Mehrangis, now 9, and finally Mehran, the 6-year-old.

Asked if she ever considered leaving her husband, she reacted with complete surprise.

“I thought of dying,” she said. “But I never thought of divorce. If I had separated from my husband, I would have lost my children, and they would have had no rights. I am not one to quit.”

Today, she is in a position of power, at least on paper. She is one of 68 women in Afghanistan's 249-member Parliament, representing Badghis Province. Her husband is unemployed and spends most of his time at home. “He is my house husband,” she joked.

By persuading him to move away from her mother-in-law and by offering to contribute to the family income, she laid the groundwork for her political life. Three years into their marriage, after the fall of the Taliban in 2002, she began volunteering as a health worker for various nongovernmental organizations. Today she makes $2,000 a month as a member of Parliament.

As a politician, she works to improve women's rights and the rule of law. She ran for re-election on Sept. 18, and, based on a preliminary vote count, is optimistic about securing another term. But she could run only with her husband's explicit permission, and the second time around, he was not easily persuaded.

He wanted to try again for a son. It would be difficult to combine pregnancy and another child with her work, she said — and she knew she might have another girl in any case.

But the pressure to have a son extended beyond her husband. It was the only subject her constituents could talk about when they came to the house, she said.

“When you don't have a son in Afghanistan,” she explained, “it's like a big missing in your life. Like you lost the most important point of your life. Everybody feels sad for you.”

As a politician, she was also expected to be a good wife and a mother; instead she looked like a failed woman to her constituents. The gossip spread back to her province, and her husband was also questioned and embarrassed, she said.

In an effort to preserve her job and placate her husband, as well as fending off the threat of his getting a third wife, she proposed to her husband that they make their youngest daughter look like a son.

“People came into our home feeling pity for us that we don't have a son,” she recalled reasoning. “And the girls — we can't send them outside. And if we changed Mehran to a boy we would get more space and freedom in society for her. And we can send her outside for shopping and to help the father.”

No Hesitation

Together, they spoke to their youngest daughter, she said. They made it an alluring proposition: “Do you want to look like a boy and dress like a boy, and do more fun things like boys do, like bicycling, soccer and cricket? And would you like to be like your father?” Mehran did not hesitate to say yes.

That afternoon, her father took her to the barbershop, where her hair was cut short. They continued to the bazaar, where she got new clothing. Her first outfit was “something like a cowboy dress,” Mrs. Rafaat said, meaning a pair of blue jeans and a red denim shirt with “superstar” printed on the back.

She even got a new name — originally called Manoush, her name was tweaked to the more boyish-sounding Mehran.

Mehran's return to school — in a pair of pants and without her pigtails — went by without much reaction by her fellow students. She still napped in the afternoons with the girls, and changed into her sleepwear in a separate room from the boys. Some of her classmates still called her Manoush, while others called her Mehran. But she would always introduce herself as a boy to newcomers.

Khatera Momand, the headmistress, with less than a year in her job, said she had always presumed Mehran was a boy, until she helped change her into sleeping clothes one afternoon. “It was quite a surprise for me,” she said.

But once Mrs. Rafaat called the school and explained that the family had only daughters, Miss Momand understood perfectly. She used to have a girlfriend at the teacher's academy who dressed as a boy.

Today, the family's relatives and colleagues all know Mehran's real gender, but the appearance of a son before guests and acquaintances is just enough to keep the family functioning, Mrs. Rafaat said. At least for now.

Mr. Rafaat said he felt closer to Mehran than to his other children, and thought of her as a son. “I am very happy,” he said. “When people now ask me, I say yes and they see that I have a son. So people are quiet, and I am quiet.”

Economic Necessity

Mehran's case is not altogether rare.

Ten-year old Miina goes to school for two hours each morning, in a dress and a head scarf, but returns about 9 a.m. to her home in one of Kabul's poorest neighborhoods to change into boys' clothing. She then goes to work as Abdul Mateen, a shop assistant in a small grocery store nearby.

Every day, she brings home the equivalent of about $1.30 to help support her Pashtun family of eight sisters, as well as their 40-year-old mother, Nasima.

Miina's father, an unemployed mason, is often away. When he does get temporary work, Nasima said, he spends most of his pay on drugs.

Miina's change is a practical necessity, her mother said, a way for the entire family to survive. The idea came from the shopkeeper, a friend of the family, Nasima said: “He advised us to do it, and said she can bring bread for your home.”

She could never work in the store as a girl, just as her mother could not. Neither her husband nor the neighbors would look kindly on it. “It would be impossible,” Nasima said. “It's our tradition that girls don't work like this.”

Miina is very shy, but she admitted to a yearning to look like a girl. She still likes to borrow her sister's clothing when she is home. She is also nervous that she will be found out if one of her classmates recognizes her at the store. “Every day she complains,” said her mother. “ ‘I'm not comfortable around the boys in the store,' she says. ‘I am a girl.' ”

Her mother has tried to comfort her by explaining that it will be only for a few years. After all, there are others to take her place. “After Miina gets too old, the second younger sister will be a boy,” her mother said, “and then the third.”

Refusing to Go Back

For most such girls, boyhood has an inevitable end. After being raised as a boy, with whatever privileges or burdens it may entail, they switch back once they become teenagers. When their bodies begin to change and they approach marrying age, parents consider it too risky for them to be around boys anymore.

When Zahra, 15, opens the door to the family's second-floor apartment in an upscale neighborhood of Kabul, she is dressed in a black suit with boxy shoulders and wide-legged pants. Her face has soft features, but she does not smile, or look down, as most Afghan girls do.

She said she had been dressing and acting like a boy for as long as she could remember. If it were up to her, she would never go back. “Nothing in me feels like a girl,” she said with a shrug.

Her mother, Laila, said she had tried to suggest a change toward a more feminine look several times, but Zahra has refused. “For always, I want to be a boy and a boy and a boy,” she said with emphasis.

Zahra attends a girls' school in the mornings, wearing her suit and a head scarf. As soon as she is out on the steps after class, she tucks her scarf into her backpack, and continues her day as a young man. She plays football and cricket, and rides a bike. She used to practice tae kwon do, in a group of boys where only the teacher knew she was not one of them.

Most of the neighbors know of her change, but otherwise, she is taken for a young man wherever she goes, her mother said. Her father, a pilot in the Afghan military, was supportive. “It's a privilege for me, that she is in boys' clothing,” he said. “It's a help for me, with the shopping. And she can go in and out of the house without a problem.”

Both parents insisted it was Zahra's own choice to look like a boy. “I liked it, since we didn't have a boy,” her mother said, but added, “Now, we don't really know.”

Zahra, who plans on becoming a journalist, and possibly a politician after that, offered her own reasons for not wanting to be an Afghan woman. They are looked down upon and harassed, she said.

“People use bad words for girls,” she said. “They scream at them on the streets. When I see that, I don't want to be a girl. When I am a boy, they don't speak to me like that.”

Zahra said she had never run into any trouble when posing as a young man, although she was occasionally challenged about her gender. “I've been in fights with boys,” she said. “If they tell me two bad words, I will tell them three. If they slap me once, I will slap them twice.”

Time to ‘Change Back'

For Shukria Siddiqui, the masquerade went too far, for too long.

Today, she is 36, a married mother of three, and works as an anesthesiology nurse at a Kabul hospital. Short and heavily built, wearing medical scrubs, she took a break from attending to a patient who had just had surgery on a broken leg.

She remembered the day her aunt brought her a floor-length skirt and told her the time had come to “change back.” The reason soon became clear: she was getting married. Her parents had picked out a husband whom she had never met.

At that time, Shukur, as she called herself, was a 20-year old man, to herself and most people around her. She walked around with a knife in her back pocket. She wore jeans and a leather jacket.

She was speechless — she had never thought of getting married.

Mrs. Siddiqui had grown up as a boy companion to her older brother, in a family of seven girls and one boy. “I wanted to be like him and to be his friend,” she said. “I wanted to look like him. We slept in the same bed. We prayed together. We had the same habits.”

Her parents did not object, since their other children were girls, and it seemed like a good idea for the oldest son to have a brother. But Mrs. Siddiqui remained in her male disguise well beyond puberty, which came late.

She said she was already 16 when her body began to change. “But I really had nothing then either,” she said, with a gesture toward her flat chest.

Like many other Afghan girls, she was surprised the first time she menstruated, and worried she might be ill. Her mother offered no explanation, since such topics were deemed inappropriate to discuss. Mrs. Siddiqui said she never had romantic fantasies about boys — or of girls, either.

Her appearance as a man approaching adulthood was not questioned, she said. But it frequently got others into trouble, like the time she escorted a girlfriend home who had fallen ill. Later, she learned that the friend had been beaten by her parents after word spread through the neighborhood that their daughter was seen holding hands with a boy.

‘My Best Time'

Having grown up in Kabul in a middle-class family, her parents allowed her to be educated through college, where she attended nursing school. She took on her future and professional life with certainty and confidence, presuming she would never be constricted by any of the rules that applied to women in Afghanistan.

Her family, however, had made their decision: she was to marry the owner of a small construction company. She never considered going against them, or running away. “It was my family's desire, and we obey our families,” she said. “It's our culture.”

A forced marriage is difficult for anyone, but Mrs. Siddiqui was particularly ill equipped. She had never cooked a meal in her life, and she kept tripping over the burqa she was soon required to wear.

She had no idea how to act in the world of women. “I had to learn how to sit with women, how to talk, how to behave,” she said. For years, she was unable to socialize with other women and uncomfortable even greeting them.

“When you change back, it's like you are born again, and you have to learn everything from the beginning,” she explained. “You get a whole new life. Again.”

Mrs. Siddiqui said she was lucky her husband turned out to be a good one. She had asked his permission to be interviewed and he agreed. He was understanding of her past, she said. He tolerated her cooking. Sometimes, he even encouraged her to wear trousers at home, she said. He knows it cheers her up.

In a brief period of marital trouble, he once attempted to beat her, but after she hit him back, it never happened again. She wants to look like a woman now, she said, and for her children to have a mother.

Still, not a day goes by when she does not think back to “my best time,” as she called it. Asked if she wished she had been born a man, she silently nods.

But she also wishes her upbringing had been different. “For me, it would have been better to grow up as a girl,” she said, “since I had to become a woman in the end.”

Like Mother, Like a Son

It is a typically busy day in the Rafaat household. Azita Rafaat is in the bathroom, struggling to put her head scarf in place, preparing for a photographer who has arrived at the house to take her new campaign photos.

The children move restlessly between Tom and Jerry cartoons on the television and a computer game on their mother's laptop. Benafsha, 11, and Mehrangis, 9, wear identical pink tights and a ruffled skirt. They go first on the computer. Mehran, the 6-year-old, waits her turn, pointing and shooting a toy gun at each of the guests.

She wears a bandage over her right earlobe, where she tried to pierce herself with one of her mother's earrings a day earlier, wanting to look like her favorite Bollywood action hero: Salman Khan, a man who wears one gold earring.

Then Mehran decided she had waited long enough to play on the computer, stomping her feet and waving her arms, and finally slapping Benafsha in the face.

“He is very naughty,” Mrs. Rafaat said in English with a sigh, of Mehran, mixing up the gender-specific pronoun, which does not exist in Dari. “My daughter adopted all the boys' traits very soon. You've seen her — the attitude, the talking — she has nothing of a girl in her.”

The Rafaats have not yet made a decision when Mehran will be switched back to a girl, but Mrs. Rafaat said she hoped it need not happen for another five or six years.

“I will need to slowly, slowly start to tell her about what she is and that she needs to be careful as she grows up,” she said. “I think about this every day — what's happening to Mehran.”

Challenged about how it might affect her daughter, she abruptly revealed something from her own past: “Should I share something for you, honestly? For some years I also been a boy.”

As the first child of her family, Mrs. Rafaat assisted her father in his small food shop, beginning when she was 10, for four years. She was tall and athletic and saw only potential when her parents presented the idea — she would be able to move around more freely.

She went to a girls' school in the mornings, but worked at the store on afternoons and evenings, running errands in pants and a baseball hat, she said.

Returning to wearing dresses and being confined was not so much difficult as irritating, and a little disappointing, she said. But over all, she is certain that the experience contributed to the resolve that brought her to Parliament.

“I think it made me more energetic,” she said. “It made me more strong.” She also believed her time as a boy made it easier for her to relate to and communicate with men.

Mrs. Rafaat said she hoped the effects on Mehran's psyche and personality would be an advantage, rather than a limitation.

She noted that speaking out may draw criticism from others, but argued that it was important to reveal a practice most women in her country wished did not have to exist. “This is the reality of Afghanistan,” she said.

As a woman and as a politician, she said it worried her that despite great efforts and investments from the outside world to help Afghan women, she has seen very little change, and an unwillingness to focus on what matters.

“They think it's all about the burqa,” she said. “I'm ready to wear two burqas if my government can provide security and a rule of law. That's O.K. with me. If that's the only freedom I have to give up, I'm ready.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/world/asia/21gender.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Branson Charity Focuses Aid Effort on Zimbabwe

Richard Branson is challenging conventional wisdom once again.

Mr. Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, a collection of companies popular with consumers around the world, is announcing a new philanthropic venture that aims to do nothing less than put Zimbabwe back on its feet.

Zimbabwe is considered to be one of the most difficult nations in Africa to help. Its gross domestic product has fallen to $1.8 billion from a peak of $13 billion, its official unemployment rate is 90 percent and it president, Robert Mugabe , is notorious for repression of his political opponents.

But where others see a sadly failed state, Mr. Branson sees hope. He has established Enterprise Zimbabwe with the Nduna Foundation and Humanity United, an organization backed by Pam Omidyar, wife of the founder of eBay .

“Since the coalition government was established a couple of years ago, things have changed,” Mr. Branson said in an interview Monday morning. “Most kids now have schoolbooks, and hospitals now are open as nurses are getting paid.”

Enterprise Zimbabwe has attracted the money that has helped those things happen and now wants to attract more. Established quietly a year ago, it will have its official debut on Tuesday before one of the biggest gatherings of billionaires and other wealthy people dedicated to making social change, the Clinton Global Initiative.

Given the country's recent history, most donors understandably believe that Zimbabwe's infrastructure and capacity to use gifts efficiently have been destroyed, but Amy Robbins, founder of the Nduna Foundation, said schools, hospitals and other civic organizations simply lack money.

“My greatest frustration is that there are all these misconceptions about the country,” said Ms. Robbins, whose foundation sends money into areas afflicted with conflicts and their aftermath. “Zimbabwe is far and away the most stable, most secure, least problematic country we've worked in.”

She said that the country now operates using dollars, which makes investment and support easier.

Enterprise Zimbabwe has so far attracted $1.5 million from another philanthropy, Absolute Return for Kids, an international charity focused on improving children's lives around the world, and supported a Unicef initiative to distribute 13.2 million textbooks in primary schools.

Isabella Matambanadzo, chief executive of Enterprise Zimbabwe and a Zimbabwean native, said that as social services like schools and hospitals return to operational health, the organization's goal is to attract not only philanthropic support but also investment money that can be deployed to support businesses.

“My mother heads up the clinic at the university,” Ms. Matambanadzo said. “One of the greatest days I've had was when my mother came home and said today we had medicines, today we had water and power.”

She said many small and midsize enterprises in industries like agriculture and mining were eager to build on such improvements. “There's even the scope for tourism now, and for microfinance to reach the mass market,” Ms. Matambanadzo said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/business/global/21branson.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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On a Clock, a Grim Toll of Mothers

For years, New York City has had a National Debt Clock, an electronic billboard perched on West 44th Street, with numbers spinning every second to reflect the explosive growth in what this country owes.

On Monday, the debt clock got a death clock as a neighbor.

In Times Square, just north of 44th Street, a digital sign began carrying a message quite different from what one usually sees on a billboard operated by MTV and flanked by images of Kanye West and Usher.

The “maternal death clock,” as it was called, ticked off 90 seconds, then started the count all over again. Then again. And again. And again.

Every 90 seconds, on average, a woman dies in childbirth somewhere in the world. That is nearly 1,000 women a day. It adds up to 358,000 women a year, according to the most recent estimates made by United Nations agencies and the World Bank.

That is a lot of death, considering that much of it could be prevented with better medical care.

The death clock, a creation of Amnesty International , will be in place for three days, to coincide with a gathering across town. World leaders are getting together at the United Nations this week to recommit themselves to the Millennium Development Goals , a batch of targets agreed to 10 years ago for reducing abject poverty around the globe by 2015.

The concerns are many: hunger, unsafe drinking water, environmental ruination, infant mortality , to name a few. Also on that sad list is the rate at which women die while trying to give life.

Amnesty International's adoption of this issue might seem unusual for a human rights organization. Isn't it essentially a public health matter?

On one level, yes, said Larry Cox, the executive director of Amnesty International USA. But, Mr. Cox added, “it's such a clear example of people dying who don't need to.”

“That's the ultimate definition of a human rights issue — steps that can be taken, and aren't,” he added.

The situation is not entirely bleak. There is hope for improvement. Those 358,000 deaths, an estimate for 2008, were well below the 546,000 believed to have occurred in 1990. Even so, the rate of decline has been substantially slower than hoped for when those development goals were set.

Not everyone is impressed by the depth of the world leaders' commitment. No sanctions, for example, are imposed if a country doesn't measure up. “The cost is being paid by these women who are dying every 90 seconds,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International's secretary general.

It might seem that maternal mortality is a distant worry for most of us, given that nearly 90 percent of the deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. But the United States has no reason to feel good in this regard. Nor does New York City.

When it comes to mortality rates — measured as the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births — the United States ranked 50th on a United Nations list of countries, behind nearly all other industrialized nations and even behind not-so-prosperous ones like Serbia and Slovakia. In some respects, the American situation has worsened in the last two decades, said Nan Strauss, an Amnesty researcher.

As for New York, a recent report prepared by the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and by the New York Academy of Medicine put the death rate here at twice the national average. Not that the actual number of deaths is huge. This analysis was based on 161 deaths from 2001 to 2005. Still, the assumption is that many of the deaths could have been avoided with better nutrition and prenatal care.

Half of these women were obese. More than half had chronic health problems like hypertension and asthma. Blacks were seven times as likely to die in pregnancy as whites. Poor women were more likely to die than wealthier women. In many women, these various factors overlapped.

As it is throughout the country, the death rate is a small fraction of what it was a century ago. But progress has stalled over the last 20 years, and “this is of great concern to the department,” said Deborah Kaplan, an assistant health commissioner. Officials are doing “enhanced surveillance” of maternal deaths, she said, to learn what might be done to keep the grim numbers down.

This is, obviously, no simple matter. Even in the time it took many of you to read this far, two more women, somewhere, died bringing life into the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/nyregion/21nyc.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Border Tensions Are Seen at Governors' Conference

SANTA FE, N.M. — There were hearty handshakes and friendly words, but the annual binational conference of border governors wound up here Monday as divided as it has ever been, as well as being a little short on governors.

The final communiqué showed a common vision among the participants about cracking down on violence along the border between the United States and Mexico , changing immigration laws and promoting economic development in the border zone. But it was the no-shows that made clear that cross-border unity was seriously frayed.

Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona was supposed to host the 28th annual conference in Phoenix, but all six Mexican border governors refused to attend in protest of the immigration crackdown she signed into law.

After Ms. Brewer canceled her session, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico stepped in to organize a conference of his own, with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California as co-host.

Ms. Brewer stayed away, as did a fellow Republican, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas. Then Mr. Schwarzenegger canceled because he was ill and sent his lieutenant governor, Abel Maldonado , a fellow Republican. That left Mr. Richardson as the lone United States governor in the discussions.

“It's their loss not to be here and to listen to their neighbors,” Mr. Maldonado said of Ms. Brewer and Mr. Perry. “We have some issues that we need to hash out.”

He said participants made a conscious decision not to dwell on Arizona or Ms. Brewer, which could have kept from discussions from moving on to anything else. “We didn't want to cloud things up by bringing up Arizona,” Mr. Maldonado said.

As five of the six Mexican border governors, and one governor-elect, spoke of unity, it was clear that the differences were significant. The view in Mexico is that heading to the United States for work is not an illegal act.

Whereas Mexican governors focus on the role of American guns and American drug use in the violence playing out in their country, the view in many parts of the United States is that the security woes south of the border are largely Mexican grown.

Perhaps trying to defend herself from afar, Ms. Brewer granted an interview with Univision, a major Spanish-language broadcaster, that was shown as the border governors' meeting began on Sunday. She said she was disappointed that the Mexican governors had not come to Arizona to hash out the issue of illegal immigration face to face and said she was hurt that she was being branded by some as a racist.

“Not only am I concerned, it's really disappointing to me,” she told Jorge Ramos, a Univision anchor. “I've lived in the Southwest my whole life. I've got many friends, of many cultures and certainly a great deal of them are Hispanics, and I love them from the bottom of my heart. I love everybody, Jorge, from the bottom of my heart.”

Mr. Richardson, the only Hispanic governor in the United States, said it was Arizona's harsh immigration law, much of which has been blocked by a federal judge, that prompted him to invite the Mexican governors to his state. “This is not a meeting to criticize Arizona,” Mr. Richardson said. “We're here to have a positive meeting. We're not criticizing the governor. We're moving forward.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/us/politics/21governors.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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Family Fight, Border Patrol Raid, Baby Deported

WASHINGTON

A few days before her daughter Rosa's first birthday, Monica Castro and the girl's father had a violent argument in the trailer they all shared near Lubbock, Tex. Ms. Castro fled, leaving her daughter behind.

Ms. Castro, a fourth-generation American citizen, went to the local Border Patrol station. She said she would give the agents there information about the girl's father, a Mexican in the country illegally, in exchange for help recovering her daughter.

Ms. Castro lived up to her side of the deal. But the federal government ended up deporting little Rosa, an American citizen, along with her father, Omar Gallardo. Ms. Castro would not see her daughter again for three years.

On the morning of Dec. 3, 2003, agents raided the trailer and seized Mr. Gallardo, who was wanted for questioning as a witness to a murder. They also took Rosa. Then they told Ms. Castro she had until that afternoon to get a court order if she wanted to keep her daughter.

A frantic lawyer rushed to court, and she called to plead for more time. But there was no court order yet when the government van arrived around 3 p.m., and agents hustled father and daughter into it for the long ride to the border.

Ms. Castro later sued the government, saying the agents had no legal authority to detain, much less deport, her daughter. Nor should Border Patrol agents, she said, take the place of family-court judges in making custody decisions.

The last court to rule in the case, the full United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, rejected Ms. Castro's arguments, over the dissents of three judges.

The brief unsigned majority decision, echoing that of the trial judge, said the appeals court did not “condone the Border Patrol's actions or the choices it made.” But, the decision went on, Ms. Castro could not sue the government because the agents had been entitled to use their discretion in the matter.

Ms. Castro's lawyers last month asked the United States Supreme Court to hear the case, in a petition bristling with restrained incredulity.

The agents themselves have rejected the assertion that they may have acted a little rashly.

Holding Mr. Gallardo and the girl overnight, long enough for an American court to sort things out, would have involved “a tremendous amount of money,” Gregory L. Kurupas, the agent in charge of the Lubbock and Amarillo stations at the time, testified in a 2006 deposition.

Asked to quantify the daunting sum, Agent Kurupas replied, “Well over $200 plus.”

The American government gave Ms. Castro no help in finding Rosa beyond identifying the city in Mexico to which she had been delivered. That news did not comfort Ms. Castro.

“She was sent to Juárez, which is now the most dangerous city on the face of the planet,” said Susan L. Watson, one of Ms. Castro's lawyers.

Mr. Gallardo was in time again arrested for entering the United States illegally. As part of his plea arrangement, he agreed to return Rosa, who had lived with his relatives in Mexico. He was once again deported, and my efforts to find him were unsuccessful.

The mother and child reunion, at the United States Consulate in Ciudad Juárez in 2006, was rocky. Rosa, then 4, did not recognize her mother and did not want to leave her other relatives.

“She was crying,” Ms. Castro recalled. “I started talking to her in Spanish, and she started yelling. She would hit me with her doll. She kicked me. She didn't want anything to do with me. She wanted to be with her grandmother.”

Like the appeals court, the trial judge, Janis Graham Jack of Federal District Court in Corpus Christi, expressed some uneasiness about the case. Judge Jack said the agents might not have chosen “the optimal course of action.”

Judge Jerry E. Smith of the Fifth Circuit, who was in dissent when a three-judge panel of the court first heard the case and in the majority when the full court revisited it, agreed that the situation was not a happy one.

“No one is pleased,” Judge Smith wrote in his dissent , “that Castro did not see her daughter for three years.”

Things are much better these days, Ms. Castro said. Rosa is a happy, thriving 7-year-old in Corpus Christi. “She's a straight-A honor roll student, in second grade now,” Ms. Castro said.

Ms. Castro added that the Supreme Court “should do something about the Border Patrol,” and perhaps the court will. The patrol did, after all, send an American infant to Ciudad Juárez with a man mixed up in a murder to save a couple of hundred dollars.

Or perhaps Ms. Castro will have to make do with the muted murmurs of sympathy she has received from judges who have heard her case so far. They do not condone what happened, are not pleased by it and, if pressed, are willing to say that the entire affair was “not optimal.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/us/21bar.html?ref=world&pagewanted=print

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The Wars' Continuing Toll

OPINION

The United States military has never been better at helping soldiers survive the battlefield with sophisticated advances in treatment and transportation. Service members who come home with psychic wounds and hidden traumas are still not getting enough support.

Last year, there were 239 suicides among active-duty personnel across the Army, and more than 1,700 attempts. There were 32 suicides in June, a grim high. Nobody is exactly sure how many veterans take their own lives, but the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that veterans make up about 20 percent of the more than 30,000 suicides each year.

The military is becoming more aware of the problem. At an event dedicated to suicide prevention this month, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was joined by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who acknowledged the toll the epidemic has taken.

The causes of suicide can be mysterious and solutions elusive. But advocates for troubled soldiers say the military can save more lives by acknowledging that it is overmatched and directing more people to outside help.

Linda Bean, whose son Coleman committed suicide in 2008, four months after ending his second tour in Iraq, has testified to Congress and pleaded with the Veterans Affairs Department to deepen and widen its outreach.

Many soldiers don't live near a veterans' hospital, she said. Many are hard pressed to leave jobs and families to make mental-health appointments. Soldierly reticence is a huge problem. Before Mr. Bean's second deployment, he received a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder from doctors at the Veterans Affairs Department. The Army didn't know, and Coleman didn't tell his superiors.

Ms. Bean points to nonprofit groups like Give an Hour and the Soldiers Project, which provide confidential counseling, and the National Veterans Foundation, which runs a hot line staffed by trained veterans. She sees hope, too, in small peer groups, like Vets 4 Vets, an Arizona-based organization that organizes weekends for veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq.

The military and the Veterans Affairs Department have been adding mental-health staffing and studying the suicide problem. But they still need to plug gaps in care for people who shun or live far away from government services. Ms. Bean's family was also among the many that sent body armor to undersupplied troops. They learned that when the official program isn't working, you improvise.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/opinion/21tue2.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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In an Ugly Human-Trafficking Case, Hawaii Forgets Itself

This is a story of two farmers, Laotian immigrant brothers who grow vegetables in Hawaii. People love their onions, melons, Asian cabbage, herbs and sweet corn, and their Halloween pumpkin patch is a popular field trip for schoolchildren all over Oahu. They count local politicians and community leaders among their many friends, and run a charitable foundation.

Though they are relative newcomers, their adopted home is a state that honors its agricultural history, where most longtime locals are descendants of immigrant plantation workers. The brothers fit right in.

But they had an ugly secret. A captive work force: forty-four men, laborers from Thailand who were lured to Hawaii in 2004 with promises of good wages, housing and food. The workers sacrificed dearly to make the trip, mortgaging family land and homes to pay recruiters steep fees of up to $20,000 each.

According to a federal indictment, the workers' passports were taken away. They were set up in cramped, substandard housing — some lived in a shipping container. Many saw their paychecks chiseled with deductions for food and expenses; some toiled in the fields for no net pay. Workers were told not to complain or be sent home, with no way to repay their unbearable debts.

The news broke last August. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice filed charges of forced labor and visa fraud. The farm owners agreed to plead guilty in December in Federal District Court to conspiring to commit forced labor. They admitted violating the rules of the H-2A guest worker program, telling the workers that their labor contracts were “just a piece of paper” used to deceive the federal government.

I wish I could say that at this point the case so shocked the Hawaiian public that people rushed to aid the immigrants, who reminded them so much of their parents and grandparents. That funds were raised and justice sought.

But that didn't happen.

In an astounding display of amnesia and misplaced sympathy, Hawaii rallied around the defendants. After entering their plea deal, the farmers, Michael and Alec Sou of Aloun Farms, orchestrated an outpouring of letters begging the judge for leniency at sentencing. Business leaders, community activists, politicians — even two former governors, Benjamin Cayetano and John Waihee, and top executives at First Hawaiian Bank — joined a parade attesting to the brothers' goodness.

The men were paragons of diversified agriculture and wise land use, the letter writers said. They had special vegetable knowledge that nobody else had, and were holding the line against genetically modified crops. If they went to prison, evil developers would pave their farmland. Think of the “trickle down impact,” one woman implored the judge. Besides, their produce was delicious.

The friends pleaded for probation, fines, anything but prison. The workers, now scattered to uncertain fates and still in debt, have seen no such empathy.

The Sous were supposed to have been sentenced months ago, but at a hearing in July they made statements that muddled and seemed to contradict their plea agreement. The vexed judge, Susan Oki Mollway, postponed sentencing to Sept. 9, so they could get their story straight. Back in court this month, the men recanted some of their sworn testimony, so the judge threw the plea deal out. Now there will be a trial in November.

Another shocking story emerged in Honolulu this month: a federal grand jury indicted six people on charges of enslaving 400 Thai farm workers on Maui and elsewhere — the largest trafficking case in American history. In Hawaii, no uproar ensued. The pumpkin-patch field trips are still booked.

Hawaii has a state motto: Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono, or the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness. Hawaiians use “pono” to mean what is just or right, in harmony with nature and with other people. The words hang on huge bronze seals at the State Capitol, and I feel sure that most longtime residents of Hawaii can easily recall and recite them, in Hawaiian and English.

Whether some of them ever think about what the motto means, or care, is another question.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/opinion/21tue4.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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Anatomy of a Misdiagnosis

Chicago

A WOMAN calls 911 to report that a baby in her care has gone limp. Rescue workers respond immediately, but the infant dies that night. Though there are no external injuries or witnesses to any abuse, a jury convicts the woman of shaking the baby to death.

More than 1,000 babies a year in the United States are given a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome. And since the early 1990s, many hundreds of people — mothers, fathers and babysitters — have been imprisoned on suspicion of murder by shaking. The diagnosis is so rooted in the public consciousness that, this year, the Senate unanimously declared the third week of April “National Shaken Baby Syndrome Awareness Week.”

Yet experts are questioning the scientific basis for shaken baby syndrome. Increasingly, it appears that a good number of the people charged with and convicted of homicide may be innocent.

For the past 30 years, doctors have diagnosed the syndrome on the basis of three key symptoms known as the “triad”: retinal hemorrhages, bleeding around the brain and brain swelling. The presence of these three signs (and sometimes just one or two of them) has long been assumed to establish beyond a reasonable doubt that the person who was last taking care of the baby shook him so forcefully as to fatally injure his brain.

But closer scrutiny of the body of research that is said to support the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome has revealed methodological shortcomings . Scientists are now willing to accept that the symptoms once equated with shaking can be caused in other ways. Indeed, studies of infants' brains using magnetic resonance imaging have revealed that triad symptoms sometimes exist in infants who have not suffered injuries caused by abuse. Bleeding in the brain can have many causes, including a fall, an infection, an illness like sickle-cell anemia or birth trauma.

What's more, doctors have learned that in many cases in which infants have triad symptoms, there can be a lag of hours or even days between the time of the injury and the point when the baby loses consciousness. This contradicts the idea that it's possible to identify the person responsible by looking to the baby's most recent caregiver.

Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome be discarded and replaced with “abusive head trauma,” which does not imply that only shaking could have caused the injury.

The new understanding of this diagnosis has only just begun to penetrate the legal realm. In 2008, a Wisconsin appeals court recognized that “a shift in mainstream medical opinion” had eroded the medical basis of shaken baby syndrome. The court granted a new trial to Audrey Edmunds, herself a mother of three, who had spent a decade in prison for murdering an infant in her care. Prosecutors later dismissed all charges.

Troublingly, though, Ms. Edmunds's case has been a rare exception. Most shaken baby convictions have yet to be revisited. New cases are still being prosecuted based on the outdated science.

Despite the shift in scientific consensus, debate about the legitimacy of the shaken baby syndrome diagnosis continues. Some scientists point to studies using dummies modeled on the anatomy of infants as evidence that shaking cannot possibly generate sufficient force to cause the triad of symptoms — or that it could not do so without also causing injury to the infant's neck or spinal cord. But others challenge the validity of these studies and maintain the belief that shaking alone can (though it need not) cause the triad.

What's needed is a comprehensive study of shaken baby syndrome to resolve the outstanding areas of disagreement. The National Academy of Sciences, which last year issued a comprehensive report on the scientific underpinnings of forensic science, would be the ideal institution to undertake such a study.

In the meantime, however, there remains the question of justice. In Ontario, an official investigation concluded that there are deep concerns about the science underlying the triad, and now the province is reviewing all convictions based on shaken baby syndrome. Similar inquiries should be conducted on a statewide level here in the United States.

For decades, shaken baby syndrome has been, in essence, a medical diagnosis of murder. But going forward, prosecutors, judges and juries should exercise greater skepticism. The triad of symptoms alone cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that an infant has been fatally shaken.

Deborah Tuerkheimer, a professor of law at DePaul University, is a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/opinion/21tuerkheimer.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=print

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From the Department of Justice

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WASHINGTON - Bidemi Bello, 41, formerly of Buford, Ga., and presently from Nigeria, was arraigned toda y, following an indictment returned by a federal grand jury on Sep.10, 2010. Bello faces federal charges of forced labor, trafficking with respect to forced labor, document servitude and alien harboring. Bello was arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Judge for the Northern District of Georgia Janet F. King.

The charges and other information presented in court allege that Bello brought one young woman from Nigeria to Georgia and compelled her labor as a nanny and housekeeper from October 2001 through March 2004. After her first victim escaped, Bello brought a second young woman from Nigeria to Georgia and compelled that young woman's domestic service from November 2004 until April 2006. Bello threatened and physically abused both victims, isolated them from their families and confiscated their identification documents, in order to compel them to perform child care and domestic service without pay.

Each of the four labor trafficking charges carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. The two document servitude counts carry a maximum sentence of 5 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. The alien harboring count carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

The indictment only contains charges. The defendant is presumed innocent of the charges and it will be the government's burden to prove the defendant's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt at trial.

This case is being investigated by Special Agents of the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Assistant U.S. Attorney S usan Coppedge and Deputy Chief Karima Maloney of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division are prosecuting the case.

http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2010/September/10-crt-1056.html

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From ICE

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20 arrested in Chicago area during ICE operation targeting gang members

CHICAGO - Agents with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Office of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), in close partnership with local law enforcement, arrested 20 suspected gang members during a three-day operation last week. This is the latest local effort in an ongoing national ICE initiative to target foreign-born gang members.

The arrests were made as part of Operation Community Shield, a national initiative whereby ICE partners with other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to target the significant public safety threat posed by transnational street gangs. Partnerships with local law enforcement agencies are essential to the success of Operation Community Shield.

The multi-agency operation, which ended Sept. 14, targeted foreign-born gang members and gang associates. All 20 men arrested are documented members of the following street gangs: Latin Kings, Belizean Bloods, Two-Six Boys, Sureño 13s and Latin Dragons.

Sixteen of those arrested have prior criminal convictions. Some of their convictions include: aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, drug possession with intent to distribute, criminal trespass, disorderly conduct, aggravated drunken driving, and retail theft.

The nationality breakdown of those ICE arrested include: 15 from Mexico, four from Belize, and one from Jamaica. Arrests were made in the following Illinois communities: Addison, Bensenville, Carpentersville and Chicago.

Two of those arrested by ICE have been presented for federal prosecution for illegally re-entering the U.S. after being deported, which is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. All 20 men are currently in ICE custody on administrative immigration violations, and are pending deportation. ICE does not release the names of those arrested on administrative immigration charges.

"Street gangs operate as criminal organizations and are responsible for committing a significant amount of crime in our communities," said Gary Hartwig, special agent in charge of ICE HSI in Chicago. "ICE works closely with our local law enforcement partners to identify, locate and arrest these gang members in the name of public safety."

ICE was assisted in the operation by the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service and the police departments of Addison, Bensenville and Carpentersville.

Since Operation Community Shield began in February 2005, ICE agents nationwide have arrested more than 18,000 gang members and associates linked to more than 900 different gangs. The National Gang Unit at ICE identifies violent street gangs and develops intelligence on their membership, associates, criminal activities and international movements to deter, disrupt and dismantle gang operations by tracing and seizing cash, weapons and other assets derived from criminal activities.

Through Operation Community Shield, the federal government uses its powerful immigration and customs authorities in a coordinated, national campaign against criminal street gangs in the United States. Transnational street gangs have significant numbers of foreign-born members and are frequently involved in human and contraband smuggling, immigration violations and other crimes with a connection to the border.

http://www.ice.gov/pi/nr/1009/100920chicago.htm

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From the FBI

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Chicago Man Arrested in Attempted Bombing Plot

A 22-year-old Chicago man was arrested early Sunday morning, immediately after placing a backpack which he thought contained an explosive device into a curbside trash receptacle near a crowded North Side street corner, announced Robert D. Grant, Special Agent-in-Charge of the Chicago office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

SAMI SAMIR HASSOUN, who lives in the 4700 block of North Kedzie in Chicago, was arrested just after midnight Saturday, without incident, on Seminary Avenue near the 3500 block of North Clark Street, by members of the Chicago FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF). The arrest followed an investigation that accelerated in June of this year. HASSOUN was charged in a criminal complaint filed today in U.S. District Court in Chicago with one count each of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and attempted use of an explosive device, both of which are felony offenses.

In announcing this arrest, Mr. Grant and Mr. Fitzgerald wish to emphasize that at no time was the public in danger during this investigation. The supposed explosive device was inert and provided to HASSOUN by an undercover agent. In addition, HASSOUN was under intermittent surveillance as the plot developed and the undercover agents were in regular contact with HASSOUN, monitoring his activities. There was no indication that any foreign or domestic terror groups were in any way connected to this plot or inspired HASSOUN.

According to the complaint, starting in June of this year, HASSOUN, who is a Lebanese citizen and permanent resident alien, began expressing to an associate the desire to commit acts of violence in the city for both monetary gain and to cause political transformation in Chicago. Unbeknownst to HASSOUN, his associate was secretly cooperating with the FBI and assisted with the investigation of these alleged threats.

Throughout the summer, HASSOUN allegedly discussed with this associate a number of possible targets and plots, including a biological attack on the city, poisoning Lake Michigan, attacking police officers, bombing the Sears (Willis) Tower, and assassinating the mayor. Eventually, HASSOUN is alleged to have selected the Wrigleyville area of Chicago as his target, utilizing an explosive device which he would detonate on a weekend night to inflict maximum damage.

Because of HASSOUN's stated desire to carry out this attack, an undercover agent (UCA) was introduced to him in July by his associate. The UCA indicated that he was from California and that he had access to explosives and the expertise necessary to construct an explosive device which HASSOUN could use to carry out his plot. During this and subsequent meetings with the UCA, at which time a second UCA was also introduced, HASSOUN allegedly discussed several possible plots and scenarios in which he could dramatically impact the city and force the mayor to resign. HASSOUN eventually settled on a bombing outside a crowded Wrigleyville nightclub as the first step in his plan.

The complaint indicates that HASSOUN met with the UCA late on Saturday night, at which time he was provided a backpack which he thought contained a high powered explosive device. HASSOUN was shown the various components of the device and instructed on its operation. Although the explosive device was designed to look real, it in fact was constructed by the FBI of inert materials and was incapable of detonating.

HASSOUN and the UCA then left together in a rented vehicle, en route to the Wrigleyville area, where the bombing would take place. HASSOUN was under constant surveillance and agents watched as he placed the fake explosive device into a trash receptacle, after which he was arrested and the fake device recovered.

The complaint indicates that HASSOUN's motivation for planning this attack was a combination of personal greed and political motivation.

HASSOUN is scheduled to appear today at 2:40 p.m. before Magistrate Judge Susan Cox in Chicago, at which time he will be formally charged. HASSOUN has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Chicago, since his arrest on Sunday. If convicted of the charges filed against him, HASSOUN faces a mandatory minimum sentence of five (5) years to a maximum of life in prison.

This case was investigated by the Chicago FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) which is comprised of FBI special agents, officers from the Chicago Police Department, and representatives from 20 federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.

The public is reminded that a complaint is not evidence of guilt and that all defendants in a criminal case are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Copies of the criminal complaint filed in this case are available from the Chicago FBI's press office at (312) 829-1199.

http://chicago.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel10/cg092010.htm

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